I have started taking walks again. While it's difficult to disregard the fact that this is yet another thing that I have to do and which is taking of my limited time and energy away from what I want to do, well... I have to do it so I'll do it, I guess.



I found myself emerging from the woods near the entrance to the residential area I grew up in. And I found myself near a familiar gap in the hedge.

And then I found myself seeing if I could still get from there to my old house without being detected.

Instead of slipping into the back yard of a house I no longer live in, I politely appeared on the street outside the garage just as the current owner came out of his car. He was confused and a little upset and wanted to know what I was doing there.

"Looking" said I.

"Looking at what?"

I pointed across his shoulder at the house numbers on the garage wall.

"I put those numbers up there. About thirty years ago."

While his back was turned, I went sideways between a wall and a large bush and was gone.



The hidden ways are still there.

A couple of friends of mine are being screwed over by the Veteran's Administration something awful, and they are in need of financial help. They are Snout, founder of VCL, SPR and cohost of EuroFurrence 2, and his husband Banwynn, furry artist, writer and fursuit maker. See Snout's journal post for details. http://www.furaffinity.net/journal/9157691/

So yeah, just to set the record straight and stop people worrying... I am having a case of mysterious chest pains that wander around. I've had these periodically since my teens, they tend to last a week or so and then fade away. The reason I was sent to the hospital by ambulance is because I happened to be at the doctor at a moment when they went particularly bad, causing all the classic symptoms. Acute pain in the left upper chest that radiates out in the arm, shortness of breath, nausea, all that jazz.

So I decided that since I now have several doctors confirm that I do, in fact, have pain in my chest (something which apparently is hard to get people to believe for some reason) and since it's worse and longer lasting than I have had it before, this time I am going to try to get to the bottom of what might be causing this.

As far as I know I'm not dying of this.

Unless it's connected to the asthma in which case I am, technically, dying of it I guess. Just not immediately, more like over a period of decades.

I really hate the inability to recall positive memories. NFC 2019 was just weeks ago but it feels like an eternity, and because of how the depression messes with my memory and recollections I can vividly remember every moment when I was tired and just wanted it to end, but I am struggling to remember all the fun times I know I had.

My best memory that I can recall just now has to be sauna with the medics and security and the guest of honor at the last night. Just relaxing after both he and the rest of us had been run around like crazy the entire week and now we finally had some time to ourselves.

I also remember how cool it was to sit and be the blipmaster while one of the coders worked on the interface as I was using it. He was sitting on a chair next to me and editing the code, and I kept refreshing the page and every time there was a new feature.

"Hey, wouldn't it be cool if the interface could do x?"
*tappatappatappa*
"Okay, hit refresh."
[interface now does x]

One of my best memories ever though was NFC 2017. We had a videolink to VancouFur and I saw that Gilda fursuit I totally don't have a crush on or anything! And so I drew some stupid fan art and taped it on the wall in front of the camera, and later on it was missing... and then after the con I found out it was because someone had sent it to the suiter. And they posed with it!

Squeeeeeeeeeee





Not that I have a crush on that suit or anything like that. It was just cool, you know...

I have this thing I do where I get obsessed with a song, listen to it over and over and draw a bunch of very emotional drawings inspired by it and then I get upset because nobody cares about them. It's an emotional rollercoaster and it's really exhausting.

I recognize the pattern but I don't know what causes it or how to break out of it.

I had to explain the green dook to someone who didn't quite understand it.

Them: "How did that green creature appear there?"
Me: "It was outside the frame."
Them: "Yes, but in the context of the comic, where did it come from?"
Me: "It was outside the frame."

I remember when I first played a computer game on a colour monitor with sound. For the most part I'd been playing computer games on old laptop computers with monochrome CGA and EGA screens and without sound, but just that once I played Ultima V on a desktop machine and it was beautiful, so vibrant, I loved it.

Ultima V shaped my expectations of a computer RPG a lot. Even now games have a hard time living up to it.

Every year there's a winter, every winter there's a flu, and every flu I am profoundly reminded of my mortality and the ultimate pointlessness of my struggle with asthma.

Asthma isn't a disease you get well from. It's a disease that stays with you until the day you are no longer strong enough to keep up the fight. Every winter and every flu I feel closer to that day.

It's apparently difficult, as I've seen in some recent comments on depressed people's journals and have met myself from time to time.

