War isn't Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is worse.

Tell me, who goes to Hell?

Exactly. There are no innocent bystanders in Hell. War is chock full of them. In fact, except for some of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander.

[Paraphrased from mash]

Be safe, be loved, give safety, give love.

Shi can see the wall
Shi can see me running
Shi can feel the impact
Shi's glad, but true

Maybe I will see
The trees but not the forest
The cover of a book
But no page at all

I try to climb a mountain
Shi's standing on my grave
Shi will try to reach you
Will we still be safe?

I try to keep hir secrets

But shi sees me through!
I always try to blame hir
But I'm the fool

Maybe I will think
Shi likes to play these games
But you can not imagine
A harder job to do

Balros is one of those
Always blames Echoen
Facing circumstances
He always understand

I now identify as a dom / dominant. This isn't really a change, more like, an acceptance/recognition.

The most appealing types to me or best describe me is:

Caring Dominant (caring for submissives physically, mentally and emotionally)
Service Top (Pleasuring bottoms in my care)
Primal (Feelings are pure, raw, animal emotions, sensation and/or instinct)
Breeder & Feeder (Pump subs full of growth)
Laughing Sadist (Joker-esque in their play, laughing or cackling) (More on the laughing than the sadism)
Daddy/Mommy (Several folks I'm close with feel more comfortable if they are regressed to some degree)

Overall, I'm largely a Top because I take control of a scene, and Dominant because I take control outside of a scene as well. The word "Take" isn't quite accurate because it's more like, if the scene is a ball, I've made the balls too big and full of pressurized energy to be held by anyone else.

A large part of this is more about allowing myself to be more assertive when it comes to IRL or IRL-adjacent sexuality and kink. Disentangling myself from traditional gender/sexuality definitions and expectations (particularly those from my parents), and giving myself permission to be attracted to and affectionate towards those I want to, in the way that they and I both want me to.

It's also about recognizing that I have this INCREDIBLE power of creating reality, creating realities for others to exist in more comfortably. For a long time I've been "All responsibility, little power" because I wanted to be absolutely sure that I would not gaslight or entrap since I feel that's what happened to me.

It's been two and a half years of dating CeBee the Corruption Bunny: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/31933112/

Looking back at your memories with her: https://www.furaffinity.net/gallery.....yper-Multi/2/?

What would you like to ask of her?

Three days ago, we gave one example of a specific flavor of nazifur recruitment: https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/10120368/

Today is a lesson in how nazifur communities are dismantled: Documentation, Documentation, Documentation.

An alt-furry telegram server leaked and over a dozen souls poured themselves into combing through, screenshotting instances of racism, transphobia, National Socialist ideology, antiemetic hate screeds, and right-wing extremism. Identifying usernames and telegram handles, and linking such individuals to previously exposed / identified bigots. You may scrape the surface in twitter threads such as this: https://twitter.com/echoenbatbat/st.....TeioEisJF28Dvw

But the most fundamental factor to documentation of fascists is (to me, at least) authenticity. They thrive on gaslighting, on disinformation, on spreading false narratives through patsies and folk who just don't know what's going on. Not giving them the chance and also not relying on word of mouth or persuasion.

Thus, you may download the full contents of this nazifur telegram server for yourself and see with your own eyes: https://drive.google.com/drive/fold.....hPLZ5S0dFNtkFO

Of particular note would be the member roster. Please rescue those you love from people who use porn as a shield to obscure their hate.

Love,
Balros / Echoen

This step-by-step guide follows a recent example of a known alt-right, transphobic furry porn artist using someone's public Discord to recruit new victims.

“It’s Called DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim & Offender.” https://southpark.cc.com/video-clip.....s-called-darvo

Step 0: Be a racist, transphobic, horrific alt-right asshole. Bonus points if also an artist that draws niche porn – there will always be people who want wank material so bad they will tolerate (or adopt) any ideology spewed at them.

Step 1: Attack and harass the target until a reaction is provoked in public

Step 2: Respond to the public reaction with ‘reasonable-sounding’ responses, appear as the calm and rational one, appeal to decorum and congeniality so that onlookers don’t know who to trust.

Step 3: Gaslight the target and gaslight the audience, reframe the context for onlookers so it all becomes blurred into ‘he-said-she-said’

Step 4: When some members of the audience step in to join the conversation, keep projecting that congenial attitude, appear relaxed, keep gaslighting and reframing context to sound like the victim in all this. Appeal to authority, fabricate whatever lie or half-truth needed.

