Moving accounts (sort of)

TL;DR: I'm going to be posting new (and old) stories to  Ebni. That's going to be my main account for posting writings.



"Tygacat" is not a name I've liked for a while. But I've been struggling to think where I want to go. I like the core character, just not the name. Thoughts of changing the name to Ebni have been in my head for a while, or coming up with a new fursona, or many options. I've also had a shift in the character design, or alternate human version of the character in mind.

Over the past couple of months, I settled on splitting two characters. My old tiger is rechristened (or relavagodded as the case may be around here) Trail Juniper. That's the new name for my tiger character, and I'll still be keeping him around here. This account will be focused more on following folks, faving art, and getting more porn of my tiger.

All of my old stories are going to stay up here. Partly because I hate when artists delete their galleries but more because I'm too lazy to go through and do that.

The other character, my new persona, is Ebni. He's a human, wears a green robe, tiger ears, gloves, and maybe tail. Also green steampunk goggles. This is all based on ideas I had spur of the moment at MFF 4 years ago. The other account will aim to be more 'in character.' Whereas this will stay more plain me.

In other news, I've finally got a full time job (as a cog in the pharmaceutical industry, yay). So I hope to afford more things like cons, costumes, art, and the like.

So, yeah, that's the plan moving forward. Go follow my Ebni account.  ebni

I have a vignette in the just-released Red Ferret anthology Furnicate. The anthology is a collection of extremely short ertoica stories (1k words). My submission, Base Desires, features my Sayen and Itu having some butt fun.

The electronic version is available for free at: https://www.red-ferret.com/

Or you can purchase a hardcopy at: https://www.weaselpress.com/shop/furnicate-18

So people were tweeting about Patreon recently. Folks were saying it would be a good idea to set one up now to get grandfathered in to whatever system they are setting up next month. So, I figured that was as good an excuse as any to set one up.

I've got it set for 'per creation' donations. I've gone this route as I've been far from regularly making content to justify a monthly patreon. Plus I respond well to positive reinforcement so this will help encourage me to work harder on this stuff. (Also, people can set a monthly max so if I do get industrious some time they won't have an unexpected drain on their funds).

There's not much in the way of rewards. I'll be posting stories a couple of days early over there. I've got $1, $2, and $5 tiers set up, mostly for convenience if anyone does want to support me at those levels. I might do the occasional poll at the higher tiers when I get the ball rolling, but that's all I have planned at the moment.

So, here's the link: https://www.patreon.com/tygacat

Or, if you want to just give me a one-off tip (or Patreon isn't your thing) I have a ko-fi: https://ko-fi.com/tygacat

Thank you for your support,

Tygacat

Doing another worldbuilding stream in half an hour (7:30 CDT). Going to be talking about the music of the world.

So, again trying a worldbuilding stream. I'm hoping to do these regularly (weekly or biweekly) and have different on chatting with me about my world. They can ask questions, give ideas, and generally help flesh Saffron out very large.

Stream will be here: https://www.tigerdile.com/stream/tygacat at 8:00 Central Standard Time (about 20 mins from now)

Tonight we'll be talking about the political geography of the world.

Finally getting this series posted again. My NaNoWriMo project from four years ago at this point. I edited and uploaded chapter four here: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/30352487/

I also massively rewrote the second chapter here: http://www.furaffinity.net/view/23853411/

More on the project plus link to the start of it here:
Table of Contents

So once again I want to review a property a few years after it was relevant. Except this one is only slightly irrelevant as it has a sequel coming out soon. This is about the game Life is Strange. Spoilers ahead, obviously.

Now I did not play this game, I only watched my roommate play some chunks. I came into the living room after work shortly after he'd started it. His partner, my other roommate, was also watching. I knew nothing of the game at that point. I watched the start of the game, I watched a fair bit of the rest of his play through, and he filled me in on the bits I missed. I watched the end as well. My final thoughts on the game were that I really didn't like it.

So the game follows Maxine who is a prodigy photography student. She has just moved back to town after being accepted into a high-to-do art boarding school full of complete assholes. She watches her childhood best friend get gunned down in the school bathroom, (though she doesn't know its her at the time), and then a magic butterfly lands next to her and gives her the power to rewind time. Butterfly because 'butterfly effect' of course, which we'll get back to.

