The first months of the year were just wasted because I just stayed away from everything out of fear. I guess that's just a more specific part of what this year has been filled with for me: stress, anxiety and paranoia. The former comes partially from work but at least I can actually do something about that. The latter two will never go away and there is nothing I can do about them because a big source of them is out of my control. I've developed several health conditions because of this.

All that's left of me is an empty shell and any sign of otherwise is just fake and a bottling up of the darkness in place of what used to fill me. But if I didn't, I'd take destructive actions and push away the only ones I still have, and I'll take their fakeness over having nothing.

After my hiatus from the beginning of this year, I slowly realised something about my friends:
1. This one is obvious and I guess I knew it already: they have their own problems that they aren't so vocal about. They don't need my shit too. But it does mean they are unavailable when I need to be assured there is still some fucking good in the world.
2. They stopped caring or think what I say I'm going through is just made up for fucking attention, or they just pretended to care in the first place.
3. They pretend to care because they pity me, and they won't just let go of me because they think that'll hurt me more than when I realise they are pretending to care.
4. All they want is to get in my pants or to use me in some other way.

And some things I learned about myself:
1. I am desperately lonely, to the point where people have taken advantage of that to unleash abusiveness, and I just allowed it to happen. It was inevitable, really.
2. I don't have the capability in me to relate to people anymore, or to love anyone, because all I see is lies, lies, lies and ulterior motives.
3. I am less of a good person than I always thought of myself. I lie too if I think it's for the greater good, I've manipulated people, I've been acting fake for a while now in the name of trying to present a good public image because of my obvious narcissism.
4. I don't know if it's what I've been through but for some reason I seem to be more realistic about the future than others, in contrast to burying my head in the sand. I can face the fact that life is going to get very much harder (for one reason or another), not better in the coming years. Not a day goes by where I don't think about the countless ways shit could hit the fan at any minute, for me personally or for society or the world.

I released the first version of Polygen 3 in a closed alpha. 7 years or so of iteration and it's just too easy to take the user interface I created from the ground up for granted. That's where most of the effort went, sadly, and now that I've got the foundations of something that can be extended without barriers due to bad design or architecture, it's still riddled with bugs and I have no motivation to work on it any further.

There have been good moments in this year, but moments is all they are. they've been and gone like the inconsequential shrug of the shoulders I do mentally when I think of those moments. The death march of time continues ever onward, and like toxic water dumped unnaturally into the source of a spring flowing downhill, I'm getting old and ugly. If not in my body, then in my mind.

It's been around 10 years since I started throwing myself into the dream I'd started to have and year after year I saw myself progressing.
Later on I've taken to only giving things out very rarely and when they meet what I thought were my strict standards of quality, but I've been blind to my own ineptitude long enough.

The signs are all there and my colleague need not worry anymore for he can take over and give the projects I work on a developer with the level of intelligence they deserve, given my own is clearly lacking. Don't try to tell me otherwise because the signs have all been there long enough and it's not only because I had a project I helped to build from the ground up compared to one of the worst in the company.
The last job I had, I couldn't keep up with everyone else's work rate and was let go.
The feedback on past programming projects I posted was mostly negative.
I thought I worked hard to improve codebases I'm exposed to in my current job but I often cause myself more problems in the future, and was moved early on to a project where the amount of damage I could cause was limited due to an avoidable mistake.
I don't know the first thing of good object-oriented programming principles.
The system I mentioned earlier has defects when you completely clear text fields with the delete key, how could I miss something so obvious?
Of all the years I've invested in Polygen 3 and earlier versions, it's ultimately just a pointless, bug-riddled program that was plagued by bad design causing limitations in past versions. All it amounts to for all of that effort is "click to make triangles" presumably because my fucking pea-brain can't handle anything more complex.
At the first sign of any challenge in life I flounder, struggling with concepts like pointers in low-level languages, matrices and just about anything in 3D games. I could never understand 3D modelling tools or engines so I've been stuck using tools a fucking moron could pick up, because my dumb ass takes orders of magnitude longer to grasp concepts that come easily to others. I can't even figure out escape rooms, and spend most of the time thinking up stupid solutions that don't even make sense. People take advantage of me time and time again, and I fucking fall for it every time.
The only reason I have any illusion of skill or capability is because I've done things so many fucking times that it's burned into my mind.