I think the funniest example of a complete lack of understanding of depression is this one song I keep hearing over and over at one workplace. I work, among other places, in a department store which streams unreleased songs day in and day out over the PA system.

One of the songs is some kind of ballad directed at a person who from the narrator's description appears to suffer from a depression. The song is probably meant to be supportive of this person and their struggle, but the utter lack of understanding of what a depression means, coupled with the whining and plaintive tone of the singer - which I guess is meant to affect sympathy - makes it sound like they are just impatient with the depressed person and wants them to stop being so... well, depressive.

The first line of the refrain really sums the song up, both in terms of the amount of actual support it gives as well as to the attitude toward depression:

If you just liked yourself, so many things would get better

It just begs for a sarcastic "wow, I had never thought of that!"

A lot of people get very annoyed at depressed people because depressed people are, well, depressive, and they don't understand the mechanics of the disease, or even that it is a disease to begin with.

I can understand that, the concept of a disease that affects your thoughts is both extremely alien and frightening. It invokes the very real and justified fear that the disease can be transmitted to yourself.

And that's sad.

As for that song, about two thirds into it I would like to insert the line "have you tried drinking a glass of warm milk before going to bed" just to make it even less helpful and push it across the line into satire. Sarcasm is the mind's natural defense against idiocy after all. :)

My new schedule pretty much doubles my workload. My body already has problems coping with the workload - which they are aware of - so I wonder what they expected would happen now.

I'll just save some time and book a doctor appointment for my soon to be busted legs and arms.

Today was an interesting workday.
It started when the boss called to announce that the workforce is down to a third of the usual mimimum, so I would have to ignore my hand injury and do the vaccuum cleaning and the window polishing today.
Oh well. I'm used to it by now.
Since there were only two of us instead of six I had to remain there instead of moving on to the bank I normally clean at after, so my colleague with the back injury had to take that job alone.
Oh well, she's used to it by now.
It could have been worse. I could have been on the crew cleaning the cinema. There's normally eight of them, which is very little given the amount of theaters and the heavy work.
Today they were two.
After work I met up with my colleague from the bank who was off to clean a food mart. Alone, since her three colleagues there were gone.

But it's not all bad! At the latest staff meeting the district manager proudly announced that her district keeps breaking record after record at going under budget, and still gets record amounts of work done.

So, uh... congratulations on the bonus I guess?

I guess you've all had those moments you wish you could record and relive again and again. I had one of them in a very unexpected place and time.

I had had an evening with friends, I am in a car home and my friend is driving. I am tired, I have a headache and my stomach is upset. I'm in the passenger seat and there's nothing for me to do but to sit the time out, staring through the grimy, cracked windshield out at the darkness. We're driving along one of the most boring roads I know, just one lane straight ahead for an hour with nothing to see but the concrete barriers on both sides of the lane, and trees and overpasses and the occasional building. There's a dip under a viaduct and I see an electrical substation on the side of the road.

The scene is lit by naked grimy lightbulbs and striplights, shining on the filthy steel, grimy concrete and dirty asphalt. Everything so caked in grime it's brownish grey. It's all naked and ugly and raw and nobody cares because this is just a place you go past as you're driving to something or from something. I, my friend, and everyone around us is passing between experiences.

But it somehow strikes me that we're all here, now, experiencing this. This is life too. And these people that I can't even see but can assume to be in the cars, they are people like me. They see through their eyes and think thoughts in their heads. They, too, are life.

We had watched a movie, and movies are about tragedies, about amazing dramatic things, explosions and weddings and great accidents at sea, but life isn't just those things.

Life is also being in a dirty car being driven by a guy you've known for thirty years, driving past an electrical substation you've driven past so many times you've lost count. That's life too.

I've driven past that ugly substation so many times and I never really cared about it. And that's fine too. You don't need to care about everything in life.

Sometimes I like to care about what I care about and why and for some reason caring about an ugly electrical substation made me feel at peace with myself and the world.

