So, my brother roped me back into Pokemon Go. I was clean, honest! I hadn't used in 2 years!

Now I'm addicted again and the damn game is trying to force me to spread the addiction by giving me a mission to add three new friends. Only problem is, I tend to be pretty antisocial these days except for a small group of friends and co-workers, all of whom I have already added to my friends list in the game. Do any of my watchers play Pokemon Go? Anyone want to add me?

Pokemon Go Friend code: 6379 9084 2199

I really do need to update this more often and I am so sorry to my viewers who probably for the most part have no idea what is going on in my life! I think I've not been updating much because of a lack of art to post on here and feeling kinda guilty about that. Anywho.

So I moved to Reno Nevada and obtained gainful employment through Tesla. The hours are rough, but the weekends are awesome and I have a steady income. I have purchased a lovely new laptop for the sole purpose of art and a very nice desktop for gaming. More art is coming here, but likely not until after May 19th. Why? Because May 16th through the 19th is BLFC and I am attending! It's within generous walking distance, so yeah. Gotta attend!

Are any of my watchers going? Would anyone like to hang out? Drop me a note here!

Also as I mentioned previously more art soon and if I can get off my ass and get over the depressive grind of re-doing stuff I did before, hopefully updates on the BJD rebuild.

What the FUCK life!?! Would you fuck me a little softer, or provide some lube or at least give me a reach around?

So. My WD passport, where I was keeping my ONLY backup copy of my 3D model for the ball joint doll just died. Despite my rant at the top of this journal, I really only have myself to blame for this. I had ample opportunity to back this thing up to the cloud. Google has given me lots of drive space, but noooooo! I had to be lazy and trust Western Digital to keep things safe for me. I could start over, but at this point I'm not sure I have the motivation to do so.

I've been putting off gainful employment with the prospect of getting this project finished and maybe being self employed, even though that was likely very wishful thinking. At this point, I think I just need to stop for a while and get some income, draw some art, re-evaluate my life. Sorry for all those of you who have been watching me just for the 3D project. I kind of feel I may have let you down.

Maybe when I have a real income I can afford a real laptop and start doing 3D work again...

So, some of you may be wondering why I have not been posting lately.

Than again, it's not like I was posting regular updates to begin with! About three months ago, I lost my laptop. No kidding, it is sitting on the bottom of the ocean off the coast of Costa RIca right now. There was a drunken boating accident and our skiff(a small vessel for ferrying folks too and from a larger boat) sank. Fortunately nobody was hurt, but my laptop bag ended up on the bottom of the sea, along with my laptop and Kindle, and my cell phone, which was in my pocket, suffered salt water damage. I highly doubt it will be repairable. I currently have a low-end loaner phone and a Dell Chromebook 11($120 on Amazon!), and have managed to replace the Kindle.

Fortunately, I had backed up the Blender model file about a month before losing my laptop, so I think I only lost all of the tail work I had done. That said, ChromeOS is not Blender compatible, and the older model Chromebook will not run the latest version of ChromeOS, which is Wacom compatible. I have stripped out ChromeOS and given this poor thing the gift of Ubuntu, but it only has 4 gigs of memory, and cannot take a memory upgrade.

While I can do raster digital art using my Wacom and Krita, 3D is just beyond this poor thing. Ubuntu does this wonderful thing where if you need more memory than you physically have, it will write the Linux equivalent of page files and just keep going at a slower rate, and being a Chromebook, this thing does have a SSD, which means minimal slowdowns...but it's only 16 gigabytes. My huge high-poly-count 3D file is just too big!

Currently I am looking into replacing the SSD with something larger to see if that resolves the issue, but what I really need is something like the Acer Chromebook Spin 13, due to be released later this year. 16 gigs of memory, 128 gig SSD, Intel Core i3-8130U Processor, built in wacom technology and the software to run both Linux and Android apps out of the box. It will supposedly sell for less than $600.

Sooooo. I will be taking commissions if anyone wants to help me buy a new laptop and get some nice art as compensation. I'll probably post some comission advertisement art later tonight, but I thought I'd start things off with a journal. If you'd like a commission, please let me know!

