oh, mama raised me well

but if you can't be good
then just be better at it
🎶

i know that you mean so well
but i am not a vessel for your good intent
🎶

the vultures that surround me ride the thermals up on high
yeah, ever since you found me i'm afraid that i might die
🎶

and cedars, they blacken to cinders
don’t recognize your face in this glow
🎶

upstairs toilet must have gotten fixed, but the upstairs neighbor also moved out which is eeeh, good and bad. their kids were kinda loud, but they were overall mostly quiet - just music noodled frequently, but they could at least play decently. the downside is that: we're gonna get a new neighbor and it's a gamble on what that might end up being. the majority of individuals have been okay, or at least tolerable, except for that one woman and her children that had to be evicted and then weren't even out of the house when the landlord and the sheriff came down. i wish he wouldn't rent the place out at all, but what can you do

also dreading the inevitable $50/mo rent hike when i need to renew my lease ://// every year i get a meager raise and every year it's eaten up by my rent going up

---

been trying to draw more - or at least keep busy a little creatively



working on a ref for ancyn (base is by garoline) b/c i saw this base and it has SUCH ancyn vibes, so that was a big bit of inspiration to play around with it. i'm liking how it's coming out so far, at least. gonna add some more stuff to it, i think, as well, and make it more of a full ref sheet like my ally one is



also working on a commission thing~



also also realized i never posted these here?????? glimmer for mitsene (from her webcomic glimmer), cassiopeia for suzanami, and a kailani for me (her anthro destiny version - just straight opossum lol)

got a fit of inspiration at the end of december - AFTER i'd done my 2024 art summary, NATURALLY (which i also realize i haven't posted here lol - there's probably gonna be a bunch of individual art posts after this)

august was pretty busy - geekfest and the punk rock flea market on the same day, akron pride at the end of the month (that we marched in!! i talked for three years about getting a group together and i finally committed to it this year!). lots of kitties and a NEW KITTY given to us by the cat distribution system

just keep your mouth shut
keep your guard up
i swear i'll make it right
🎶


( symbolism )

( a promise made with twisted fingers behind my back )

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

beneath my breasts
there burns a fire
of blood and flesh
of sound and wire
it won't be quenched
🎶

spent the better part of the week over engineering a matchbook zine (inspired by rachel bard and pam wishbow) before i finally figured out that it's easier to just fold as needed as i go x_x

initial mockup - design done in canva, utilizing a matchbook template from a custom matchbook manufacturer. i was unsure what i was putting inside of it at this point


mockup with b&w pages - decided to format that little drabble i wrote about ancyn killing her partner and use it, plus some other little things. 20~ pages altogether. i was struggling a bit with the dimensions of each - the spots i had marked for scoring weren't correct with the page sizes and it was frustrating me. ended up spending some time measuring and re-measuring and tweaking and adjusting and reformatting everything in canva


reprinted with new (slightly larger) measurements and, instead of scoring everything from the get-go, i just scored what i needed as i went and then trimmed anything excess (the flap that goes under the stapled part, basically). these came together MUCHHHH quicker than the others and with less paper waste, as well. used one of the craft paper cutters and the whole process was easy and relaxing lol - plus i got some nice textured edges b/c the blade on the cutter wasn't super sharp, which works really well for these


complete!!! twenty-four little matchbook zines~ i made a reel on instagram showing me putting one together and you can see the little burnt matches pattern on the inside! the only thing i FORGOT was to put my @ somewhere dfkjghdklfghldfk so i ended using some label paper and printing a weathered paper texture on it and then my @ and sticking them into the back behind the pages lol

despite the frustration (and seemingly having to work backwards to solve it lol), this was a nice little project! i'll probably print a more here and there for assembling during downtime at work. they're slightly more labor intensive than the other zines i've done, so idk what to price them, b/c they are so small lol. for now i may just keep them for trades maybe

this last weekend was pretty nice/relaxing - i discovered librarything and have spend the last week or so cataloging everything i can find in the house which has multiple benefits: we're bad at remembering what books we have AND if i pack stuff into a box/tote to store somewhere, i can tag it appropriately so we can find it easily later

can ALSO catalog movies and music AND, while it's not a common thing to catalog on the site, video games! which, for the same above reasons, is super useful for us

i still some stuff to go through and add, including stragglers lingering randomly around the house, but i've got the main bookshelves added at least

also started doing some bigtime decluttering of the bedroom (cataloging stuff is part of that lol) b/c it was feeling claustrophobic and messy. things just stack up easily and i'm prone to just let it do so until the invisible, unknown breaking point is hit and i HAVE TO CLEAN.

