A couple friends of mine have fallen on hard times, so I'm going to be doing more YCHs to try to raise funds for them. I'm already working on the next base, and I'm open to any ideas you guys have for other things. If you guys can't bid on any, please spread the word and help me get some work to help my friends with.

Also, a reminder, my other pony sprites are available too: https://www.furaffinity.net/view/37831547/

...are big, loving, adorable ones who honestly have no interest in eating me. Not just reluctant, but afraid to try. Ones that would be too worried about my safety, that I'd have to convince. It's ones like that that I kinda think deserve to have me the most, and are the ones I find myself most drawn towards. Caring individuals without a hint of sadism to them, and who would only even be willing to try after telling them about how you can't possibly get any closer to someone than like that, and how I already have my own ways of coming out fine in the end anyway, so they can enjoy themselves and not have to feel guilty about it.

I guess I've just got a thing for taking a pred's voreginity. XD

I give you... Garfield Minus Garfield Plus Kelvin!

https://twitter.com/kelvinshadewing.....50613463142400

...and one of them eats the other and reforms them. The prey was still technically dead, and since the vow is "till death do you part", does that mean...



...they got a di-vore-ce?

It was the first day of the month and I already failed No-vore-ber.

*pokes my belly and sighs as it squirms*

I have no discipline. Throw shame upon me. Delicious, wiggly shame.

I've begun playing through Super Tux recently. You can find the first three videos here:

Part 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eJ5ijfNj6k
Part 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0UumRvkul0
Part 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_TL1LsNC3CQ

https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/9657094/

Go get you some! Her art is so good!

Today was a pretty productive day with my game engine. I managed to fix a function that was giving me an annoying segfault (due to my own lack of hindsight, much to my embarrassment), but with that fixed, the [code]findSprite()[/code] function now works perfectly. This is a major factor in loading tilemaps, as the maps made using the Tiled Map Editor don't actually store any graphical data, just a filename, and having a system to search for pre-loaded sprites, as well as adding search directories for the map to check through, helps with compatibility and making sure everything loads correctly.

The code to the game I recently started, Bruxout, can be found on GitHub here: https://github.com/KelvinShadewing/bruxout/.

I just did that for fun with my friend while on his stream. We're going to be refining it over time. It's more just a practice project than anything else, but I'm rather proud of how well it's come out so far. Working on it has given me ideas for things to make tutorials of for my Youtube channel, which you can find at https://youtube.com/kelvinshadewing. I may be doing non-tutorial development videos as well, if anyone wants to watch.

That's all for now. If anyone would like to support my game development, consider joining my Patreon page at https://patreon.com/kelvin. Every little bit will be greatly appreciated!

I have a weakness for the beakness.

That is all.

My friend I was doing the YCHs to raise money for was hired by the company that bought his work, so he doesn't need anymore support from me. I'll be going back to personal projects after I'm done with my current commission queue, too, which is definitely gonna include more non-pixel drawings. Thanks to everyone who helped out!

I've seen it a few times and even started participating myself a while back, and I just wanted to say, to anyone uploading my stuff there, please tag me as "artist:kelvin shadewing", no underscore, and not all one word. The only reason my name appears that way on most sites is due to username limitations, the proper way is with a space.

Weird thing to make a journal about, but it turned out to be necessary. XD Also, in reference to my character, it's "oc:kelvin". Shadewings are technically mononomous, and don't use last names. They just put "Shadewing" after themselves as a formality.

I got a Motion F5te tablet and got OBS working on it. Turns out the issue was me running Mint all along. XD I've got mainline Debian on it now, and it works beautifully. Still getting used to all the stuff I have to install on my own, which is why I'm writing a configuration script for fresh installs to handle setting up for me next time I put Debian on a machine (like my main computer ;3).