I think it's time I finally woke up from my oblivious stupor and realised I can't fix my lack of intelligence. I should just quit trying to create and stick with things that won't make the two brain cells I have to rub together evaporate from overuse, like janitor/cleaner work.

This is your friendly neighborhood fucking lobotomized brainlet of a foxcat, signing off.
Have a good weekend.

While I understand lines or quantity of code in general don't measure code quality, I just noticed it's surpassed 3000 lines.

And it's going to become a lot more than that before I have a useful version which takes advantage of all the improvements it's going to support.

I'm sorry I said things that put you off fulfilling plans we made, even though you wouldn't tell me that's why.
I'm sorry I tried so hard to put my own worries aside when you said suicidal things, and that you saw my attempts to help you as me thinking that you couldn't take care of yourself.
I'm sorry I never gave you back what you deserved in our friendship, and that you're ignoring me now rather than reciprocating my attempts to keep things working now that I'm ready to repay what you're owed.
I'm sorry I was foolish enough to take things seriously, and that you treated me like the fool I am for it.
I'm sorry that I burdened you with the things that were upsetting me, and that you thought it was a fabrication and that I wanted attention.
I'm sorry if you feel like I took advantage of your friendship in the past, and that your behaviour back then might have actually been taking advantage of me.
I'm sorry that I approached you when you already have people in your life that can do everything I can do, but better (because that's a forgone conclusion).
I'm sorry that I dared suggest your choice of music production software might not fit well with the styles of music I wanted to produce, and that you took it as an opportunity to shit on the genres which I aspired to produce.

Fortunately for you, you may not have to deal with me for much longer.

To those who haven't let what I've become get in the way of our friendship:
I'm truly sorry that I don't give you the attention that you deserve, despite all that you give me.
I'm truly sorry that I can no longer be the person you once knew and might have once loved.
I'm truly sorry that I'm a soulless imitation of what I used to be.

Every time I feel better, old unwanted feelings and memories come back to haunt me, exactly like my mind was reprogrammed into doing.

I've been feeling like shit and the quality of my work is suffering for it. But I at least feel well enough to consider doing actual things again so at least I'm now isolating myself for that instead of for no reason except feeling shit.

A dark shadow passed over, an ominous cloud stalking from which there is no shelter, omnipresent.
There is no low ground to escape the danger of a lightning strike at any moment, unforeseeable.
The unavoidable threat and misery of gloomy skies and pouring rain gradually hollows out my soul until nothing is left.
Fields of once beautiful flowers I cultivated, increasingly neglected out of my own misery to the point of wilting and decomposing, until the lack of sun leaves them no more than distant memories. The pain of their absence, excruciating, tears only adding to the growing puddles of rain, an invitation to drown myself.
Unknown others waiting at the fringe of the inescapable darkness; my presence would be a dark omen and leave them forever with the same lingering threat.
When I am struck and fall, alone, the barren soils that once held the most beautiful gardens I was able to grow will remain indifferent to the course of events.
All this as a consequence of trying to escape the storm when I saw it still coming.

It's no fucking wonder no one I want anything to do with, wants anything to do with me, when I'm such a fucking wreck like this.
And who can blame them? As much as I'd try my best to help any suffering friends through the best advice and honesty I can give, I can only admit if they were behaving like me it would drag me down. I'm the architect of my own misery because I can't forget, and no one will ever be able to help me escape this situation.
There is nothing I want more than to stop being afraid, but it can NEVER happen.
Many times I've considered just being done with it, getting rid of all the friends I loved, and disappearing forever.

Do you want to call me whiny, or attention-seeking, or overdramatic? Would you get pleasure out of insulting me, or treating me like an idiot? I can't stop you.

Everything we take for granted is going to be ripped out from beneath us.
Every day we have worked or studied is going to be worthless in the dark years that are to come.
Our hopes and dreams will amount to nothing as societal constructs and civilisation collapses around us.
We'll lose contact with many who we love because the means to stay in contact won't exist anymore, or they won't.
I'm not talking about 30 years from now. I'm talking about 10 or less.

There are too many things that can go horrifically wrong with the world. It doesn't matter who you are or where you're from, it doesn't matter if you're in a third world country or a prepper or in the 1%, we will all be as fucked as anyone else.
Money can't save us from nukes.
A roof over your head can't save us from "natural" disasters (that are actually caused by humans destroying the fucking planet).
No amount of medication can save us from every possible disease.
Our neighbours won't save us; they'll be looking after themselves.
The military and police won't save us; they'll be looking after themselves.
Governments certainly won't save us.
Billionaires sure as fuck won't save us.