So that's the game. She has the power to rewind time, and later also to go back in time through photographs and alter stuff. So she does this to save her best friend's life (repeatedly, as she keeps getting herself killed throughout the game) and also expose the town serial killer slash rapist. No matter what path she takes though, whenever things start going well the town gets hit with a freak massive storm (because butterfly effect). In the end she and her friend decide said friend was suppose to die, as is why she keeps dying in so many paths. In order to avoid the storm destroying the city, she has to go back to the beginning and let the friend get shot to death in the bathroom.

So the player then has the choice. Go back and watch her friend die, and everyone else lives happily ever after or keep the friend alive and let the storm ravage the town (and presumably kill everyone else in it).

Ultimately this is the thing I hate most about this game. The moral feels like, 'Trying to improve things is futile, because physics, I guess.'

The butterfly effect is a metaphor slash thought experiment to demonstrate the absurdity of certain physical systems. Edward Lorenz came up with it, the idea that a butterfly beating its wings in one place could cause a tornado somewhere else. It's similar to Schrodinger's cat in that its trying to put strange scientific ideas in terms our minds understand. It's a bit easier to grasp, at least. Let's start with it isn't primarily about an actual butterfly or storm.

It's about chaos theory. And chaos theory is the study of chaotic systems. A chaotic system, in science and math, is a system which has wildly different outcomes for small, even infinitesimal changes in input. Take as an example, an archer shooting at a target. They aim directly at the bulls eye, the arrow hits the bulls eye. This is a non-chaotic system as if their aim waivers slightly off from perfect, their arrow will land on the target slightly off from the bulls eye. A chaotic version would be an archer in a story attempting to show their comically bad aim or bad luck. Their aim waivers off dead center and somehow shatters the vase on the shelf behind them, or goes through the window and there is a cat scream, or skewers an apple a kid was balancing on his head down the road.

The events depicted in Life is Strange are almost ludicrously actually not chaotic. After all, for wildly different inputs they all give the same output: storm. Only one course of action avoids the storm. For all of the Simpson's references they put in (I do applaud the Inanimate Carbon Rod cameo), they should have paid more attention to Homer and his time traveling toaster. That is probably one of the best fictional demonstrations of the butterfly effect.

In fairness, it is the curse of the medium. Video games like this want to explore the interactive aspect of the medium to give the player more choice in how the story progresses. But the more choice one gives, the more outcomes one has to program. They grow exponentially. So you have to make those choices be either purely cosmetic, or funnel around to the same outcome which has the inevitable feel of 'choices don't matter.' You can have a handful of possible endings, but if nothing else that makes having a direct sequel difficult or impossible.

So that's that. I have yet to decide whether I'm burned enough to avoid the sequel, or to seek out a let's play because, as the great philosopher Terry Pratchett noted, hate is an attractive force.

Still, MFF has had a bad badge pickup setup for the six years I've been going there. When I started they had queues organized by last name, basically one for each letter of the alphabet. Great if your name started with 'Q,' not so much if 'M'.

They stopped doing that last year in favor of the computer setups, which is good. They've moved to the Stevenson this year, so also good. Aside from that there hasn't been much much change to their system. When the con was three thousand guests it took a while and was annoying, but once it was over one could enjoy the con. The bad experience was forgotten. Until the next year. Now that setup that was not great at 3,000 people is having to deal with 10,000. That is why the line is three hours long this year, and will be much longer next year if they have the same growth and don't completely rethink it.

It's particularly frustrating for pre-registration, because for most of these past years my at-the-door registering friends have been in and out well before me. In 2016 I sponsored, was in the line for early pickup for sponsors, and they still had their badges before me. This year they were done half an hour before me.

Also this year I had a friend sponsor and he stood in line with me for most of the time. Not necessarily because he wanted to, but because there was no separate line for sponsors. Eventually a guy came through calling for sponsors to follow him for early pickup (kudos to that guy, by the way) but still the lack of such a bypass seems an obvious exclusion.

The big selling point to pre-registration is the ability to pick up your badge and be on your way. Cons want pre-registrations because it helps them plan, or so they say. It's basically like RSVP'ing. I continue to pre-register because of this. Still, it is annoying to know I could have waited, paid $5 more, and been done that much sooner.

Things need to be done structurally to change it. I know it can be done as the badge pickup at Anthrocon has never felt this bad. (Okay, that's a bit of a lie. One out of the three of my times there has sucked, but that was a different unrelated issue.) I don't bring this up to say 'oh AC is sooo much better than MFF.' I know they share a lot of the same staff. It's that they share a lot of the same staff and information that bugs me. MFF doesn't need to be working this out on their own.