So yeah, I now have a tablet I can draw on and stream from! :D I've also got a new OpenPandora, which I'm also going to be using for art, mainly pixel art, as well as development, too. So many options! :D

I'll be trying to set a schedule for regular art streams if I can. We'll see how well things work out. If you're interested in watching me stream, follow me on Picarto: https://picarto.tv/kelvinshadewing

I'm not joining that site. The design is horrible. It looks like DA Eclipse copied FA's color scheme, and somehow made itself an even more cluttered mess. Not to mention, why is there so much freaking padding on that side menu? Does it need to be that wide? Then the right pane has that annoying triple column layout from Tumblr, and the visuals are so low-contrast that I wonder why they even bother putting borders around things in the first place. The design is absolutely horrendous, and I have no reason to go over there when I have an active following here anyway.

Seriously, why are so many people jumping from this site, which actually gives you some say in how it looks, for sites like Twitter and FLO?

I feel like more people would use my sprites if they had some canon characters to go along with them, so should I do ones like the Mane Six and whatnot? They'd be under a normal CC-BY 4.0 license, so you'd be able to use them in things like monetized videos, games, comics, and other projects. I feel I should point that out because the Desktop Pony sprites/bases are under a non-commercial license, and though I've yet to see anyone get in trouble for using them in things like Youtube vids and such, I'd like to at least make it clear I'm not making mine NC.

The sprites are sized so they'll fit well with other games like Super Mario All Stars/World, Mega Man X SNES, Rivals of Aether, Super Metroid/Castlevania, Digimon Battle Spirit, and possibly many more, so there's plenty of potential for crossover projects. They'll be made using my pony commission template, so you can already get an idea of how they look.

I'm asking about this since commissions really don't seem to be going anywhere, and I wanna see if this is something people would like me to do on Patreon so that, if I end up quarantined, I have something to do so I can earn something. Would anyone be interested in these?

In regards to the template, I also have a few more layer ideas, such as bug wings/eyes/shells, bat pony ear tufts, and paws (already in progress). Let me know if you guys have suggestions for other layers/animations you'd like added.

I figured I'd add in the lunch scene, and some more fun stuff ended up happening afterwards. If you guys are interested, I might do a part two with a slower scene of you getting eaten, try to get more detail into it.

https://www.bountysource.com/issues.....causes-a-crash

Current bounty stands at 30$.

[EDIT]

Solved it. Converting data types that were incompatible but didn't give an error message was the issue.

So, I've actually been making some progress with my game engine, but there's a few issues I'm still having. I've decided to put the money I've made on Patreon towards solving these issues by posting bounties on them. I'll be posting the bounties here as they come up, so if anyone knows any C++ or someone else who does, here's your chance to make a bit of quick cash.

OK guys, this is a delicious recipe I want to share. There are only three ingredients you need:

Pancake mix
Vanilla yogurt
Fresh blueberries (other berries if you prefer, but using these for example)

First, we make the dough. Mix about equal parts pancake powder and yogurt in a bowl until you get a nice, somewhat loose dough out of it. In a large pan, heat up some oil. DO NOT USE HIGH HEAT! This could cause a flash fire, plus, it won't cook evenly if the heat is too high.

Drop a berry into the mixture and roll it around so that it forms a ball with the berry in the middle, then drop that into the oil. Do a few at a time so you can watch them and take them out quickly enough once they're done. They may float, that's fine; just turn them over with a fork to make sure they heat evenly.

Let them fry until the outside turns golden brown and crispy. The heated berry may burst and soak the yonut or become sort of like jelly filling. Take them out with a fork or metal strainer, and place them on a plate to cool.

If you don't want berries in them, make them plain, and they will taste delicious with syrup, just like a pancake.

Enjoy!

Thank you to everyone who's shown support for me through this. I've gotten some very good advice that's helped immensely with the pressure I've been feeling, and it's just been such a huge weight off my back. I still feel some fear about the future, but I've got good friends who I can trust. I think I'm going to be fine.

So, earlier today, I had it out with my mother. She made a rant at me a while ago regarding covid and the end of days, and since then, I wasn't able to bring myself to speak with her. I'd had an anxiety attack over it at work, one that was bad enough to cause me to throw up and get sent home, and now my coworkers think I've got covid.

