...would you buy from me?

So I figure I needed to post an update after two months. So, without further ado, here's a summary of what's happened lately.

1.) I've graduated from UTEP! Whew! I was SO worried about having to retake my numerical analysis class again...
2.) Submissions have been nuked again (not going through 3,270 of them—sorry). I need a fresh slate, and I am considering doing another watcher purge.
3.) I'm in the middle of moving back to El Paso. Most of the work has been to focus on painting, but in a week we'll all be settled in.
4.) Christmas loot consists of a deck of cards for my playing card collection, an Amazon Fire, and some clothes. (My birthday was the day after, and for that I got a jacket. Lost two in a month at school, and now I don't have to worry about doing that again )
5.) Comic work's slowly but surely getting there It's still evolving a little (I just recently decided that it's going to be hard to cram in one case per chapter, so internally everything's now in volumes with no chapter subdivisions yet), and right now I'm rewriting some stuff I wrote when I still wanted it to be a computer game back from around the first week after it was conceived. I should have more time (and maybe energy, I hope) to devote to it after the moving's all done.

That's pretty much all I feel like talking about. I hope you all had a nice Christmas (or whatever else you celebrate) and have a happy new year

The four folders I had before are now in two groups called "My fursona" (self-explanatory) and "Other" (currently for stuff not of my characters). There is a new folder group called "My non-fursona characters" that is intended to parallel the "My fursona" group; I made it in anticipation of uploading my comic characters to this group. I feel like I'm making better progress on the scripts than I was before, but keep in mind I'm doing it in between classes and schoolwork and whatnot.

I hope to show you more soon

It apparently affects both what I HAVE to do as much as what I'd LIKE to do, and the former is concerning to me. I should know from experience that little to no schoolwork corresponds to crappy grades, and I don't want my graduation delayed again, so why am I blowing it off? Why can't I convince myself to care? And why are the things I'd like to do instead to forget about it ALSO things I don't feel like doing? It's been a problem for something like a month now. (While this affects the planned comic I've talked about in my last journals, I am happy to report that work has been done on it in the last 24 hours )

I don't know what else to say, really.

I'd like to start off by letting my watchers know that I've had a chance to look at all their stuff since I've last ventured onto these parts. While I have not favorited anybody's (and should be asleep), rest assured I'll find time this weekend

Comic progress is... slow. I have about eight cases thought up and partially written, and I had been going back and forth between them, especially the ones I feel like publishing first, for awhile. Right now I'm stuck with writer's block, and I'm trying to see if more prewriting helps me. (I don't remember whether I said so here before, but the comic was originally conceived as a computer game, so I had an introduction, the characters I wanted involved, and how each case ends, but virtually nothing in between. That's getting me stuck when I'm trying to write a full script.)

I'm back in school for what I plan to be my last semester before graduation. How I'm doing varies on the class, but overall I'm doing worse than I want to be, especially as regards keeping up with deadlines. (A couple attempts have been made in the past to get in the habit of using a planner to help with time management. The last time I tried using one, I felt enslaved by it, and I really don't have the motivation to do it again.) This is the first time since the spring semester of 2016 that I'm signed up for 15 credit hours, and the first since fall 2015 where none of those are split off to a minimester. I told my dad it was like trying to juggle plates when they keep falling on my head. I'd love not to delay my graduation again and go further into debt than necessary...

Well, that's the latest on me for anyone that was curious. See you next time around

I became a furry Yep—been one WAY longer than the January 2015 join date it says on my account, which is simply when I bothered with getting one here :-P

The MSN Messenger chat is lost to time and my memory is cloudy with exact details, but I was encouraged to become one by a couple friends I had on there who noticed I had become interested in doing so. I had other furry friends at the time as well and openly approved of befriending them, so that was pretty much that.

The name StrangerCoug has, befittingly, a strange history—it actually antedates my being aware of the fandom a little! At the time I came up with it, I was a fan of Rooster Teeth's machinima The Strangerhood, and I wanted to show that somehow. I was also in high school at the time with the cougar as a mascot, and the trend was to incorporate my then-mascot into my username. That, plus the site then having a 12-character cap on usernames (it's since been lifted), is how the name StrangerCoug was born. Even stranger still: my fursona had no name until three years into my being a furry, when I decided that StrangerCoug was a good name for it as any. So the name went from displaying both high school pride and my being a fan of a certain web show to connoting that I'm a furry that's a little crazy :-P

I don't regret a thing about being a furry, honestly. It's an integral part of me I like animals, I count two Disney movies with entirely animal characters among my favorite movies, and I'm happy being part of a quite accepting community of people!

