This is a cross-post across Rooster Teeth, FurAffinity, and Facebook.

I have cleaned out my Skype contact list. With one exception because I want to allow him the chance to thank me for wishing him a happy birthday today (I'll give him until Sunday night), everybody who has not talked to me on Skype this year has been deleted. I'm sorry. If you were in The Cougar's Den (the Skype chat with my friends), you remain there.

Anybody who wants to be re-added, as well as anybody who's never been Skype friends with me before and wants to be, may send me a contact request at strangercoug. If your Skype name is not something I recognize, please modify the default greeting to include a name I know you by. I get contact requests from spambots from time to time, so I don't add people I don't know.

(I don't think my watchers overlap between the two sites, but just in case they do, this is a cross-post across Rooster Teeth and FurAffinity. If you've already read this on the other site, the one here's exactly the same.)

So I made this a sort-of family outing; I took my older niece and my nephew, and my dad drove us since I have never taken driver's ed let alone been a licensed driver. (And somehow, I managed to beat my dad at a racing game at the arcade despite this. I tend to crash into everything, especially on curves :P My niece, on the other hand, I don't think I'd surprise anyone that I beat.) I did want my sister to take us since it was her kids I was planning to take, but she said she had work today. I anticipated that possibility, so my plan B of having one of my own parents drive us instead went into effect.

We liked the movie quite a bit. It's great, it's funny (and some of the jokes got good laughs from the theater), and it's very relevant. You should go see it.

...me :D 26 on the 26th, interestingly enough.

It's been awhile since I've been on either FurAffinity or the Phoenix Forums. I have been dealing with some stress these past few weeks, especially around mid-late October. If you're not in The Cougar's Den group chat on Skype, I ended up dropping a class because I had allowed the lab homework for it to pile up on me, and I freaked out over it one night and was unable to get any sleep.

As for why I haven't been on the forums lately... I honestly don't know. I like the vast majority of you that I've gotten to know both there and on the old FAF. I really do. (This is not the place to air the dirty laundry of the few I don't, so even though I don't think they're watching me I'm not going to do it behind their backs.) Unfortunately, I don't feel the same sense of belonging there that I did on the old FAF, and I'm tempted to remove the forum from my bookmarks. I've largely been in the Den as of late instead. If you want to talk to me there, let me know, but I want you aware that you will be in the chat with non-furries. My Skype username is strangercoug if you need to add me first.

I'm really sorry for this, guys. Please bear with me.

 mrsparta is writing a space-themed story in which I allowed permission to use my character. The first installment can be read here.

I have nothing I should be worrying about too much. In fact, I have everything to be excited about, now that my financial aid is here and I'm ready for school again. I may be in a pretty tough major, but I still think it's fun, and I'm looking forward to my classes (except the Calc II retake—glad I dropped it while I could, but still... grrrrr....).

So how come I don't feel happy? I know life is not perfect. I'm aware that I don't have everything I want and probably never will in the truest sense of the word. But why won't that register in my head? Why does my mind want to apply the snowball effect to minor bothers that ultimately don't matter in the big picture (even though I do, in fact, care)?

*sigh* Damn you to the lowest hell, depression. Damn you.

 redsavage.

I'm really sorry we didn't talk more. I really am. But I want you to know up there: my thoughts will be with you. And I know the rest of ours will be as well. I really hate to say goodbye, but unfortunately we all must do this at some time or another.

*breaks down into tears*

OK, so...

Late last month, I had to give a presentation in public speaking class about an item of pop culture and how it affected me. IMMEDIATELY when I first knew about the assignment, I was seriously thinking about doing it about the furry fandom, and since it seemed the obvious choice for me, that's what I picked. The below is the transcript I had to turn in to the professor before I presented. The only changes here from the transcript are formatting and to fix a typo that was pointed out when I got the transcript back (I deliberately waited until I saw my grade to post this to avoid a false plagiarism accusation).

This is NOT the speech as I actually presented it to class—I never gave it exactly as on the paper even with an extra copy in front of me, and he didn't care. The speech as actually given has a couple places with added content: once (first paragraph in between the last two sentences) to reference a speech that was given before mine, and the other (I forgot the exact spot, but early in the fourth paragraph) was because I felt I had extra time, so I stopped, asked if anybody knew what a fursona was, and explained it.

If the speech professor in question finds this: Thank you for not being judgmental about any of us. You were fun to be with, and I'd recommend you to anybody going to UTEP.

Good morning, everyone. I feel there’s this part of me that never really grew up. You see, I like anthropomorphic animal characters, and I have for a long time. That’s where the furry fandom comes in. Yes, I’m fully aware of the more adult stuff in it, but I will not talk about that today. What I will talk about today is what got me into the furry fandom and how it influenced me, through movies, webcomics, and drawings.

I’m actually going to set back the clock to 12 years before I was even aware of the furry fandom: 1994. I was four years old at the time, and the first movie that I can remember seeing in the theater, The Lion King, was coming out. My favorite character from that movie is Timon, and he was my favorite character as a little kid. He remains my favorite male character. There are a few other movies that, as a furry, I find myself drawn to, such as Alpha and Omega and Fantastic Mr. Fox. As you can see, this thing I have for animal characters started quite early. And I never grew out of it!

Now fast forward to 2006, a year and a half before I started calling myself a furry. I don’t remember who it was, but a person on a forum I had joined fairly recently had an avatar that I thought came from an anime, and I asked about it. It turned out that it was from a webcomic called Twokinds, and that ended up being my first real exposure to the furry fandom. Furry webcomics helped draw me into the furry fandom. Three of them that I read are Ozy and Millie, Catena, and Lackadaisy. They are all quite different from one another, but they each appeal to me in their own ways.

Did you notice a common theme in my speech? I hope you did, because it’s something that’s inescapable in the furry fandom. I’m talking, of course, about art. There are a lot of furries—me among them—that like to draw. For me, drawing is an every-once-in-a-while thing, but I like looking at what other furries drew, of their fursonas and others. My fursona is a cougar, which I took from my high school mascot. I’ve usually dressed him in a Hawaiian shirt, khakis, and flip-flops, which is about as casual as you get. I draw this character—StrangerCoug is his name—that looks like he’s ready to go to the beach, and, yes, I’ve paid another person to draw him. I know it sounds a bit silly, but that’s one of my creative outlets. It’s how I like to express itself.

So there you have it—a G-rated presentation about the furry fandom and how it is important to me. I wouldn’t trade it for anything in the world. It’s the source of one of my favorite motivational quotes: as Dana Simpson said in Volume 1 of The Complete Ozy and Millie, “Any artist who claims not to care about having an audience is lying.” To any artist in here, no matter what your interest, I leave you with her words. And I want to add my own: Don’t let other people judge you by what you like. I hope you’ve learned some interesting aspects about me. And P.S.: It’s still Jeffrey when you’re talking to my face. That other name’s if you catch me online. Thank you.

Select drawings (those from after 2012) now have a bigger version for the full view. The upload process seems to be very slow, so I'm going to take it easy on FA's servers for the moment.

So I've finally bothered getting an account on here. I've actually been a furry since 2007, but at the time I wasn't really on the social networking bandwagon. I'll be uploading my art from the past seven years over the coming days.

P.S. I almost never take commissions. Sorry, but there are other things I like doing besides just drawing.