Step 5: The target of the initial attack may be gone at this point, leaving the audience alone and free to be recruited from. Appeal to reason, ask innocent-sounding questions, direct the conversation to generate the most sympathy or, better yet, empathy with others who feel put-upon in their own lives.

Step 6: Develop a relationship with the participating audience members, they are now potential recruits to side against the initial target.

NEOS VR DANCE PARTY TONIGHT

We usually start at 6:30pm PST

If you want to be there, find me as Balros.

Dance, dance our fucking hearts out.

Four commissions done in 11 days (fourth will be posted soon). Excellent. Excellent.

Thank you to everyone who commissioned me to take all of your kinks and fetishes and distill them into concentrated injections of conceptual corruptions.

Most special thanks to all of you readers who eagerly dose yourselves in my written sins until you pop your pants and burst with your own inspirations.

With 2022 here, I am forging ahead with even more fiery passion. There's much work to do to help people and systems that need it. There are relationships to forge and hot dates to go on. This bat feels empowered and this squirrel feels excited!

The ability to command the written word is an awesome power.

With communication, I can create worlds, people, events, emotions, and all the necessary components to breathe life into them. All it takes is to be observed.

Thank you for your perception this 2021, and the years, decades before. We have grown, mutated, evolved, and corrupted billions of realities together.

To another trillion more dimensions filled to bursting with possibilities~

First one was about a contagious rat corruption that will break quarantine

Second one is about endlessly growing infinite gryphons

Open for more commissions this week: https://forms.gle/pgCndDZxtecBvkaG6

Free from work until the new year, so I may as well redirect my Corruption Engine at you all.

Commission form: https://forms.gle/4BMNdpxYh5dSaziX9

Not first come first serve - I will select ideas that appeal to me or have... potential.

The inability to make smutty/adult journals continues to push people to use Twitter instead.

For the past many months now, I have been the DJ for a weekly Tuesday Night Neos VR Dance Party.

If you use Neos VR and love music, I may be open to inviting you in to dance and share some tunes.

We get started around 6:30pm PST.

A virtual Shiva, a Jewish farewell. A candle to tell his stories in the dark.



He leaves behind a family and friends who were grateful to have known him. His legacy in them will live on; he changed the world.

With his joy in our hearts, we continue to change the world for the better.

I've just finished scouring through troves upon troves of photo albums from 1989 to 1995, scanning each and every picture of my uncle, so send to my mother to prepare for her brother's online service. I feel like I've been wading through memories of a reality that no longer exists.

I am beginning to conceptualize what I would want in a fursuit. Yes, it will be Balros, big floofy squirrel.

But specifically I am thinking of having at least the arms be exosuit-like. I insert my arm, slip my fingers into a glove, that glove is connected to a much, much larger handpaw.

Something like (skip to 2:13)

Okay, I'm proud to share this video that I created for my work. Served as the project manager, director, interviewer, script manager, logistics, and producer.



I'm the squirrel the interviewees were talking at during filming, too.

Tonight's been a good night for pulling engine cord on the lawnmower of my mind.

I just need another night of licking the blades sharp again.

On Nov 19th, I went on vacation to the east coast. Georgia, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia. Went amazing places, saw amazing things, learned a LOT about how Slavery (specifically chattel slavery) was created and implemented, and learned new ways of thinking too (framing things as recognizing our caste system).

But, Thanksgiving itself, I came down with the flu. But not just a flu, but the most horrible flu I've ever had in my life. It was so severe, so extreme, that I was briefly hospitalized.

In a moment of fevered lucidity, I wrote this on 11/29. Components of it are still true to this morning, though I'm not longer at my parents' place in Maryland.

"I'm tired of waking up every 2-3 hours, throat painfully cracked and dry, sweaty, needing to expel another great gob of gunk. Of a slow, brain-boiled boredom in which my higher mind has not ever actually not once ever for a single fucking moment turned 'off' (except when actually asleep, and even then perhaps not entirely). Oh, for sure, I'm self-aware of my physical actions and appearance when debilitated by illness, of how I sway and stagger, sneeze and cough, reel and retch in response to the ravagings of illness, all culminating in a reality-facing performance of a properly plagued person. But it would be nice if I could stop thinking about it for a while, to simply wallow in misery and let time teleport forward to a point where I am not suffering in some state of stagnation. No, I offer up no prayers nor pleadings to Nurgle nor any other malformed narcotic faith. Yes, I do my utmost to express my appreciation and adoration to my 70 year old mother and 62 year old father for their exhaustive care and attention they have afforded me since my arrival pre-Flu Friday 19th and present-plague Friday 26th. There are downsides to being an unstoppable engine of creativity, thought, care, attention and willpower - unstoppable does not imply that the wheels of my truck-bus brain are actually in contact with a surface or that friction is a constant. Even boiled, even baked, even bloated overwhelmingly fat with suffering and malaise, I endlessly persist to experience it all in real-time."

