Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays, a joyfull time to everybody of you.

May you have a good time with friends and family.

For myself, we normally celebrate on the 24th, but since my siblings could not get to our place in time, so for a change, we celebrate on the 25th, like most of hte Anglo-Saxxon world does.

Today marks the last day of my job at the bookstore at the main train station of our city, where I have been working the past three and a half years. I was the sole person there that stil held the same position since I started, everybody else that has gotten a job there since has allready quit or got fired.

And now it is me that handed in my 4 weeks notice a month ago, as to start a new job.

The new job is as a media worker at the state university library here in the city. And I will even get a schooling to become a fully professional librarian at one point in the next year!

Soooo excited and looking forward to it! On monday, a new chapter in my life will begin!

Today I turned 32 years. Yet I don't feel any different to just a decade ago, to be honest.

Well, maybe a bit more brave and out-going by now. Though I could try to bring back my old productivity, to be honest.

Onwards to a new year, together with a new job, and new goals!

I am stil not fully comprehemding or feeling it.

But about half an hour ago, I got a call from the university where I applied at several weeks ago. They told me it could take a while to sort through the other applicants, as well as an immediate vacation time afterwards delaying it a bit more.

Yet here I am. They told me I am part of the team now. Wow... Just wooooow.

Maybe I should buy a lottery ticket too today?

Finding an account here on FA or Sofurry that has not been used in years, no faves or uploads, even though they seemingly were a lot more active in previous years?

It just makes me wonder, what has happened to these people that they just....stopped...kind of leaving the fandom.

I know what you want to say. 'But Matt, people change, interests change, their focus in live moving some other places.'

And you are right, I am kind of aware of that.

But stil...in my mind, pouring so much heart, soul, passion, and also money, into one's gallery...to simply stop there...anbandon it...it hurts me, even though I never met or interacted with these strangers on the internet, that only left behind a gallery with various pieces of art.

To me it would hurt less if they kind of left a last message, like 'Been there, done that, was fun, going new ways' . This would set a marker to me. A final stone on a long road. But simply disappearing...this just hurts me for some weird reason.

Yeah, on the 30th of that month I will be 32, yet I don't feel mature enough for what people think of how one should behave for that age...dunno why writing that here, just some weird thoughts venting.

Not even sure what I want, or will get for this Bday....oh well. Maybe some more focus and determination....

Didn't get the job at the state archive here. Had the interview yesterday, and allready today got the mail saying I didn't get it.

Oh well, keep on searching. And I also stil have a pending position at the university library. So I can stil hope.

Okay, it is close to midnight here at my place, yet I have to write this off of my chest, simply to get these thoughts from my brain.

I am scared, of so many things. The future, death, my own one, the one of friends and family, disease, you name it all.

But also of being forgotten, washed away in the sea of time. I have contemplated what I can do against this, but all thoughts come to the same conclusion, that one cannot really do anything against it.

I started writing down my thoughts here and there on a little notebook, random thoughts, sad thoughts, good thoughts, just thoughts in general. It is the reason why I write such journals, even though I should be soundly asleep by now, as I work in just a few hours again.

Like, did you know there is a museum of sorts in Germany (or rather an archive) that houses private coresponcences and diaries? They do this that average writings of people are preserved for future generations.

But then again I begin to think in larger time scales. decades, centuries, milennias...I mean, I don't even know if this website here will beonline in the 2030s or not. It would be great if it were. or at least fully archived by then.

Does it all even really matter? Like, we don't even really know the names of most of the people that lived 200 years ago in most places, what they thought, felt and desired.

Same will probably go for myself, my name, my life, gone silently in the stream of time.

And so will probably be pretty much every other human being ever. Like, in the far future, if humans will survive that long, the only names of past humans they will probably remember (and think they know their life) are Jesus, a certain angry moustache man and Neil Armstrong. People that did exceptional things compared to all other humans at their time.

I wondered what I could do to preserve my legacy, my thoughts, to prevent them being destroyed in any ways. Make a statue of myself of some hardy long-lasting material and in it some kind of long-term data - storage? Write my memories down on metal plates, like a metal diary, so it won't whither away? Set up a long-time contract with a law firm, that in a century, two centuries, a kind of memory capsule will be opened for my future relatives?

