arnanak: oriental shorthair furry taking a mirror selfie with the phone covering his face (Default)
its been hard to blog lately as i cut back entirely on personal stuff. because then if im not getting up to professional stuff either, what do i talk about if not oversharing my relationships lmao? well after a month it seems ive gathered enough info to chirp on a bit.

im going to it! everything is lined up, confirmed, paid for, etc. got my real id in, the whole nine yards. now theres just simple prep to do like, what am i bringing in my carry on bag vs whats staying with the general luggage, lol. i mean obviously the fursuits are going into luggage for the flight. got air tags for mine and my partners so we can track 'em down in a worst case scenario. even after two last minute roommate cancellations we were able to get things back in order and once again have a full room of people ready to go.

i have prepared some stuff for funsies. my partners mother got us some fanny packs and one matches my kangaroo fursuit, Ambergris, perfectly. finally, i can have a pouch despite being a partial fursuiter! i diy'd some pins to represent the species since people mistake him for a cat a lot.
a blue kangaroo fursuit head laying on a gray weighted blanket.  beneath it is an  aqua fanny pack with three red pins on  them, each one a letter that spells out "roo" as in "kangaroo"

I'll put more pins on it last minute as the rest of my favorite pins are on my work vest.

So yes I'll primarily be partial fursuiting with Ambergris here! I am however also working on another fursuit and will bring a part of that to FWA as well. My feline truesona, Nate. well, just his paws. im almost done with them! i'll be able to finish them up in a day or two. one needs its sewing finished and both need their markings trimmed up!

two brown tabby cat fursuit paws. one is right side out, and the other is inside out and still partially unsewn.

I figured these will be nice to have and wear when I'm not full out fursuiting, as a cute accessory to represent myself, etc.

i have some big plans for personal projects! im of course going to make a blog rundown of what happens, but im also going to get footage to maake some cute themed gifsets as well as using some clips to make an amv of all my summer events! probably using this song because why the hell not, everyone else is using it to make amvs of their summer plans!

im getting really hyped. the scariest thing is the flight! but im gonna take a lot of anxiety medicine beforehand. i might even take some melatonin. anything to reduce my brain functioning so i can be nervous! but once im there itll be epic. im really looking forward to the sexual side of things especially. anthrocon is such a clean con, meanwhile fwa has motherfucking bad dragon as a vendor!

i also got my covid booster a few days ago to keep me nice and protected during fwa. holy shit, it FUCKED ME UP! i lost several days to recovering from that! seriously, heavy fullbody pain and a pounding headache if i stood up. i only got out of bed to take a hot bath and read.then back to bed. and slept 11 hours despite being in bed the entire time. thankfully feeling much better now, just injection site soreness and general unease but ah well.

not much else i can think to chirp about, especially when its about time to get ready for work!

arnanak: oriental shorthair furry taking a mirror selfie with the phone covering his face (Default)
howdy. back again with some bloggin' and postin'

learning to cook has been going good. been making soups, dips, and more fish cakes. a "friend" has offered to help teach me to cook, which will be a lovely time.

CATWYRM
im thinking of transitioning catwyrm from neocities to nekoweb, exclusively because neocities suppresses nsfw sites. when neocities itself added the 18+ button and stated it would be hidden from the main search but added to a special search function, i was happy! happy for it to be openly acknowledged and given its own space! ....but there is no special seperate nsfw search. there hasnt been for years. i dont think its happening...

this means all sites marked as 18+ are suppressed entirely with no way to be discovered unless directly linked to. indefinitely.

meanwhile, nekoweb allows nsfw content entirely and openly so long as it is clearly marked as such and the landing page of a site is SFW.

this didnt bother me for a long time, but lately the frustration at being suppressed has eaten at me. especially because catwyrm is 99% 
nonsexual! i just talk about sex sometimes! god forbid!

mento health
had a weird moment in therapy today where my therapist gently asked if i was ready to start lessening how often i see her. and here i was thinking i needed to see her more! i feel like i have so much childhood trauma to work through, i guess? she pointed out some people work better leaving old wounds alone and moving on. i dunno, we're gonna poke at it a bit next time. i guess in her defense, i do seem to be fine on my own... every time i come in im like "yeah, i had this crisis situation, but i handled it myself, and it was easier than it was the last time i had a similar issue. my depression and anxiety are both lessening as time goes on and i gather new coping mechanisms and adjust my mindset. even the agoraphobia and car anxiety that were ruining my life earlier are more like, background thoughts? and now im just fine with the fact that im gonna be driving 8 total hours to another city to talk to a gender surgeon?"

shes probably like damn my work here is done this dude is fine. and maybe i am? i dont know! i think i need back on antidepressants before i say im fine tho

gender
yes, speaking of which, my consultation for top surgery is in exactly one week. i will be driving 4 hours to another city, having the consult, then i will be driving back home the same day. i have a list of questions made up, and im going to be printing them out soon so i can take notes and not forget any information. you are free to look at my list of questions here.

well, see ya. i will be working in the background to do the nekoweb swap. later today that same friend mentioned earlier coming over. if we are lucky, the rain will not be so bad and we will get to go to the creek. as long as we arent sopping wet im fine with however muddy it is out there!

