Furry Moon Creations

I got to poring over old bills and invoices, prepping for taxes, and I stumbled upon some milestones. This is going to be a rather lengthy post, so my apology to the "tl;dr" crowd. I'll start it off with some images from oldest to newest.

From our forums logo which never quite worked right.

To our website banner after converting from PHP to RHTML    

FromTo the image that most recognize us by now.

We keep growing, learning, and improving. It's easy to show you how the art has evolved over time, but it's not so easy to show you how the back-end code has. The email, VPN, even the wires for the hardware are laid smarter. With all that we've improved, it still obscures where we came from; lets dig deeper.

"Lowmoon" was the 6th planned name for what is now Moonshards; the domain had been picked up months later by a sponsoring umbrella company, Top Gun Enterprises, Inc. It was a side project to them as part of the company's view of seeing if something was cost effective. With an expansive number of products and services they dabbled in, from child safety and car security to dating and advertisement, this was just another possible path to success. During this time, Lowmoon was based in California, and I did web work for them in trade for the funding for the Lowmoon project. Times changed, and I moved to Iowa where I moved in with the man I would one day marry. We had already known each other from Second Life where he had his estate, Lop Ear Purlieu. He too had the dream of creating a project for managing images in a unique way. This would later be dubbed Image Warden by me and the project as a whole called the Warden Project. Now we had a bunch of pieces but no direction.

In Feb of 2008, money was tight and the projects were all intermixed, and it was decided we needed a change of pace. Furry Moon became the umbrella for which we would link everything, but it was to much like Lowmoon, and I had already used it for unoffical things, not to mention it said who we are but not what we do. We realized right away what we do is create and so Furry Moon Creations became a sole proprietorship, and the web site got a major overhaul. Lop Ear Purlieu got a rules revamp, and the pricing was adjusted to account for the change from charity to break-even. We started keeping better book keeping and looked towards breaking even and were not concerned with making a profit. Not yet at least, that would come in time.

In late Aug of 2008, we got our paws on two low-end servers and took a daring leap of faith. Opensimulator Project looked very promising and, given the economy within Second Life, a worthwhile venture. Thus FMC undertook the Furry Life Grid project. It started off nearly too perfect: complied, ran, easy to log in, but then. We found major flaws with it that were still being worked on by the community, we found we needed more infrastructure then we had available and above all we need time to get it all working right. So we did the best we could, we started working on other projects that will later become the framework on which the Furry Life Grid will be built.

Over the next nine months, we would lay low, setting up email, databases, finding a good ISP, checking laws, firming up storylines, and trying to keep everything afloat on a shoestring budget as the world economy around us tanked. Then in July of 2009, Furry Moon Creations became Furry Moon Creations LLC, and that brings us to here. The world of Moonshards is now known to hundreds of people around the world with an unexpected number of alpha sign ups. We have our paws into a fair number of projects but they are all unified in three key areas. Same furry focus, same programing languages, same passion.

We have a slogan here in the office: "Where mind and fur blur." We enjoy producing a product for others, but we also get to enjoy the product ourselves once finished. It is selflessness that turns into a self rewarding effort. It can make us wonder, is the passion in the work or in the goal? I think it's both.