I'm probably going to be stuck being even sparser than usual for a while, turns out. New job is scheduling me 40 hour workweeks. Which would be great if it was my only job, but I still have to maintain the old job too. So... yeah. Very high likelihood that I'm going to be working literally every single day that I don't have covered by vacation time, 56 hour workweeks. Hopefully I can stockpile enough cash from this soul-crushing activity that I can drop one job or the other before I snap, or become sufficiently deadened to it that I can function in my off-time well enough to resume having a life.

I mean, not exactly new, just an additional cashiering job. Two job fox. Free time is gonna shrink to veeeeery little. Probably not gonna be much new art for a bit (Just when I was starting to get a lil' groove back, whoops) and likewise won't be in contact much either. This week especially when I'm literally working both jobs the same day.

Hopefully I can get it fixed within the next week or so, until then I'll be MIA.

Fuuuuuuck this shit. Hopefully at least some of the cool stuff websites tease sticks around afterwards for once.

As some who've noted me while I was gone or talked to before going, I went to Orlando this week with family. Both universal parks, two days. Did most of the non-carnival-style rides plus the Sinbad show and the Poseidon show adventure thing. All three potter rides were great, as was escape from New York, Simpson's and the mummy. Spiderman, Kong and Jurassic Park were decent, Transformers and minions were okay, shrek is totally skippable. Didn't do anything like Hulk because I like my thrills to be of speed and soaring, not freefalling or being flipped over where it genuinely terrifies you into feeling like you're going to die.

Been fighting water coming in through the walls for about 30 hours now. It finally stopped raining/sleeting at around 5 AM. Got about 4 hours of sleep when my parents took back over from the overnight shift of working on it. Called off work because I'm exhausted in every sense of the word. Will be around but sporadically and mostly trying to catch up on stuff while praying the lake doesn't go any higher. 3 stair steps to deck level, then one big step to porch level at which point I think we try to sandbag, then one more big step to house level. Rain, rain, stay away.

Looks like it's coming in through the wall column next to my computer. Nothing water susceptible is on the floor so it's mostly just going to keep me busy all day until it stops.

I've been slacking on drawing stuff what with being busy at work, but also because I've stepped up my job hunting a bit. Friday, I have an interview for what I hope will be a part time accounting position, which if I land it, will finally be actual non-placeholder employment, the crucial work experience I need to do anything else with my degree, and for the first time in my life will mean I'm fully employed.

Also I'm going to the vore doctor tomorrow. Hopefully my teefs are still all okay.

Edit: Whoops, interview rescheduled until next week on account of us getting a fuckload of snow tomorrow. Also, I'mma be getting my back left molar crowned since the (large) filling is starting to crack.

Seems like a transformer or something blew in the middle of winter and we have no power for the next few indeterminate units of time. Joy.

Edit: Hour and change later, it's back, woo.

Well! I finally broke out of an art slump (Drew more in the last four months than I have in the last four years before that) in part because of all the commissions I've gotten (both for myself/my friends from other artists, and as the artist for other people)

Lost a very good friend, and have another whose medical outlook is not great, though I'm trying to be optimistic for her. Had my own medical adventure and lost over a hundred pounds. An uncle with cancer, but he seems to be doing well, considering, you know, cancer. Found out my cousin is a furry.

Ten years working this part time retail job, making less than many states' minimum wages even after that long, and even with a degree, no new opportunities. It's time to start hunting for internships, I think, even if they're going to have to be unpaid, just so I can get those required years of experience.

Here's hoping we can all collectively make the world a little bit less of a dumpster fire in the upcoming year.

So I'm currently up in Michigan and seeing family for the holidays. And my cousin comes in and is wearing a MFF shirt. Look him up via Facebook and sure enough. I didn't say anything directly beyond a brief "nice shirt, and that's all I'll say on that", along with some basic context awareness when it was mentioned in general family conversation, since our aunt rescues and raises and is otherwise into raccoons. 'it's from that convention he went two, second biggest one besides the one in Pittsburgh' clarifying that it's actually the biggest one now, never actually implicating my knowledge openly but yeah. He fursuits and does photography, but it's all clean stuff, so I feel a bit wary about directly contacting him through Wes, what with the vore and tits and all. :V

Still though, that was interesting and kinda neat regardless. Literally the first person I meet face to face who is definitely a furry turned out to be family. Small ass world, innit.