No amount of survival training can save us because it's impossible to know in what way it'll all go down the shitter. There are too many possible scenarios:
Climate change causing social collapse?
Mutually assured destruction?
Technological singularity leads to AI destroying us all?
Impact of a massive enough asteroid?
Yellowstone erupts?

Don't believe me? Just check the doomsday clock.

If we're "lucky" enough to survive the start of any of these situations? How are we going to feed ourselves when there's nothing on the supermarket shelves and it's too dangerous to go outside?
Ok, so maybe you live in the countryside out of harm's way, comparatively. There will be no power, thus no internet, no technology, and not even any running water. What's that going to be like to live like that after having had access to it for so long we take it for granted? Will it drive us mad not knowing whether those we care about are even alive, because we have no means to get hold of them? (I understand one might have lived without such conveniences and it'd be ignorant to assume otherwise, but please bare with me and keep in mind, any device like the one you are using to read this right now would be among the losses)

I think climate change is going to screw us over sooner and harder than most media would have us think. You don't have to dig much to find papers (much better written than this journal) that indicate this, for example: https://www.lifeworth.com/deepadaptation.pdf which looks at decades of climate research and the way things are going, and is written by a guy with a fucking PhD.

In Europe, thousands of students have skipped school to protest climate change, I commend and admire them for it and wish I could be among those that make a stand. It makes me wonder why my own generation didn't start such things, I like to think I'd have joined them. It feels too late for me, I can no longer depend on my parents to provide a home for me when I inevitably lost my job just for missing a day of work. It's saddening that it's had to reach this point, and that generation will be growing up fully aware of how shit the world is going to become.

So what's the solution? As the paper above suggests, adaptation. I suspect many will try and fail to do so, myself included, with agonizing and deadly results. All my years of learning how to write software and make anything else with technology will be utterly and completely meaningless when shit hits the fan, so I don't expect to last long. Until then, all that can be done is to try and prepare for we don't even know what exactly, because we can't predict the future, and otherwise try to make the most of what we have left of our lives before existence becomes miserable (or even more so) for us.

"Sometimes we reach a point where we just can't see ahead of ourselves anymore.
We all believe we're on some sort of road anyway, right?
You know that little path that you cooked up inside your head, that you tricked yourself into believing, that if you somehow follow it, maybe your whole life will work out for you in the end, right?
Now tell me, what's going to happen the next time when you wake up, and it just isn't there anymore?
You're gonna have no fuckin' idea where to take your next step. You won't even know if you should make one or not.
You see at that point, you're gonna have to take a look at yourself. And what you're gonna find is, that that decision doesn't even matter anymore."
- Bruce Moallem, AKA God Body Disconnect

The Dark Mountain Project: https://dark-mountain.net/about/manifesto/

No idea how to feel about life at the moment. Some things are more shit, others are less shit. Overall I think I'm in a better situation and should probably move on as far as the job side of thing goes.
I was at Coxcon for the third year in a row this year. The night before leaving to head back home I realised I was no closer to achieving any of my real goals than the first year I went. That gave me a burst of willpower to finally get something done for the glory, satisfaction, achievement, and having progressed towards my real ultimate goal of becoming self-employed so I don't have to suck corporate dick and get paid half as much as my contribution is worth, just so I can exist and either have no spare time or no energy to enjoy the benefits. Part of what I have to do is stop myself from putting everyone else's needs before my own, but it's a tough balancing act when you can feel the increasing tension in interpersonal relationships every time you tell someone you don't have time.
So I'm in this weird ass situation where I really want to get something done, but work leaves me so drained I have no willpower or mental focus. I've made slow progress, but I increasingly make less across time spans, a problem which started for me a few years ago. I can't switch to a less stressful or exhausting job because I'll immediately become irrelevant to the software development industry and never be able to get my foot in the door there again. I can't take up a game development job I might have otherwise loved because the pay is garbage. When I look at everything I create in my own time or at work I can only feel proud of it in the sense of "it's less shit than X thing I did" and seeing stupid mistakes (including in my programming work), while everyone else seems to be better at everything than me after years of stretching my ambition further and further until I can't even finish anything.
Take my art for example (and I do a lot of practice outside of what I upload to FA): I still don't know what the hell I'm doing with shading, I could improve so much on posing, variety, and perspective, and everything I draw on a tablet looks like something a little kid could make. Though with the way things seem to be, a 4 year old kid could probably art better than me lol.