I'm not one to complain about things when they're outside of control. The room booking situation sucks, is another whole discussion, but it is not MFF's fault. Back when the dealer's den was spread across multiple rooms of the Hyatt basement it wasn't the con's fault. They worked with what they had. I knew they couldn't 'just' move into the Stevenson, that the con center likely had contracts with other groups in place for years before we came along. But I digress.

The reg situation, though, that is within their control. It feels like it's an afterthought. Like there's some conversation that goes, “Should we do something different for reg this year?” “No, it's too late now. We'll just do what we did last year. If people complain, then they complain.”

To armchair con-chair this the big thing I see is the timetable for badge pickup. That really hasn't changed over the years; 4:30 sponsors start, 5:00 pre-reg, 6:00 at the door. Ideally the reg pickup would start much earlier. Here's a big part of where I'm comparing with AC. If there's money issues with this then maybe badge prices need to increase. I've never been to any non-furry conventions so I have no idea how $60 for a con of this size compares. If it's low for comparable events, then yeah, maybe it does need increasing. I have seen many people stating a $5-10 hike would be fine if it'd greatly cut down line time. Another possibility would be a bigger price jump for late pre-reg and even bigger for at-the-door. More early pre-reg is better for the con (allegedly), so this seems a reasonable thing for the con. Fewer at-the-door registers could mean more resources available for the pre-reg pickup.

If opening reg earlier isn't practical or possible because of conflicts with the con center, okay, I get it. But in that event efforts should be made to expand the head start pre-reg and sponsors have. I'd go so far as to say to not even have at-the-door reg available on Thursday.

Some of this is venting my frustration, a lot is wanting to actually point out things I see. I know I'm not on the inside so I don't know what's going on internally. What I do see is the problems of reg pickup growing disproportionately faster than the con size is. I don't remember exactly how long I spent in line Thursday of MFF 2017. I'm thinking it was between 1.5 and 2 hours. At least three hours this year. That's somewhere between a 50% and 100% increase in wait time for a 20% increase in con size. If the con continues that rate of growth, and nothing substantial is done to improve reg, well, I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

All that said, I'm going to try to get involved more in cons next year. I say this every year, every con really. Every con my social anxiety talks me out of it, though. “That could be very complicated and stressful. You don't want to do that. Besides, what if some friends want to do something? You don't want to be trapped having to work.” And I fall for it. Even though I have like six actual friends at the con of 10k and they're all going to be busy doing their own things. This year I'm going to try to help in what ways I can. Starting at Fur Squared, as that will be my next con. (Anyone got a room there? I need a room there.) I want to try to put my proverbial money where my mouth is.

So, yeah, that's my thoughts post-MFF. I'm hopeful for things to improve. MFF is my home con, so it has a place in my heart in spite of its issues.

Starting a writing worldbuilding stream right now:

www.tigerdile.com/stream/tygacat

Come say hi!

So this was my year of lore. I did a fair bit of writing, though a lot of it hasn't been posted. Most of what I wrote was aimed at anthologies. Two of those I didn't submit. One because it was too sad and the other because it was way over the word limit. Those are both on the 'I'll figure out something to do with these later' pile. Another was submitted, rejected, revised, and submitted to another anthology. Results aren't out for that one yet. *fingers crossed* A fourth was submitted to an anthology and accepted! A short vignette involving Sayen and Itu will be in Furnicate, by Red Ferret Press. Hopefully that will be available for purchase soon.

In other news, I posted a few things, most notably the start of my Lava God's Journey series. A lot more coming on that in the not too distant future as well. I've also made some progress on some other stories that I hope to get finished and posted.

But this 'year of lore' is going to end with a bang. World Anvil, the world building site, is having a marathon world building incentive in December. What they are calling Worldember. The discovery of World Anvil has already been an amazing thing to happen in my year of lore. In the trailer video for the site there was a brief glimpse at someone's article 'Lyra,' which shares the name of my primary fictional city. If that's not a sign from above I don't know what is.

Anyway, they have goals for this. A badge is earned for completing the challenge of 10k words written in the month. They have stretch challenges of 'novelist' for 50k words, and 'trilogy' of 150k. Damn I want that latter. If there's one thing I can do it's spin a fuck ton of world building. Let's go for it.

https://www.worldanvil.com/w/saffron-tygacat is the site. There's just a few fragments there currently. But damn I hope to run far. I've been focusing on polishing it up and remembering all of my old CSS skills. So yeah, that's the goal.