I'm tired of never including my friends and whatnot in stuff I get or draw because I'm never sure whose okay with me borrowing their characters to include in a thing.

Volunteer some of your characters (with references and whatnot) with at least a general list of what's okay and what's not in the comments below so that I may use them whenever I'm looking to fill a space. Anything you're included in, you will be credited with and given links to.

So one of the commissions I've already dropped cash on is still looking for people to fill the last slot.
https://www.furaffinity.net/view/25570344/
If you've been seeing all this fresh stuff I've been getting and want to appear in some of it, here's an opportunity.

Because I find myself very easily swayed into giving into temptation and becoming addicted to the reward cycle of getting something I like.

I think I literally need to remove my card from my paypal and cut myself off because I just. Won't. Stop. Impulse buying. :<

Hey! Welcome to my FA page. I'm hijacking this (currently recent) journal post that was originally me advertising that I was going to start advertising being open to continue to advertise that I am open, but now in a more 'this is intended stay on my front page' way.

I have fallen down the rabbit hole of commissioning other people, and that means that I can always use more funds to get more art, or to cut out the middle man of paypal fees and just do an art trade.

I am into a bunch of stuff, most of it related to mouths and bellies but also including vanilla sex stuff, and will draw basically anything if you pay me enough, which honestly is not very much. Drawing stuff I genuinely like or am ambivalent about is stupidly cheap. Like, seriously. $10 for colored, custom work. You can hardly find a YCH slot for that cheap, even for the people who are just coloring bases. For up to TWO CHARACTERS, even!

I also do coloring work for hella cheap. Why pay someone else $5 or more to recolor their base, when I'll color any picture (that you have the rights to and/or permission to have me color, mind) for that? I'll color an entire comic page for less than $20.

Keep in mind I work full time now, so it may take me a weekend or two to get it done, and my trade-off for not taking payment up front is being somewhat choosy about what I'll attempt, but if you've got a solid idea, seriously, shoot me a note with details and I'll let you know if I think I'm up to it.

I've been having entirely too much fun spending hours on this. (Even if a good chunk of those hours have been doing other stuff besides the massive statue, like getting my equivalent exchange economy rolling (I'm in a full suit of gemmed red matter, hence being able to casually fly and casually swim in lava) or Forestry stuff. (I've done apiary stuff before, up to and including the herculean effort of getting a fully functioning alveary, but this time I'm actually doing tree stuff too. I've successfully cultivated cherry trees, but I can't get my walnut trees to grow. I assume they just refuse to in a Taiga biome like I'm in.)

It always helps me when I can share the things I'm making in the game. That is like 75% of the game's appeal to me. I wish I knew of a server to do this kind of stuff on, genuinely collaboratively and all. Legends is definitely my favorite pack; It has working, 1.7 update level versions of Equivalent Exchange, IC2 and Forestry, plus some new ones I really enjoy like the Carpentry blocks that make all those angles possible. It's like microblocks but better, and with diagonal cuts. (And lets me keep it illuminated without torches, heck yeah.) I just wish it had Dimensional Doors; that was such an awesome little mod. Some day I'll have to learn how to build my own packs.

Edit: Progress update.

Right back at the end of November, I was diagnosed with gallstones. I was some amount over 350 pounds and at risk for diabetes. Back in March, I got my gallbladder removed.

10 months later, I'm down to 260 pounds. I've gone from having a full plate of chicken tenders and fries every day to having a vegan boca burger every day. I've stopped having a full bag of tortilla chips and a heaping bowl of salsa to having half a pound of top round steak.

