With Windows 10 reaching end of life a few weeks ago, and the endless horrors I constantly hear about Windows 11, I decided now was the time to finally take the plunge. I wiped my main PC clean and installed Linux Mint in its place (and convinced my partner Kisa to install Bazzite on her old gaming laptop).

Having owned a Steam Deck for several years now, as well as Mint being the OS of choice for a computer resale shop I like to visit, I've already had time to acclimate to Linux and its quirks. And I have to say that I really like how much more customizable it is, to a degree that I never could with Windows. (Plus the complete lack of bloat, spyware, and AI garbage is a HUGE selling point in 2025!)
I also cannot overstate how fantastic Steam's Proton service is for making nearly all their games Linux compatible, save for a few AAA games that refuse to run due to anti-cheat crap.

I can't say there hasn't been a few hiccups along the way -- getting all my old creature comforts back such as screensavers, mouse macros, RGB lighting, and a few old .exe programs that don't play nice with Wine or Proton. But it's been a good way to learn how to tinker under the hood following many guides online and I feel up to the challenge. And of course, finding a good replacement for Photoshop is going to be a daunting task.

At some point I would love to get my hands on a spare computer just to have something to muck around in other Linux distros with. There's so much for me to learn still!

At the risk of sounding like a vegan, I am quite happy I made the switch and I highly encourage more people to do the same.

https://abiboi.gumroad.com/l/bigcat.....layout=profile

I just bought this avatar a few days ago. I was told it was the best lynx model, the most fully featured, etc. But now I want to get it modified to look like me (and add my costume, of course).
I don't know the first thing about 3D modeling, so I need someone to do it for me. But asking on Twitter is just going to get me swarmed with bots and scammers, so I thought I'd ask here instead.

I don't use vrchat yet, since I'm still a stubborn Second Life holdout. But at some point in the future I inevitably will. Plus, I was told that vrchat avatars work in Tower Unite, which I do play.

Any pointers in the right direction will be greatly appreciated.

I never use FA journals anymore, but I can't fit everything I want to complain about into a Twitter post. (No, I will not call it X.) Just feels like a lot of bad luck has compounded all in one week and I'm worried about the next few months.

My financial situation has never been all that stellar, thanks to poor life choices made in my early 20s (and frankly neither has my medical situation). Since I moved out of my parents house in 2020, I've also been struggling to hold onto any single job for longer than six months, for a variety of different reasons.
At some point my depression had just spiked so badly that I just...gave up for a while and spent the entirety of 2021 unemployed. And since I hadn't bothered to sign up for unemployment benefits, my credit card debt got really, really out of control. To the tune of about $20,000 total. On top of owing my parents $10,000 for a car they bought for me about five years ago, after I totaled my previous one.

Since then I've been really, really trying to dig myself out of the hole I'd gotten myself into, but things just never seemed to work out and I'd only slide in deeper. It's hard to both pay off debt but also live a life, you know?

Over the last summer I had finally snagged a job that was easygoing, close to home, paid well, and computer-focused. I thought I finally got a job I could stick with for a while. I was still struggling to get my spiraling bills under control, but I was staying afloat. My girlfriend  kisaofthesnow and I were confident we could finally afford to move out of the crappy ghetto apartment we are staying in and into a nicer one. One that didn't feel like a broom closet, one we wouldn't be embarrassed to invite our friends to visit.

Then in August, during a massive heat wave, Kisa's car died on the side of the road. Her engine almost literally melted. She had to borrow $3000 from her parents for a secondhand car to replace it.

In September, my car had to go to the shop to fix some nasty steering and suspension damage from potholes in the spring. That cost $1500.

A week ago, Kisa put in her two week notice as her job was taking its toll on her mental well-being.

Just this last Friday, merely four months in, I got let go from my job.

My car is back in the shop because my starter is shot.

And now my computer is on the fritz, crashing frequently from bad RAM and now I suddenly have no sound. Probably my motherboard dying.

We only have just enough money to pay the deposit on the new apartment, but nothing else past that. Not even rent for our current apartment.