"When I lay in bed before my trip to the hospital, my breathing belabored by the pain of air passing through the shredded remains of my esophagus, no amount of physical delirium could instill any judgement-impairing, consciousness-reducing impediment upon me. While waiting several hours at the Urgent Care clinic for my turn, sat hunched in a wheelchair with my face hovering over a plastic bag to capture any of my body's attempts to reject what sips of water I swallowed (for how dare I dilute the nasal drip which so kindly stripped all moisture from my upper body in order to twist my guts into a dehydrated knot), I was still fully concious for every moment. Eyes clenched, body shaking, breathing shallow, loud and rapid, each ticking second experienced in full. As every second ever is, ever was, ever shall be for my existence. No curse, no power, just a stream of experience that, while I may choose what to record and keep and which moments to willfully discard to memory-holes or entropy, is still experienced. It was fortunate that the hospital immensely improved my condition once I was finally wheeled to a room and my veins flooded with sodium chloride solution and additional antiviral chemicals, but even staring at the passing tick-tick-ticking of the clock on the wall was a reminder that I exist, I persist, I experience, regardless of state of matter. All that matters is state of mind; recognizing it and unhinging from sanity oft seems my only reprieve from continuity."

"I found out (11/28) that due to my presence at the major family gathering of Thanksgiving, that I have indeed passed this pestilence on to several others. Including the two children of my brother and his who hosted us. Infecting others' realities may be my 'thing' but it is only for pleasure, only for pleasing results, and only with permission would I ever want to permit a corruption to take hold of someone. I took utmost care to isolate, disinfect, sequester and protect, and I am still fearful that this particularly virulent strain of influenza will affect those who care for me most and most closely. The moment I learned that this unpleasant illness had turned into a family-penetrating pandemic, I texted my brother with all the information I had, including which prescriptions the hospital doctor had prescribed and the specific strain my blood tests had indicated. My dearest wish is that their suffering by shortened, weakened, alleviated and quickly forgotten. I can endure and I have endured, even when I must take to text to loudly whine, piss, cry and bemoan my state of being, for it is all venting mechanisms with beloved ones to help pass the time. But friends? Family? Children? I alleviate suffering in this world, I should not create it."

"For now, this morning (11/29), I have exhausted myself again, but have so much more to tell of the actually /excellent/ vacation I had before the symptoms began on Thanksgiving. I shall crawl back to bed, sloshing with as much water as I've managed to suck down, throat sprayed down with cholraseptic, turn on a Kripparian Hearthstone video to distract my higher mind until I fall properly unconscious, and hope to sleep for longer than I've managed subsequently so far."

We are the stories that we tell ourselves.

I serve a massive network of employment specialists who's jobs it is to help people get hired in good jobs, get skills, get training, get services, everything you need to enter a good job and live.

While I'm providing this network with the resources they need to help you, I am also happy to connect you (if you live in the region) with these employment specialists.

I don't need any personal information from you. Just send me a note or an email (echoenbatbat@gmail.com) and I'll help point you in the right direction.

 Min is launching his cute new scifi tabletop rpg, Aether Adrift, on Kickstarter today!

https://www.kickstarter.com/project.....-savage-worlds

It'd mean a whole lot to me if you guys could check it out and help spread it around!

Fully mended from the COVID-19 booster! Apparently, my immune system has several levels of Fighter, or even Barbarian, and slaughters all intruding viruses.

But now I'm at full hit points and kicking ass at work again.

Stay safe, get your vaccine, grab a booster when you can, and blow a few loads to some smut from deep in my gallery whenever you feel the pressure building up again.