I should clarify why her mentioning the end of the world threw me over the edge like that. When I was little, my mother would tell me horror stories about what the end times were going to be like, being as brutal about it as she could, going on about how it would both be an Orwellian dystopia complete with barcode tatoos and a zombie apocalypse, sometimes interchangeably, sometimes both at once. She would terrorize me with these stories, about what it would be like for us, being hunted down by whatever government came to power, about having to live in the wilderness and forage to survive. And then she weaponized that fear.

Any time I did or said something she didn't like, any time I made her upset, she would rub my face in it like a dog who peed on the floor, screaming at me like I'd just murdered someone, and then bring up the end of days and tell me that I need to shape up or I'm going to die. She used the fear of death to keep me submissive, and it was especially effective since she explained death to me long before any child would be ready for a concept like that, so yeah, there were plenty of nights when I cried myself to sleep because I didn't want to die. And that's only the verbal torment.

You see, my mother could easily be called abusive towards me. She would get violently angry, throw things at me, hit me, scream bloody murder at me, play the victim about everything, especially if we got into a fight and I dared try to defend myself, that's when she'd say things like "how dare you hit your mother" when she'd just been beating me senseless, and most often times, she would go for the head. Heck, I wouldn't be surprised if I'm not really autistic, and it turned out I have some sort of brain damage instead. One way that she would torture me was by pinning me down and holding my wrists so that I would feel trapped, as though I were buried alive, and then she would scream at me and tell me that I wasn't going to be let up until I calmed down. Naturally, since what she was doing was causing me to go into a panic, and she was doing in to punish me for panicking, these episodes would go on until I was so exhausted that I couldn't cry anymore.

The only time she seemed loving to me that I can clearly remember was when she would talk about how I was destined to be a famous game designer, how I was going to make an award-winning game that got me rich so that I could take care of her. She would even encourage me to do things that were getting popular in mobile gaming, practices that I found disgusting for how manipulative and anti-player they were, things like loot boxes, pay to win, idle/skinner box games, and the like, even trying to get me to use my most cherished characters in them. Looking back, it seems more like I was some sort of retirement plan for her, given how she was trying to drive me towards the most profitable outcome, rather than actually telling the stories I wanted to tell.

What's ironic about that was our house. My mother is a hoarder, often buying things she didn't need and leaving them lying around, throwing her trash on the floor for us to pick up, bringing home pets that we didn't need and didn't need us, but they were so cute that she just HAD to adopt them, and then they'd pee and poop around the house and we were supposed to clean up after her and her pets, and if her stuff got ruined, it was our fault. If I ever happened to get along with an animal, it was suddenly mine and my responsibility, especially her dog who clearly loved her more than me anyway, something that she would frequently rub in my face, which always made me feel worthless. And through all this, while she's telling me to hurry up and become a famous game designer for her, she's making me pick up her trash, yelling at me to get off the computer and do more cleaning when I'm trying to learn to code and get better because I didn't know how to make something worth selling even if I wanted to.

Nothing I did was ever good enough for her, either. Like one time I remember so well, she took the girls to a horse show and told me to stay home and clean. Bear in mind our house was BAD with how much trash was in it. I cleaned up twenty, TWENTY, bags of trash, and had them ready to go to the dump when she got back. She got home, went off on me for not doing anything, accused me of playing on my computer the entire time, despite physical proof of what I'd done being right there in front of her. She screamed at me, hit me, told me I was just like my father (who, by the way, was never around and never had any influence on me at all because he moved out before I could even remember him), told me that I didn't care what would happen if someone came in and saw the place, screamed about how much she sacrificed for me (probably meant she made the mistake of having kids in hopes that they'd take care of her after retirement). I've never been able to forget about that day.