I don't know how in the hell we're gonna make it through the next couple of weeks, dealing with moving expenses, medical bills, groceries, necessities for our irl cats, an obligatory family wedding trip, and whatever other tragedies might hit us all at once. Not to mention the minimums on my credit card statements that are almost as much as a full paycheck. And it seems like things around the house are all suddenly breaking all at the same time. To say I'm stressed out is putting it lightly.

I finally filed for unemployement benefits after all these years, and I'm trying to search for a new job right away, but man, it just feels like the deck is stacked against me.
It's tempting to start a gofundme, but I feel ashamed begging for help when I'm a nobody who's done nothing notable and deserving of attention, and probably brought this all on myself.

Hopefully this doesn't mean I'll end up having to disappear for a while, but who knows what will happen in the coming days.

31 today. Though some days I feel twice that. Getting old is fun.

Apparently both the Queen of England and Thurston Waffles passed away within the last 24 hours, so...that's a thing.

I don't have much for birthday plans, aside from Furry Migration happening this weekend, which I will be at, and of course my lovely gf  kisaofthesnow will be there as an artist. See some of you there!

As the title says. Fur Squared is next weekend and I will be there! I'll be supporting my gf  kisaofthesnow and be hanging out with local lynx friends  arestheram and Solvi Lynx!

2022 already? Jesus. I've been unemployed for nearly a year now. Though I certainly have been spending that time trying to better myself in a lot of ways. No sense in making new year's resolutions when I'm still working on the last ones. That 2012 nostalgia be hitting hard though, for what feels like the last time things were ever "normal" in my life.

Let's hope that this is the year that I, you, and society collectively gets its shit together and things go back to "normal."

Just learned yesterday that my friend  Aridacus_Bercanicus passed away due to Covid.

I talked with him regularly on Telegram in both MNfurs and vore interest groups. He was from one of my original hometowns and we often talked about meeting up in person one day.

Just...fuck, man. Wear your masks and get your booster shots, y'all.

Well, part of me for many years used to think I'd never reach this point in my life, but here I am. 30 years old. I can't believe how much crazy shit I've been through in the last 10 years of my life. Hell, the last five alone. I figure it's probably about time I finally make a new FA journal since I'm barely active on here anymore.

During the last winter I hit some very deep lows, with a job I wasn't enjoying coupled with isolation due to depression and covid, not to mention the stress of now living on my own for the first time in my life. About six months ago I was ultimately let go by said job on bad terms, and I decided to use my newly found free time to try and do some self-care before I hit rock bottom. I saw doctors for anti-depression medication and to talk about my medical issues. I got back into old hobbies. I finally started whittling through video games that I always wanted to play through but never had the energy to. I got back in touch with some old friends, and even some new ones that had moved into my area. I started going out and doing fun social things again, like petting zoos and retro arcades. And, maybe most importantly, I got my covid vaccination.

Unfortunately I'm still unemployed, but now my savings have run dry, so my little "vacation" will be ending soon. But the love of my life  kisaofthesnow has been helping me, both emotionally and financially, and spending time with my local friends  arestheram (Macid the lynx) and  graith_tiger has certainly helped as well. While I don't think I'll ever be back to my old self again, for those of you that remember me during my college years, I certainly don't feel as worthless as I did for the last few years.

So, here's to getting older, wiser, and the roller coaster of life that I've endured since my school days. I may be settling down slowly and no longer interested in fame or glory, and my circle of friends may have changed drastically over the years, but you bet I'm still up to my shenanigans like old times.

If anyone that's still followed me after all this time is interested in getting back in touch, I'm still quite active on Twitter as well as the usual slew of instant messengers, and I even still poke my head into Second Life every now and then (no vrchat, my computer still needs an upgrade or two despite having been built in January! Damn GPU shortages.) I will also be attending Furry Migration this coming weekend as well, along with a slew of other local Minnesota conventions (2D Con was an absolute blast, as always!).

P.S. Will I ever upload more commissions? Maybe. Will I ever draw my own art again? Even more iffy. But who knows what the next ten years might hold in the cards...

Well, it's finally happening. An apartment building in a town near the Twin Cities I want to move to that has all the amenities I like, allows cats, and is reasonably priced, accepted my application. The move-in date is November 15. I'm over the moon right now.