Next year will be the Year of Congruence. The city of Lapis Lazuli, the eccentric rich snow leopard demi-god.

So getting a start on this: https://www.worldanvil.com/w/saffron-tygacat

I'm trying to do a small bit each day to build it up. Soon I'd like to set up streams for working on it. But in the meantime if folks have suggestions for areas to explore, feel free to suggest them.

So I was told about World Anvil yesterday. This is a world building website with lots of tools for creating and storing fictional worlds. It's pretty much the thing I've desired for fifteen years or so now.

I've started one for my world Saffron: https://www.worldanvil.com/w/saffron-tygacat (also I'm back to calling this world Saffron).

It is extremely bare bones at the moment but I hope to add stuff in bit by bit. I've got tons, after all.

I may even do some streams for worldbuilding and coming up with ideas in the future. We shall see.

In the words of one Griffon McElroy, this changes everything.

Figure I should put this up here as it is my current obsession.

Pokemon Go friend code is: 5298 1063 5766

Caught five shiny chikoritas yesterday during community day, evolved three meganium, and gained 180k xp between the bonus multiplier and lucky eggs.

I want to rant about plot twists. (This rant will contain spoilers for Zootopia, Frozen, and Infinity War. So skip this if you care about those.) We all love them when they are done well. When a big reveal shows how all the little pieces we've been given fit together, when we weren't expecting them to come together at all, even.

I feel, though, they've become far too overused. It's gotten to the point that the audience considers a plot twist a mandatory part of the story. We worry about spoilers extensively because we assume knowing what's going to happen ruins our enjoyment. People assume fiction is creator v. audience and if the audience can figure it out before the reveal then they win, and the story is bad. But not everything is a mystery.

This belief that leads to plot twists being shoehorned in when they aren't needed. Take Zootopia. The Bellweather twist is pretty much entirely unforeshadowed (no, one post-it note doesn't count). It slightly makes sense given the treatment she receives at the start. But she's never shown any kind of malice, she never leaves subtle clues. Why is this twist there? Because they felt they needed one, or because they couldn't think of another way to end the story? (That Bellweather says “I framed Lionheart” when she never did makes me question.) I had a friend tell me that kids she watched were upset by that reveal. They liked Bellweather and didn't get why she turned mean at the end. Why not go with a more opaque villain?

Frozen is a worse offender. The Hans twist is unforeshadowed and completely out of character with everything he'd done up to that point. If he did it for the reasons he stated in his reveal, well he passed up a handful of chances to off Elsa and/or take over the country with a glacier sized pile of plausible deniability.

The idea that theses twists need to be there, that a story needs to be unexpected, ruins analysis of things that don't use them. Take Infinity War, for example. One of the first complaints I saw about that film was that the heroes would clearly use the infinity stones to undo everything. I'm like, no shit. First, the ending wouldn't be palatable without that eventuality. Second, there's always a poetry in the villain's work being their own undoing. Thanos has all of the infinity stones gathered together. His very work in movie one will make it all the easier for the remaining Avengers to steal them.

But all of that stuff is ignored because 'I can see what's going to happen.'

Big stakes stories are never truly about the big stakes, though. We don't care about the world being saved. It should always be saved at the end, really. What we care about are the small stakes. The individual characters, their relationships, how the battle changes them. That is what matters in any story.

So, yeah. It's time to step away from plot twists and surprises as being things a story needs. They can go where they fit, but they don't need to be in every single thing.

I need to vent as I'm in the midst of various existential issues.

I had an old student come yesterday wanting to interview someone about Fermat's last theorem for some other class. I accepted as I have passing familiarity. It was a simple little thing. Afterward I decided to look up the proof of that. Of course I'd hardly expect to understand it all at a glance. I worked until I ran into the acronyms UFD and PID. Oh, I know what those stand for, and could write the definitions passably. I don't, however, have familiarity working with them enough to have their various properties at the ready.

And that's where I run into issues. I've noticed over the past few years  how my graduate level math education had focused on pure "here are the axioms, prove stuff from here." So I was taught group theory but I didn't learn the phrase "permutation groups" until after. I can recite the definition of a topological space but have no clue how to connect all of that to the surface stuff.

I didn't do a thesis for my masters. My school provided an option of passing a competency exam for the degree instead. They were the same competency exams they had to get into the PhD program. Which I had been trying to get into. I did well enough for the Masters but not the PhD program. After the fact now I had many mental health issues. While this is a whole different story I'll just describe it as my brain was 50% blaring static from about 4th grade through age 30. I was getting things straightened out around the time I was getting the Master's, but the damage had been done.

