Never interacted with him: I'm too small-fry for that. All I can say is that what he showed of his struggle during the past month was horrendous.

Also, just to be safe, I'll reiterate my other art links here. I don't want to go anywhere else right now, but just in case something happens:

https://inkbunny.net/WingCommanderRudoji

https://www.weasyl.com/~rudojilape

https://www.deviantart.com/rudojilape

https://cohost.org/LavenderRattata

https://twitter.com/LavenderRattata.....Znjzg&s=09

That being said, I'm fairly certain IB is the only place I can host ALL my artwork, as I don't know how much of my fetish art can go anywhere else, and Twitter isn't very archive-friendly.

https://x.com/KevinCow/status/18191.....4Pnhw&s=19

I know I've been invited by some of you into Discord servers. And I've always politely accepted these invitations. But I'll be quite honest, my social anxieties make it impossible for me to be in these kind of environments online.

Worked myself to sore as hell. Stuck at work and extra twenty minutes because I couldn't find the fault in the alarm system. Fucking starving. And then right before bed, find out an artist I really liked blocked me out of the blue.

Cool day bro.

"And I saw that one of his heads was, as it were, wounded to death, and his deadly wound was healed. And all the world wondered after the beast."

Revelations 13:3 KJV

It was staged.

Edit 7/14: yeah okay I don't think it was faked anymore. Still pretty shitty though because there's a lot of room for stuff to go downhill from here.

Sometimes I'm scared.

I wake up after a sour dream feeling very scared of what little future I have left. A future that I sometimes fear will have me either in an political internment camp, or dead by summary execution. Because I do openly queer things.

I know some of you will say this is overreacting. I tend to believe that people throughout history and in places besides the United States of America would understand better.

As an Absurdist, I don't necessarily fear physical death. I'm supposed to avoid it as much as possible so I can continue to observe the Absurd unfold in the lives of everyone and myself.

What I fear more than queer concentration camps or lynch mobs, is the philosophical suicide I may have to commit in order to survive.

I'm white. Blonde hair, blue eyes, six-foot-two and usually present male because I work too much to dress up otherwise and fear losing my job because I non-binary status would become too inconvenient. I could pass as the status quo. I do it more often than I would like to, and that already kills me inside so much every day.

I don't know if I'd want to live in a world where I could no longer even attempt to feel like how I want to when I can. Where I'd be pretending to love my country, the Judeo-Christian god YHWH, and moral absolutism. From my current point in time, I think death would be a more comfortable outcome.

But I also know I'm a coward. I couldn't let that happen. I'll mask. I'll find a beard and never see my girlfriends again. I'll learn to want to just grill for God's sake! I'm not strong enough right now to stand up for myself.
...

...And then I go about my day and these feelings subside. I forget this flavor of anxiety and move on. I've had this anxiety for a long time, but this is the first time I've really been able to put it down in text.

I know I'm potentially hyperbolizing. I get I'm being a bit... much... with all this. But it's been a creeping feeling for a long time.

And though I don't put my real name here, I still have a decent amount of furry porn linked to my accounts if someone were to come snooping for anything indecent...

My FA profile name, and all the pseudo-military art I used to post.

I miss the thrill of thrift store hopping, finding neat cheap little things. Thrifting now, everything is so expensive because of DIYers and resellers, and there's so little in the places to begin with (might be a local issue).

Used gaming is one of the big ones. It's the logical conclusion to the industry going digital and getting more locked down in how it treats classics. I'm just glad I got a lot of my collecting, close to all of it, without paying collector's prices. But with all the neat little stores gone, there's not even a place I feel comfortable hanging out anymore.

This was a problem in 2011, and it's just as bad post-Pandemic. But there's simply no place to just be outside of the home anymore. Or maybe it's more that there's no place to be that doesn't have a paywall or a membership fee (in time and/or money). Everything has to be choreographed and controlled when you're in a public space; it has to have a grindset meaning nowadays. I have to be doing something meaningful, when I've already finished my 40 hours this week doing that.

Little rant.

If I were to do refs for my main characters for once, what would anyone want to know about them in particular? This is stuff beyond the normal reference stuff. Information out of left field is welcome.

I don't think I've ever really talked about how I identify myself, nor how I tend to feel in social interactions with others.