But I'm also nervous as hell. After all these years, this is the first time I've ever been out on my own, away from my family. It's been long, long overdue, but I just haven't felt ready. I don't think I could be doing this without my love  kisaofthesnow by my side. She's helping immensely with everything.

This is a really, really big deal for me, and a lot of work ahead to make this work. So effective immediately I will be cutting down on all of my usual social networks, IM, Second Life, all of that, so I can focus on getting things ready in the next two months. I would prefer to completely shut them off but.....we all know how that works out.

Just heard the news today that an old friend of mine  kentam has passed away. Details are scarce, but Twitter is definitely buzzing about it. As far as I'm aware, it was not covid.

He was one of the first folk I met back when I first started exploring the fandom, back in my early days on Yumchat, IRC, god knows wherever else (like 2008? 2009?). We weren't the closest of friends, but man was he ever the nicest guy to talk to. We had some fun times together back in the day. Somewhere, I still have an unfinished drawing of silly fun with him and some mutual friends that never saw the light of day, and I feel awful that it never got finished.

I think it's safe to say everyone feels the same way about him, and it's quite comforting to hear that he touched so many people and left such an impact.

Goddamn this year is a bitch.

Felt a compulsory need to update this since I never do anymore. So hi.

As of posting this journal all of Minnesota is supposed to be in a soft lockdown to hamper the spread of Covid-19, but since about 70% of stores have deemed themselves "essential" nothing has really changed for me. I still have to work, and the store I work for seems ten times busier than usual, despite half my coworkers either quitting or taking sick leave. The "100 Days of Hell" be hitting early I guess.

I've been spending most of my time the last few weeks back on my retro gaming collection, grabbing lucky finds here and there from Half Price and Goodwill, buying bulk CD cases to repair games already in my collection (even Sega CD/Saturn long boxes), and playing around with Photoshop trying to get old game manuals restored from crappy internet jpegs. I've also been working toward turning my console collection blue...because reasons. Lots of goodies on eBay, Etsy and fan repair sites. I'm hoping to get a new collection photo at some point since my collection has grown considerable since the last photo I took five years ago: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/15918310/
My Backloggery account is at 1188 games last count... you'd think with all this free time I might actually get around to finishing some of those games... Maybe I should become a streamer just to encourage myself to finish all these damn games.

Anyway, that's all the updates I got for now. Just riding out this virus ordeal by burying my nose in my hobbies. I'm pretty much more active on Twitter these days than anything else so you can follow me there to watch my mind slowly deteriorate.

Oh right, I'm at con this weekend.

If you're in Milwaukee come say hi!

I barely update these journals anymore, so this also serves as a bit of a journal bump.

For the probably three of you that still actively follow my FA, I am going to be gone on vacation for the coming week (1/12-1/18). Family cruise vacation to the Bahamas, a particularly favorite spot for my parents. They paid our boarding passes as a Christmas gift. My gf  kisaofthesnow is coming as well.

I plan on being completely offline the entire week, so this journal is mostly for the sake of anyone from F-list, Second Life, and wherever else I usually chat with people, if they ask where I've disappeared to.

So, Fur Squared. I did the thing. Sort of. Most of the weekend was spent being my gf Kisa's shadow the whole time, and the few times we split off to do different things, I didn't know what to do with myself. The rest of our group was too busy to hang out with, and the few folk I was wanting to meet up with at the con were also too busy to visit, or I only got fleeting glimpses of them in the hallway before never seeing them again. Didn't buy any art, only bought one piece of merch, went to no room parties, and the one panel I made it to was completely screwed over by the host running late from a broke-down Uber.

Another thing that really bugged me was the amount of young kids and teenagers running loose in the con. It's something that's been bothering me for a long time with local meets as well, and anyone I've bitched to on messenger knows how much I absolutely loathe seeing kids at furry things. The fandom has always been adult-oriented in my experience, and was my draw to the fandom to begin with, so obviously this makes me very uncomfortable. But it's also a depressing reminder how long I've been in the fandom, that so much has changed; people are getting older and having kids of their own, the fandom has become hugely diversified and more mainstream, and I'm not sure I like it.