The natural reaction to a terrorist attack appears to be to feel unsafe, but curiously I feel safer now. I will attempt to explain.
It's a bit like having been in a car accident and having been saved by the seatbelt for the first time. You always wear your seatbelt anyway, it's the intelligent and rational thing to do because you know with your intellect that it can make the difference between death and walking away unharmed. But after the first time you've been in a car crash and the safety belt did save you, you wear your seatbelt and you know, truly know with your feelings, what it does.
Yesterday I saw the metaphorical seatbelt in operation.
I listened to radio reports as events were happening. Witnesses to the ramming jumped out of buses and ran out of stores to begin first aid. Police and security guards were on the scene in moments and coordinated to bring the situation under control. Fire departments, hospitals, everything responded like clockwork. And while this was happening high profile targets were secured, eyes and ears everywhere started looking and listening.
And all of this happened not like an old steam engine that is chugging to life - it was like watching an enormous clockwork device that was wound and ready. Someone released the catch on the main spring and all of the cogs started whirring and clicking all at once.
Yesterday I saw the safety machine in operation and it was enormous and it worked like magic.
And it wasn't only emergency services and other formal operations, it was the civilians. Civilians rushing toward the scene of a terrorist attack to save victims. Civilians running out with blankets. Civilians giving stranded people rides home. Civilians opening their homes and places of business to people in need of shelter.
The safety machine is lovely and I will walk the streets of my home town with more, not less confidence in the future.

For those of you who heard about the incident in my home town, I'm ok. I live and work outside the inner city and wasn't affected. Most friends and family have reported in as well.

So I was reading Alistair McLean and being annoyed at the absurd level of detail in the descriptions of things. The protagonist can't just drink wine, the vintage has to be specified from the wineyard and year down to the faintest notes of aroma. He can't just drive a car, or even a Porsche, or a Porsche 911 or even a customized 1988 Porsche 911, oh no. The exact customizations have to be specified along with what workshop did them. Every. One.
Moving along, the protagonist doesn't just wear a lether jacket. It's a 1967 vintage medium brown calf leather Balmain with a belgian cut and a beige suede collar, and it has been customized by Clarkwell Chapman & Wexham's in London to contain a carefully concealed pocket for his Colt M1911A1 - which took half a chapter to describe by the way, with all its customizations.
At least his 1897 Patek Philippe wrist watch is mint condition...
And then I noticed the glaring omissions. We don't get to know what type of engine pulled that freight train, what kind of cars were in it or even what gauge the railway was or the type of sleepers! And the protagonist lives in - and I quote - "a house".
I would like to have the author sit and read this book to me so I can interrupt him and demand a consistent level of detail.
"Not so fast!" I would say. "Back to that guard dog. What breed was it? What colouration? Was it an American or European standard line? What kennel was it from, who was its sire and by what dam? DO YOUR GOD DAMN RESEARCH!"

I've got a new scanner! Unless the tons of smut didn't give it away.

Won't be reliably putting drawings up for a bit. I'm off to NFC in a couple of days, and I no longer have a scanner since mine up and died.

A couple of years ago I was playing this MMORPG called Wurm Online. It's on Steam these days I noticed and I keep thinking I should get back to it.

What happened to me in that game one summer was, in my opinion, exactly how quests ought to be.

It started when I came down on a pier and found a huge pile of fish, claimed by no-one. They had been left there by someone who had practiced their fishing and then left to do other things. Nearby a carpenter had practiced making barrels, and I found this the ideal time to practice cooking. I started making fish soup, filling the barrels.

After a while I was out of barrels but not fish, and was left with a decision. Do I dump the soup on the ground? Do I stop training? It turned out I didn't have to make the decision as a stonecutter dumped a shoddily built fountain nearby. I schlepped the barrels over and started filling the fountain with fish soup, mostly as a joke.

Then I left the server for over a month as I had other things to do.

When I came back the starter village had grown and it took me a while to find my bearings. Once I did I found the pier, and to my surprise I found the fountain I had filled with fish soup. It was still filled with fish soup, only now it had a similar fountain next to it, filled with water. And between them was a sign: "Free food and drink for newbies - keep filled"

It was something beautiful, and without meaning to, I had started it.

That sense of accomplishment is what I want to feel when I do a quest in an MMORPG. I want a lasting effect, one that benefits not just me but everyone around me.

Did you ever have one of those moment when mid-game your suspenders of disbelief just snap?

So I'm playing Shitty RTS 4: Dumpster Fire and then suddenly it dawns on me what it is I'm actually doing. I just now sent armed, uniformed men into a civilian industry building, and it is now paying money directly into my account. Money that I can only assume my armed men - who never came out of the building again - are currently extorting out of said industry.