This journal sounds a lot more ranty and negative than I actually feel or intended, I feel okay overall except for random inexplicable headaches on Sundays, and I feel a lot less stressed than last year. So don't worry about me! I guess I'm just doing the thing I usually do with journals here and using it as a space to do a brain dump of my quite obviously pessimistic mind. I can say for sure I do feel better for it, whereas in Q4 last year I probably wouldn't have recognized positive thoughts.

That's right, another promising relationship that showed promise down the drain.
But it's all my fault for forgetting I signed a fucking contract before I was incarnated, saying "you will have an okay life in all if you sign here, but thy shalt never have a successful relationship"
The fact is after this long I should know this would happen, but I was fucking fooled again. I should have learned by now, if nothing else, the consistent factor in all my countless failed relationships is me... Maybe I'm just ugly or boring or I smell and don't realise it, I worry that I need to change but don't know how. It always ends up this way before it can get anywhere, every damn time, it's like a curse.
Years ago I accepted that I was going to die eventually, some day, dread about death dominated my life while everyone else was gossiping carelessly and enjoying the moment. Maybe I just need to give up and come to terms with that I am destined to die alone and unfulfiiled.

What have I got left to live for?

What have I done with my life?

I've chosen technology over people.
Technology is cold.
Technology is indifferent to my misery, my mental state.
Technology is the reason I am alone.

What have I done with my life?

A couple of months ago, my favourite artist The Flashbulb put a teaser of some unreleased music he has done on Soundcloud. The last release he did under that alias was in 2005 and holy shit was it good. I never had the privilege to own anything of that alias on a physical copy and I haven't come by any way to get the releases digitally either, so I was super excited at the possibility of a finally getting a release from that alias.

Now, the main alias The Flashbulb has released stuff consistently since like 2004. So when the guy behind the music put up a poll asking whether to release NEW Acidwolf music, or something ALREADY released on vinyl, OBVIOUSLY you're going to pick a 2008 Flashbulb release you can already fucking buy digitally AND own a CD of if that's your thing.

WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK (I actually feel this mad about it sometimes)

The vinyl release isn't even going to be better quality, it's the same damn 16-bit 44KHz as the original master. The artist himself made comments on the Facebook page implying that he wanted the Acidwolf release to win. And yet people would rather have THE SAME MUSIC in a different shape, because oh boy ain't that exciting (ok, I get that vinyl is more different to CD than that, but you get my point). Even worse, other people's comments seem to be saying that the Acidwolf content won't see a proper release because it lost, I can only hope this isn't true...
GOOD JOB to the people with outstanding logic in favour of having more of the same instead of new quality content that there hasn't been a glimpse of since 2005.

Call me a drama/attention whore if you wish. It won't be the first time I have over this kind of thing so I know how to deal with people with that kind of insensitivity.

It's been 2 years since it really started to affect me but it crept up on me and before I knew it the feeling has put me through agony for countless days. About early to mid 2013 things started getting worse much faster.
I lost most of the friends I was close with after finishing college, since they all moved on their separate ways and there's little hope of meeting them again regularly. The first thing that hit me was how much I missed hanging out with them in early 2013 just to play video games as it was probably the most fun I've had in years. Now I want to go back to being able to do that so hard it hurts... And going back to my consoles just makes for a sad reminder of the silence of playing alone.
Then about 4 months ago, I lost what good friends I thought I had left. This time it was the internet friends, coming out with reasons like "you didn't send me messages", yet someone else would get angry at me for sending them a message while they were busy, without any warning, so what the hell was I supposed to do?!
So now I have a job with just a single person I get along with and I like him, let's say, too much, but he doesn't have the same feelings with me as he's not the same orientation. The job also seems to take up all of the time I could use making something creative although what the hell is the point when I'm too exhausted and lacking in motivation to even try anymore. Sure it provides a distraction but it also adds more stress that I could live without.
Finally I feel distant from my parents. They may as well just be some far away friends and I don't really feel any attachment to them anymore and it makes me feel like a terrible person.
I've tried getting closer to people in my friends list on Steam by making pleasant conversation (obviously hiding my grief...), to have none of the effort returned even on people that long ago showed interest in me and I made the horribly regrettable move of dismissing.
Some nights I just wonder if I should give up and close myself off completely. My trust has been let down again and again and no amount of pain seems worth trying to find friends that look to be genuine, only to find when you really need them they won't be there for you. It's a real kick in the teeth when the last friend you thought you had disappears from your friends without notice, when this is the only person I had any real hope of meeting in person due to the smaller distance between where we both live.

