Hoo, it's been a hot minute, hasn't it? Both Halloween and Thanksgiving have come and gone, leaving only Christmas left to go before the world explodes at 11:59 on New Year's Eve.

Halloween was amazingly fun. Years past, I always struggled with good costumes before the lesson finally sank in this year-the best costumes are mixed and matched from the non-branded section of the halloween store. It might be obvious to everyone but me, but I would always look for something all in one- for example, last year I went as one of the WoW orcs, mainly because for some reason they were still selling the movie branded costumes at spirit halloween, and mostly because orcs are cute. Expectations totally mismatched reality, however-the latex mask had that horrible smell, and it was bent all out of shape, and the fake muscles they included in the bag basically amounted to a weirdly shaped pillow. Low point in halloween costumes.

BUT THIS YEAR. This year I learned. Step 1! Skip all branded merch. It's gonna be terrible and the true spirit of halloween will thank you for not letting capitalism win. Step 2! Get some kind of cloak or hooded robe. It'll come in handy for dungeons and dragons and also wearing around the house when it's cold but not too cold. Step 3! The mask. Go with hard shelled over latex 99% of the time. This year, we found some really cool geometric cultist masks that had that really cool rainbow-metal effect that you see a lot on kinves and sunglasses from the 90's. Those three steps will save you from dissapointment every time. Or just go as napoleon dynamite. It's the eternal costume that everyone will understand.

Honestly, I have a really bad habit of amping myself for halloween store trips and then getting let down three steps through the door when I go. It's the steady diet of TF stories where the fictional stock is a bunch of amulets, masks, cool looking rocks, etc... And then in real life you walk in and there's like, a whole wall of plastic knives with fake blood inside them.

Thanksgiving went great, too! I took a few big risks and half of them paid off and half of them failed spectacularly. The Good: I perfected my pumpkin pie recipe. It's ready to be written in pen and put in a reciipe box, it's that good. Pretty proud of that one. I chopped up crystallized ginger really fine and added it to my homemade whipped cream and it totally took it to a 10/10. The other good thing was the cranberry sauce. I mixed in strawberries this year, and that one simple changed turned a side into basically a dessert, if you put whipped cream on top. Really damn good. Now, the Bad: Turkey came out drier. Even with the herb butter rub under the skin, it needed gravy to bring it back to life. Next year, I'm sticking to what I know and I'm just gonna cut it up and cook the parts seperately again. I made cornbread dressing instead of traditional stuffing, and while it was good, it didn't land quite the same. I grew up on boxed stuffing, so I think I'll ditch the cornbread and go back to regular bread next year.

And now we're here! December in a few days, which means I'm allowed to put on christmas music again. I've actually got a lot-cassettes, records, and spotify- enough to make any man gag on festive cheer. This year since we're stuck inside, I'm gonna try and make a traditional gingerbread house with the boyfriend, but really tradtional-baking the gingerbread, making the icing, all that good stuff. If I knew how to add pictured to this thing and not break it I'd do that, but..yknow. I'm lazy.>

Speaking of this blog, I've been thinking about maybe moving over to Dreamwidth. I know I made a big fuss about this place, and if I move I'll go from 1 occasional viewer to none, but...I'm a bad coder and I can't make this place a pleasant thing to look at. Readability on this blog is..challenging. I don't know yet. It's still a thought.

Story wise, not much progress has been made. I'm thinking I should just start a brand new story, and by finishing that, I'll be able to go back and finish at least one of the other two. But hey, thanks for checkin' in!

oh and p.s. that book on crowley is a /slog/ man, I don't think I'm finishing it.

It's a thin line between complaining and commiserating. You run the risk of being The Guy that's always complaining about everything, you stop getting invited to stuff, your house burns down, you move to a cave in the woods. It's no good. I've been trying to focus on positives more lately, for that exact reason. I -think- that whenever I complain it's relatable, but you never know. I make what I think is a witty observation, I imagine the seinfeld bass in the background, then google ads about caves start appearing before my youtube videos...