Why do I even need this money? According to the game's story I am supposedly a field commander for the Union of Good Guys fighting against the Legion of Evil Badguys. Good guys don't extort money from civilians! Why am I even extorting money in the first place? Why am I buying tanks in the first place? I am representing the combined armed forces of every industrialised nation on the planet, you would think I would have some tanks already at my disposal. Given the speed at which these tanks appear when I order them they've already been built, the crews have already been hired and trained.

These tanks have already been paid for, why am I buying them again? And from whom?

And why am I stealing money from civilians to do so?

Speaking of which, I am not just a field commander for the Union of Good Guys, I'm the only remaining field commander. I represent the entire chain of command from strategic command down to individual squad leader it seems, given the amount of macro- and micromanagement I have to do, and all of this is because - and I'm not joking, this is the actual reason - every other officer was on a space station that got blown up.

Every. Single. One.

You would think they would have some sort of contingency plan considering that this exact thing happened in Shitty RTS 1 and in Shitty RTS 2: Shittier and in Shitty RTS 3: Shitstorm and then again in the DLC, Shitty RTS 3: You Thought That Guy Was Dead Didn't You.

No, I didn't. He's the villain in every game in this series so no. No I didn't think he was dead. Not this time either. Sorry. Maybe I'll fall for it in Shitty RTS 5: Guess Who Blew Up Every Commanding Officer Again or maybe in Shitty RTS 6: We're Not Even Trying Anymore.

So yeah.

One. Job.

I put down my playthrough of Deus Ex: Human Revolutions Director's Cut. The re-release where you buy the game again, except now it's not ruined by the lousy boss fights...

...except that yes, it still is. You still get to this point where you find yourself in a deathmatch arena instead of a believable environment, and you face off against an enemy with Final Fantasy levels of hitpoints that is immune to all your weapons, and in an environment that is specifically designed to enhance their abilities and make all your tactics - tactics that work flawlessly in the main game - completely useless.

Fantastic.

Hugs?

It's such a hassle, really, having to upload here and the other half dozen furry art sites there are. It'd be easier if everyone could settle on one standard rather than everyone creating their own, but I guess that's not happening...

I had a wonderful dream. I was able to sing, I had a pretty good singing voice and I was rehearsing a duet together with a musician friend (who actually is a musician in real life too). We were sharing a bunch of laughs and everything was great.

And then I woke up to a world where I can't sing but wish I could.

Everything seemed so damn colourless for a while.

A large villa in a very affluent area. View from inside the house out the open front door as a middle aged man in very ostensible clothing is seen sending a boy out to a luxury car waiting on the street. A phone on a table in the foreground rings and the man walks up to it and picks it up, obscuring the view of the door. There is the sound of a phone hanging up and then a dial tone. The man puts the receiver down, irritated. He turns to look out the still open door. Just then, the car is catapulted violently into the air by an explosion, spinning wildly and shedding parts all over.
View from the street up to the house. The man runs out to the smoldering, twisted wreckage of the car, screaming in agony. There is noone in the car. Quick pan the the left as the boy from before comes running to the man with a frightened expression and silently hands him a mobile phone. The mobile phone rings and the man answers it.
Closeup on the man, with the house in the background, out of focus.
A woman's voice on the phone: "Repeat after me. I will stop dealing with drugs."
The man, hesitantly: "I will stop dealing with drugs."
Phone voice: "I will start a new life."
Man: "I will start a new life."
Phone voice: "I will obey the law."
Man: "I will obey the law."
Phone voice: "I am aware the next time my son won't be removed first."
Man (afraid): "I'm... I'm aware the next time my son won't be removed first."
Phone voice: "Good."
The call is disconnected. Pan out a bit. A tree in the garden of the house suddenly explodes in a fireball, causing the man to stagger back in surprise. A fraction of a moment later the house itself explodes, rapidly followed by the garage, and the dog house.
Pan out and up to show the man standing in the street, holding the boy as fragments of the burning buildings rain down.
A dog runs up to the man from the same direction that the boy came from.
Fade to black.
Title sequence.

Meeeeeeee!

She said it was "kinda awesome" seeing me over the video link from Nordic Fuzz Con and that I should arrange for some catnip for her for next year. I guess I'll have to contact the people at VancouFur for that...