You know, it just occurred to me to ask, any furries watching me who live in San Blas, Mexico? Or anywhere in Mexico? I highly doubt it, but I thought I'd ask anyways as I am currently staying in the flying teeth capitol of the world.

Yeah, that's it for now.

So, it's been far far too long since I updated my furry friends and family on my life. I've been kind of in an art slump and a bit of a depression due to failing relationship issues that culminated recently in divorce being filed by my wife. So yeah, there's that.

I have taken advantage of the fact that she no longer wishes to be married to me to go with my father on his annual Mexican sailing trip(He usually participates in the Bahaha - Google it, it's kinda neat!). We're headed as far south as Acapulco. I will be back stateside sometime around May.

While on the boat, I will be enjoying sun, sailing, LOTS of Mexican food, and a substantial amount of free time during which I can work on the digital sculpture for my ball joint doll and take commissions. Give me a bit of time to knock together some art for it and I'll post a price guide. In the meantime, I'm charging $10 for "pencils", $20 for "inks", $20 for "watercolor" on "pencil", and $30 for shaded digital coloring on "inks". All work is digital with digital delivery, thus the quotation marks around various real media terms. I'll be working mostly in Sai, but will probably use MyPaint for any watercolors, as MyPaint's watercolor engine is very sexy.

All proceeds go towards my taco fund. Or maybe to help pay for the printing of the ball joint doll prototype. Feel free to commission me!

So, I'm hoping this will all be over soon but...

Once again, I'm having computer issues. I'm fairly certain this stems from my having crappy hard drives and don't have the money to buy new ones.

I /THINK/ I have one drive that is in good condition. As I write this, Gparted is working on partitioning the drive. After that, I'm going to run a low-level format on it to ensure it is not rampant with bad sectors and then try to install to it.

For those who are curious, I'm writing this journal using Firefox running on a liveCD instance of Ubuntu while working on setting up this hard drive for use.

Okay, Gparted has finished it's work, so I shall finish this journal. Wish me luck!

So Hey, sorry, but the next game post is probably going to be delayed. Thanksgiving coming up and all that, and things are picking up at work, which means the only time I have to draw is after work and on the weekends. After work lately has been taken up by life, so. Yeah. I will NOT be stopping the game, just warning, it might be a bit before the next post, and sorry...

So, I could use a few friends for Pokemon X. Or just 3DS friends in general. Anyone who wants to friend me feel free to do so, but please reply in the journal or PM me if you don't want others to see your code, that way I can add you too!

Mine is: 2852-8186-8681

So. If you should ever be lucky enough to score both a KIndle and a Wacom Bamboo touch and pen, and you need to dock your Kindle to load some books on it. never set the plugged in Kindle on top of the Wacom, even if you just got done drawing and it might be inconvenient to move it.

For some reason, something in the Wacom causes the Kindle to go nuts and mount and unmount itself over and over. Pretty sure I didn't hurt the Kindle, but that can't be good for it...

Not sure if it's just a Linux thing or not, but I'm not gonna move my tablet to my wife's Windoze computer just to test.

Okay, with the exception of the loss of some one-of-a-kind irreplaceable personal files, I am going to tentatively declare computer issues are solved. For now. I've been working on the game post(sorry this is taking so very damn long!) and hopefully will have the post done soon. Gonna take a bit though, as I do not have a day off until Friday, so I can only work on it after work...

Sorry...

[EDIT]

Okay, so, I lost a LOT less then I thought I did. Turns out I just forgot to reset the permissions on the recovered files. Silly me...

Graaaaahhh! Shad mad! Shad smash puny computer! Raaaaarrrr!

Seriously, my computer is pissing me off right now. I'm not sure what is wrong with it. I'm writing this after booting from a live CD, just so I can post.

I'm not sure whether I have multiple hard drives that are failing or maybe it's my mother board or maybe it's something else I have no clue. As we speak I'm running a deep file system check on my boot drive to see if perhaps there's some bad sectors on there that my OS didn't catch when formatting it or what, but for some reason, periodically, my computer refuses to boot. I'll run scan disk on it and then it boots again. Once, maybe twice, then starts it all over again. This last time, I couldn't get it to boot at all so. Yeah.

