- he/him
Well I don't do my iconic victory dance for nothin'...
What can you do when your five senses are not enough?
An all-female group of various scientific specialists enter an anomalous zone known as Area X and try to uncover its mysteries. You will be stuck in the head of the biologist, someone who is utterly disconnected from humanity, married to her work, and seemingly always dissociating. You're reading her stream-of-consciousness journal, one that's she's tried to keep objective and scientific, but you'll soon find that objectivity can not exist in the subjective and interpretable world of Area X.
Annihilation is a surrealist horror, full of dread and apprehension. It's easy to be confused, but easier to open your mind and accept all that is witnessed. Those seeking a puzzle where every piece slides into place at the end will be frustrated. This isn't a place of logic, this is the place you go when you finally fall asleep after you take too much melatonin while feverish.
To me the best part of this novel is the prose. Never before have I seen such accurate stream-of-consciousness writing. That is just how it is inside my brain to be honest. In my mind I see the biologist as autistic like myself, even if that wasn't intentional. I hope my writing style could be something as strong as this someday.
soooo i saw that tyranobuilder is on saleeeee and so i bought it and now im converting some old writing into a test-vn thatll play for like idk 5 minutes just because i realized itd be a good exercise thatd involve multiple expressions, a cutscene graphic, an "item acquired" style png moment, and some screen and sound effects.
i had downloaded ren'py but i was too intimidated to start scripting... and i know its the easy way out, but i think the one with no scripting at all is great for me.
the back end looks like this
and then when i test run it, it looks like this
obvs literally everything here is a placeholder but yeah
like i said this thing right now is just gonna be a 5-minute 1-scene tester. the characters in this are still are still getting their story worked out, so my next project might be my zombie furry story? The one where you could have a route to romance this guy.
Thought it'd be nice to do some regular blogging on here. I had been viewing my Bluesky as my personal sharing website, but man, only being able to post bite-sized tweets sucks when I'm such a wordy guy.
Recently
Last week I had a very fun saturday! I detailed it in the description of one of my art posts so I won't repeat it, but I went to an Oddities Expo and then to a local furbowl and I had a lot of fun and got some goodies.
Very Recently
What have I been up to this week? Well, more of the usual, but viewing it differently in my head. The drive to work is scary. I'm still new to having my own license and being able to drive all by myself. It's terrifying! There's this one intersection that's especially scary, and had been literally keeping me awake earlier in the week.
To make a long story short, there's no protected left turns. And I need to take a left turn. And it is very busy. So it is scary. I have had bad experiences there. But the last two times I drove it, it went smoothly, so slowly I'm forcing my brain to remember that only rarely is it bad. During my last work day of the week, I even rolled my windows down so I could feel the movement of the car.
Also I downloaded American Truck Simulator and beamNG.drive in order to exposure therapy myself to driving more in a safe controlled environment and now I'm just playing it for fun.
The Weather
On my way home from work yesterday, I thought to myself it'd be nice to visit the local creek that day as I drove past it. There was still so much daylight left. When I pulled into the parking lot for the apartment, it turned out my partner had texted me the same idea! And so, we went out.
The weather was great! I mostly just sat and watched because I was tired from working. Somehow, my partner spotted some... vertebrae! Just sitting there! I have not shared this fact here, but I am into vulture culture. So I gathered the bones and now am in the process of cleaning them. I will post them when they're ready.
Picture Time
While at the creek I also took picture of a dragon art doll that I got at Anthrocon 2023. One and two.
As you can tell by those links, I have a Flickr now! Very fun! This is THE best place to see all of my photography, even my photography persona on here doesn't have as many photos.
The Moderator Symbol In The Room
Yes, a new change from my last journal just a week ago. I am a site moderator now! It feels good to be able to contribute to this site in a different way after loving it for so long! Just wanted to touch on that and communicate it because well it sure is a new change that my followers wouldn't know until they saw my next post!
If you need to contact me specifically for moderation reasons, I've added a comment block to my profile and you may DM arnanak on Discord.
Name
I've been pondering names to give myself as my current name is... Too gender neutral! I wish to pass and be stealth as a trans man, and that means having a passable basic legal name. I've been thinking "Chase" and by Been Thinking I mean my friends just mentioned it in VC an hour ago as a joke because they were like "You literally look like a guy literally everyone knew from high school who lives in the middle of Ohio named Ryan. Maybe you could be a Chase." and I was like. Hmm Don't mind if I do! Because I already was into a C name, and also Chase is just like my beloved blorbo Chase Hunter from Echo VN...