A few years ago, I was very mentally unwell because of all this. I was often afraid for my life while living with her, but at the same time, I wanted to die, and her torture and gaslighting me had led me to despise myself to the point where I didn't even want others to mourn for me. I had these periods where I would lash out at my friends, try to destroy every friendship I had so that no one would miss me when I was gone. I had seriously nearly reached that point one time, and were it not for my best friend, Teric, I would not be alive right now. In one of my videos, I mentioned he had saved me from "social suicide"; I didn't mention actual suicide because I was still living with my mother at the time, and I was afraid of how she would react if she ever came across my channel and heard me say something like that.

Since I moved out, I've had this recurring nightmare of going back to her just for a visit, but then I'd miss my flight or something, and would be unable to go home. As soon as she had me, the fighting would resume, and I'd wake up thinking I was still there, and it would be so surreal to find myself in my room, living with my pack. I still have frequent panic attacks at the thought of dying, too, especially when I'm going to bed. I'll lay there shaking and twitching, any movement I can make just to remind myself I'm still alive.

Last Christmas, I wanted to see a good friend of mine, and we'd already made plans, but then my mother decided she wanted me to spend the weekend with her, and wouldn't you know it, she picked the weekend my friend was coming, and refused to reschedule for anything. So I was with her and my sisters in a crappy motel room while she did nothing but criticize everything about my life, made me do things that she wanted to do and never once asked me what I'd like to do, and made no effort whatsoever to be pleasant to be around. If it was an honest attempt at reconnecting, it was the weakest one I'd ever seen, and I don't know what she was trying to accomplish, other than to waste my time and feel like she had some control over me again. She wouldn't even let me stay the last night in my own home, saying she'd drive me to work instead, so I didn't even get to see my friend off when he left.

And so, after days of her trying to get my attention, days of me not being able to answer her because I just couldn't take being reminded of my past with her by her anymore. I went off on her about everything here, as well as going off on her about saying that Walmart making people wear masks was a sign of the end times. At the end of it all, my sister texted me saying they were disowning me, even though my sister knew full well my mother is insane and had sided with me in the past, especially after my mother's rage had started being directed at my other, much younger sister, but nope, now I'm the bad guy for bringing up all the times my mother hurt and terrorized me, for the anxiety and paranoia I still have in me because of her, about the multiple times she nearly drove me to end my own life.

But then there was how my mom reacted herself. She didn't get hysterical, or angry, or beg me not to cut her off. She simply said she'll always love me, and that she hopes I have a good life, that she'll keep praying for me, even if she never hears from me again, and she'll stop bothering me, followed by a simple "good bye".

I know my mother, at least I knew what she was like when I lived with her. She was very good at playing the victim, very good at turning things around so that everyone else were the bullies and she was helpless and being treated unfairly. Heck, she even used that skill against me plenty of times, like if we got into an argument and I managed to beat her with facts that she couldn't refute, she would break down crying and say I was being evil to her, yes, "evil" was the word she used.

But this? This was different. She actually sounded like she was being mature, calmly letting go. It scared me, and it put a seed of doubt in my heart, made me think "What if she isn't lying? What if she really, honestly does want to fix things between us? What if she's really been trying to redeem herself, but she just doesn't know how, and now I'm kicking her when she's down?" Like I said, she's always been good at making others look like and even feel like the bad guy, even when all evidence was to the contrary, and so part of me is saying that this is just another one of those times, that she's trying to make me feel sorry and grovel to her, that I've been gaslit for so long that it's easy for her to make me unsure about anything, even after I've heard her say outright insane things like "Atlantis invented pigs because they wanted meat that tasted like humans and that's why pigs are unclean, it's in the Bible" when the Bible says pigs are unclean because they're scavengers with unhealthy eating habits, or that when Revelation says "the dead will rise" it literally means a zombie outbreak and not just people waking up to be judged. She can say crazy things like that, and yet, she can still make me believe it's my fault that our grandfather's furniture that she brought home and crammed into the house when we had no room for it got ruined when she put it in the room that the cats liked to poop in and was hard to reach because the rest of her stuff was in the way. She can say all that craziness, and yet SOMEHOW, still manages to make me doubt myself.