The best part of this is I can't get a college teaching job now. They expect experience with full responsibility, but since I was originally a PhD track I didn't get that as a T.A.

The job I have now is at the Math Assistance Area of a community college. The idea of my position is since adjunct faculty aren't required to keep office hours (and every college in the country is cutting back on tenured faculty for adjunct) we fill in that void. We provide short help for students who are stuck on their homework.

I like this job a lot, honestly. Working one on one with students helps me see how they learn things, what sticking points are, and so forth. I've also came to better understand a lot of the math material offered. Going back over the material repeatedly helps me make connections I missed before.

But the downside is the job is part time. It pays well per hour, but is less than 30 hrs. per week. Add to,that the ten weeks mandatory unpaid vacation a year it's fairly stressful. The thing is this is pretty much a job for ex high school and college instructors to make some extra money while providing their expertise. It's not meant to support someone permanently. Nor to provide a stepping stone to a more full time career.

My boss is ambitious in expanding the nature of our department. She had myself and a few other tutors sit in on physics courses to provide assistance there. We've had a lot of success. Last semester we had a demonstrable improvement of physics students who used our services over those that didn't.

So things are hopeful at least. But I'd like to do sort of the same thing at a place where I could cover more advanced material and get more sustaining employment. 

But yeah, that's my life story of the past few years. I don't expect you to do anything. I just needed an ear (or eye, as the case may be) of someone who might understand.

So, I want to talk about my story, “Appreciating Art”, which you can read here first if you don't want spoilers (or just want to know what I'm talking about): http://www.furaffinity.net/view/25469883/ (contains F/F sexiness)

The seed idea for the story is two women visiting an art museum, one who gets very flustered by the nekkid statuary. Part of her connection to this is art catalogs were her closest thing to porn growing up. This may be based on the author's own adolescence. *cough* (The statue 'Kaylani Admiring Herself is based on the statue of Venus admiring her own ass in a pool; a favorite of teenage me.)

The story idea came pretty quick, one being a fairly snooty art enthusiast and her impatient not-at-all interested girlfriend. I ran into a hurdle fairly quickly in actually following the flow through the museum. I started trying to make up art exhibits to annoy her. A whole exhibit of artistic chairs that she wasn't allowed to sit in would be the crux of her annoyance. But I felt this was too on the nose. It felt too much like some writer dude sitting in his apartment trying to imagine dumb art to mock.

So, since I live in the suburbs of Chicago, it was time to take a train ride into the city and visit the Art Institute of Chicago for inspiration.

Quite a bit of that story was fleshed out walking through those galleries. I originally intended to tell the tale from Fay's perspective, but here realized it worked far better from Abby's. Most of Fay's observations throughout the museum are based on my own wandering the AIC. The hydrometer, the floor tile mosaic, and the display of furniture she becomes enamored with were all taken from the galleries in the art museum. Even her pizza lunch was exactly what I had and exactly my thoughts as I ate it.

When I got home that night, I had the whole story in my head. It was done within the next day or two. So yeah, that's some stuff that got put into fiction from my real life experiences.

Also, as a final note, a few months ago I was back in the AIC with friends. There at the time (and still at the time of writing this) was a temporary installation called 'Exercises in Seating.' It is, in short, a room of artistic chairs that you're not allowed to sit in.

So I set up a Ko-fi. I talked a while back about maybe setting up a patreon, but didn't feel I produced enough content to justify it. Ko-fi, though, seems more up my alley.

So if you want to tip the writer and give some tangible encouragement:

https://ko-fi.com/tygacat

With the Doom 2016 run of SGDQ (Summer Games Done Quick, a giant video game speed running event for charity), I want to talk about my absolute favorite bit of visual storytelling/joke telling in the game (and its one of my favorites of all time).

So, some spoilers ahead.

The plot of Doom 2016 is as follows. The Union Aerospace Corporation on Mars through its president Samuel Hayden's research figured out how to drill into to hell and convert hell energy into usable power for people back on Earth. Everything goes horribly wrong when a high-ranking employee named Olivia Pierce makes a deal with the hell beings for power in exchange for releasing them onto Mars.

She does this, and demons tear apart and infest the corporation's facilities on Mars. Samuel Hayden had a backup plan. He had led an expedition into Hell to retrieve a powerful warrior, the Doom Slayer. The doom slayer had eons ago wrought havoc on hell and its demons. Those demons had managed to trap the doom slayer in a stone sarcophagus. Hayden, though, had sought him out and taken him back to Mars as aforementioned backup plan.

