I wrote a dumb gay Star Fox romance novella, featuring Fox and Wolf and smut and not-smut and knot-smut.

Go check it out on AO3. Comments, kudos (the little heart button), messages, etc. appreciated. You can do any of these things as a guest, unlike FFN where you have to make an account or be treated like a second-class citizen. The link is here:

https://archiveofourown.org/works/2.....pters/64438984

Might post it all here when I'm done, might not.

I figure I should make a post about this, since it's been a while and I haven't posted any updates in a long while. I still have significantly more written than I've posted, and some sites have much more posted than others.

I've fallen out of working on Black and White, for a number of reasons--both personal and work related. I hope to get back to it, but we'll see. The main reason was that I wasn't getting too much out of it--I put in a ton of work, but only knew one or two friends who actually cared about the story, and the stupid amount of pressure random people were putting on me over it just made it not worth it. I traveled two straight months for work last year (very busy!), and after that, I never could get back into the story, because there were so many pressures steering me away from it, and so few steering me towards it.

Is it done? I hope not. I loved writing the story and I have so much of it written and polished that just hasn't been submitted yet. I just sort of hated posting it.

Maybe I'll get over the inertia at some point, or maybe not. We'll see. I certainly hope that I do, because it was a ton of fun while I was working on it.

In the meantime, I hope that I can write a bit more this year than I have in previous ones. I'll stick to shorter things, probably.

I'll be there briefly today and tomorrow!

Won't have a ton of time, but let me know if you want to meet.

Google voice works now! Now I can make a furry telegram and also hide from German coworkers.

Add me! Orvayn

1. I've been posting a couple of chapters of Black and White over to SoFurry lately. I've been slow about getting the most recent ones out, but they'll come.

2. I'm in South America for around a month (mostly for work) and I have shitty wifi and not so much privacy, so my presence online is going to be pretty slim for a while. Doubt I'll do any writing or editing until I come back. (I do go on another work trip one week from when I return... but my situation there will be a bit better.)

That's all!

I haven't been the best at keeping up with people lately, so I figured I'd make a post here. There's probably nothing interesting here if you don't know me personally.

Life. Things have been on and off. I've had a few scares, and I've had several joys. I'm not going to head into the personal details in such a public forum. Things went to shit pretty badly over the summer, in retrospect. At the time, I was relieved to finally have some time off after the senior-year crunch, and that deadened the blows, fortunately. And everything seems to be working out now, which is pretty nice.

All I can say is that this past year has been a sobering reminder that everything can end in an instant. You can sleep soundly one night, and the next discover you have only a few weeks to live. It's not likely, on any particular day to any particular person, but it happens. And you never expect it, and you wonder what made this day that day.

Physics. Grad school has started. It's hard. It's really hard. But it's not quite as scary as I was expecting. It's manageable, and more importantly, it's incredibly fun. It's fun delving into the fine technical details that have been skimmed over in my previous studies, and finding that, though it's difficult, I can keep up. The first year is going to be hell--it's really not fun spending hours and hours every single day working on problem sets. But it's worth it at the end of the week, when I reflect.

City life is fun. It's quiet here where I am, but Chicago is a wondrous place (if you stay out the bad parts).

Tiger. I've never had a good track record with relationships, and not just because I'm particular and it's rare I find myself liking someone wholly. I'm never sure what's reasonable to expect, for one, or what I truly desire from having someone I can call mine. When I've tried before, I've always had doubts in the back of my head, and I'd accepted that as an inevitable fact of any human commitment. There's always been something that just doesn't quite fit, and each time I end up single, I always wonder if I'm the type of person who's even capable of sustaining a relationship--either because of my personality or because there simply aren't viable candidates that fit with me.

I'm the happiest I've been in a very long time, because I can now write that all in past tense. The future is still hugely uncertain, but I've found someone with whom I could easily see myself spending the rest of my life, ceteris paribus. There are no doubts. There are no uncertainties (he commutes with my Hamiltonian!). There are no topics I dread to discuss, or questions I dare not ask for fear of what the answer might be. I realize I've never had this before. I realize this is the way things should be. Thank you, my tiger. Let's have a wonderful life.

I'll see you all in 5-6 years.

Send help. And coffee. And  BlueberryWuffle.

Grammar and spelling.

Why is it ever okay to make a mistake and not care about it?

Why are there people out there aspiring to be great writers who don't give a damn that they misuse semicolons and don't know what a comma splice is? (Gut reaction: they're all idiots who'll never see a lick of success. No one's ever proven me wrong.)

Why are comma splices becoming acceptable in journalism?