Aside from not hurting from gallstones, I feel pretty much exactly the same, but every day I get encouraging compliments on how much progress I've made. Being a cynical person, I still can't actually see any difference in myself in the mirror, just an awareness that I constantly need to wear a belt, and knowing that anything I eat with fat in it has to be handled entirely by my liver, so fat and grease equal liver strain; I must regard things like potato chips and greasy sausage like they're moonshine without the buzz. I've switched many things out for low-sugar alternatives; low sugar ketchup legitimately tastes great, I recommend it to anyone, way more tomatoey.

Turning 29 on the 21st. That sad realization that I've been working in part time retail for a full third of my life now. Running out of 20's. Filing for every accounting position I see cross my Monster feed.

Re-addicted to WoW, so I've been spending my nights in Azeroth instead of drawing. Sorry, just haven't had the time or motivation or ideas for drawing lately. Kinda considered coloring some old stuff for 8/8 but yeah nope.

TL;DR, I've been tweaking and playtesting an arcade mode lobby in Overwatch for a couple weeks now. I did my best to make it balanced and give every hero a reason to use them. Here's those settings and reasons why they are what they are.


Heros are broken up by speed tiers. These are basically a rough guide, you can adjust them collectively to different ranges as long as they're separated into different speed brackets (though any slower than 140% can't effectively melee for crap and feel incredibly sluggish) though my settings are tuned for the higher end. ie, either use the high or low end of the ranges for the settings for all of them.

280-300% - Bastion is pure speed and doesn't rely on any hackable abilities.
260-280% - Hanzo can wall climb and is unhackable; Reaper can wraith/reapersition. Ana can Nanoboost (purely for psychological effect since everyone's already one hit kills, even with the defense bonus.) All are exceptionally fast.
240-260% - Mercy can rez/glide, and Lucio provides team-wide increased speed.
220-240% - 76 can sprint to be the fastest in the game, but only while sprinting. Widowmaker provides wallhax.
200-220% - Orisa can use Halt to yank people to a predictable point or off cliffs and no-sells Reinhardt charges with Fortify. Junkrat drops 'nades on death and has a 50 second cooldown trap, meaning he can generally only place one per life. Dva can defense matrix projectiles and has a one-time hit absorption thing with being forced into pilot mode. (I've been wanting to test if enabling Self Destruct to allow her to re-mekka with enough kills would be imbalanced, since everyone can move so quickly and everyone has almost zero cooldown barriers it's fairly trivial to avoid it)
180%-200% - Tracer has blink on a small cooldown, meaning she can use it a little less than once a second, letting her blink-strike and evade, at the cost of being relatively slow. Pharah can jetpack and somewhat hover (She can't stay up in the air) and has the only other projectile besides Orisa with concussion rockets on a small cooldown. Sombra can hack to disable some hero's bonus traits (though others like Bastion and Hanzo aren't effected at all in practice) but that close range channeled effect leaves her open to being killed; she can also stealth to speed boost similar to Soldier 76; All three abilities are on a short cooldown to prevent spamming them. She also can pull off an EMP with enough kills, though it doesn't have as much effect in a game where people are dying and respawning so fast and again some characters don't even notice a difference to what they can do.
160-180% - Reinhardt has big sweeping hammer swings that can hit multiple heros with little aim, and can lethally charge fairly often which is why he's the absolute slowest, easy for significantly faster heros like Bastion to zip in and kill between swings. Winston's multi-target is the jump pack, on 4 second cooldown and Reinhart-like sweeping blows when ulting.