This is where the player come in. They play as the Doom Slayer cleaning up Hayden's mess; navigating the compound, killing demons, fixing things, and hunting down Olivia Pierce before she makes things even worse.

The Doomslayer himself clearly is not entertaining this shit. One of the first scenes, in my runner-up for best visual storytelling moments, you enter an elevator. There is a cut-scene with Samuel Hayden talking over the intercom. He tells the slayer how in spite of everything the hell-digging was worth the risk. The camera pans down to the corpse of a UAC soldier as Doomslayer cracks his knuckles as Hayden tells you how this was all for the good of mankind. Doomslayer punches the intercom, and we get the title screen.

Brilliant writing matched with the visuals and tells it perfectly. It could never have been worth the risk. It could never have been for the good of mankind. If this hadn't gone wrong, something else would have. They were working with hell, literally.

Anyway, advancing to my favorite bit of storytelling now. The objective for the level is to disable three devices that are filtering the argent energy as it's called (despite it being red instead of the silver as implied by the name 'argent' would imply, but I digress). At the first filter Samuel Hayden begins to explain to that the slayer will have to carefully remove the filtering lenses. The Doomslayer briefly examines the machine.

The player knows what is going to happen before it does. This is Doom. They've been playing for a few hours now. Doing things carefully is not a mechanic in this game. Doomslayer raises his boot and smashes the machine.

Hayden hisses through his teeth that the cessation of power production is not necessary. Doomslayer likely begs to differ. But anyway, we work our way through the compound and soon find the second.

Now this is my favorite bit. As I played through it for the first time, in the back of my head is the many, many video games I've played where I've been controlling a character who does things completely and obviously idiotic, making things worse. As the player, I can see the stupidity in the course of action, but have to do it anyway to advance the plot.

So smashing these things puts that worry in my head. We don't know what these things do, we don't know if breaking them outright will not be a horribly bad idea.

At the second one Doomslayer raises his boot for the smashy. Hayden speaks, “You can't, the hell energy is un...” and the Doomslayer pauses. In the hundredth of a second before the rest of that word a dozen things are running through my mind, and the mind of my character as evidenced by the hesitation. Doomslayer hates Hayden and his technology, but that doesn't mean smashing it outright is the best course of action. We don't know what will happen. We need to hear Hayden out. Our minds are filling in the rest of the world. Unstable? Uncontrollable?

Hayden continues, “unusable without the filters.”

Immediately we realize, oh, he's just worried about his bottom line still. *Smash*

I love this because everything is timed so perfectly. Doomslayer's actions perfectly in sync with Hayden's dialogue. It's flawless. That it's on the second one that this event happens helps as well. It wouldn't work if the player wasn't primed to be worried about this from the destruction of the first of these things.

It's also very fast. I've watched a few people play this game. I don't think any have caught it. But when I first played it knocked me on my ass laughing. I applauded the brilliant execution.

Anyway, this has been Tygacat explains a joke, what will hopefully not be a regular feature here. But as I said I love the moment, have seen it overlooked a lot, and wanted to draw some attention to the brilliant writing here.

Boston Market is one of my favorite fast food joints. I like their chicken, love their sides, and have rarely had a bad experience there. I decided to get food there this past weekend and noted a new advertisement for prime rib.

Prime rib is one of my personal favorite meals. I have fond memories of it growing up; it was the occasional treat, plus my father would cook one for Christmas every year.

Most foods run a gamut of possible qualities ranging from bad, through mediocre and okay, up to superb. Prime rib does not do this. It has two possibilities. It is either excellent or awful. Salmon is another such food.

So knowing that this is a fast food chain, abeit a good one, attempting a meal that does not have any margin for error, I did not expect it to be good at all. Still, I figured I'd gamble. I've been plesantly surprised by fast food joints serving things that were far better than they had any right to (see Arby's brisket sandwiches).

I had to wait a few days as it was only advertised as available on Sunday and Wednesday. Since I was there on Saturday and not going to Boston Market two days in a row, Wednesday it was. It was also only available after 5, so it would be dinner.

These time restrictions were actually a good sign. Prime rib is a roast. You have to cook a lot of it at once. The restrictions on the time pointed that that was what they were doing, not just reheating pre-sliced steaks.