Raaaaaaarrr!! *gnaws on his PC case in a rage induced fit of biting*

Okay, my computer officially is having a bad month. And I've figured out why. Turns out my 10 year old IDE drive was dying, and that was causing all sorts of data corruption on my other(SATA) hard drives. This time it ate my boot drive - usually a much easier recovery then your home drive on Linux. All you have to do is reinstall your operating system. All your personal settings and files are kept in your home drive.

But noooo! This failing piece of hardware was(unbeknownst to me) interfering with my IDE CD drive too! Which just happened to be slaved to it. You'd think I'd have figured that one out easily. Not so. It took me two days of fighting with my computer before I remembered lesson number 1 from my computer repair class: If all else fails, starting taking stuff out of the computer until it works again. I could have had this fixed days ago - days I could have spent working on the next game post, I might add. *grumble*

Still, it is mostly fixed now(still have a few programs to reinstall) and I'll see if I can find the time to draw a little later today...

Okay, I am so sorry that I have not made the new game starting post yet! I should've posted about this sooner, but I keep thinking I'm going to get this thing posted any day now...and then I don't.

So an explanation.

I work a seasonal job. Periodically, my job gets super busy. Most recently because of Mother's day. But Mother's day is over with now and things are slowing down - part of the reason I was anticipating a post.

But...here's where things get no fun. My computer just decided to eat my home folder. On Linux that is where you keep all your settings, and where I keep a majority of my personal files, including my art files. I think that maybe - and I stress the world maybe here - I can recover everything, or at least a majority of it. If this is the case, I should be able to make a post soon. I hope.

Sorry...

So, I'm not sure if anyone even noticed, as rarely as I post, but I've been delayed in posting Whault's picture. Yeah, I fucked my computer up. Fortunately, nothing unfixable. It'll just take a little bit for me to get a few programs reinstalled and everything running up to speed again...

Sorry...I'll post it ASAP...

So...I read 9gag.com every now and again. Well. Sometimes. Often. ALL THE FUCKING TIME! Okay? ALL THE TIME! I can't stop!

Anyways. So I find this post...with a picture in it. Yeah.

http://9gag.com/gag/5205275

Not sure how I feel about PETA having people running around in furry bodypaint asking kids to yiff. Kinda creepy. On the other hand. Kinda sexy too. Damn it PETA!

So, a long while back, my family and I went to an Indian restaurant, and I had what they called Satay. Over the last few years of fruitlessly looking for a similar recipe, it has come to my attention that what I had was NOT Satay, but something else entirely, and I cannot seem to find a name for this stuff. It was a sweet and spicy sauce of peanut butter and coconut milk, in which had been cooked spinach leaves and pork. I'm sure there was more to it then just that, and I would love to look up some recipes so I could try to make it right. But I have no clue what it is properly called. Has anyone had something similar and perhaps knows what to actually call this dish? Please help if you know!

So yeah. Friend of mine talked me into getting a copy of Monster Hunter Tri so I could play with her. Anyone else play this and want someone to play online with? Drop me a message!

So. Umm. Does anyone know of a solvent that will melt/dissolve/remove acrylic, but won't hurt silicone?

I mixed a batch of acrylic wrong - I think the acrylic itself was old and had gone bad or something. The end result is a mold full of a sticky gooey mess, about the consistency of old honey. I have no idea how to clear the mold, and since the original was damaged to the point I doubt I could make another mold with it, this is the only mold I have and will likely get unless I completely resculpt the piece.

Not that it really matters, as often as I update, nobody's likely to notice, but...

Going to Califur this weekend. So yeah. Might see some of y'all there. I'm volunteering my time at reg this year, so if you REALLY want to track me down for some reason, I'll be spending a lot of time at the reg desk. Just look for the guy with the badge that reads Shadarack.

So, as has happened to so many others here on FA, life has raped me in the pocket book. It's all good and unless things go disastrously wrong, I should recover fairly easily. However, right before things went down, I had made up my mind that I wanted to get a stylus for my phone and start up the D&D game again using my phone as a time saving trick so that I could find the time to actually do the game again.