---

we had a pretty nice thunderstorm thursday night - TONS of rain and a nice bit of lightning and thunder. there was some sketchy purple bits around us on the radar, but we didn't get hit with anything heavier than heavy rain. apparently there was a tornado touchdown in massillon, but i don't think it was anything significant.

also had a little bit of rumbly last night before bed, as well

garden is coming along nice. i feel like i was def eating tomatoes and peppers out of it by this time last year, but given i didn't really rehab the soil on the one side as much as it needed, i should be glad it's growing anything at all. so the tomats and pepps are coming in slowly, but our strawberries (container) have been producing nicely, as well as my sugar snap peas (when i can beat the birds to them). the cukes are also flourishing! there's quite a few hidden lemon cucumbers i spotted yesterday and a couple of the regular ones starting to look like actual veg

---

twitter is still impoloding. i'm still scoping out places where i might want to hang out as a twitter 'replacement'

i've got complaints about mastodon - i don't think it's user friendly in terms of signing up. in addition, one of he bigger furry instances just recently decided to shut down, so all those users have to move and find somewhere new to occupy. which is just...............bad for a social media platform. (tho i know masto isn't intended to be, like, an average socmed platform, but people are going to treat it like that b/c they don't understand what federated/unfederated/decentralized/whatever actually means or is for). i was on snouts back in the day (i signed up for masto pretty early on to play around with it) and i didn't even know it imploded when it did. but i'd have been Pretty Annoyed if i'd had a lot of posts/followers/whatever on there and it got nuked

but that's one of those masto things - you're at the whims of the admins of the instance you choose. and if you choose the 'default' mastodon.social instance, other instance owners may restrict that instance from theirs (meaning it's harder to view someone's posts/profile - it's, like, an extra three steps to go and view it on their own instance) and it's also, like, a three step process to follow someone not on your instance, including copypasting their @ info into the search on your instance and then following from there. it's not great

i'm waiting to see if i can acquire a bluesky invite, just to claim my name and play around with it. but i've been on the waitlist for mooooonths x_x

and, like, i don't really want a furry-specific socmed site b/c i LIKE being able to stumble across all different kinds of art and stuff - i don't want to JUST be confined to furry stuff. my twitter feed is a pretty varied and i LIKE it like that. that's why i like tumblr, as well. it can just be stream of thought/personal/art/furry/fandom/horror/games/whatever. and, sure, i can do that on a furry-centric platform, too, but i'm not going to be exposed to/find as much cool stuff i like in that kind of space

so idk, i'm kind of bouncing around everywhere lol

---

ran 'prophecy' over the weekend with growl and tony!! it was very fun - i like the dungeons where there's lots of space and stuff to explore and the mechanics were enjoyable to do (not like the nightmare that is the second encounter of 'ghosts of the deep')







leaving these full size b/c i like them lol

other than that i've been grinding for the solstice title ('flamekeeper') - i didn't get it last year so i gotta redo everything this year. all i've got left now is.......................killing guardians. which means running either crucible or gambit. i'm hoping for a mayhem week so i can just force myself into crucible b/c killing guardians in gambit is more strategery lol

---

a little wip, as a treat

i am.............so eepy

house/petsitting this week for friends chris and sam while they're out in south dakota visiting sam's family. i stayed over over the weekend due to their new puppy, sadie, still having a bit of kennel cough. but since i went back to work today, i tossed sadie off to chris' sister and now i just have to pop over and feed the cats before/after work. sadie is FUCKING ADORABLE, but god, are puppies a handful x_x their cats are also on a feeding schedule, so i had to plan my days out carefully lol


sadie: puppy, george: orange, ferret: brown

(the last kitty isn't theirs, but their neighbor's - so sweet, but outdoors ://////)

but i did hit up the local bakery once or twice over the weekend (their macarons are SO good), and got ribs at the ribfest downtown, as well. got to zip back and forth on the bike trails quite a bit and, after last week with the wildfire haze, the weather was pretty beautiful. also seen on the bike trails: a family of raccoons, three cats (b&w, cream, gray), groundhogs, and a turkey




also watched A LOT of buzzfeed unsolved lol, but didn't do much art like i'd hoped. it is what it is