Who the hell is ever going to be successful at putting in the effort to write something good when putting in the effort to capitalize and punctuate is too much effort for them?

I don't understand. Can someone explain it to me? Is this just a 'me' thing and I'm expecting too much (even though the rules are simple and basic)?

I'm officially going to grad school. PhD, here I come.

Hopefully I can keep up. It'll be a big step going from "shitty state school" to "top 10 graduate program."

So, on that note, anyone in the Chicago area--prepare your booty.

EDIT: duck you auto cucumber.

So, it looks like my work has paid off. I've been accepted to several top 10 physics graduate programs--and now the difficulty is in choosing which one from all of them might be the best fit.

That also means visiting all of them. Visiting schools, plus dealing with an unusually-difficult senior year, means things are going to be tough for me.

I might drop off the radar for a while unless you're a close friend. Don't take it personally.

Fact.

For a long time now, I've wanted to get art of X or Y, but fact is, I very rarely browse FA and thus watch very few artists. I'm never able to pounce when one of the few artists I know opens commission slots. For quite a while now, I've wanted more art of Orvayn, as his conception has changed a bit since I last got something with him, and I also desperately need an icon...

So--does anyone have any recommendations for me to watch or to look into commissioning?

I tend to get extremely anxious about insignificant things. I procrasturbate procrastinate for days things that only take my thirty minutes to do in reality.

Example: I'm working with giant catalogs of star data, and a collaborator requested I send a table with some different info from that which I provided previously. Which more or less amounted to ten minutes of work--plus a half-hour of going through old notes to get my bearings and change gears mentally, but that's not important. In essence, I've been procrastinating sending ONE SMALL E-MAIL for a week now.

Then, for the big, super-important things? Eh, fukkitYOLO. I won't study for the general GRE at all, and still get 95% in quant/verbal. I'll write personal statements for grad school in one day and feel pretty damn good about them. I'll not study at all for a final until an hour and a half before the test and still get everything right. (Let's not talk about Physics GRE here, though--I bombed that shit.)

Brain pls.

Maybe I'm just one of those people who needs pressure and challenge to motivate them.

This has become A Thing now, so I figured I should do it again...

A few fun things happened this time 'round:

-Maintained a 4.0! Huzzah!

-Completely mentally collapsed halfway through the semester. It was bad, but it all worked out in the end, and I got a lot done.

-Attended my first scientific conference.

-Just applied to grad schools. Pray for the best... there's a school in particular I have my eyes on, but chances are, I won't get in.

I keep hoping to get back into writing, but nothing ever works out the way I want it to. Hopefully this won't be The Eternal Slump...

Who wants to room with a physicswolf?

Anyone I know going to be in the Arlington, VA area next weekend?

Stolen from  voltatrice. Been meaning to do this for a while.

Doing this for-fun, with a sci-fi background for Orvayn I used once for a roleplay. I've actually sort of wanted to turn said roleplay into a story, but I've been too lazy.

---

1. What is your full name?
Orvayn Illindrel. The middle name is of no consequence.

2. Do you know who gave you that name?
My mother. It's not an inherited name, but rather an overt attempt at escaping my background. "Illindrel" means "the enlightened one." Orvayn means--I'm not sure. She died before she ever told me.

3. How old are you?
Thirty-three.

4. How old do you think you look?
Older than I am. Stress has aged me prematurely.

5. Anyone you'd risk your life to protect?
Delwyn. That fox could get me to do anything.

6. Ever been married in your life or want to be?
Marriage is foolish. It promises eternal monogamy when we are at best serially-monogamous creatures.

7. Home town/planet/universe?
My hometown is a place of which I'd rather not speak too much--let's just say I spent many years wandering the streets as one of the lucky few able to refuse joining a local gang and survive. Even as a kid, I scared most people off, it seemed. These days, my home is simply PanTech University. I've served there for a doctorate and two postdocs.

8. What is your greatest fear?
Betrayal. Loss of independence. Intimacy, though I'm slowly getting over that one.

9. What would you say is your most special feature?
My brain.

10. Who is your best and closest friend?
I've had only two. One, during my childhood that I won't speak of. Another, during graduate school at PanTech--a fox, by the name of Delwyn. Back then, I was such a fool. How I treated him, and the fears that led me to do it, are likely my greatest regrets. I miss him and what we could have become, but he deserves far more than someone who's hurt him so deeply. I do my best to disappear, to leave him alone, but it looks like soon we're going to be on the same ship together for a long, long time.

11. If you had a theme song, what would it be?
I suppose it depends on my mood. Either movement three of Shostakovich's fifth, or Satie's third gymnopedie.