Closing
I've left this journal open for a few hours waiting to finish it off but as per usual I can't think of anything so that's that then.
Today Mark Merlino / Sy Sable passed away. You can still help his partners and loved ones by donating to the GoFundMe made earlier during his hospitalization.
I thought it would be nice to celebrate his life by stating some of his accomplishments within the furry fandom and American anime community.
In 1977, Mark was one of the founding members of the Cartoon/Fantasy organization. Which was a club dedicated to the viewing and discussion of many works including Japanese animation. The C/FO was one of the few places people could watch anime in this pre-internet time period. The mascot of the C/FO is a furry character designed by Mark, named Fanta.
Fanta is a member of an original species created by Mark in 1971, known as a Skiltaire. They are a species of intelligent aliens that resemble colorful weasels with antennae.
The furry fandom started in sci-fi conventions, where fans of anthropomorphic art and "funny animal" comics found each other and held room parties. Eventually Mark and his partner Rod O'Riley co-founded their own convention for furries, known as Confurence. This was the very first furry convention and it ran from 1989 to 2003.
Mark also owned and ran a "furry house" known as The Prancing Skiltaire. A furry house is a private home that may house several members of the fandom, or could be a place that hosts furry events and parties. The Prancing Skiltaire was both, all household members being furries who held monthly house parties among other events for the fandom. The monthly parties stopped only recently due to Mark's medical condition.
Mark has also contributed much to the fandom through writing and speaking. He has written fiction and non-fiction work for fandom zines and other projects. He has spoken at many panels throughout the years, discussing things such as funny animal comics and the furry fandom's history.
To get a deep dive into the furry fandom's origins and receive context on some of the feats listed here, please watch The Fandom: A Furry Documentary.
For even more information, click on the Wikifur links or browse the Confurence website's archive.
The information in this journal was intended to be brief and surface-level, where you can explore deeper in the links if you so desire. This isn't even all of the stuff Mark has done for the fandom in his life, there's much more that I haven't touched on. Please correct me if any of my information isn't correct.
I've made a persona for my fursuit "business" right over here -> https://sheezy.art/arnanak/persona/fuzzyforecast
I've been on a long break from selling things online, from reselling on Ebay to making and selling original stuff, but I'm returning to it. I've been having fun working on Ambergris and of course more money means achieving goals a lot faster such as top surgery and eventually a car because sharing a car won't work forever.
I actually had a lot of fun today because of making that persona! I went back and gathered up and archived ALL the fursuit stuff I've made in the past 5-6 years I've been doing this stuff. That includes photos of projects I sold off and haven't seen photos of in 4 years, the only surviving photos being privated on an account I had to hunt to find the info to. Feels really good to have it all saved and archived now. I've even made a list to know what order to post everything in.
I also had fun taking a bunch of pictures of the parts that never got the spotlight before, such as Jem's wings and the white-scaled faux-scale mail arms I wore to Anthrocon 2022. I haven't worn parts and taken photos of myself in a long time. I've modeled for my BF's fursuit parts quite frequently.
The one tail I have listed on The Dealers Den is pretty old, been laying around unsold for several months now. I've progressed quite a lot on Ambergris and think I might move on to a new fursuit project soon, maybe paws or a long tail? Maybe even a partial fursuit or something...
I also want to get into making fursuit sprays, but with more complex and unique scents. I want to strike a niche where I use fancy sounding scents and layer things together, but I do NOT want it to seem fancy at all. Nothing more expensive, nothing that puts other fursuit sprays down and implying that my products are higher quality just because they smell like cologne instead of mango.
Sometimes I just need a break from things to return with fresh... Emotions? I was feeling burnt out about my fursuit work for awhile as it was my only income and I felt so pressured into it. I stopped for a long time after getting depressed, then started my job. And now that I have more flexibility and comfort, I'm ready to return to working again I'd say.
I'd like to post journals fairly often. Feels good to share my art thoughts in a longer format. Fancier than Bluesky, but a lot easier than writing a blog post on my website where I need to manually add paragraph tags and crap. I've lost my focus so I can't really end this journal gracefully. Sorry if you saw this twice, I posted this on said fursuit persona first on accident.