The upshot of this is, I am offering $5 pencil commissions, digital delivery. I will draw whatever you want, one character, in pencil I will scan it and give it a quick clean up and a digital monochrome tinting, much like many of the D&D posts I've done in the past. I will post a fair resolution of the picture here, unless you request otherwise, and if you ask for it, I can email you a higher resolution copy. If you want to send me shipping and handling, I'll even mail you the original pencil work.

I have paypal, so that is how I will be taking payment, unless you can convince me to get an account with another payment service.

Since I just want to get my stylus plus shipping and handling, currently I'm only offering six slots for this, first come first serve. So if you want one, give a reply here. Let's see if this works for me. I've seen lots of other artist(most more talented then I) do this successfully, so...

Slots available:

1) Chitter http://www.furaffinity.net/view/5725999/
2) Chitter To be determined
3) empty
4) empty
5) empty
6) empty

Hmmm. I'm not sure if I should continue posting these. Unfortunately, FA does not have a viewed counter for journals, so unless people reply to a journal post, I have no clue if anyone is even paying attention. So do me a favor and post feedback on these if you like or don't like it when I post links to furry media.

Anyways. I found another semi-furry audio story broadcast on one of the podcasts I listen to. This one is from the Dunesteef. Enjoy or not, but if you enjoy it, let me know so I know to keep posting these.

http://traffic.libsyn.com/dunesteef.....on_Sanford.mp3

So I've been meaning to pimp this for days, but keep forgetting.

http://www.panamindorah.com/

Although the artist does not think of her work as furry, and had no concept of what furry was when she started the series, I think it is quite furry. Her works consist of both text documents and audio book format narated by the author herself. The story prose is a little "lower reading level" but the stories do have adult material in them. Anyways, I've been listening to these for a couple of days now and thought I'd share.

That is all.

Wow. So, while I work, I often listen to podcasts, as a way to fill the silence. One of the podcasts I listen to is called Escape Pod. It's a podcast of short science fiction stories read aloud. This most recent story...I don't even...just...wow...

The story was about a genetically engineered hyper intelligent tyrannosaurus rex who gets stranded on an alien world by a teleport net malfunction, and has to hike through an alien jungle full of predators bigger then she is, accompanied by a nanoswarm janitor and an artificially intelligent talking flechette gun who sounds like a cowboy, on a quest to find a hyper-dimensional thingamajig so she can "rejigger" it. For reals. I can't make this shit up, although someone else somehow managed to.

Give a listen if you want to:

http://hw.libsyn.com/p/6/8/3/6832d1.....;l_mid=2396382

And if you want, here's the URL for escape pod:

http://escapepod.org/

Well, today I finished the first part of the mold for the first part of my ball jointed doll. Mind you, I still need to work on the originals for many of the parts, but since the first part I'm going to be casting is the "blank" chest - that is, the upper torso without any breasts attached to it, I need to get this piece done so I can see how the whole thing will look before casting the final molds.

So, I carefully made a pour box and over the course of several days(it takes 8 hours per pouring to cure the rubber I'm using), I poured several layers of silicone rubber, sprayed on a few layers of demolding compound, poured several MORE layers of silicone rubber and finally demolded the mold. Because of the detail and complicated shapes of the parts I'm casting, I decided to go with clamshell molds. Just to make things MORE complicated, it's all but impossible to pour the pieces I want in a single piece. I'm going to have to cast clamshell pieces, glue them together and sand the seams. That means that every single piece of the doll I cast is going to require four pieces of rubber.

So I finished two pieces of what will eventually become two different clamshell molds for the upper torso blank chest and for the upper torso back. I pulled the rubber out of the casting box and after a bit of searching, found the seam, split it, then very carefully I pulled the two pieces of rubber apart and...the clay original inside crumbled. It fell into pea sized particles from the stress of me pulling the clamshell open.

This is not quite the disaster I thought it was as first. Yeah, I spent weeks on this piece(lots and lots of little modifications over time), but I have a nearly perfect casting of the front and the back of it, and I don't need the original to cast the other halves of the clamshell molds. But if these molds don't work for some reason, I have to rebuild the entire piece and hope for the best.