oh, mama raised me well

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a delicate matter
yes, trust me, a dagger
🎶

saturday was FURREST CITY MINI CON!!!!!





it was extremely successful - 192 attendees in total!! we had a small space at sears think[box] on the case western reserve university campus (a staff member used to work there and had organized a small meet there previously and discussed that it might be a good option for a larger than a meetup, con-like event). and that's something we worked on over the last year or so (definitely moreso others on staff than myself, especially our finances person)!

i spent all day running around, mingling, doing whatever was needed in the moment - hanging out up by the parking garage to be a wayfinding point to make sure people could navigate their way to the venue (love what a maze college campuses can be), going along to help with the west side market excursion (and also acquire lots of goodies!!), meeting lots of folks for the first time, watching in on panels, poking around the little dealer's room, watching people play video games, etc., etc.

i'm honestly so happy this came together so well and went off without a hitch - folks who know me know i've historically been kind of a debbie downer (and sort of an aggressive realist when asking pointed questions to the people who'd claim it would be 'so easy' to get a con going here) when it would come to establishing a furry convention in cleveland. lots of factors are already kind of 'against' it - we're sandwiched between anthrocon and midwest furfest, two of the biggest 3-4 conventions in the states. it costs money, it needs people willing to do the thankless work of running a convention (and events in general!), and it needs people willing to simply show up. and i think it really just needed the right combination of people to get the gears moving - we have an amazing board and staff that are really committed to cultivating a real, living community and that's so deeply, deeply awesome and i'm so very happy to be proven wrong about my prior feelings on the matter X3

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after we closed up and cleaned out the space, the remaining staff walked up to little italy and had coffee/food at a little tea shop called algebra and i finally got off my feet lol

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also, rode the rail for the first time in cleveland! i never, like, bothered with it previously, but we were able to take it directly from the corner by think[box] out to the intersection at west side market, which was really cool!

i also reeeeeeally wanted to be able to take photos of the graffiti along the rail lines, so much of it was SO good

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ANDDD!!!! webri found me and was like 'hey did u ever check artfight??' (they had messaged me back during artfight if they could draw something for me and then i forgot about it b/c i never got back around to doing artfight) and i was like 'NO I DIDN'T LEMME DO THAT NOW' and was greeted with this masterpiece

draw the cat eye sharp enough to kill a man
you did some bad things, but i'm the worst of them
sometimes I wonder which one will be your last lie
they say looks can kill and i might try
🎶

[click thru for larger]

after i committed to the thyroidectomy, i realized i'd be getting a cool throat scar and i wanted to incorporate that into my fursona's design. so i figured, why not punish myself and make her a proper reference sheet (i hate doing reference sheets lol). so i did and i actually finished it!!! which is honestly the most shocking part

i'd really just never bothered with a ref sheet outside of a base one b/c she does have a really simple design and i'm flexible with 99% of it anyhow, but this was a fun challenge for myself and i quite like how it turned out!

may feels like it flew by, too, but looking back at the pics from last month, some of these seem a much longer time ago. especially seeing the aurora and going to the punk rock flea market. also started going to the coffee shop to work on art, and finally went to pick out new glasses (that we need to pick up lol)

april went by so fast??????

in knife_lounge's discord server the other week, the showcase topic/theme was 'before and after! How have your OCs changed over time?' and i was thinking about how my fursona, ally, has changed AND split over the years



ally started out as 'alien' - green haired brown fox. she was pretty short-lived - up until 2002. i was using either faith originally in some satAM rp chats, and the phe as, like, my 'main' charas online

i was into men in black and the x-files and aliens at the time, which is where the green hair came from, i'm pretty sure. i redrew her in 2020!



fursona got a fresh new design in 2002 and renamed 'angel'. bonus big and/or chibi angel wings as part of the design now!