But then I also think that this behavior is very selfish, because what makes my life more worthy for that to be done than all the lives of people around me?

Sorry for such sad thoughts, I just are having a hard time again after Arakaraath passed away nearly half a year ago now. It just...makes me so sad. And it makes me think. Think these sad thoughts again and again and again, making me afraid in my own bed, alone....

Gods, I truly wished we had some sort of clue or evidence if souls or the likes actually existed, to have some actual hope that there is something of us that truly stays 'us'....

I feel tired.... Exhausted.... Drained.... And I don't know why.

Anybody feeling like this lately too?

At times I dont even have energy or motivation to get out of bed in the morning. Today in a long time I even skipped breakfast, as I simply did not feel like it.

Sidenote here, a week ago, I moved into the house next door, so for the first time in my life I kind of have my own place. Before that, I lived in my parents' house and had two rooms there. Now I have a big living room/office combination, and a bedroom, though there is no door between the two, and my own toilet and bathroom. And a shared kitchen and dining room (my sister and her Bf live on the floor above me)

So, maybe I a stil in a kind ot mental transition phase, where I have to get used to kind of....do things, even if no family is around asking me to do stuff....man...adult life is scary.

How does one do this all? Fuck, I stil feel like a 16 year old teenager, even though this August I will be twice as old.

Moving my stuff over I obly saw how much stuff I have.... And I did not even move everything over, stil a lof of storage in the other house....seeing all that stuff scared me.... What will all happen with it one day... It scares me.... Life scares me.... Time scares me.....

Today I was informed via Telegram channels that   BreeW has suddenly passed away. Not much is known yet, but it seems it was sudden cardiac arrest.

It is always so sad to see people pass away without any warning.

May he fly high now, wherever he is.

Yes, as of yesterday I got my second shot of Astrazena vaccine, as well as the rest of my family. Luckily I had no real side effects, aside some pain in the arm. With my first shot I had some cold-hot chills for half a day and felt like I gotten the flue, but I slept over it back then and was mostly back to normal the other day.

So, hooray, now I very soon should be allowed to go out and do stuff....oh wait.... never goes out to do stuff anyhow

Just a journal to make a list of artists whose stuff I really like, and so they don't clutter my frontpage any longer.



Artists whose stuff I really like:

  9delta One of the truly best TF-stories you will ever read
  arakupa Just love the stories of this guy, love stories between anthro dogs and humans. Simply lovely.
  endium A damn cool ruber/latex - artist. Go and give his account a watch.
  Eyrich His style is awesome. Hope truly to get more art from him in the future.
  narse An artist of lost and lots of sexy dragons, so what's not to like?
  spelunker_Sal Just love his 'Roommates' comic.
  tojo-The-Thief It's Tojo, does not need any more explanation why she is on that list. ^.=.^
  LINCARD1000 A really amazing author. His stories of the Vanguard species are truly a kind of its own.
  RetronWolf : If you want some really cool art about the 70s or 80s, this guy is your man.
  Graventhax : If you want some super realistic scalies you better go over to this old reptile!

Yup.

That is what the title says....I think I should unwatch some folks....and just mass delete what is oldest in my inbox....how do I do that?

It is just not funny these days, especially these days.

It is just pathetic making such stupid jokes.

...what it is that you think of when you hear my name?

What was my first impression I left on your mind?

Is there something that you want to tell me, but have not done so yet? Then please, don't hold back anything. Ask me, tell me, speak to me anything that is on your mind.

Never hold back questions or things you wanna say. Because some day it may be too late.

I don't want to waste more of my life away!

I want to do things, achieve things, meet people, see things...

https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/9751982/

Ara's life aparently was cut short by just...we don't know why yet...but it seems he is no longer among us...I cannot believe it...





I myself have so many things that I wanna do...I wanna finish them...before it is too late...

It cannot be true...

Why...how...why....