I've come to the conclusion I'm my life that I don't like to identify with any gender or sexuality. I'm definitely not masculine enough by society's standards, and I'm certainly not very feminine. Sexually, I'm most attracted to personalities and people's choices of expressions than any biological aspects or attractiveness. But I don't know if pansexual or omnisexual work for that feeling, so I just don't bother trying to label it.

Apparently, because I don't identify as either, I'm by definition transgender. Personally, I've never felt a lot of the more complicated feelings that other trans folks have felt. In that way, I tend to avoid saying that I'm trans just out of politeness.

However, I'm also lazy. I tend to default to male things. I'm pretty timid about outward expression; I don't like to be the center of attention, and dressing femme might make that happen.

In my work environment, I just let it go to he/him and go by my legal given name. I'd honestly feel very uncomfortable if my coworkers called me Lavvy. I know how most of the Silent Majority and Status Quo feel about such freedoms of expression, and work is uncomfortable enough as it is. My girlfriend, who transitioned several years back, is leagues braver than myself in this regard.

I could ask people that only know me as my supervisor to use they/them. But a recent debate I had with my store manager about the plurality of they/them leads me to think that would only cause tension.

In my artistic environments, like here, I notice I still get a lot of he/him. And it's true that I really don't mind this too much... To a point. I've wondered about this: how much masculinity do I embody to others? I've always secretly hoped I could naturally slip into a they/them position without demanding it, just by being vague and androgynous in my posting habits.

But then I noticed how often I attract gay men and transfems. And this makes sense, because we would both have similar upbringings and interests developed when we attempted to blend in with male-oriented activities. And since I don't ask for a specific pronoun, I get put in the male category.

And truly, I don't necessarily mind. Though you would get a lot of kudos from me if you were to just think of me as something neither male or female.

I'd elaborate on this more, but my thumb is getting tired. Please engage with me on this so I can think of more things to say about myself. I have a hard time talking about myself without jumping off points.

I think I might have talked about this before, but it's a thought that has kind of come creeping back into my mind.

How does one get passionate about something when they're 33 years old and just sorta floated through life without any real interests that they'd sacrifice their health and security for?

I'd like to know, or at least know what's wrong with me for not doing that.

To get out of bed today.

As of this month, I'll have had my main art tool for a decade.

I originally purchased my Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 2014 Edition as a replacement for a dead laptop. It wasn't long until I discovered the efficiency and flexibility of the onboard S-Pen, mostly thanks to my girlfriend  se7en77 having the phone version and showing me all the good stuff it could do.

I've been using the same S-Pen, with a couple dozen of replacement nibs and another couple dozen in reserve. Also only just last year replaced the battery, a feat I never want to repeat. Still using an outdated version of AutoDesk Sketchbook that I can't let go of.

That being said, I've also been losing a lot of drive to keep on doing artwork. It's been a rough couple of months for me, and I don't see things getting much better in the way of inspiration and creativity.

A phrase has been repeating in my mind, intrusively. That my work might not be very talented, but people just want to see more of the themes and topics I explore. That I should continue to add to the zeitgeist of the furry and kink art fandoms. That folks don't care if my art is as good or worth their time as someone else's, but that they just want more art to digest.

I don't know if I want to keep providing it if that's the only way I can justify it existing.

https://twitter.com/Se7en7789/statu.....KDvkg&s=19

https://www.furaffinity.net/user/se7en77/

She's open to commissions as I type this. If you want some art, now's the time ;3

I get the whole suicide-rate-gets-higher thing.

Bah Humbug.

Since I have a minute of downtime after all my rushing around at work, I thought I'd ask something to anyone that might read this. It's a question I might feel like asking multiple times now and again, and maybe hear something different.

How does someone actually become passionate about something? I'll be honest, in all the things I've done in my life, whether I have shared those activities with others or not, not once have I ever felt anything remotely close to "passion" or "devotion". I've been curious, and even interrogative, but never really felt any true drive or unconditional motivation for anything I've ever done.

Visual art? I like the way some things look and felt like mimicking those things sometimes. Music? I did it in school and since I can read standard notation, why not do it sometimes? Gaming? It's cheap[er than heroin] and easily accessible dopamine.

Seriously, this has been bugging me for years. I've Googled "how to find passions" and "where does passion come from" so many times, I have no clue what to do.

Been really down since November. Lots of changes where I work and being in charge of a skeleton crew in retail during the holidays is really messing with me.

Will catch up on missed posts soon, and have some things to post myself later.

I have invasive thoughts that tend to haunt me, and they do most often when I don't have a chance to express them. Fortunately today, I have the opportunity to share at least one of them.