---

twitter finally fucked up tweetdeck, so i'm pretty pissed about that. it was what i primarily used on desktop to access the site b/c it kept things in order and nice. the new tweetdeck sucks AND it's gonna be confined to blue subscribers and that sure af ain't me

you can also only access one account at a time, instead of how it was before where you could have a bunch of columns from different accounts for whatever you needed

so idk people are gonna get scattered to the four winds and i'll have to juggle half a dozen sites if i want to see what anyone's doing. there's also gonna be half a dozen new [subject] social media sites popping up and i don't WANT a 'furry twitter' or an 'artist twitter' style site. the whole appeal of twitter was being able to follow a bunch of different types of accounts - tumblr does this, but a lot of the other sites that've popped up don't have that appeal (or that kind of userbase). i want to follow furries, i want to follow artists, i want to follow horror stuff, i want to follow destiny stuff, i want to follow a big variety of things, not just 'specific subject'

but there was bound to be a breaking point, and i think we're about there. unless musk dumps the site onto someone else, but it's doubtful b/c it makes him the center of attention

---

i fiiiiiiiiiiiiinally made it down to the main library to play around with the garment printer. since most of our backend stuff is still down due to the ransomware outage, since i was downtown by the library anyhow, i popped in to see when i could get an appointment and was able to snag one over the weekend!




it's......................finicky. at least, for what i wanted to do specifically, which was make some patches. the fabric i had ended up being two-way stretch, which wasn't ideal. it didn't dry as nicely as a cotton would've after being pre-treated. i also fucked up and did AT LEAST one of these on the non-treated side x_x but the ones that came out nice DID come out nice and this was primarily experimental to see what i was working with. refining some things, i think i should be able to do some nice patches with it

it def needs, like, clear, solid black linework, otherwise it looks blurry in some spots. but then the two i did that were sketches actually came out looking really cool! the printer has an option to basically ignore black in the design which i had hoped would just print white. which, uh, it DID, but it was VERY strict about the black and those designs just came out sort of faded and greyscale. i'll probably go through my designs and re-ink them really clearly, or at least darken the linework on them. i may also try doing these on a different color fabric, as well

i put up a bunch of the better designs in my ko-fi shop!

my favorite design actually ended up being the one with the most color! so maybe i'll try some more grungy stuff like this, as well

i wanna feel the edges start to burn
🎶

new month, new grid of pics that's eighty percent my cats!

( Read more... )

i got hyperfixated on doing a mini 8pg zine stuff last night after zipcon and they're pretty fun to do!! no real plans going in, just pulling images from places and lyrics/poetry/words from places, and rooting around in my textures folder and doing whatever with it

gonna try printing it tomorrow at work, i'm sure most of the text is too small for it to be viable on an 8.5x11, but maybe it'll look nice on 11x17 - tho that might be bigger than i actually want it lol

clicking goes to my ko-fi shop~

charms that i got made through knifeorchid's discord group order earlier this year! it's very, very fun to see your art as physical items. i also absolutely adore the hook one - i thought it would make a great charm back when i first drew it

made all these cute little merch graphics with canva, since half of my awake time is spent at work and without photoshop or something, and canva's great for this kinda shit and i don't have to really wrack my brain over graphic design lol

---

( art dump behind the cut )

---

other than that, uh

i picked up a new phone (on payments of course) this month - moto g power 2022. my old one (moto g6) still works OKAY but it was doing shit like not charging, or having to be sat a Very Specific Way to charge, or just turning off whenever it felt like, often in the middle of the night when i had an alarm set. sometimes it would decide it was 'too cold' and shut off at the end of my scooter ride so i couldn't end the ride in the app. it was slow, but i'd adapted, but it was still s l o w

new phone does have some finickiness, which i knew going in, but i wanted as new as i could get in my budget. it feels like it's not as fast as it SHOULD be for a phone that's three years newer than my g6, but since i've been using it normally now it feels decently speedy in comparison. also, more space, a really nice camera (in comparison). it's bigger (taller) which is kind of annoying, but i'll get used to it

i also managed to put my screen protector on with NO BUBBLES OR DEBRIS UNDER IT. the true accomplishment here

work has been..............................something. a lot of something. both of our student workers quit within a week of each other, out part timer transferred to another branch. we GOT a teen librarian from a different branch transferred over (heard rumors of issues with the manager there). had, like, three incidents to do paperwork on with neighborhood kids last month, including one where they threw a whole kid's scooter into our foyer and at the inside automatic doors and then went around pounding on the windows in the front of the branch

i have four days off for christmas, which is nice, i'm hoping to maybe try to accomplish some kind of art but i'll probably just end up playing destiny b/c i can't manage my time anymore lol

tonight, tho, i'm going over a friends' place for a holiday dinner and that should be nice (idk if tony's going with or not, he was invited but is also sketchy with holiday stuff)

---

forgot i wanted to add reading stuff too lol...