around 2006-2007 i was doing more vampire-based rp stuff on tapestries muck and revived a bit her older incarnation that was based off the self-insert character i played in a vampire the masquerade chronicle (like, this had always been there, i just wasn't utilizing it lol). so there was a lot more of her with 'darker' art next to the pretty cutesy/brightly colored stuff i drew of her (the wavy/curly vs. straight hair was usually the visual difference between the two)




in 2010, i gave her another overhaul b/c possum just felt right to add. i'd also been playing freckles/pepper the previous year and had made her a possum, so...



i think that first sketch was the only time i EVER drew the tattoos i wanted her to have lkhglkhgd - i ended up basically giving the tatts to kailani

in 2018/2019, there were more liminal/horror themes coming out in my art and i started pivoting back to playing with ally/angel/vampire stuff



i leaned back into that pretty heavily and it's been the consistent them of her for a couple years now



what, then, about the left side of that image? who is ancyn? and what does she have to do with angel???

so, i kind of yoinked V:tM angel and shook the dust off of her and decided to kind of re-work her origin story. ultimately, it's pretty much the same, but i wanted to actually re-work her sire (who was originally a jr/hs bf of mine lol) and make him his own creation instead of mostly based off someone else who isn't even someone i think about anymore lol

(now, mind you, there's overlap with ally/angel/ancyn's stories across the board - fursona ally is really just me, but offshoot of fursona ally has the V:tM history mess, and angel got rolled over into a fresh new form with ancyn and a slightly different version of the V:tM history mess lol)



so ancyn got reworked for my D2 hunter slot - her and her partner left the last city early on in the city age to scout north america and report back. this went on for a good while, but eventually they went off grid. something happened to them and she was forced to kill her partner (not final death). she returned to the city to seek out an old friend some time after that. she's a solar main hunter and it's been fun to do a lot of those colors in her pieces!

(i realized i put one of her d&d pics in here, but it's actually kind of both D2 and d&d lol so i'm not going back to fix it)

i also rolled her to play in the d&d campaign chris is running - her story is much more vague, but roughly something happened to her partner and she's going to have to figure out how to fix/remedy it. she's a swiftstride shifter rogue and the party doesn't know her real name or that she IS a shifter at all ICly lol - it's also fun to draw her with the overlay of ears/tails to represent that

come morning we awaken to a garnet colored sky
the mirror cracked and broken making ✗'es of my eyes
🎶

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done on hensa's new portrait base!!

a weird one to tag - 90% not my art lol, but i did mod the hair and some other little things, as well as add stuff (jewelry, top)

made two zines, managed to do some personal art, brunch bowling, and not looking forward to the weather changing, but kinda am looking forward to halloween

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in the chaos and calm
cut a slash cross your palm
promise blood, it poisons your heart
🎶

still bummed about not being able to go to anthrocon, but june was nice otherwise!

got what they want, got what they want
and they know, they know, they know
i can see it in their eyes
they're coming for you, honey
🎶

killing me slow, out the window
i'm always waiting for you to be waiting below
devils roll the dice, angels roll their eyes
what doesn't kill me makes me want you more
🎶

oh, i’ve been moving kind of slow, don't you think so?
oh, i've been taming bloody hearts into valentines
🎶

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okay so otherwise, what's been going on this last month?

i'm trying to weasel my way onto anthrocon staff (fingers crossed!) b/c, honestly, i DO love staffing cons and helping out, but it also makes ATTENDING easier for me and will save me a little money, which is always appreciated. i've been wanting to staff at ac for awhile now and just haven't actually put my feelers out there to see about making it reality b/c [gestures broadly] and then pandemic and everything

might be also doing some game/ttrpg stuff at matsuricon?? maybe???? that one's kinda up in the air atm

DID reach out to andy, who runs oddmall, about furry stuff and he's on board. so i gotta find time to get up with him and have a chat about what i'd like to see happen. can't do it at the event downtown due to how the knight center rents the space out (by room), but CAN do it at the two events they have in richfield (hotel, rents the whole space out together for him). and then it's a matter of lighting a fire under local folks to get them wanting to help out/be involved/present panels/whatever. i WANT it to be a COMMUNITY thing, not a 'oh ally organizes that' and everything be on me. aiming for sort of something between a meetup and, like, a mini con??? so, yeah, like folks running panels about furry stuff and maybe a section for furry vendors/artists/whatever and, like, maybe a fursuit photo area or something?? vague ideas currently, nothing set in stone, but fingers crossed for something cool to come of this!