Aparently...   AraKaraath has passed away just this morning Australian time....how... there was no sign that he was sick or anything...how...

We were so close...he was my dragon-daddy...I have never met him, yet I felt like I was part of his family since forever...

I have found out about his from his lovely comic series: http://iapw.southernweyr.net/ In A Perfect World

I was drawn to it as it was so cute and lovely and full of life and love.

When I first found it I was sure I'd never ever be able to talk to this artist, to thank him for this wonderfull thing he created.

And then it just...happened...we started chatting...talking...we Role-Played various things and I treasure each and every one of them now.

Why ... how... how could this just happen...aparently his heart... it just stopped... as mentioned in this journal.... https://www.furaffinity.net/journal/9751869/

Oh daddy...my dragon daddy...I wanted to meet you...I wanted to hug you and say how much I loved you and...

Ara...my dragon-dad...thank you for all the good times you showed me...thank you for the art you drew me...thank you for being there for me.

Your beloved dragon-son...

Thank you.

Happy new year to everybody out there. May 2021 be a ton more happy than the previous year.

Let's all just pretend last year was all just a big nightmare, right?

About now 2 months ago, my grandfather Alois Neuner, or simply Luis Opa as we grandchildren called him, passed away.

I was there with him in his last moments. I nearly did not go to meet him that day. He was allready in a sanatorium for quite a while and me and my family have been visiting him alternatingly in nearly daily intervalls, a COVID-19 necessity. He has been weak for the past few months allready, so he had to spend more and more time in the sanatorium, getting drips of various medications and whatnot.

It was only about a year ago or so that he got a diagnosis of very low levels of white blood cells, as well as some other diagnosis that did not seem right. It was later suspected that he had developed age-related leukemia, and that this was one of the reasons why he was so weak. This also made it harder for him more and more to live his normal daily routine. Which in the end caused him to fall down several times, in one case he bruised his ripps, and in his age this aparently was too much for his body to handle any longer.

So he spent several more weeks bound to a bed most of the time, which was quite a hard time for him, as he had spent so much time in his life being active in so many different sports. The thing though is, he was there mentally pretty much all the time. Forgetfull, yes, but not of the likes somebody with dementia would have. He always recognized us, recalled so much of the past and all, kept telling us of things of his life until the very end.

Only on the last day he was barely even conscious. As I said, I nearly did not go to meet him that day, but then on a whim decided to go, me, my father and my grandfather's girlfriend (not his wife). He was having troubles breathing nearly all the time as I was there, and I then there decided to tell my mother, his daughter, as well as my siblings to come there and then as quickly as possible. I kept on holding his hand, trying to give him any kind of signal to tell him he was not alone, that the ones he loved and cared for were there at his side.

And we were there, until the very end. My mother and siblings arrived just a few minutes after he had passed away. It was...I dunno how to describe it all. My memories of this day and event are very clear, yet my emotions from it were scrambled all the way. We all cried, we hugged, we just were there for each other in that very moment.

The sanatorium's chaplain then also was there for us, and she was surprised that we did all say our last good byes to him. She told us many other people neither had the strength nor the courage to do so. She spoke a last non-religious prayer for him and I think a short song too as we said our last farewell to him.


Luis Opa was a remarkable person. Strong, independent, silly and goofy at times. Somebody who had travelled the world, seen so much and lived through so many things.

As a child of the 30s, he of course went through all the horrors of the second world war. Yet up until last year, we did not know what he had truly lived through.

You surely know that Austria back then was part of the German Reich, and thus pretty much all kids were strongly encouraged to join either the HJ, the Hitler-Jugend (Hitler Youth) or the BDM, Bund Deutscher Mädel (German Girl's association). My grandaunt who has passed away a few years earlier was not part of the BDM, but my grandfather was in the HJ.

His home city of Innsbruck was not targetd by aerial attacks until very late in the war, and as a meassure to protect children, the HJ told parents that they would send the young boys to towns and villages and camps in the side valleys where they would be safe from the bombing.

This was a lie.

Luis Opa never really told anybody about this, because he was afraid if anybody found out about the events that unfolded then, it could have bad consequences to his family.

