oh, mama raised me well

october was mostly garbage all around (lots of little things piling up and one deeply inconvenient issue still pending), but halloween weekend was nice, at least

july wasn't super eventful, but we did have a handful of nice storms!

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.

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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

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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

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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

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a little wip, as a treat

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

look at the way we gotta hide what we're doin'
'cause what would they say
if they ever knew?
🎶

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?