12. What are your talents?
I can figure nearly anything out. Perhaps not in the most elegant way--but if someone wants something done, he knows to come to me. It's a combination of being smart and working far too much for my own good. Working lets me push out everything else. There are no personal problems to think of, no worries to dwell on, when one is working. People think I'm good--no, I'm just a procrastinator who procrastinates living with work.

I also make a good leader, both because I get things done, and because, though I may not be the most tactful individual, I can usually scare anyone into doing what I want.

13. Quick, you only have one day to live, what do you do?
I'd say kiss Delwyn on the lips, like I mean it. Four years of sleeping together, two years of living together, and I never really kissed him. Never even told him I particularly liked anything about him but his skills in bed. Didn't want to hurt the guy, or hurt myself, but in thinking that, I did so much damage.

But if he were living even a single day after me, I couldn't do it. I hear he's dating someone now, still trying to get over what I did to him. It would torment him, and undo all the healing since graduate school days.

14. If you could have anything what would it be?
For the launch of the D-SETS project to go unhindered. It's the first non-experimental superluminal intergalactic vessel, and the first with which we will do real research--in this case, large-scale transient surveys of low-redshift galaxies. I suppose there's something to be said about me, that I'm leading a project that will leave me as one of the most isolated beings in existence, should it go through.

15. Favorite Book(s)?
What's it to you?

16. Favorite Movie(s)?
I don't have time for these.

17. Favorite Video Game(s)?
I don't have time for these.

18. Favorite Artist (Musical and/or general art)?
Shostakovich.

19. Call me maybe?
What?

20. Do you need more pylons?
I don't know what that means.

21. Who would you say is your online best friend or could possibly be?
I don't keep many online friendships. The closest correspondent I have now is likely Branimir Sorenok. A crotchety old dragon, but at least you know he's genuine. Funny story. He was my mentor, once; now he works for me.

22. If you could change your voice what would you want it to sound like?
I'd like to be a little less scary.

23. Immortality. Yay or nay?
Absolutely yes. Living may be hell, but I believe in no afterlife.

24. Almost done. Are you Royalty, Nobility, etcetera?
I'm about the farthest from that you can get.

25. Time to Tag!
I don't know what that means.

Why is it that every other furry character is an eight-foot-tall muscle freak with fire magic or some similar crap?

I get it. You want to stand out. You don't want to boring. You want to play in a fantasy world. Whatever. I have my individual qualms with all of these. I am not opposed to fantasy, or just crack-style derping around for the sake of lulz, but when it comes to portraying anything seriously, I have tight constraints I like to keep.

Making your character Special does not make him Interesting.

This is the primary reason why I don't enjoy furry chatrooms/MUCKs more. Everyone's an Uber Special Character With Exceptional Magical Abilities, and those characters simply do not exist in the worlds I typically play my characters in.

I'm not saying there's anything intrinsically wrong with these types of characters, but when they're everywhere and they become the norm, what's the point? I sometimes get the feeling that all these people simply lack the ability to portray normal characters in an interesting way and are using this is a crutch to make up for that deficiency.

Whatever happened to being normal?

When the first in a series of Hell Weeks is over and you've managed not to majorly fuck anything up.

Granted, my week isn't *done* as I have a lot to do over the weekend, but still. Small victories...

Like, really hard.

Specifically, juggling classes and two research projects and conference preparations and GRE studying and SPS shenanigans and life and grad school apps and a social life and API docs to write and papers to revise all at the same time is hard.

I can't really maintain all of these things plus an Internet social life, let alone all the other hobbies I have. These next few weeks are going to be particularly rough for me--after that things should clear up *slightly*.

Here's hoping I make it.

Some people probably wonder about why I'm never online or why I'm always online, so, rather than explain to each individual, have a journal explaining how I use messengers.

First, about my setup. I have a dual-boot with Win7 and Arch Linux. Win7 has all my games, my audio studio, and all my messengers. Linux has my work code and my writing. My Linux machine also serves as an SSH server whenever I'm out of the house so I can access work things from anywhere. I'm on Win7 when I want to goof off, and Linux when I'm either out of the house or working.

AIM/Yahoo/etc. are only available to me when I'm logged in under Windows, as I use Trillian to manage 'em all. Not having Pidgin set up similarly on my Linux box is a deliberate choice. When I'm logged onto Windows, it's often specifically to game, chat, Netflix, or compose.

