► WWWWolf's home page ▻ Furry Stuff ▻ Artwork ▻ Wolf Sperm Heart

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Warning: This page is notably the kind of stuff that only a subset of furries will truly appreciate. Non-furries probably miss the point immediately. If at any point you get grossed out, consider yourself properly trolled.

This is a random symbol or emblem for random furries. It has a wolf paw print and two sperm cells, forming a heart.

We, the Geeks, have this unfortunate habit of sometimes making something cool related to our field and then, after the joy of creation, find out it is practically useless for any task at hand. It is just the way things are, and one of the things that is so wonderful about being a geek.

I have absolutely no idea how I succeeded in making this symbol, or even why I made it, so I would like others to have it as well. Maybe there's something subconsciously memetic about attempts to make symbols and emblems.

I have very vague idea what it means: it's about Wolves (or furries in general), Yiffing and Love, all merged to a sweet whole. Or maybe it's a good logo for a canid genetics research company, like has been suspected. This is the general direction, anyway.

Like with most of the spontaneous creations by geeks, the coolness value (as evaluated by the other people) is directly proportional to its uselessness - but, paradoxically enough, if the thing is actually useful, the coolness curve immediately shoots through the roof. So, I hope people will find this at least curious if not actually useful.

The symbol is made for all other cute, wolfy, romantic and/or yiffy anthrowolves - and, well, every other canid as well. Or make it all furries, whether they need it or not. =)

For what purpose you'd use it, then?... um... Use it to promote world peace, general yiffiness, and make overly politically correct furries groan by spreading it wherever you see? Print it on a shirt with text "Wolf In Hea(r)t"? I don't know. A friend of mine used it as a C0wntarStrike decal. As far as I know, a reason as good as any.

You are free to use this symbol for whatever you want. You're free to mimic it - if you can draw it yourself, you can do so for whatever reason without needing to ask for permission or anything.

This particular version of the symbol has copies that you can use almost anywhere for any reason (under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license - attribute my work and include the license info, as-is copies and derivative works must be spread under same license). You can use the SVG graphic (and PNG graphics directly rendered from the same SVG) on your website without further legal hassle if you keep the files as they are. I would appreciate some kind of link somewhere, or at least emailing if you use it, but it isn't legally required.

You can use it on your website, but if possible, copy it to the site itself and don't trans-link it from my page. Oh yeah - while this page's URL will likely not change in the future as I own the domain and all that, I still recommend that you link here as <URL:http://www.iki.fi/wwwwolf/furry/artwork/wolfspermheart.phtml>, not through beastwithin.org.

History

In 29th November 2003, I had this odd idea of making a symbol that would have a wolf pawprint, with a single sperm cell forming a circle around it. I drew a sketch, but I thought a single sperm can't stretch enough to look credible.

I started drawing it on my computer using Sodipodi vector art program. Later versions also used Inkscape. Final version of SVG code was indented by hand and Creative Commons and Dublin Core information was added.

I was looking for animal stuff around the net, but I couldn't find diagrams comparing the shapes of sperm cells of various mammals, specifically, no examples of canid sperm cells. Some references to farm animals, though... I even almost asked one zoophile if they had any Obscure Medical Information, but I thought that it's only about a couple of bezier vertexes anyway, and I no one probably has the stomach to debate what kinds of sperm cells furries have, being somewhere between humans and animals...

After I had done the paw, I was thinking of adding a single sperm behind the thing. I drew it quite easily. I left the head facing up diagonally.

Then I thought it'd look a bit more dynamic if I put the head down to right and the tail would be diagonal. It looked pretty good. Then I added another one behind it, and it looked even better. It reminded me of those old cursive monograms with its curves. I added some blending so that the paw and the sperm behind it is translucent, while the top one is opaque. Then I noted the sperm tails form a heart.

And I still had no idea why I had started drawing this thing! Maybe my brain woke up a little bit too late for the Yiffstar banner contest (in which I actually participated, but didn't fare that well - I guess I was thinking it far too much from logo point of view rather than banner point of view). So here we have a furry-themed symbol with no clear idea what is the reason for its existence or its true purpose. Well, it's useless to think of what has happened, the fact is, it exists.

Nowadays, this is technically just one of these odd pet projects of mine. It's a technical kind of feat: SVG stuff, RDF stuff, Creative Commons taggery, XML namespacing, Dublin Core tags... and it's a good enough tech project if it is technically valid and well-formed and still makes some apps crash =)

Anyway, here's some insight I'd like to add: I think the symbol itself is decent enough. I'm an anthrowolf. I'm a yiffy wolf. (cml in taps, too. =) I'm more than enough a romantic one too. I believe in love, and yiffing, and love and yiffing. It's just my view of yiffing: Fun, often, and preferrably with the ones you really like - or subscribe to the same idea of fun.