I don't know what's going to happen now. My pack says I'm free now and don't need to worry about her again, but I can't shake this fear that I've made a horrible mistake, that I should have tried to be good to her, even if she wasn't good to me. Part of me thinks it's because of my Christian upbringing, and a certain Commandment: honor thy father and thy mother. After all, how can I do that when my father is gone and may well be dead, and my mother is an insane child abuser who is impossible to please? It's like now that I've cut ties with her, it'll be impossible to ever get into her good graces, and thus, impossible to please God. The way I see it, even repentance wouldn't save me at this point, because that only works if you stop repeating the sin, but what if it's a sin that's continuous? What if it's impossible for me to stop dishonoring my mother now? Why is that even a requirement in the first place when it's possible for your parents to force you to break that rule? What even is honor, anyway? Every culture, heck, every individual seems to have their own idea of what honors them, so does that mean that getting into Heaven requires me to obey the subjective rules of a mortal sinner? I don't know, I just don't know. Part of me thinks that, assuming the Christian faith is true, given what my mother is like, I never had a chance of going to Heaven in the first place, and so nothing I do will matter anyway.

I don't know what to do now.

So basically, I'm gonna be both Kelvin and Midi, just different depending on the situation. Kelvin is my public face, my brand, and the persona I use in social settings. If I'm doing roleplay or gaming, I'll be Midi, which is much easier when you consider he's bipedal, so it's easier to play as him in any game that allows modding/character creation. He's even still my main in Second Life, if anyone wants to meet there. In fact, SL is the place where I still use Midi in social settings, too.

Of course, some people know me more as one or the other, so if it's just me and someone who prefers one, I can override and be the form they're more comfortable with.

Also, as far as canon goes, forget it. The Midi I am and the Midi in my game are two separate people. In situations where I'm Kelvin and it comes to a fight, just think of Midi as my battle form. I'm also seriously depowering Kelvin anyway, as well as shadewings in general, because I made them kinda broken in canon as well, heheh.

So basically, when I'm asked Grey-Mane or Battle-Born, the answer is yes. ;3

So, about five years ago, I created my current sona, Kelvin. After being inspired to create shadewings by MLP's rendition of changelings, I started to feel like I needed to change myself. There are two main reasons why I stopped being Midi:

One, since Midi was my sona at the time, that would mean that KL was basically a self-insert. I was afraid people would like the game less if I put "myself" into the game as the main character.

Two, I felt that Midi's personality didn't really match my own anymore, and felt I needed a sona that was less of a character and more of just an avatar for myself.

However, I've come to realize that those reasons really don't seem valid anymore.

One, a lot of my friends make media involving their sonas that are high quality and widely accepted. In some cases it's their actual avatars, and in others, it's character versions of their sonas that don't necessarily match their personalities, and have backstories to separate them from just "I became a thing one day". People don't get mad at them for this, they don't look down on them for this, so what was I worried about? Because a few people on Fimfiction said they don't like self-inserts? Well, the overall positive reaction works like these get seems to suggest it's not a bad idea after all, and I'm just overthinking it.

Two, I can't make a character to reflect "myself" because I'll always be seeing myself through my own biased lens. And maybe Midi wasn't how I saw myself anymore, but he's who I wished I could be more like. Kelvin is... nothing. I honestly for the life of me cannot get invested in him beyond his appearance. I thought having psychic powers and such were cool, until I realized just how easily they could become OP if there were no limits beyond "if you know the physics behind a thing, you can do it", and the genetic computer thing was a really bad idea that I originally made up just because I wanted to give my shadewing characters what was basically a scan visor mode and it just sort of spiraled out of control when I thought of that same system assisting in using psychic powers to perform complex tasks, and just decided the only thing holding Kelvin back from using his powers to the fullest was because he was scared of what he might become and what others would think of him. If he just gained confidence, he'd be unstoppable, and I don't want a sona that does that.

I'll probably just get rid of the genetic computer concept and make shadewings more physically limited, but even then, that doesn't make me interested in Kelvin. I can't think of a decent backstory for him, given his extreme shyness, I don't think he'd be interesting in slice of life stories, and he's certainly not the hero type because I don't think I'm the hero type. I can't seem to get invested in him. I made him to reflect how quiet and reserved I tend to be IRL, but that's not a character I find interesting.