Anyways, the point here is that I'm breaking from the live laugh love policy to declare, for everyone, that august is one of the worst months and good riddance, fuck off, see you next year. When I was a kid, we went back to school in august. For americans, there's no holidays in august. august is the month of 115 degree weather. august seduced my wife and stole my dog. You'll notice a lot of capitalization errors in this post. That's because august doesn't deserve capitals. august took something cool sounding (dog days of summer? Dogs are awesome!) and made it shitty. My A/C broke twice in august. august is the britta of months.

Which makes it so awesome that September is here! Halloween stuff has already started creeping back into the grocery stores around here. There's a ton of reasons why I like Halloween and September/October in general, but the biggest two relevant to this blog is 1) furries generally loosen up for once and write really awesome, freaky TF stories, which I'm hella into, and 2) seasonal halloween stores start popping up, which means costume hunting to my little gearhead heart's content.

Now, I don't know about furries in general, but for TF fans there's one question/forum thread/discord topic that reigns supreme. Which is, "How did you get into TF?" For me, the answer is horror movies/books. It's informed a lot of my kinks in general, and definitely influenced what I like about TF content. I haven't written anything horror-y yet, and honestly, I'm kinda scared to try. It's hard to pull off right. Since I'm writing more this year, maybe I'll do something for halloween. There's room for goofy horror, that might make for an easier start.

As it stands right now, I have two stories in the pipeline, both stalled because of writer's block. The first is MtF smut, I don't have any delusions about it being more than a means to an end. The second I've affectionately given a working title of "pretentious," and if it ever comes out, it's gonna be a long one. I'm having a hard time cutting corners. For example,the main character starts in one town and takes a carriage ride to another, where the story takes places over the course of a year or longer. How much time do I want to spend writing the first town? Right now it feels way too short, it's maybe a page. I have a problem with rushing, I think. Dialogue I can handle, it's the worldbuilding and the...immersiveness that will be the end of me. I exist in a weird spot where I know I couldn't pull off a story if it wasn't in the fandom, but at the same time, I want to get better. Good enough to self-publish something that doesn't involve furries at all, so when I do write furry stuff, -I- know it's good. I've got this nagging thought that people only like my stuff becuase it's part of a tiny niche. Practice makes perfect, I guess! Gotta be bad before I get good.

But, the good thing is, I have time. Time to sit and think and write and let it percolate for a bit.

It's a bit weird having a blog. There's the part of your brain that knows it's going to get maybe 5 views in a two week period, if you're lucky. But there's the other part of your brain, the part that sees a lottery ticket as This Will Be The One, and fills your head with visions of people flocking to your blog, filling the comments with conversations that you started, emailing you things "that would make a good post, you know!" and other equally fantastic nonsense. I don't know which camp I'm in yet. I suspect the latter. This could very easily just be a discord server, but I was hesitant to make that for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, I wouldn't want to start one and have maybe one guy join. I've got less than 50 followers on fa (not a complaint) and I'm sure that most of them have better things to do than join a discord for someone that's only posted three stories, of which one was like...five years ago.

Secondly, I like having this little space of my own. I know neocities is probably more prone to failure than a big VC-backed platform like discord, but at least here they give me the option to download my whole site. So in case the servers shut down, I can spend actual money on a web host and just..pop back up. Not to mention all the creepy algorthim data mining activity tracking all the modern social media platforms do.

So I decided to settle here. Hopefully it lasts awhile. We'll see where it goes. I'll probably talk a lot about cooking. I know I'll get naive about traveling and talk about other countries with such starry eyes that you'll probably think I'm being sarcastic. Maybe I'll post ideas here that never made it into stories. We'll see. Maybe I should just stop being an old man and make that discord server after all.

well I don't know how to format a blog so this is gonna how it's gonna look until I get my shit together. Right now, the whole thing is bare bones, which is okay, beacuase all its meant to be is a functional backup if (or honestly, when) FA goes down for a week or more in the future. And really, I'm all for a critical examination of web 2.0 culture and fully support jumping back over that walled garden and attempting to bring back a little part of what made the internet so cool in the first place.