Here's to the past ten years, with all its ups and downs

Not awake enough to go through all my alerts, but I've looked at everything from August 3 on. From the time of my last journal to August 2 (and from this post to when I wake up) I will check in the morning.

Also, I feel like revealing what the reference in the last paragraph of that journal is to: I've had several attempts at doing webcomics in the past decade, and I'd like to give it another shot This is a detective comic I'm writing, and when I have a completed chapter I plan to look for an artist. I hope that, when I am ready to show the comic to the world, you will enjoy it.

That number is now 126.

It's been hard, but with my sporadic coming here for a good while now, I simply don't feel I can keep up with all of you with me not checking regularly. To those that I deleted, I send my apologies.

Also, I conceived something the other day that I may reveal more about on FA in the future What could it possibly be? Stay tuned!

...after I get through my mountain of alerts in the morning, I will probably delete some watchers so I'm not drowned in alerts nearly every time I can be bothered to get on FA. Let me sleep before I make my final decision, but if we're mutual watchers, we're friends on Skype and/or Steam, or you've ever drawn my fursona, you are for sure safe. The rest will most likely be based on art quality.

I've been going to bed late and waking up late the past couple of weeks even by the standards I have when I don't have to be up early the next day. I can't remember the last time I went to bed before midnight, and while I was up at 6:30 or so yesterday morning going by the calendar, I was back asleep to be up at my somehow-now-usual 10:30 (waking up after 10:00 used to be rare).

I feel like I have no control over my sleep schedule

...and hit the nuke button on my submission alerts. I'm sorry, and I graced the first page of them with my attention, but my recent visits to FA have been relatively brief and none of them were to check on them. 3,200+ alerts as the result of something like a two- to three-month backlog was overwhelming me. If I care about your art enough to want to look at it, I'll check your user page after I get some sleep.

...when the girl you had just developed a crush on cancels her dating site account before you get a chance to talk to her offsite and hardly any girls look at your profile at all. I apparently attract mostly guys. I mean, I get it to some extent since it's a furry dating site I'm talking about, but I don't do guys. I have to go through leaps and bounds to find girls that haven't decided they want children as it is. (I find children too stressful to deal with, especially if they're younger, so... no. That's out of the question.)

Why am I such a tough sell to the kind of people I want to be in a relationship with?

Don't log in for a month and get more than 1500 submission alerts when you come back... And I've only gone through a third of them... *passes out*

(Yes, I know of the nuke option. I did that to the journals; I care too much about all your art to do that to it.)

Update March 3 @ 7:32 PM MST: Finally caught up... *pant, pant, pant*

First of all, I know that I've only been on at most once or twice a week lately. My interest for this site isn't completely gone; I just do not feel compelled to check it on a daily basis. As I type, I have almost 600 submissions in my alerts; rest assured that all artwork you submit will be given a look at some point in the future. (Journals are a different story since I pick and choose what I want to read. Please forgive me...)

I have just deleted the bookmark to the FurAffinity Forums from my browser since I've pretty much left it in favor of FurVilla's forums. I MAY return there on a temporary basis to request commissions, but don't hold your breath. The last batch of commissions I asked for, I talked to artists I had commissioned before, and I watch so many people that I may try checking my journals for openings first before venturing back over to FAF. I currently am not expecting any commissions because I couldn't think of any good ideas I hadn't already done at some point when I got my check; one idea I did come up with I'd rather leave to myself.

School has been going OK. I haven't gone back to old habits... yet xD (Seriously, I feel I did better around when I had just started. One of the things I asked when I was going to counseling in late 2015 and early 2016 was how I had gone from being on the dean's list to showing signs of difficulty in my classes.) Now that I feel like I have direction for my individual project...

Anyway, that's all I feel like posting for the moment. Hope you all are doing well

Another four months of procrastinating and paying the price for it :-P With a 7:30 class to boot Tuesday and Thursday, too.

Two more semesters of this... I hope...

I think some of you know that I am a senior by credit in college, even though my graduation's not going to be until December 2017. (Would have liked for it to have been May, but stuffed happened in general in the second half of 2015. Going to put that past me.)

My mind is yelling at me, wondering what the hell I'm doing on Skype and FA when I have a lab due on Wednesday that I've done next to nothing on since it was assigned. I never properly learned time management skills, keeping track of due dates in my head and going by the "better safe than sorry" approach of assuming it's the next time class meets if I forget it. Two attempts to use a planner have failed—the first time around was forced on me by a professor, and I felt like I was forcing the second time around on myself in a futile attempt to break old study habits that I still have to this day. Supposedly, they teach early on how to transition to college, mostly from high school (though not in my case), so you can be a successful student. And I had so little problem with early university that I made the Dean's List a couple of times. Then the habits I had developed the first two years of it started biting me in the butt.

