I had a rather long "break" from furry and from most social activity for the first half of this year. My writing supplies have collected dust, my website is unfashionably stagnant, and my pen pals are probably wondering where I've gone. Still here, just lurking and shaking off social cryosleep.

Saw the AP News headline creep into my Slashdot feed, and my first thought was the Harvey Danger song (YouTube link, CW brief mention of self-harm) that was, sadly, not mentioned. Come on, people, they had songs other than Flagpole Sitta! (That's the one that goes "I'm not sick but I'm not weeeeell". It's one of those songs whose title never caught on because it's not in the song verbatim.)

National Gift Shopping Day is here (aka Black Friday; the day after Thanksgiving; the time we run out of excuses not to play Christmas music on every other radio station), and my recon at Thanksgiving wasn't too informative. My guesses are usually fine if I don't wait until the last minute.

I haven't done much actively furry stuff lately. Retrocomputing and photography have been the latest shiny objects in my field of vision. The latter is something I can enjoy with my partner when we go out on walks together and go to conventions and such. Still hoping to improve my technique in time for a furry meet...wait, oh god, most of them have fursuit heads, right? I don't! Unlike my photos, apparently, I'll be EXPOSED. But that's probably fine. If I see a coworker there, then we're mutually aware of each other's weirdness. Whatever.

The winter holidays are an AFK time of year, but I want to stay active-ish in the meantime.

I more or less ignored SoFurry for like six months after the February downtime, and I've been behind on furry reading as a result (less the bound stuff, more the short stories). "Yeah, but my watchlist is probably huge, I'll look again when I have time," I've said to myself. It's often called the double-or-nothing fallacy, a usual suspect behind my procrastination fits. I wiped it on login. If anyone out there's SoFurry-exclusive and wondering where I've been, sorry for the wait. It's just hard to prioritize watching on multiple sites when my output isn't high enough to also post on those sites regularly. I really want a site with SoFurry's functionality and FA's popularity. (Is that what this Itaku thing's supposed to be?)

As if backlogs weren't already a problem, I also went through my FA watchlist and watched linked SoFurry accounts. That was productive, right?

In an episode of The X-Files, Mulder and Scully discover that some half-human, half-flukeworm monster has been attacking people in or near a sewer system in New Jersey. When they have it cornered for a moment, Assistant Director Skinner says that he wants to send the visibly inhuman creature away for psychiatric evaluation. (Not a real spoiler, this is about mid-way through the episode.)

Days after seeing this, the memory of this moment completes its slingshot maneuver around my cerebellum and provides me with the image of the humanoid fluke monster laying on one of those red therapy couches, mutated digits steepled over its lumpen midsection, speaking in a calm manner to a bearded man scribbling notes behind a clipboard.

"Well," the monster says, shifting with a squelch that came from inside it, "I think the trouble all started when I was a larva. The others teased me because my fangs grew unevenly. I didn't know who to turn to for help or a kind word, and, well, I suppose I started lashing out...Relationship with my mother? My host died when I emerged and swam away down the shower drain. I want to say I don't blame myself, but..."

I stopped at Walmart to pick up a new lunchbox (I'd ruined my old one in an incident involving frozen peas). Back when I worked at one over a few summers, there were a couple evenings where a tired bat in a mostly empty part of the store would endure a group of chattering, giggling teenagers. This was back when they were selling those cheap mascot-style animal heads, which itself was a real trip to see all gathered in an iron basket for $20 each. Some product designer, I assume, became vaguely aware of furries when one of their kids was looking at fursuiter pics on the social feed du jour, and they figured out a way to mass-produce animal heads so kids everywhere could beg their parents for one and get bored with it after a week. Chances were good that the teens would try them on for a lark.

They didn't have any intention of purchasing the things, nor were they shoplifters. They were just hanging out, making each other laugh, killing time. Walmart, whether the Subway by its customer service gland was open, was a hangout spot. Laboring under soul-blanching fluorescent bulbs all day, I didn't know why.

Back to today, driving out of the parking lot. Three girls, probably late-teens, were loitering next to a red car, Slurpees in hand, in no hurry to get anywhere. One sat cross-legged on the pavement with her cigarettes while they talked. I had the A/C cranked; why were they out here? They didn't seem to be waiting for anyone. I can't say this is an innovation from chilling inside the Walmart, there are at least benches in there. It seemed to be more incidental, a rest stop between places to go—but that's it, isn't it? Where, as someone living in the Midwest and not old enough to drink, do you go when you're not at home?