And the actual settings besides speed.
-Cooldown for non-specified abilities is 10%.
-None of the abilities that don't matter like self-repair or lucio's ult are disabled, because they provide no benefit.
-Unless specified, default settings.
-Ult charge percentages operate on the assumption that health has been reduced to 20% to prevent bulky heros from surving punches with damage reduction skills or armor. Less than that means everyone who has one constantly complains that their barriers are about to break.
-Damage is of course set to 500% done and taken; base melee damage is 30. The only thing that won't kill in one hit is a glancing hit from Winston's jump pack. (Which is good, he should have to basically land on his targets to kill them with it.)
-Game balance/map switch: After game. Return to menu: Never.
-Hero respawn rate, 50%. Capture/cart/score speed, 75%. Start: Immediately.
-Hero limits, 2 per team. Too many of some characters like Rein or Mercy are not fun to fight against when stacked too high and it reduces people settling into a dominant strategy single hero spam.
-Hero settings: Disable Genji, McCree, Roadhog, Mei, Torb, Symmetra, Zarya, Zenyatta. (You can't disable their alt-fires)
Bastion: Disable primary fire, reconfigure, tank
Ana: Disable primary fire, grenade, sleep dart (does damage, therefore kills, therefore verboten)
Hanzo: Disable primary fire, scatter arrows (lol) dragonstrike and sonic arrows (they do regular arrow damage, sadface)
Reaper: Wraith cooldown 25% (to prevent him from staying invulnerable too frequently) disable primary and death blossom.
Mercy: Disable primary fire. 300% ult charge.
Lucio: Disable soundwave, primary fire. Base movement speed boost is 1.3x multiplier; At 260% settings his base is 200%, at 260%, ~185%.
Soldier 76: Disable primary fire, helix rockets and tactical visor (it re-enables primary fire while active.)
Widowmaker: Disable primary fire and venom mine, 500% ult charge. (Adjust down as needed; Even at 500% she doesn't get much use.)
Orisa: Disable primary fire, 30% cooldown on Halt.
Junkrat: Disable pimary fire, concussion mine and rip tire, 500% cooldown on steel trap.
D.va: Disable primary fire, boost (Way too controllable; way too easy to kill everyone with), Self-Destruct if you don't want to try it, and Defense Matrix 500% uptime/cooldown. (For as little as you're likely to use it unless you're deliberately counter-picking Orisa/Pharah)
Pharah: Disable primary fire and barrage. Jump jets at 40%. Hover jets reduced to ~40% as well, enough she has to land and come within punching range. Concussion rockets at 35%.
Tracer: Blink at 30%. Disable primary fire and pulse bomb.
Sombra: Disable primary fire. Hack, Translocator and Stealth all at 40%. If you don't like the hacking aspect, disable it and EMP and boost her speed a tier.
Reinhardt: The reason why you can't just disable primary fire for all heros. :V Disable Fire Strike and Earth Shatter. Charge at 40-60% cooldown, tweak as appropriate, but too low and it becomes dominant strategy to spam it.
Winston: Disable primary fire. Jump Pack, 60% cooldown. Primal Rage, 200%.


Bonus: Theoretical settings I would add for the rest of the cast if they didn't have alt-fire, all of which would probably change with playtesting;
Genji - Deflect on, swift strike on moderate cooldown similar to charge, 250% ult charge rate. 140-160% speed. Likely that swift strike would be removed in exchange for amping up his ult and bumping him up to rein/winston speed.
McCree - Roll on. I wish Flashbang did no damage. Up in the 260-280% with the other almost-no-abilities guys.
Mei - Ice Wall, MAYBE Cryo. 220-240 if no, 200-220 if yes.
Torb - When all you have is a hammer (which swings faster than the average melee), you get to go 220-240% speed but with a 500% ult charge. 240-260 if you still can't set his gun and hammer separately.
Roadhog - I want an option for no-damage hooks so badly. As is, he gets Bastioned at 280-300% with no useful tricks.
Zarya - Self-barrier on a long cooldown, Projected Barrier on a modest one, 220-240%; unless melee damage doesn't affect her bubbles, in which case, another useless set of skills, bastion speed.
Symmetra would have the teleporter with a high ult rate charge. 240-260% speed with the other team-boosting types. Probably the one I'd want ot add the most.
Zenyatta - Fast-charging Tranquility for self-immunity and additional movement speed, which doesn't do much, so probably in the Hanzo/Ana/Reaper speed tier.

We're fast approaching "isn't it funny that I lied to you" day. Some especially egregious wannabe pranksters like to set up their """""jokes""""" a day or so early. Be prepared for the dozen "I'm leaving FA. LOL JUST KIDDING!" journals, fakeout thumbnails and whatnot.