On the plus side, it's hard to get post-con depression when you've spent the entire con already being depressed.

Honestly, this experience just makes me pine for the old days of cons when I had the energy to party hard, especially before MFF became an overcrowded clusterfuck. Hard to believe it's been almost 10 years since my first convention, AnthroCon 2009. I miss being young and dumb, able to stay up late and drink myself silly, and not being weighed down by adult life, not to mention all the medical problems I've had as of late.

I think it might be time to finally hang my hat and cease traveling to furry conventions. Meeting furries irl has just become a less and less enjoyable experience for me, and maybe soon it might just be time to give up the fandom entirely.

Welp I finally confirmed my time off work and got preregistered.

See some of you there, probably.

Another Christmas, another year over. And very little to show for it. Other than a nasty cold with possible lung infection that keeps me up all night with nonstop coughing.

I've been feeling a lot of burnout in everything I enjoy lately, and I've started to wonder what I'm even doing with myself and my life. Living the same dirty habits and vicious cycles that I have been since I finished college in 2012. And now the decade is nearly over. What the hell happened to all that time? What the hell happened to me?

Learning one of my old Temple of Mewtwo friends  jaximusprime passed a few weeks ago, possibly from suicide, hasn't helped my mood either. In one of the final conversations we had together, he had said he was tired of being stuck in a rut. And I know all too well how he feels. But I don't want to end this way too. I need to pull myself together. And I'm not sure I know how.

I know my activity on FA is scarce, if ever. And I've been becoming less and less active on social media as well. Aside from talking to people on messenger, I'm starting to wonder if there is any appeal in the furry fandom left for me anymore, aside from dirty things to look at. I'm finding myself more easily annoyed by petty problems in the fandom, as well as the massive influx of younger people, which my hostility toward is maybe a sign I'm not of that ripe age to enjoy the fandom anymore. And being continuously unable to make any creative progress on Cyrus makes it hard to justify being a furry, because, well, if I can't do something creative to make myself stand out, I'm no better than an anonymous lurker.

This may soon be the end, I think. Not of me, but of my journey within the fandom. There may soon be a time where I just simply disappear for a while, maybe not forever, but long enough to do something else with my life. I'm getting tired of feeling this way at the end of every year, still living like it's 2009 and accomplishing nothing.

My external HDD, with 10 years worth of furry art, vacation photos, and basically my entire life, just crapped out on me. Won't read on any computer and causes Windows Explorer to crash when I try to access it. Normally I wouldn't be bummed since it's only a backup HDD, but I have a lot of things on that drive that aren't on my computer, and a few things that were never uploaded online, as well as lots of old things that have since been deleted off the internet. Naturally, I'm pretty devastated.

Micro Center wants a $450 deposit to send it to a specialist for data recovery, and however more it costs from there, and I'm not sure it's worth spending that kind of money. And I'm not exactly experienced enough with this sort of thing to know who else I can turn to.

I'll be brooding somewhere for a while.

I always forget to post things on here cuz I mainly do on Twitter anyway.

Yeah, I'll be at  furrymigration this weekend. I'll be running video games as usual.

See you there, those of you that are going.

Whoops, didn't realize it until today. The very first piece of art of Cyrus I ever uploaded to FA was on April 15, 2008.

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/27168590/

Now that is kinda fuzzy seeing as I had older art than that in my scraps and my first FA account itself is older than that, but I consider it the day Cyrus was officially "born." And what a strange, turbulent 10 years it has been.

The last journal was a bit too depressing, so here's a journal bump of lynxes being cute.

On Easter Sunday. The funeral was last Friday, and both the gf and I attended. To be honest, I wasn't that particularly close to my grandpa, and yet he was there for all of my life. He was also very sick for a long, long time and had somehow clung to life a lot longer than anyone expected. I don't feel as sad as I should be, and yet there's still a great big hole in my life now. It's hard not to think about, especially the more I dwell on times spent that I took for granted.