I arrived at Boston Market shortly after 5 tonight (Wednesday) to what fate I had selected for myself. After ordering the worker asked if I wanted it medium rare or well. I was pleasantly surprised that I wasn't restricted to the latter. They passed that test. I was not surprised they did not have the full spectrums of temperatures available, restricting it to the two most common (also categorized as 'right' and 'wrong' respectively). I answered that question correctly.

The steak that was put on my plate was a beauty. Gorgeously pink, close to the rare side of things it seemed. I was very pleased at the sight. It was a bit thin compared to my preferred cut, but I had not expected much. I got my preferred sides, mashed potatoes and creamed spinach, got my drink, and sat down. They also had an actual steak knife for me so that was another pleasant surprise.

I tasted the crusty outside first. It had a very nice peppery spiced shell, always a good sign. And the fat of the thing was perfect (I'm odd in that I like eating steak fat). So then it was time to dig in to the steak itself.

Now I have to emphasize how good it looked and how much my expectations were set up to be pleasantly surprised. Because the whole reason for me writing this journal is how amazing it is that they made a steak that looked so good yet tasted so terrible.

This was one of the most dry and tough pieces of meat I'd ever had. I dumped the whole cup of aus jous they gave on it in a futile attempt to improve it. I had predicted it to be bad but somehow had not expected it to even be on this level of awful. I tried to imagine the reasons for it. It tasted like it had been cooled and reheated multiple times. If so how did they keep it that pink color? Did they somehow dye one of well done pieces pink? I realized it was an end piece, maybe that was the cause? But the back surface didn't have the good peppery crust of the sides? And how do you get one of the end pieces to be medium rare in the first place. Your medium pieces come from the center and the well pieces the ends because of how heat transfer works.

So yeah, that was the experience. So just in case anyone was considering trying it as a lark, don't. Learn from my folly.

So, this is sort of what I wanted to get started as my 'year of lore.' I've been imagining the travels and battles the Lava God faced as he established the Fifth Pantheon.

This story itself has been banging around in my head for a while and decided it needed to be told now. So, yeah.

Go enjoy the start of the Lava God's journey. It was quite intense to write and I love how it turned out.

http://www.furaffinity.net/view/26693672/

A criticism I've seen of many furry writing is the basic 'why furry? ' One might expect this criticism to come from outside the fandom, but I've seen it a lot from within the furry writing scene. One must justify having furry characters instead of just humans.

This question has bogged me down in the past. One big reason I've been so haphazard on getting things finished and posted is I worry too much about making them perfect. And this has been one sticking point. In stories I've managed to finish I've swept the issue under the rug saying it's okay to not have this for now, but I'd have to work it out if I'm to be taken seriously as a furry author.

Over the past year I've had the important realization that the whole mess of worrying about 'why furry' is horseshit (apologies to equines for the metaphor). The problem is in-fiction justifications of things are just facades for the real reason for the furry: I want to imagine tiger people boning. Any explanation is just a convoluted and obvious cover up of that fact.

There are really only two not in-fiction reasons for having animal characters, other than just 'because I want to.' One is using animal species as a metaphor for various human differences (which 99 times out of 100 it's race). The other is your juxtaposing furries against humans to make some point about humanity. And while that has its place, it's not really what I'm going for. So the bottom line is I'm just plain owning it. I write furry because I like furry.

Now, that said, I also like convoluted explanations of things. So there are still going to be in-fiction reasons for everything. I hope to do more journals on worldbuilding stuff that focuses on that sort of split. Some world building thing, the in-fiction justification, and the actual me explanation for why I make it that way.

Happy 2018, everyone. This year I'm theming my “Year of Lore.” I want to tell many more stories and things related to the lore and history of the world Ocus. I do tons of worldbuilding and stuff and I really want to put more of it out there. And I hope I can at least tell this stuff in an entertaining fashion.

2017 has been a year of many things. For me it has been a year of personal revelations. These big things that dig deep into my personal mental health issues that I've had throughout my life.

I'm going to start with the second revelation of three that I want to cover. It is a simple one and that is my skills are worth something. I had some private math tutoring gigs come my way recently. I had not been aware just how much people would pay for math tutoring. Particularly for mutlivariate calculus, since there aren't a lot of tutors at that level. It's not something I can rely on as a source of income. It seems word of mouth is the best advertisement in that area, and so I have no knowledge of if or when someone may contact me wanting help. But for a person who has suffered imposter syndrome on a large scale, and had interanlized that it was a prewritten rule of the universe that he couldn't do anything truly of value, it is a pretty important bit of evidence to the contrary.