(I am on record for finding April 1'st stuff to generally be incredibly fucking stupid and a """""holiday""""" I'd be happy to put in the fucking ground any year now.)

Surprise. I've been posting updates on Derpibooru but didn't remember my password for here so couldn't be assed.

Sunday night, went in to the ER for stuff. Had a lodged gallstone apparently. Gotta stay in the hospital.
Monday, got an MRI (Well, MRCP) and all kinds of fun fluids pumped into me since I was NPO (Nothing Prescribed Orally I assume)
Tuesday got an endoscopic removal of the lodged stone (they knocked me out, ran a tube down my throat, stomach, into the upper intestine, used a hot wire to cauterize-cut the opening wider, ran the stuff into the bile duct, couldn't get the stone out even with the widening, crushed it, swept out the duct. Super easy, woke up feeling totally fine. Only sucky bit was getting an anti-inflammation suppository beforehand.
Wednesday, laproscopic removal of the gallbladder. It was challenging, but since I've lost as much weight as I have they managed. Three incisions, biggest one through my navel, plus a JP drain tube run out through the side. Woke up feeling like I had my ass beat down. Ow ow ow. Allowed clear liquids.
Thursday, trying to recover. JP drain is cola looking. Walked a little bit.
Friday, mostly recovered. Walked a bunch, started getting all the gas they pumped into me for the laproscopy out. Drain is regular blood color and less. Darker colored again in the evening but not that much stuff.
Saturday, Feeling mostly fine. Can get in and out of the bed without excessive pain. Not on painkillers anymore, nothing's really bad enough to need them, though they did send me home with some just in case. Doctor took out the JP drain (which felt super disturbing, eeeugh.) despite being a little concerned about the color.

So yeah. That's how my week's been. At least I'm past all this, assuming that nothing goes wrong and I recover fine, aside from two months of not being able to lift anything and never being able to eat fatty foods again without getting diarrhea. Just as well, I was developing fatty liver issues, and I really don't want to end up with liver psoriasis when I'm 40.

Another frustrating round of "Hey I can't tell you what to do or how to cope with this. You're still high risk, lose another 25% of your body mass first unless you're too much of a wimp to handle the pain. How much risk is additional risk? No one's ever done a study or research to show, because there's really no point. I'm not a cardiologist so I can't say one way or another if your chest pains are related or not. So yeah bye, feel free to call and schedule a surgery if you pussy out and can't handle it anymore." And because I am a surgery-fearing wimp I allowed him to talk me down from considering surgery. Again. Basically all I got out of it was a reminder to start actually *exercising* on top of the diet so I can shed the problematic pounds. Oh, and some condescending remarks about how the computer is a 'complete waste of time'.

Feeling mostly better right now, so after calling my family doctor and them saying "hey man you're technically on medicaid so you're stuck with this doctor you know nothing about and have never been to and who gave you the phone run-around last time you tried to schedule an appointment with them" but hey at least I presumably definitely have the right number to call if I decide to get a second opinion.

Gallbladder's being colicky again. Like the title says, somehow something under your liver can give you chest tension/discomfort/IDEK how to describe it. Its an unpleasant sensation that sits right on top of where your ribs come together that leaves you mentally exhausted after coping with it for hours at a time because even when you know what's causing it, it still kind of feels like you're sort of dying. Just, like, a little concentration of physical anxiety. It's settled down from where it was earlier today while I was at work, but it's still likely going to be another rough night. (Last night I set my alarm for 12 hours after I went to bed. I have no idea how long it took me to fall asleep, but I know I kept waking up, adjusting myself and trying to fall back unconscious, and did that until my alarm went off.)