Skype: I have two main Skype accounts in active use. One is furry, and the other is not. One of these is ALWAYS online on my phone, no matter what (which one it is varies, but it's usually the furry one). Skype is also the only messenger I have on my Linux machine. Net result: I'm on Skype every day but my other messengers... maybe once every few days.

tl;dr If you want to get up with me, Skype is generally the best option, but your chances of finding me on when I'm not available are much higher on Skype.

Also, I'm no good with small talk. If you want to talk about something, sure. If it's an interesting topic to me, I'll be eager to do so! If you want to just talk... well... I dunno. You'll probably find my responses slow and boring.

Tell me something you assume about me, and I'll tell you if you're right or wrong.

Okay, so. I should probably do one of these. I'll try to make it quick...

Rode up with  gofostergo  berner  happyhuskykoma. Something like a ten-hour drive--painful, but worth it. We had The Most Epic Playlist and probably freaked  happyhuskykoma the hell out with the Shostakovich.

Met  ezrathewuff  Fyl  doniago  stormshepherd  sin-wolf  virothesciencedog et al. Made a lot of new friends. Raided the dealers/artists. Went to a panel by  Kyell and  Rukis. Tried to go a panel by  doniago but it sort of got sodomized by the schedule.

Roomed with  Ferlynx and  foxwolfgoof. Spent most of my time with  foxwolfgoof. We had SO MUCH FUN (after the 5-hour registration line fiasco). There were dances, tea shops, whose lion is it anyway, more dances, panels, 3:00AM Subway, karaoke (hi  DJX), Cards Against Humanity (hi  clefwolf), downtown adventures, tons of artists, and lots of hearing loss!

Also,  foxwolfgoof made me get a Yiff Me Berry Hard. Don't ask...

Was sad to leave the con and  foxwolfgoof behind, but I walked away with many happy memories! Always said I wanted to go to AC at least once, and, well... thanks to a fortuitous circumstances with Foster, I got the chance!

AC was awesome and if you have the chance, you should go at least once!

Where are you staying?
Westin.

What day are you getting there?
1:00 PM Thursday.

How are you traveling?
Dogmobile. Thanks  gofostergo and  berner!

Who are you rooming with?
: Ferlynx  Foxwolfgoof

Who will you hang out with during the convention?
Mostly  foxwolfgoof and spontaneous random folks / people I run into! Potentially hitting room parties with  stormshepherd and  djx.

How is the best way to find you?
I'll post what I'm wearing. If only I had a badge!

Are there any panels you might be attending?
Uncle Kage's Story Hour. Other than that... whatever opportunity finds!

What do you look like?
A sixteen year old white nerd.

Will you be suiting?
No.

Do you do free art?
Art? Me? Ha.

Do you do trades?
...

Do you do badges?
If I had one.

What is your gender?
Androgynous robot fox. Male.

How tall are you?
6’ 0”

Can I talk to you?
MUCHO.

Can I touch you?
I really am not that touchy-feely, but I'd like to break past my anti-social tendencies for the con.

How can I find you?
Look for the nerd.

Can I buy you drinks?
Wine is nice.

Can I give you stuff?
Sure.

Can I hug or snuggle with you?
Not too touchy-feely, but if I know you and know you aren't trying to get in my pants, then why not?

Are you nice?
Generally,

How long are you going?
Thursday to Monday!

Do you have an artist table?
...no.

Will you be going to parties?
Mucho.

Will you be performing?
If I dance, then you can all laugh at me.

If I see you, how should I get your attention?
Poke me. Call me. It's (OR-vein).

Where will you be most of the time during the day/s?
Wandering around looking for people or following  foxwolfgoof.

What/where will you be eating?
I have no idea. Anyone with any suggestions?

Can I come with you for food/fun/etc?
Sure?

Can I take your picture?
I'd really prefer not. I'll probably ask for pictures with friends, but I'd want to keep track of 'em.

What's your goal(s) for the con this year?
Find  ezrathewuff and  Fyl. Meet  foxwolfgoof (<3!). Browse the dealers. Attend panels. See the dances.

I'll be there. Lemme know if you're around and want to meet!

Verbatim from  foxwolfgoof because he asked so nicely.

Comment with a present below and I'll tell you things about you... or, if I don't know you I'll just make something up.

I will:

1. Tell you what animal/creature you remind me of.
2. Tell you what color I think fits you.
3. Tell you how I feel about you.
4. Insult you.
5. Tell you my favorite OC of yours. (If you have one...)
6. Tell you what season you remind me of.
7. Tell you what food you smell like in my head.
8. Think of a random nickname for you.
9. Tell you what element you remind me of.
10. Ask you to put this in your journal without using the word 'tag'