As for the name, "Wolf Sperm Heart", I couldn't think of anything more veiled. This name is... um... descriptive, I think. You may, at your discretion, avoid this term if you want - it is boring enough to be completely ignored, in my opinion - but I think it's good enough as an "official name". =)

In 21st May 2004, I made a new version of the symbol - This is hopefully more interesting than the earlier version. Basically, now it's nonsymmetrical. Also, the pawprint was previously traced and tweaked; now it's completely done from scratch. (Although the earlier pic was tweaked the hell out of after I traced it in Sodipodi from a random .gif I found from the net, I felt there might have been copyright issues. The animal who left the print in the first place probably doesn't care, but some person along the way of getting that picture to me might.)

18th June 2004 I made version 2.1 - some "angular" bits in v2 were smoothed a bit. Also, the description inside the file is now in XHTML instead of plain text. Cool, huh? Well, librsvg 2.6.4 begs to disagree, crashing spectacularly when trying to render it.

13th April 2005 I changed the license from CC BY-SA 1.0 to 2.0. I also made a version that has a circle on the background.

30th November 2005, I created two further files that are basically the symbol put in a viewBox. This makes the files actually scalable in Mozilla Firefox 1.5.

And as for its further adventures, it will probably go down in the history as one of those useless symbols that had no chance to begin with. I don't care much about that - I like this thing, and will use it myself. Uh, that is, right after I figure out a sensible use for it. =)

Reactions

I had severe doubts about releasing the thing at all at first. You know, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that such product of over-yiffy mind can be a little bit hard to digest for both the non-furries (who have serious problems understanding anything furry-related anyway) and furries worried about the "public image" of furrydom (such movements have luckily died down a bit, even though some people still keep trying).

But on the other hand, this thing might be the tactical nuclear weapon of annoyance. Due to the aforementioned digesting problems, it's guaranteed to offend/gross the hell out of some people. You know, I don't need to be worried about it, they will be annoyed. So, I felt pretty safe releasing the image - In a way, this is automatically a massive troll. I don't care if people get annoyed or offended by this.

Nevertheless, the reaction from furries has been mostly positive. Thank you, people.

Downloads and technical mumbojumbo

"Large" versions have been rendered directly with rsvg to 300x350 size, "small" versions have been resized to 125 pixel height (107x125).

The SVG file is 86x100mm, but it is, of course, scalable to whatever physical dimensions you need. Good sizes for the image for web use are 107x125 and 300x350 pixels, as shown on this web page.

The SVG is included above in images; If you see a PNG image instead, your web browser doesn't support SVG directly and you may need to save this file and open it in an app that does. (I'm definitely hoping Mozilla's SVG implementation matures soon...) If it shows the symbol with weird background, you probably have IE that pretends it knows how to render PNGs. If it shows you "No plugin" warnings, your web browser doesn't apparently follow the HTML standards (or something).

The SVG has meta information and copyright information only as meta-info, it is not added to the actual image. Rules are there, just not seen. =) This was also my first experiment with embedding metainformation to file. The CC tags are right there, but I'm not sure how well the DC tags work... Well, at least it's human-readable.

The file is SVG 1.0, only uses Paths and some translucency and stroke types, that's all. It should be renderable on any non-sucky SVG renderer. So far, the following have been tested and found to work somewhat:

• MSIE. My friend said the page works in MSIE. I looked at it myself with new MSIE, and I think it showed PNGs instead, because the background was screwed up. I heard MSIE has SVG or some other stuff in it. No idea if they actually do. Maybe not.
• Sodipodi (where it was originally made)
• Inkscape (where the new versions were made)
• GIMP 1.3 and later (small problems nailing down the rendering size, otherwise OK)
• Nautilus and GNOME librsvg. Note: the <desc> block, unlikely enough in XHTML instead of plain text, makes librsvg 2.6.4 crash! you need to hand-edit the file to remove the <desc> block to make it work properly in rsvg! librsvg 2.8.x and later seems to work though...
• ImageMagick (Leaves some room to the edges, otherwise fine)
• Mozilla Firefox 1.5 appears to show them just fine.

PNG bitmaps on this page are exported from Inkscape. (circle bitmaps were done in rsvg.)

Unless your browser is competent enough to render the symbol in SVG, you're seeing PNGs. If you doubt your browser vendor's SVG skills, the PNGs are linked above. If you aren't seeing PNGs, or your PNGs are garbled (an acute case of MSIE, for example), you may try the JPG versions. I recommend the PNG versions because they're semi-transparent. If you see nothing above, I guess the browser has a lot to learn. (If there are nested objects, the browser should show the one it thinks it can show. I think Safari can handle PNGs, but it bloody well won't show them on this page...)

Here are also wallpaper / screen background images (1280x1024 PNG). The colors, pink and purple, are from my "yiffy" and "usual" color palette (or, alternatively, symbolising what kind of other wolves I need right now =). The symbols have been made almost translucent so they won't interfere with anything important - you can focus on something else than Putting The Ideas To Action, or Thinking About The Evening.