If someone feels like they can help me, it would be welcome if you're not going to try and make me feel worse. I can honestly say you most likely won't be able to help me as having someone present IRL just isn't the same as a chat box, but still...
You may ask what the purpose of this entry was in such a case. I just needed to get this all out in a vent/rant somewhere and I feel like it would go unnoticed enough here (in contrast to Steam) that I wouldn't get inconsiderate assholes telling me I'm being an attention whore. Do you seriously think the people who are considering suicide should just shut up and not make it clear that they're in need of help? Do you think it's right that so many preventable suicides have probably happened because those people were afraid of being insulted for trying to get help?

Well, I know I've uploaded very little lately, but I've been busy and stuff. I thought I would make some more art soon but I will be trying some new things. There's still a couple of wips I have and I have been practicing, but I've also had major art block for a while, and usually when I pick up a pencil and draw something, I just say to myself: "no, that looks crap" and decide not to upload it, or never finish it even when I don't. One thing is for certain though - I want to maintain the quality level on any new art I start, that level being that of my latest upload. I've also been trying different styles of lineart and stuff too.

If stuff starts working out better I may decide to open a couple of request or trade slots. Just one very important thing though - I'm not exactly the best when it comes to preventing procrastination, if I do start to do so then start putting the pressure on and that should sort me out.

And on another note, I'm thinking of changing Sparks to be an arctic fox/cat hybrid, do you the cat part of me would represent some parts of my personality well? Physical changes I've been considering so far are a cat tail and possibly some markings.

How are you all doing anyway?

They think I'm confused, but at the moment I really feel othewise. I told them because it was making me depressed.

They took it quite well but I'm worried that they'll be crying themselves to sleep. I know I will be. I could barely type this because I'm shaking so much.

I know I don't really submit art very often, but I intend to do so more often. I have got a few ideas in mind, a couple of gifts here and there and a long-overdue trade, after which I may say that I am open to requests/trades, but I can't gaurantee it. I'm not really very reliable at things like that, as in meeting deadlines or whatever, I suppose I need to improve on that before I can gaurantee any requests/trades.

I just want to say thank you all helping me to get 500 pageviews! I guess I've come a long way since I started drawing anthro art, and it's been good to see the progression.

The reason I've been so inactive over the last few weeks is that I've been practising lots, improving and developing my style, and a lot of the work I've made is either sub-par (even for my art), or is unfinished. I've also been practising anatomy, as you may have gathered from my latest upload.

I've recently got my paws on some vector drawing software that I'm using as I write this. I have to say, it's very different to the usual raster/bitmap images I'm used to making with the GIMP and drawing by hand, and it takes some getting used to, but I'm getting there with working it all out with its crazy bezier curves and stuff, so you should be seeing some better art with smoother curves and better colouring soon.

Well I found this quiz: http://www.gotoquiz.com/are_you_a_furry_1

I doubt it's really accurate, but it's fun anyway, take this quiz and say what your score was, mine was 52%.

...pointless and too short journal was pointless...

I've recently been very busy with my art. I've been somewhat overwhelmed by things the last couple of days and I have quite a bit going on.

First of all, I just want to say that I'm going to be changing my fursona to an arctic fox. The markings will remain the same, and the only difference will be the colour. The reason for this is that I felt that my fursona was too run-of-the-mill; too ordinary and uninteresting. My new colour scheme is, therefore, white, a soft cyan, and a blue colour.

There was a girl I met before called WolfKid. I've grown to like her very much, and we I hope she feels the same. We decided to do a trade, and she's finished her piece. I was very impressed with it and I have to say that she did a very good job, though who am I to judge what's good and what's not? The piece in question can be found at http://darkkipoika.deviantart.com/a.....arky-146949311 (note that my actual name is Sparks Darkfox, hence I am tagged Sparky - my nickname). She actually made the two of us in paint while the background was made in a seperate program. So, I'll be spending a long time on making something that is of near quality to her piece.

Another person more than worthy of mention is 7FoxFire. He is my favourite artist on FA, and I'd like to thank him for his fantastic drawing of me. He did a great job on the perspective. You can check it out at http://www.furaffinity.net/view/3148743 , and give it wouldn't hurt to give him a +watch!