I lost my dad to a heart attack. Thursday morning, on the 6th of July, 2023. It was right around the time the cats woke me up to feed them, and he was just across the hall from me. I had to borrow his car for work that day, but since he had been getting up later in the day, I thought I'd let him sleep. He had given me the key the night before. He's going to be buried at a national cemetery in the area, not far from where he was born.

I've been breaking down a lot, and I'm going to be home alone for about two weeks while my mom visits her family in Ohio. I think I may get some visits from extended family, though.

For those of you who watch me but aren't on Telegram, there's a reason why there's so few images in my gallery.

I have been having a very difficult time with all kinds of technical errors when trying to process payments to an artist for the second art piece I've tried to commission, spending more than two hours struggling to get the payment to go through. Due to some weird limits set by the site the artist uses to receive payments, I haven't been able to get the entire payment through to them.

There's also the issue of just not being at home to check to see if anyone is taking commissions, so I miss the openings every time.

All this frustration is building to the point that I'm seriously considering just giving up on it altogether.

Okay, so, while I know everyone watching my account for activity has already been told the gist of what's to know about what a xi'lahsi is, I've been wanting to create a reference document explaining about as much as I can about my character's species, such as biology, culture, and their world, but the thing is, it's easier to find a place to start if you know what questions need to be answered.

Basically, I'm requesting that folks ask me stuff about my character and hir species.

I got a new job working nights at a Kohler factory. It's a twelve hour shift, from 6pm to 6am, and I'm standing almost the entire time (except for breaks).

However, I don't work more than three consecutive nights. I work five nights this week, and two next week, then the pattern repeats. I also make $11/hr, which means I'll be able to get caught up on car and insurance payments.

Not only that, but that means I can set aside a little money here and there for a couple of reference sheets (which I hear aren't exactly cheap, but they're usually worth it).

So, hopefully in the near future I'll be getting separate ref sheets of both of my characters. Hopefully the chakat character, Oddball, is as cute as the folks on IRC think shi is.

So, I'd recently gotten some ideas, and I'm wanting to start writing again. I'm thinking of probably starting with an introduction to what a xi'lahsi is, and I'd like to do more than just show a single sketch (even though I do like said sketch). Kind of like the article "An Introduction to Chakats,"

So, really, I'd need to know what questions to answer, and I'm going to need to figure out what sort of order in which to put the various topics, as far as flow goes.

Also! I'm working on a chakat character, which, consequently, is part of how I wound up creating my species in the first place around ten or eleven years ago, but more on that later. So far, I decided to name hir Oddball, give hir a clouded leopard's pattern with a snow leopard's colors, and have hir be a bit of a goof, and maybe not have hir be an adult just yet. Or, maybe, if I actually write a story, have it take place when shi's in hir teens or early twenties. I'm open to suggestions for things like what shi would wear (if anything), and hair color and style. I'm thinking, for a chakat named Oddball, that a habit of dying hir hair weird colors would be apt, and maybe some interesting markings, but I don't want to go overboard with the markings.

I'm also considering, for hir back story, to have hir either be part of a family that runs an old, piece of crap cargo ship (and maybe call it the Rust Bucket), or have hir parents be in Star Fleet/Corps, and be on one of those ships that would end up taking family of some of the crew along. I'm wanting to keep everything regarding hir and hir back story to be able to fit in with the existing chakat universe canon nicely, but not necessarily be canon itself, especially since I'm intending to have hir be one of the first chakats to encounter a xi'lahsi face to face.

As far as my own species goes, I created it because of an inability (at the time) to think of anything that I felt was interesting enough for a chakat character, and I'd also been curious about scaly taurs, which I hadn't seen at that point. Originally I had their tech level be mid to late bronze age or early iron age, and later opted for some early steam technology, but now I'm thinking of maybe be the equivalent of Earth between the two world wars or even the middle of the Cold War, with only the earliest examples of unmanned spacecraft.

I'm open to suggestions, if anyone has any.