-Balros

I recently had the opportunity to advocate for Workforce Development Professionals in my local county [largest county in WA] to the National Skills Coalition, which helps the U.S government set policy and decide on funding priorities when it comes to frontline workforce development professionals - the people that help jobseekers find good jobs and navigate support services. It was an honor to speak on behalf of our partner organization staff and engage in the national debate about workforce system supports and professional development. Since the vast majority of attendees were East Coast or Midwest, I almost felt like I was representing the entire West Coast!

Here are the major takeaways from what workforce professionals (and those who serve them) are seeing across the United States:

Embedding time for professional development into a frontline workforce professional's daily schedule is highly effective and recommended.
Forge agreements with leadership and managers to schedule staff time to attend professional development

Survey of frontline professionals identified trainings most needed:
Working with challenging clients
Leadership development
Management training
Stress management
Data analysis
Outcomes measurement
Trauma-informed care
Note: Unfair and ineffective to train staff in trauma and resilience but not changing the workplace itself to become more trauma-informed and resilience-building.

Programs, policies, and service delivery that is focused on compliance often create new barriers and reduce efficacy of staff.
Staff who develop a 'compliance' mindset, or compensation structures that focus on compliance, can build artificial limits and create new barriers while failing to reduce existing barriers.
Difference between 'compliance' and 'quality control'.

Data collection must be intentional
If you ask a question, eventually show the people you asked data from the results or decisions made from their answers
Be careful about developing a reputation for asking for the same information again and again but doing nothing with what you are given

Good professional development is offered on a recurring basis, not once.
Set expectation with staff that as new staff come on board, they will get identical training.

Frontline workforce professionals need more opportunities to be at the table to make frontline decisions and be part of planning strategies.

MAJOR CHALLENGES

Service delivery agencies struggle with their own staffing levels
Uncertain schedules
Inability of organizations to accurately forecast more than 3 or 4 weeks into the future
In one survey of 80 service providers, less than 20% are fully staffed for all positions for 12 months to operate programs.
Extraordinarily difficult to hire new staff
Burnout training and mental health training are in high demand among service delivery staff
While training is in demand, staff ability to actually access training is a barrier.
Clients who receive services are also burnt out and struggle with mental health as they access services and get help
Outdated process and policies do not permit much flexibility during changing pandemic conditions

Lack of technology and lack of technological expertise to use technology

Outdated or ‘legacy’ online learning platforms (Learning Management Systems) that do not offer practical value to the staff asked to use those systems to access training.

“Perverse Incentives” in system design that focus on outputs, not outcomes, and function more to justify the continued existence of a system or program than on serving the stakeholders impacted by the system.
Often tied to funding incentives or compliance requirements
Data collected from staff is not always used, and it’s not clear to staff why they are being asked

Staff are repeatedly asked to perform data entry, often asked the same questions every few months.

Funding models frequently fail to incentivize or be structured to advance equity.
Funding often focuses on programmatic outputs first and only give lip service to DEI. When staff and resources are limited, DEI is frequently the first to be deprioritized.
Most funding structures are 'transactional'
Underfunded before pandemic, now also understaffed.
Government and Philanthropy lack coordination.
Business engagements are still largely transactional, workforce professionals struggle to build relationship with employers that advance equity in the workplace
Filling open slots
Meeting outputs required by compliance or funding streams

Frontline workforce professionals are often forced to focus only on service delivery and are denied opportunities to influence programs to advance equity.

RESOURCES

[a bunch of links]

NEEDED SUPPORTS

Supervisors need support in helping develop/grow staff in their organizations

What role can philanthropy play to challenge scarcity mentality

Workforce Development apprenticeships

Certifications for workforce staff

Creating a pipeline for people to enter workforce development careers

Frontline staff recognize themselves in the industry and call themselves Workforce Development Professionals and not just their job titles

Connecting the "Theoretical" services that workforce development systems provide and the de-facto services actually provided.

New hires think their job is to help people, but soon describe their job as "pushing paperwork" and helping clients fill out forms.

---

my brain is absolutely melted and I will be taking a 'vacation' of sorts for a little while because I'm doing too much again and need to slow the fuck down. I've hit that point where I am doing WAY TOO MANY PROJECTS ALL AT ONCE, and will be taking some time off work next week. Strong support from my manager.

The issue is that I'm extremely good at 'hiding' my internal stress levels, because I am able to stay on top of everything through it all. All projects stay on time, to budget, and to specifications. All of them. So I get given more, and more, and keep kicking ass on all of them.

But now I'm better at recognizing that my clogs are about to pop and am overworking myself.