Moved up my followup doctor's appointment to valentines day (ASAP) and am anticipating the answer is going to be along the lines of "You've handled it as far as you can with diet, now we've gotta deal with it surgically." Eeeeeeeuuugh. I want it to be over but I'm still powerfully afeared of being cut open, even with laparoscopic surgery. I worry that I'm going to have complications. That I'll be in that 10% or so that develops chronic diarrhea or whatnot from it. (I'm already in the minority as a guy dealing with it) That I'll have more serious complications, like my coworker who had gallstones that had already started to pass grow in her ducts and cause an obstruction that needed to be stinted to remove it even after she had it out. That I'll roll a natural 1 and be in that faction of people who have bad reactions to sedation; Its surgery. There's always the chance that I could die. So, not to be morbid or anything, but if you don't hear anything from me for a couple months. :X Here's hoping that those 40 pounds I've lost so far help avoid the risk factors.

And of course there's the financial worries. I'm still presumably covered under my state medicaid (Healthy Indiana Plan) though I just had to refile to update my pay and whatnot (since it's a percentage of your earnings, it'll go up, but will probably still be less than $30 a month, it's an amazing plan) and if I'm rejected for whatever reason (If it somehow gets gutted by all the political bullshittery going on) then... yeah. Fingers crossed it's not going to be something I'm going to be left desperately seeking help with.

I'm down to 317. :D When I got weighed at the ER I was 335, and I know at one point I was at least 350 at which point I stopped weighing myself. I actually for once feel like I can, in fact, actually lose weight. And the pain has stopped entirely. *takes a nice deep breath and sighs* I did end up with my dad patting me on the shoulder and noticing the cyst I've had near my shoulderblade for a couple years now so I can't keep ignoring it, but hopefully I can just get it officially diagnosed with "yeah that's just a benign thing, we don't have to do anything" whenever I get around to that because when I got the one in my wrist drained holy fucking shit that was the most miserably painful experience of my life and ingrained a hatred of needles into me.

I continue to learn how to cook. My dad showed me how to make some sweet lemon chicken. Coated in lemon pepper, oil seared on cast iron, deglazed and steamed with lemon juice and wine, it is ludicrously tender and lemony and delicious and is reasonable in how fatty it is; maybe ~8 grams with the tasty-ass gravy. I've also figured out how to properly do scrambled egg whites (more heat, no watering it down). If you have any tasty-ass recipes for stuff like non-breaded chicken, ham, and other low-fat meats, I'm eager.

Good news? I mean, I'm keeping my gallbladder at the moment. Scheduled for an ultrasound to see if there's anything else wrong besides gallstones because I reflexively giggle and squirm when poked in the stomach for some reason. Dunno why they can't just put their hand on my stomach, let me relax, THEN poke.

Bad news? The main reason is that I'm still too overweight and I can literally no longer medically afford to be a fatty. Having a 45 BMI means that there's too much risk of complications for them to operate unless they have to. Granted this is a doctor interview in the modern medical world, so I have no idea if that means I'm 5x as likely or just 20% more likely because either way, risk assessment insurance type stuff means that whatever it is, they'd rather just tell me to shape up and deal with the pain of stones. (And I guess keep eating my new lowfat diet and, you know, pray that my stones shrink and I don't end up with a duct obstruction or something...)

Because I have nothing to do but sit around literally all day at the computer and wait until my exam on thursday. I woke up, thankfully, with my gallstones/gallbladder having settled down enough to where they generally don't hurt at all and only hurt a bit when I inhale all the way or move around too much. My main problem now is trying to stay fed. Because gallstones are caused by eating too much fat, I'm basically dieting right now, and as always when dieting I am fuuuuuuuucked because I hate the taste of literally 80-some percent of everything, and there's only so long I can sit here eating tiny oranges, celery and drinking strawberry v8. My sugar consumption has gone up considerably, only really offset by having completely sworn off pop/soda/coke/whatever you want to call it entirely. Hopefully I can get my issues taken care of before I become diabetic on top of everything else. The only way I'm going to recover from this is losing even more weight. I used to be over 400 to the point where I'd stopped checking because it was getting depressing; when I got weighed when I checked into the ER, I'm already down to 335. I'm hoping my weight loss doesn't become too drastic because right now I kind of feel like I might actually be starving myself.