I was looking at a Xweet this morning about the shows on that anti-Disney streaming service BentKey. Against my better judgement, I looked through their catologue, and saw some very cute designs and concepts. Unfortunately, these shows and presentations are all hosted on a platform funded and produced by people that would like to see people like me either dead or disappeared.

Something I don't talk about much: I'm a sucker for cute things. I have a tendency to personify cute things in my mind and give them almost overly detailed private lives in my head whenever I'm exposed to such things. This and my interests in animals and plants is something that also feeds into my misantropy when it comes to people. Kind of why I have a hard time meeting new people and starting conversations.

Anyway, I've been driven crazy with the ideas of creating cute content, and studying how to make my ideas come to life better. The only thing I worry about is when it comes to my current portfolio.

I'm a smut artist. I make kink pieces for a veriety of interests. Anything I make that isn't that has a very good chance of routing back to such artwork, and I have a feeling that that will just spoil whatever I make that isn't kink.

In the end, this is also wwhat keeps me from writing any of the stories for my characters. I'm a very slow writer, so it's hard enough that I have to work against that roadblock. But thinking about how, in the long run, my work will always fall back to my kink art when it comes to my screennames is kind of a buzzkill.

This is something that slows down my artwork from time to time. Just wanted to get that off my chest.

Almost done with a trade and a gift I've been working on for a bit too long.

Job's been rough. Been getting back onto a Fruit Punch Rockstar every day to stay personable and coherent.

https://youtu.be/RENuxBJy7Gw?si=SQcql1JuI1UY0ufD

As an Oregonian that likes to walk without a goal as a way to decompress, this sorta stuff gets to me.

All the Twitter Furry Commission Art Bots I get sending me messages on a daily basis. Reminding me that I don't know how to social media and that I'm wasting my time trying.

Or the constant paint-can-icon accounts watching me because they're too embarrassed to use a main account because I'm kinky fucking freak. Oh oh! Or those not-so-blank accounts that fish for Watchers and Watch, like, a thousand unrelated users an hour. Those kind of people make me feel the shittiest.

I feel like, after all these years, I've really shot myself in the foot with my artwork and online presence.

This account, as well as any of my other art social media, are my only accounts. I've never bothered to separate my SFW/NSFW. And I think that this has become a huge mistake.

Every time I get inspired to create something that's not lewd/kink, I remember that it's not going to be seen by anyone, and that I just enjoy creating lewd content.

That being said, I suppose if I did want to branch out and, say, write a narrative or do world-building artwork, I could start anew under a new name and disconnect. But then I know it won't be seen or engaged with.

I'm also scared my quality is garbage and I would never know. I could post trash and everyone would like it because it's kinky and they can fap to it.

This has me in a bit of a mess today. Too much time to think and not enough to do anything about it. Am I basically stuck being a lewd artist nobody can take seriously?

So I get back from EFNW23. I'm pumped, I'm feeling elated and ready to get back into creating new stuff. Hell, I think I'm ready to start writing; setting character stories into stone for the first time ever.

And then comes the wave of shit karma. The backlash to the good that came from that wonderful weekend.

A good three-quarters of my store decides to quit. I work hardware retail, so a lot of the job is good store-ops knowledge, a decent portion is general product knowledge, and focused product knowledge is encouraged. I know, for example, plant propagation and lawn care. I'm terrible with plumbing.

The folks that are quitting are doing it for varied reasons, but there is a sprinkling of internal politics that I won't go into that's driving some of it. Worst yet, we can barely hire anyone new that's willing to work full-time, let alone stay longer than a few months.

What my main concern is ending up in the same position I was years ago at Fry's that I wanted to avoid so badly. I don't want to end up being considered competent and invaluable just because I'm willing to show up and do said job.

I don't have a college degree, nor any drive to do any kind of career. Honestly, I just want to live and live simply. Something that society considers lazy. So finding another job just means the same cycle I'm in now.

Hopefully, I can get more money out of this, though because of my default competence I'll be expected to take on responsibilities that will be soul-crushing. This is retail after all.

All this has me so down.

Gonna be there. I know most of y'all don't find this relevant, but just in case anyone does, there ya go ;3

I removed my political/theological stances from my profile. Apparently I'm just scaring people away and it's not attracting like-minded people anyway.

Is it the whole bondage/BDSM thing that does that? Am I in the wrong fetish category or am I in the wrong mindset?