Aparently the boys were not sent to these side-valleys, but instead were handed over to either the Waffen SS or the Wehrmacht (cannot recall, would have to ask my mother for that) and were sent to a military camp in Bavaria. There these kids would have been drilled to be soldiers, pilots, or military administrators for the time after the 'Endsieg' , the final victory.

Can you imagine this? This was in mid 1944. At this time the allies were coming in from all sides, and these maniacs and fanatics were still fantasizing about winning the war. Now there were hundreds of young boys aged 12/13 - 18 or so, doing various kinds of trainings. Getting up at like 6 am, a common shower room with ice cold water, then military style breakfast, weapons training and so forth, the whole thing, only that they were just teenagers. They apparently all even learned English because that would be needed if they wanted to occupy the British Isles. Just insane.

I think he also mentioned that the camp was attacked a few times from the air the closer the frontline came, but I could be wrong there. What I know is that he stayed in that camp until pretty much a few weeks before the surrender of the German Reich. Then the camp was discovered by US soldiers, who were totally stunned to find a camp that was filled with adolescents of all ages, most of them fluent in English. They pretty much did not know what to do with all these children and teenagers. They were no Prisoners of War, yet also not really civilians either, so they just kept them all at the camp, under the guard of American GIs.

Then after the surrender of Germany, the US army decided that they would bring all the kids back to where they came from. They loaded them all onto their army trucks and drove them back. My grandfather was in the same truck with some of his school friends, so he at least was with somebody he knew. Then when they arrived back at Innsbruck in the city center, the GIs ordered the kids to just get out of the trucks and wait for more orders, as they soldiers wanted to get in contact with the local authorities.

As you can imagine, hundreds of teenagers who have not seen their homes and families for a year or even longer were hard to hold back, so they just ignored the US soldiers and hopped out of the trucks and spread around, running away back home. There was nothing really much the US soldiers could do about this, there was no training or manual for them how to handle hundreds of children in such a situation. So they all got away.

Stil, the state was allready occupied by US, and later French troops, so all the kids either got rid of their uniforms they were wearing or ripped of any visible insignia. As my grandfather had no papers about his identity, or even money, they were afraid they would be arrested. Remember, he was barely 15 years old at that time. My grandfather and his family were bombed out at this point, their house in Innsbruck having received a direct hit during an aerial bombing, so they were living at a relative's place in a village outside of Innsbruck, the very same village I am living in right now.

He and a friend or two went straight through the woods to the village to avoid any kind of road blocks or controlls by the occupying forces, and they managed to finally get back to their families. It seems nobody really asked how he came back, or maybe he made up a story, I don't know that part. But I do know he has never ever told anybody a word about this part of life until last like late 2019, fearing that if the allies or later the Austrian government would find out he was being trained by the Reich to be pretty much a child soldier that it could have severe repercussions. So he kept quiet.


I don't want to delve much further into his life here now. Just a few things here, that I want to speak about that he told me about his life.

He was a very active person, always has been. Played tennis, went skiing every winter whenver possible, swimming, gymnastics. He was an avid pilot, flew various models of machines, participated in competitions both in Western Europe and even in Eastern Europe, I think in Poland.

He told us various funny and also impressive stories of his times as a pilot, as well as things he experienced with his pilot friends. Like aparently one time he flew in a large cog for a ski lift in the area. A thing totally unimagineable and surely even illegal today. But back then there were less regulations or even possibilities to control such things. So he loaded that cog into his airplane, took off, flew a few minutes out of town and landed on the skiing slope to deliver that spare part.

Another story I recall was where he and a friend of his were in the US on vacation and for some reason the two decided to go into a local recruitment office for the US armed forces, pretending to be interested in joining. Though they pretty quickly realized they were not US citizens and just wanted to prank them, but instead of showing them the way out or such, they started to talk instead, about the armed forces, what's different to Austrian forces and all, and only then did my grandfather's friend tell them that he had served in the Wehrmacht and aparently ended the war with being a middle level officer. In fact his rank was comparably higher than all the recruiters in that office. So when they heard his rank, they to the surprise of my grandfather and his friend saluted him, not as a joke, but saluted him seriously. Aparently back then (dunno how that would play out now) rank meant rank, no matter in what armed forces you served.