My personal answer is "a friend's house, the library, the game store, and nowhere." I didn't have local friends I could just bike to on nice afternoons, and my parents wouldn't haul me out there and back. The library, while nice and quiet, isn't conducive to social activity unless you convince them to host some kind of event. I could get to the game store on my bike, but without money, I didn't have much to do there, and I didn't get into Magic like all the regulars did. Wandering around town unsupervised was also a bad idea, according to natural conclusions drawn from the one Stranger Danger-type VHS we had.

The Polaris mall is the only one I knew of, and I don't think anyone at school ever hung out there. Still, there were several cartoons that insisted that malls were super-cool hangout spots, and I felt like the neighborhood was missing something because of that. What it was actually missing was somewhere to go and just be with your friends and peers, no need for money or bug spray (trails were also an option, as my boyfriend told me). Not that I would've availed myself of such a place, as I was (and am) quite the hermit. Maybe it would've helped to have those sorts of opportunities earlier in life. As it stands, I now have the ability to go anywhere, go to a bar, meet people, and the very idea tightens my jaw and makes me wish I could lock myself in a tower.

This has been one of those stretches where meatspace took precedence over The 'Net, partly from a full schedule and partly from retreating into video games to manage stress. The summer's looking better now, though.

I'm going to experiment with branching out on DW more. Knowing that my posts can be exported makes me feel safer networking on here than on most sites, not to mention the ability to have different access levels. It's still not exactly a hive of activity, but that's fine with me. Using it anyway is the only way around the chicken-and-egg problem that comes with running a network. There's also the fact that I'm just not good with platforms geared towards the short-and-now. I'm wired to be longform.

Got a new fountain pen, too. Itching to write more letters.

My story about a skunk street racer, Racing by Instinct, is up now (link to website). It was only after a couple real-life delays and a lot of hesitant editing that I decided to just package up what was there in a hurry and set it out. It's done, barring extremely glaring omissions or errors.

The huge amount of time I spent pecking away at it did not make it better. Writing quality does not increase proportionally with time, and it's possible to overcook a story until you end up wishing you wrote a different one. Mind you, this wasn't literal days of hemming and hawing over details, more like long periods of IRL taking precedence and invading my early evenings, the times when I'm not too sleepy to create. I'm writing this post right before bed more or less as a stream-of-consciousness postmortem of RbI.

On the new Stories page, I've also included links to my erotica, each of which lead either to FA or SoFurry, both of which are age-gated. The explanation for why they weren't there initially and why they are now will take a bit more explaining because it ties into the larger subject of erotic art and how my view of it has changed over time.

Shout-out to Slimy for helping me out with some webdev stuff! The navbar now runs on JS so I don't have to update the bar for every single .html file when I change something.

I just got the one book I was waiting for in the mail today, so I now have a pretty solid reading list for the next while:

Waterways by Kyell Gold
Dogs of War, anthology edited by Fred Patten
Scars of the Golden Dancer by NightEyes DaySpring

I also have a digital copy of a non-furry (edit) book by a furry: The Dogtrot Murder by Nick Sanders.

Physical copies of furry books and other small-print media are some of the coolest things, and I just wanted to enthuse about that a little. I'd love to have a bookshelf full of them one day!

In other news, my mate is sick and tired and his senses are dulled and he feels crappy and he's gotta close the blinds a bit because it's too bright in here and his head hurts and he needs a smoothie. I'm doing my best to avoid catching the same cold (not COVID, we checked).

I wrote a self-reflective article about getting a flip phone.

Site updates this time around are just some small things, mostly. I’m approaching the other side of a vidya binge and haven’t paid much attention to Neocities or furry stuff. It’s kind of the winter mindset: hunker down, entertain yourself, and try to stay chipper even when it’s perpetually gray and cold outside. There’s a new schedule at home as well, which means recalculating my free time within the new routine.

I have one story that’s coming along nicely. Once the draft is done, I’ll give it some tough edits to polish it up (including taking a chainsaw to it because it’s already over 5k words) and then post it on my site. It’s a clean modern-day story, and that’s all I can say about it.