The first revelation is a bit of a weird one. It is the revelation that reading is okay. Like I said, it's a bit weird, but I'll try to explain this. Now I generally like reading, as one who is a writer should. But for me getting started on reading a new book or story was difficult. The problem was that books had a tendency to draw me (any good book should, really). But I would become obsessed while reading them. Because of this I developed a strange sort of aversion to reading anything that wasn't by an author I 'trusted,' for lack of a better term. Trusted to tell a good story and be worth the time and emotional energy spent on reading their work.

But picking up some stories this year and reading them, I did not feel the same sort of obsession as before. I could read without getting trapped. I could put the book down and do other things and then come back to it. I truly haven't read anything since being on sertraline regularly. (Most stuff I did read was either really short stories or I just skimmed). So feeling like I can actually do that makes it a bit more plausible to do more reading and get more ideas and inspiration for my work.

And that takes me to revelation number three. A revelation that comes from a book I read because in part of revelation two. This has to do with a hangup in my own writing. As you've likely noticed I have not written much over the past few years. At best I post something every couple of months. The hangup I've had is feeling my stuff wasn't good enough. That I needed to be striving for a level of perfection in my own work stylistically.

A couple weeks back a book released from an author I like. I was quite looking forward to it as I've enjoyed previous stuff by said author befored. And it had a bit of hype around it as well. But reading it, fuck I didn't like it. I felt it was probematic and flawed in ways that make me wonder if the author bothered to reread it at all. And I just feel, reading that, that if people paid the author money to publish that and other people said they liked it then I really don't need to be worrying about the quality of my own work. I should just strive to do my best trust myself that it's good stuff.

I think I'm going to forgo the patreon idea from a couple of weeks back. That had been before I scored the tutoring gigs and was hoping for a bit of extra income from somewhere. And with this new found confidence in myself I don't need the dangling carrot to motivate me. I put up a couple of stories over the past month and have another nearing completion. I've been really going like clockwork.

So, Patreon. We've all seen it. Some of us support a few artists on there. (I support  adriofthedead,  inktiger, and  jeevestheroo. As well as the not furry but mathy Three Blue One Brown (whose math stuff is top notch. I can't recommend enough his Linear Algebra series).

Every great while I've had the very brief passing thought of starting one. Even if only a couple of people threw a dollar or two at me a month it would be swell. But of course I remember I'm not exactly the most prolific of writers. I get maybe a story up every couple months or so. So it wouldn't be super fair to people. It might be an incentive to actually write more, but regardless I don't have a great track record on that front to begin with. So I let the thought pass with a sigh.

But I remembered something this morning when the thought arrived again. Mr Three Blue One Brown up there has his Patreon set as a donation per video. And that could be up my alley. If I don't write, my patrons don't get charged. And this actually would encourage me to get stuff written and done as there would be an actual tangible reward for getting writing done.

It's something I'm going to look into and hopefully set up in the next week or so. I want to look into the possibility of seeing if patrons can cap their donations (like, $2 a story, max $6 a month). So on the off chance my muse gets me going and I belch out a dozen stories in a month, no one is hit with a surprise bill for four times what they were expecting to pay.

That and I'd also need to figure out incentives, which I have zero ideas for. Commissions, even short ones, have never been my fortay. Early access to stories/wips of stories seems less practical for writing than drawing (“Thanks for the cash, here have a shittier, less refined version of the thing I'm writing”). I could send out complete versions to patreons a month or so prior to stuffing them up on FA/SF, I suppose. Polls to let people determine what sorts of stories I work on next. Maybe more of my ellbaborate backstory/worldbuilding stuff if anyone has interest in that sort of thing.

I don't know. We shall see. Let me know of any thoughts/suggestions on the matter you have.

Thanks

-tygacat

Thinking about trying to do some art streaming again. I do want to get back to the Lapis Lazuli Blue Roses things eventually. But after a nobel (but ultimately failed) attempt at Inktober, I realized I do enjoy technical drawing. Drawing perspective things carefully.

So I'm thinking of doing a stream of that. Called Gin and Geometry, I'll be on tigerdile drawing perspective drawings in the Geogebra geometry program and drinking gin and tonic (because I need more of a gimmick.)

Anyway, yeah, we'll see how that goes.

In other news I'd also like to start cobbling together longer world building pieces. I know it's not everyone's cup of te, but if you do enjoy large elborate fictional world stuff then I have plenty to offer.