And then there's Midi. I made Midi almost about 16 years ago. Yeah, he was a game character first, but I started to use him as my avatar online, and I really loved playing with him. It was way easier for me to make him feel balanced and he's just so much more fun. He doesn't have telekinesis, something that could become really OP if a little creativity was applied to it, just his acorn bombs and, more recently, a morphball expy. He's cocky, confident, but doesn't rub his coolness in other people's face (a thing we all know tends to eliminate said coolness). I could see him somewhere between Genki and Rainbow Dash, being fun-loving, exciting, and definitely way more fun to RP as. When I fantasize about going to Equestria, or any other world for that matter, I have way more fun as Midi than I do as Kelvin. And even if I do use him as my sona, that doesn't mean that the one I play as and the canon one have to be the same person, right?

So what's stopping me from just going back to Midi? Well, frankly, I've gotten way more well known since I became Kelvin than I ever was as Midi. I feel I may have dug myself too deeply into this new sona for me to go back. I've thought of using both at once, just being Kelvin outside of RP, and use Midi for RP and games and what have you, but even then... it just doesn't feel right. There's just something off about it. Frankly, I'm also getting kinda tired of people always assuming I'm a pony. It was funny at first, but nowadays... yeah, it's getting on my nerves.

Maybe, though, maybe that is the way I should do it. Maybe Kelvin and Midi should just be two sides of the same coin. Heck, there's even some people who still call me Midi, and I still play as him exclusively on Second Life. In fact, any game where I'm able to make my own character, I always make Midi. In Elder Scrolls, I do it in a rather tongue-in-cheek way: I use a kahjiit model and role play Midi simply being mistaken for a kahjiit because everyone else is too dense to tell the difference.

Still, though... part of me regrets making Kelvin in the first place, like it was completely unnecessary, and I miss just being Midi, but if I did switch back to being the squirrel full time, what do I do with the shadewing? I've already got a site and a channel named after him, this account uses his name. Do I just make Kelvin Shadewing a brand? What do I do with my site? My domains? Or should I just try to get over it and keep Midi on the side?

I just don't know what to do, and I'm tired of this remorse constantly popping up in my mind, even more often lately than it used to.

https://play.aidungeon.io/

In this game, I harassed a ship captain who wouldn't take me out to sea to be swallowed by a whale, then met a dragoness and asked to be friends with her, and gave her belly rubs. When I asked if I could rub her belly from inside, she was very reluctant to eat me because she didn't want to hurt her friend. I promised I'd be fine and convinced her to eat me. She swallowed me gently and digested me, and after I respawned, she became my girlfriend.

Later, I turned myself into a gryphon and met a kobold. He was scared of me at first, but I eventually gained his trust and got him to agree to let me eat him. After he came back, I shrank myself down and let him eat me. Then we went and met my dragon girlfriend, who he was afraid of at first, but I convinced him to join me in her belly, and we snuggled inside and got digested together.

Now we're a weird vorish family that likes to take turns eating each other.

It's unexpectedly, but very fortunately, easy to get a willing vore scenario going. The game won't even digest you unless you tell it you're to be digested, so safe and/or wholesome vore is also very easy.

So, I just got a Windows computer after several years straight of running Linux, and I've come across something that googling has not solved. So, anyone who uses Windows, I have a question: how do I make an application go into fullscreen without it being EXCLUSIVE fullscreen. You know when a program locks the screen and makes in flash black every time you switch in and out of it? Yeah, I don't want that. I just want a window to lose its title bar and cover the taskbar. In Linux, I could do that with any program that didn't have its window size locked by pressing alt-f11, but that doesn't do anything on Windows.

I ask this because I want to be able to record a window without having gaps around it in OBS, because I'm freakishly OCD, and I'd like to play games that don't have their own fullscreen option on my TV without the bars on them. So yeah, if there's a way to do this, please let me know!