Everyones doing it, filing a last journal reflecting on the year as it lapses into another.
Normally I don't do these types of things because I've got nothing to say about it.
I survive another year motherfuckers; I live.

This year, something feels off. This doesn't feel like the right time for a new year to start. In my head, Christmas feels like its still approaching with another two weeks on the horizon, and then the new year gets here afterwards. Largely I think that's due to my mental approach to and requirements from work. Scheduled to work? Go to work. Scheduled across a holiday? Go to work and earn doubletime pay for it.

So for most of everyone else, two thousand twenty-four is going to give rise to two thousand twenty-five tomorrow.
For me? Its Wednesday.
I'll wake up, make my breakfast, then get in my car, and off I drive.
It'll be a quiet day at work. I've engaged in the family tradition of years past where I procure donuts to snack on as I watch the Rose Parade on the TV in the morning, and chances are the phone won't ever ring, and no one from the air traffic room will come out and bother me for the whole ten hours of shift. I'll go home, and that'll be my "New Years", per say. Honestly pretty lackluster.

Really am breathing a sigh of relief here because I'm lucky as shit to even have a job right now. The title of this journal isn't a lie; for in an alternate universe I'm killing myself for losing my well paying federal job for a simple oversight fuckup that I never noticed on a Thursday and no one ever mentioned until I showed up to work again on Monday.

At work there's a system that collects radar data from the field, and processes it so the air traffic controllers can see the moving aircraft spots on their screens.
Every day, because no one trusts this stupid shit, four reports have to be generated from each redundant service side, you do another reporting thing from the security terminal, and then you sign off that you've done all these things and certify with your name on the fucking line that this system can perform its services.
Somehow apparently, despite falling into a very routine process over the last two years, I neglected to ever sign off any of these daily checks, even though I went to these consoles and did what I normally do. Had there been any incidents involving aircraft and an investigation were to have found the system was left uncertified, therefore untrustworthy, I'd have lost my job. Immediately. There's no second chance, no counseling, no retraining. I'm just done. And my fifty-thousand dollar per year job goes away.

Fortunately, the air space did not produce any incidents.
But in an alternate reality tangent to this one, I'd be entering the new year wondering what the fuck it is I'm going to do going forward because all my carefully laid plans just got destroyed, and there's no replacing the job I had just lost, ever.

On a brighter note, given all the art pieces that I've painstakingly organized and uploaded to the best of my abilities in order of acquiring them, plus delving into my own art, I feel that I've grown as an artist. Make no mistake, I'm still a shit artist. I draw too slow, I draw too infrequently to ever make tangible progress, I have no concept of anatomical skeletal structure beneath a subjects skin, and my art pieces never progress beyond pencil stages because committing to inking something just makes me shudder, and I'm not exactly keen on figuring out digital art despite having a medium size Wacom Bamboo Fun size tablet sitting here collecting dust.

Still, some of you think that my arts and ideas are actually worth something. Thank you for that. I never entered this fandom with a goal that my arts or ideas would appeal to anyone but myself and yet occasionally now at cons I'm met by furs that discovered weird kinks because of me or have wanted to meet me and chat. I still like being in furry, despite its obvious problems at times, for these experiences and meetings with other furs, other friends, and its especially cool to meet other furs from entirely different countries. Furry here in the US is wildly different than overseas.

It was during the last huge project of Sleepyhead's four page comic that I felt mentally like I'd made that jump of being able to turn on being an artist on a regular basis. I'd come home from work and feel the want to draw, and just set out my sketchbook and get to it. For as insanely labor intensive as Sleepyhead's comic looks like, it never felt like it was a chore to draw any of it, believe it or not, just the opposite. The repetition of multiple limbs again and again and again got progressively easier because I started just getting practiced to it, and there was also never any rushing stress to finish it to a deadline. I'd just draw until I was content with progress, put it away, and unwind during the night.
That type of thing had never happened before, and it felt kind of good. Hopefully I can capture that desire in any future endeavors I attempt.

Going into next year I will be saying goodbye to Ixion, my trusty Windows7 desktop that I built what must be thirteen or fourteen years ago at this point. Its finally really hitting the limits of longevity and shit is just refusing to work on it anymore. Windows7 is obsolete. Discord refuses to fucking be installed on it anymore when I uninstalled it troubleshooting things so now I have to use its website interface. Dropbox is saying it'll stop working. Sometimes the graphics card will completely lose its shit when playing streams full screen and hard freeze the system but it happens so infrequently that I honestly don't know what it could be. Some games on Steam just can't run given the hardware I have.

I never had the financial opportunity to ever get hardware parts in the past. House renovation loans; the crypto shit that shot all prices to the moon; and a mentality of just saying "eh, its good enough, why bother?" until here I am where I am and the whole system just needs to be rebuilt new again.
I shopped for and purchased everything I needed to do so back in August. But then, you know...running poker tournaments at some fur cons and traveling to cons, plus the immense task of scanning in my sketchbooks and posting art pieces before dicking with my system pushed it ever further back because the last thing I wanted was to find out nothing would carry over to Windows10 and then that task cannot complete.

But I think here, in the distant two weeks once Painted Desert and Further Confusion furcons have passed, thats when there's a significant break that I could get that done.

Financially speaking, two thousand twenty-five is shaping up to be an absolute banger of a year. I think, if I play my cards right in it, come April or May one of my two remaining house loans could stand to be paid off in full and gotten rid of, and that will be a difficult thing to swallow when it happens, but the release of a debt will be so worth it and I've been waiting for this for about five years now it seems.

A friend of mine is thinking about surrendering a Cintiq22 drawing tablet and I've been feeling the want to purchase it because of the want to try out digital arts. The new system should be able to handle this but is it something that's worth delving into?
Also, gaming. The new system will have a 3060 graphics card. More than adequate to handle whatever I want to do. I've been far out of the gaming scene for many years but maybe this would be an opportunity to try and get back into that if I could.

Anyway, that's about all that I can think of.

Please me, don't fuck up anything next year...

--Mozdoc