📖 Little Monsters, Volume 1
interesting premise, nice art. i liked the muted, kind of scratchy vibe this has visually. interested to see where it goes, there's not a TON of plot in the first volume, but you get to know the characters a little bit

📖 The Closet #1
i thought this would be..........more? maybe it will be in later volumes lol. WELL, LIKE, i thought it would be more actual monsters kind of thing (and maybe it will turn into that? manifestation of fears or something) but it's mostly interpersonal relationship drama seen tangentially through the eyes of a child. which is fine, just not what i prefer lol. the main character is just a shitshow of a pathetic human being, in the bad way lol which is great writing, but man is he unlikeable lol

📖 Carole & Tuesday, Vol. 1
this is super cute so far! i haven't watched the anime yet, but i've been aware of it. my only gripe is that sometimes they draw carole's neck really long and it's disconcerting lol

📖 Die, Vol. 1: Fantasy Heartbreaker
i am......kinda? liking this? the art is BEAUTIFUL and there's an interesting story being told here, but it's not sunshine and roses. the plot IS pretty dreary, which is fine, but probably not what someone who reads the premise of 'adults have to return to the d&d fantasy world they played in as teens' would be expecting

i also didn't realize this was by kieron gillen and i REALLY did not like the writing in 'the wicked + the divine' when i first read it years ago (i don't think i finished the first volume??) so maybe i'll give that another shot just to see if it was as bad as i remember in comparison

📖 Home Sick Pilots, Volume 1: Teenage Haunts
the art in this is beautiful, the plot is a little convoluted but this one feels like there's enough plot fed in to keep you wondering that'll probably be elaborated on in later volumes (though the ending of this vol does take a turn i didn't expect lol so it could go from 'girl pilots house like a mech' conceptually to literally)

📖 Chainsaw Man, Vol. 1: Dog And Chainsaw
i kept seeing thinkpieces about how the women in this SUCK(affectionate), and we had the first couple volumes on the shelves at work, so i figured i'd give it a shot. i don't hate it! the devil designs are pretty cool and it honestly doesn't feel AS fanservice-y as i'd expect. i think i've got vol. 3 sitting on my desk atm, so it's got me willing to learn more at least lol

📖 Sports Is Hell
i'd seen this on the shelves at work, but someone requested it for a hold and i started skimming through it at the desk. figured i'd give it a quick read b/c it's pretty short. it's WILD biting satire of politics under the veneer of sports - you can see the juxtaposition of sports riots (good) vs. activism riots (bad) and the ever-constant battle between how to be the Right Kind of Activist or revolutionary

i've got a............tall stack of graphic novels on my desk currently that i need to power through lol

it failed my little fire
but it’s bright the dying spark
go tell the young messiah
what happens to the heart
🎶

think i'm sticking with 'ancyn' for her. i think lol

when you've been out exploring what's left of the world after the collapse, you tend to be cut off from communication and a lot of news. probably good to have a debriefing before returning to civilization in the last city...

( Read more... )

rolled a hunter in destiny, i really wanted the new solstice hunter armor and i had an empty slot lol. sort of re-working angel for that universe, including her Very Important Character Plot Point of murdering her partner (her sire, originally. ~diablerie~)

she's a lot more guarded than og angel, a decent bit paranoid, and definitely trauma-rattled from whatever happened in both the time up to having to put her partner down (and his ghost agreeing with the act, and purposely not rezzing him...) and the act of doing so and dealing with the aftermath. AND the anxiety/stress of returning to the city and the tower knowing that black mark is on her and someone may find out eventually

there's a lot of ~unknowns~ with her rn b/c her whole deal is that she wanted to explore places and her and her partner spent a lot of time on what would become their home turf over in the americas/canada and near old chicago. destiny doesn't have lore for that, so it's fun to keep thing vague b/c who fuckin' knows what could be happening there that's not in game or lore yet

anyhow, content warning for implied murder, blood mention. i may flesh this out more, but for now, i'm chucking it here

( Read more... )