This isn't a pity journal, I'm not asking for any sympathies. But that is a pretty significant thing to happen in my life. It's the first time in my life a close family member has passed (not including pets). It's kind of forced me to think about my outlook on life.

I recently got a new job at a printing plant that's pretty grueling; 12 hours a day of assembly line work. It pays well, but I don't know if I'm able to handle the workload. I've never had a real job aside from retail. It's a rough transition.

I guess this journal got a bit rambly. Well. I really don't make journals much anymore since I spend most of my time on Twitter anyhow. I'm still around, I've just not spread myself out on all the sites I visit like I used to. And gradually spending more time on video games and irl things (and gf too of course) than online chatting.

Oh yeah, I forgot to announce I was going to Fur Squared. Oops.

Well, I'm back from it now, and all I have to say is that it was the most fun I've had at a furcon in a long time now. I'd been turned off at the rapid growth of MFF and how overcrowded the con had become, and Furry Migration had been a nice in-between. Coming to a smaller con was like a breath of fresh air for me -- small enough that I could mingle with the crowd and not feel overwhelmed, as well as bumping into familiar faces nonstop.

 kisaofthesnow was in artist alley of course, which had only a small handful of artists altogether. Being a smaller con there wasn't a terrible lot to do, though there were some interesting panels that I got to visit. I finally broke my hiatus and got some new commissions from some of the artists I met (which I will upload as I receive them) and I also bought myself a set of cat ears and a lynx tail (I haven't bought irl furry merch since maybe AC 2009!). I got a chance to use some new calling cards I made for myself for both artists as reference info and contact info for new friends.

The only issue we really had at the con was the wait staff for the hotel cafeteria being rather poor, either rude or constantly messing up our orders, though someone did complain and the people in question were dealt with.

Also, possibly the coolest thing that happened during the con was an impromptu art jam that happened after hours; a huge group of people all gathered in the artist alley space to socialize and work on art together. I was too distracted socializing to make any progress, despite wanting to work on some pet projects of mine, but it was just so awesome to see so much productivity in one place!

I think I should stop here before I ramble on, and I'm already forgetting half the things I wanted to talk about. It was a really reinvigorating weekend for me and honestly it has restored my interest in going to furry conventions again.

So my best friend irl bought me a PS4 for Christmas, and on top of that  kisaofthesnow got me a PlayStation VR. Though it only has a fraction of the games I want to play on it, it has been fantastic finally having a VR headset of my own to play with. Plus, this rig is easier to set up and tear down compared to a PC headset, which will make it great for showing off as well as taking it to Furry Migration later in the year. Hoping to get my mitts on all the essential VR games like Job Simulator and SuperHot.

I also found a social VR game called Rec Room which I am quite intrigued by. Gym games, paintball, laser tag, roleplaying quests, fun all around! Best of all it's cross-platform and free-to-play. Anyone else dabble in this game at all?

Among my many new year's resolutions, some more realistic than others, was that with my lovely  kisaofthesnow devoting more and more time and effort into becoming a commission artist, I should try to get back into drawing again myself after many years on hiatus.

Been trying to reteach myself how to draw from the ground up and improve my style, but I have one thing that perplexes me: hair. I can't wrap my head around it and it's currently the most frustrating part of drawing for me.

Anyone able to link me some reliable how-to's on drawing hair? Preferably staying away from anime style if possible.

Journal bump, for one.

I will not be attending MFF this year. Heck, I don't know if I'll ever go back. As much as I enjoy the drive to the Chicago area, the con just doesn't hold my interest much anymore for a lot of reasons (overcrowded con space being one of them). Instead, I will be joining my lovely girlfriend  kisaofthesnow and her family on a holiday cruise vacation the week before.

As I've said in journals prior I will likely be sticking to local cons for the time being, supporting Kisa as she works to become a regular convention artist as well as expanding some of my own personal hobbies. So more than likely my next convention will be Fur Squared next year.


Also, if you haven't heard, there was a (no longer not-so-) secret patch in the Nintendo Switch 4.0 firmware that lets you use a GameCube controller to play games with the USB adapter. It's a little clumsy since it's missing a lot of vital buttons, but still a pretty cool little feature.