To put it rather bluntly, my long-term goal is to do whatever it takes to graduate as soon as is reasonable and get out there in the work force. Assuming no more delays, I will be almost 28 when I graduate. And I don't see the next 13 months being any easier, but the only thing I can really do is soldier on—I rely entirely on financial aid and can't afford to drop out of college entirely. I might as well make the best of it.

In the meantime, might as well get back to getting on my own case...

OK, so I thought slightly relaxing the rules on using my fursona is OK. What follows are what they are as of today.

First and foremost: I'm not in the habit of saying so in my upload descriptions, but the character you see here and here that's plastered all over the place in my gallery? He's my character. I am currently unaware of anyone having ever done so, but it would be nice if you please not steal him. To me, he feels like an extension of me, so I would very much appreciate it if you ask first before using him.

My character may not be used in anything NSFW unless I ask for it or give you specific permission. These cases will be more likely to come up when I think it's mild enough not to be a big deal or if I trust you as a person, not just as an artist. If you come to me asking if you may draw NSFW artwork of him, I will be the most likely to answer yes if you intend it to be mature for violence only. If you draw NSFW work of my fursona without my permission or break the conditions of that permission, I reserve the right not to let you draw him again.

Thank you for your consideration, and I wish you well in your drawing endeavors

I'm sure some of you know that I currently don't allow NSFW artwork of my fursona (with one exception that I did as an art trade before I was on FA that I marked mature here for CYA reasons).

On the one hand, I don't feel that my rule is bad per se. It's my character, and I have the right to control how he is used. I feel the rule is an accurate reflection of the fact that I consider sex to be an intensely private matter and do not feel comfortable sharing most information about my sexuality with people I do not trust.

On the other hand, I feel that the letter of how I currently allow my fursona to be used is too strict. I don't actually have an objection if he gets used in something that's a little violent for what FA considers safe for work (he IS armed in some of the ones I drew, including the one I marked mature), and I can think of cases where I'd want to privately share something that's NSFW for other reasons.

The ultimate question, really, is deciding what I'm comfortable with. I've gotten older since I've joined the furry fandom, and I don't regret being a furry one single bit. My comfort zone less than two months away from turning 27 is different than it was when I was about a week away from my senior year in high school. I still have my limits, though, and I still want to reserve the right to disallow anything I'm uncomfortable with either way. This is something I need to think about, and I feel it inappropriate to rush my decision here. Before you've gotten a chance to read this journal, I've read it over several times, debating how—and whether—I should publicly say what you've just read above, and it wasn't an easy decision. I'll make another journal to update you on this, but for now, the rule at the beginning stands.

The FA journal I linked to last time has been updated to reflect that information. He is alive.

Thanks to whoever found him OK :-D

Two of the people I'm watching have linked to a journal reporting  cocofox missing. It would be great if the word could get out as much as possible so he can be located and returned home safely, please.

The journal in question can be found here, and I am also aware of a Twitter post here.
Edited to add: I have also found a Facebook post of this as well.

At the present time I am trying to hunt down the artists for the pre-2015 artwork on my Rooster Teeth featuring my fursona that did not get uploaded when I joined FA so I can give them credit when I upload them. In addition, there are two drawings of my own from 2011 that were inadvertently skipped over when I was uploading my stuff, those two will be in the batch.

As you may know, I haven't drawn my character myself in a very long time, and the one time I drew and uploaded him since joining FA is in my scraps. I've drawn a sketch of something else that I've shown my (unfortunately now ex-*) girlfriend for a graphic novel idea I'm tinkering with which needs ideas for storylines at the moment.

And since   tamorakitty gave me the bug to think about this: Would you be interested in a short story with my character? If you're interested in this and would like yours to appear too, speak up. The story will be SFW, so no worries if you're like me

---

^{* That's what my last journal was referencing, by the way. Amicable breakup, though.}

Three months almost to the hour... Ouch...

Unfortunately, I'm not currently anywhere else specific to art. I do browse DA from time to time, but I have no account there, and I probably won't upload my furry art there if I do (instead dedicating the account to non-furry art). My submissions did not get affected since I upload stuff so rarely, but I did lose  serfass and  korrok from the people I was watching. Both have now been readded.

If you like machinima and/or web animation, though, you might want to check out Rooster Teeth. If you look me up there, you'll find that the image gallery on my profile has, among other things... guess what? Yes, my furry art, including stuff that didn't get transferred over when I finally joined FA almost a year and a half ago! (The reason for that was because I didn't bother with getting artist permissions, and some of these artists I don't see anymore, so...)

Quite excited about this I haven't had a girlfriend in years, and now I have a lovely furry that I've been talking to for over seven months now. Now, to coax her on here...