Yeah, he has travelled to so many places. Many many places in the United States, he was on vacation with my mother in India, went to a trip in China, pretty much all over Europe, many trips there via airplane.


I am really happy to have had him as my grandfather. He was truly there for me, curious about my interests, many of which we shared, like history and flying machines of all kinds. He taught me how to play tennis, we did so when I was a pre-teen. I can still recall the scent of the tennis court, how the red dirt felt beneath my tennis-shoes or how the tennis racket felt in my hand, and after each play he'd buy me a specific sort of ice-cream at the tennis house there. He also helped me with skiing properly, going to various places with me to go on skiing trips. I also remember fondly the many times he took me and my siblings to go for a swim at lakes and public pools.



There is surely so much more that I could remember now, or would only remember if I looked at old photographies, but that would be too much here now.

I just...wanted to share a bit of these memories with you all here, to share what I experienced, and thus make him live on a bit longer, spreading his experiences more throughoug space and time.



Thank you, Luis Opa. Thank you for everything you did for me and told me and taught me.

You will be in my heart forever.

Guess that now most people around the world celebrated Xmas in some form of the other, I'ma make a journal here to wish you all the very best, that you had a good time with family or friends if possibly in these troubled times, that you had some yummy food and got some nice gifts as well.

This year for me was the very first time that it was just me, my parents and my siblings, plus their boyfriend and girlfriend, so really a small one. Quite a differece for a change.

Let's all hope that with the rolling out of the new vaccine we all will slowly but surely move closer to something ackin to a normal daily routine somehow.

the dragon, now way rounder from too much food and christmas cookies, rolls into his bed, sleeping a full day, then to play video games another full day

https://youtu.be/t6wbWDip_-8

In memory of my grandfather Luis Neuner.

Thank you for all, Luis Opa. Thank you so very much for all the things you showed and taught me. I was with you till the last breath. Thank you... For all...


Alois Neuner 15.5. 1930 - 5.11. 2020 (silly typo, sorry, too many tears)

Rest in piece.


You fly your planes now among the angels.

My maternal grandfather is not doing so well...we kind of expected it to happen sooner or later, yet I wished it would have happened a lot lot later...I know he is over 90 years old, suffering from age related Leukemia as far as we know and because of narrow heart blood vessels he has been very weak as of lately. Merely getting up and walking has often caused him to black out and fall over, hurting him in the proces. Nothing broken or anything, but still...he is in the hospital right now and they will see what can be done...

I so wish that he will recover enoguh again that he can go home again...to be with us a bit longer...I am scared...

Just a fair warning to friends and artists alike, on the coming weekend I will barely be reachable via online messengers, as I want to use the time to get things done, both offline and online.

I have dozens of pictured amd comic pages that need to be uploaded, but that is judt the small part, as I want to give each of them more background, more informatiom, more.... Life.

Which is why I write small stories to each of my submissions, a thing that I have to thank   Nyhgault for, as he suggested that several years ago and I could have not been happier, making me think much more about my sona.

But also, it takes a lot of effort, time and concentration to come up with these stories. It takes up to an hour for me to get into a writing mood.

So please, bare with me if I will not be as much online on the coming weekend, which btw is one of my first weekends off in several weeks, and instead concentrate on these efforts. I want to get back into the writing moods I felt years ago, I want to write more on my big projects, finally finish them, and look at them with pride.

Thank you for your understanding and have a good time.


Sincerely,
Matt the Travelmaster

...don't just write a journal where your new account is and then deactivate your account, because deactivating the account prevents people here from reading your last journal and thus are unable to follow you to the new account. I thought by now this was common knowledge here, but aparently some don't know that yet.

If you stil wanna deactivate your account and stil want people to follow you, then at least put in the name of the new FA account into the icon of the old account, as that can stil be seen.

So yeah, just a lil rant of people moving accounts, yet removing the possibility of their watchers following them.