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sketch (and whatever) dump!!


playing around with destiny!poe. first one is a variant on the cryptarch robes, b/c that was her profession before becoming a guardian (and she only JUST became a guardian lol - so she's got, like, people IN the tower and IN the city who, like, she was buddies/acquaintances/friends/family with only a few months to a year ago and now she's trying to piece together journals and things she left behind to play catchup with the whole guardian blank slate).

second is some kind of casual wear. third is a drawover of her in game character selection screen


oekaki!! done on rainbowmancer/freakphone's drawing room. this is all the bigger it is lol. i think 300x300


still trying to get down ancyn's design. like, it's half-formed in my head currently. but stuff bounces around, which is suppose works anyhow b/c she's been around a couple hundred years, so you'd def change your appearance now and then. short hair looks cute, long hair looks cute, etc., etc.

i rambled a bit about her on twit, so i'll paste that shit here, too

she's been.....interesting to roll around across my brainmeats b/c her origin is my old self-insert vtm char (angel) who ate her sire during her embrace so, like, There's That. and angel's well past all that shit. but i put ancyn like, IN that shit

something Very Bad got into her partner and she had to put him down (for the time being), so she's returning to the last city after a couple hundred years (left when the tower was being built) carrying this simultaneous grief and relief and Still Processing what happened

so she spends a lot of her time with distractions to keep her mind off of whatever happened (and prolonging the Processing part) - running gambit, playing cards, gambling, helping an old friend with eliksni quarter stuff, etc., etc)

it's also been interesting re-creating her partner b/c BACK IN THE DAYYYY when i was a god awful high schooler, angel's vampire bf/sire was based on a guy i dated briefly and had Complicated Teenage Feelings about for a very long time

and i'm, like, weirdly all about not retconning a lot of dumb shit i've done for/to my characters lol, but i'm 20yrs on now. so for ancyn i kept his initials and dark hair, but i've been making something new of him

(mostly this version is getting based on rivers/lakes and selkie vibes b/c i fuckin love selkies)

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other stuff has been about the same. money sucks. work is fine. every day is closer to nice weather and green trees.

i sent some of my inktober zines out for a zine exchange for a server i'm in and i realized i'm almost completely out of them now! think i'll use this as an excuse to finish up the in progress 2019 one, as well, and get some more copies printed. maybe play around with doing some hand binding or something for them for funsies

and, finally, books i read this last month!

CREMA
Reckless #5: Follow Me Down
House of Slaughter, Vol. 2
Who Owns the Clouds?

silver dollar, golden flame
dirty water, poison rain
perfect murder, take your aim
i don't belong to anyone
but everybody knows my name
🎶

every time i check something related to the sabbat for ally/angel i'm reminded she isn't Officially Sabbat lol b/c i think that while our shitty st back then had some sabbat knowledge idk if he actually used the specific books for them or just went of what was in the corebooks b/c like TECHNICALLY i think you shouldn't be able to shovel an already embraced kindred, but there's a lot of shit that happened in that chronicle that shouldn't've soooooooooo we'll just tweak as necessary lol

but yeah! ally and angel are TECHNICALLY two different characters even tho i often squish them together for aesthetics or whatever. ally is just me, my fursona. angel is my self insert vampire: the masquerade pc that i've kind of used off and on for private rp stuff. they are the same, but they're not, y'know?

and outside of angel technically being false sabbat b/c she was just shoveled and never had creation/initiation rites and shit, she's BARELY sabbat outside of mostly using it to make herself seem more ~dangerous~ when necessary.

like, so, okay

rambling backstory b/c i've been piecing things together about her a bit more coherently in the last couple years lol
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( some ramblings below )