solution

Feb. 12th, 2025 01:48 pm
arnanak: oriental shorthair furry taking a mirror selfie with the phone covering his face (Default)
ok fine the blog is back on neocities. instead of some automatic stuff, its just... i post on dreamwidth, then copy/paste the HTML it automatically generates into an html file for the neocities. good old fashioned manual force. that said, at this current moment none of the images are visible. this is because my file hosting service, filegarden, is down. it seems theyre working on a fix though, so i will actually be leaving it as is. the alt text will fill in missing context until visuals are back.
arnanak: oriental shorthair furry taking a mirror selfie with the phone covering his face (damian)
Well that lasted a bit longer than expected. The free RSS viewers are all just, nonfunctional? And at this point it's like. Um. I'll just... Link the actual Dreamwidth now instead of doing all this embed shit. LMAO ANYWAYS

Another day, another blog. My site has had a big update to its general appearance and layout! Old version is privately archived on a flashdrive. And probably publicly archived on the wayback machine, I know the sites had a few snapshots on there from myself and others.

Food

So, I'm getting back into the business of cooking better food more often. The other day I made fish cakes. I boiled potatos as I baked fish then mashed them together and put in green onions, ginger, all sorts of stuff, then fried it. Definitely need more ginger next time so I can really taste it, and I should double the recipe so I can freeze plenty for later.
A plate of fish cakes next  to a photo of much better looking fish  cakes from the recipe book

Speaking of which, I’m thinking about getting a metal bento box to hold my work lunches. I… Admit my faults, and one fault is that I usually buy my snacks at work instead of packing them. I need to block out time for packing! And when I do pack, I don't wanna put that shit in any plastic like I do now, god damn! We make fun of boomers for the lead poisoning stare, just wait til gen beta is calling us plasticbrains.


Relationships
As you can see I'm going back to the subheading format I had in the lost weekly blogs. The relationship subheading was always the most problematic and the one  that needed purged. I will be very careful with using it for now on. I will be as vague as possible while I blog about the life stuff.

TL;DR The polyam stuff is... Polyamoring... Never had I expected that someone would approach and express interest in me. I thought I would have to be the one to initiate and pursue everything! It sure makes things feel weird, because I was/am the reluctant partner, but having people express interest in me is like oh! Oh I see. And how I feel is exactly how my partner feels. Polyamory truly is a "Holy shit, two cakes!" thing, isnt it?

a  black and white stick figure comic. the artist morosely brings their cake to a table, notices an intricate taller cake than their own, and says aw man that guys cake is way better than mine. in the next panel, the audience gleefully holds up eating utensils and shouts holy shit! two cakes!
I had a moment the other day. I went to my partner and a friend and was like "Guys, I had an epiphany! It just clicked in my head! I don't have to feel insecure or insignificant compared to anyone my partner sees! Even if the other person is 'better' than me in some way, I am still the best me that exists! I have so much to offer that is unique to myself such as my personality, humor, body, hobbies, worldview, politics, actions, etc! And, fuck it, I'm good enough for myself! I love you but I don't depend on you to define my worth!"

And to that they very supportively and sweetly told me that they're happy I discovered the concept of confidence.

Gender
Speaking of the polyam stuff, man, gender dysphoria sure is an extreme force lately. The usual you could expect. I'm thinking about getting a trans therapist to see weekly because man... The gender stuff is kinda bogging down my current therapy? I can't process and work through my past trauma when my present dysphoria is it's own new trauma each day. Guh. Anyways, gotta send another email to my future-surgeon to further hash out payment stuff ahead of time.

Also, I have been promoted to Admin in a FTM online forum. It's nice. The forum is full of kids so my job is entirely just cleaning out inappropriate stuff and banning bots n trolls. I don't do much beyond that. But it's nice. They deserve a safe environment to be in, even if I myself don't engage much because I'm an old fuck that has no idea what they're all on about.

C'est la vie!
arnanak: oriental shorthair furry taking a mirror selfie with the phone covering his face (Default)
February 1, 2025

Okay fine I did the Neocities embed thing, let's see how long this lasts. I have this weird thing where I'm extremely private and want to hide everything yet also want to overshare at all times. One day I'll get to the bottom of my various neurotic traits. But not today.

Though, I am making some progress on it.  The IFS workbook has been illuminating. I never realized how deeply repressed my emotions were until I tried to look at them directly and realized I couldn't.

Having someone come over tonight in a few hours so until then I'm just fooling around enjoying my day off. Last night I watched Dune: Part 2 with some online friends. I already watched all the Dune movies, of course, but this time I got to show other people! I'm also around 25% into the book Dune: Messiah. I think I need to go back and take some notes so I can keep track of stuff, though.

All this hanging out and movie watching... I want to make some write-up at some point about what it actually means to try to build community among friends. Like, yeah, we share a discord server, we go to the same monthly event. But what does it mean to push people together and try to foam a connection of interdependence? How do you do that without having to become the leader? Because I don't know fucking shit about all that! I've also become a moderator of an FTM forum, entirely to just clean up bot spam. But still, I try to engage a lot there and offer my advice as one of the older people there. (Yeah, yeah, 25 years old ain't old but I'm somehow the oldest out of all my real life friends and the oldest in online trans spaces because they're all tweens.) It's just like, god, what else is there? Aside from being helpful and trying to bond with others?

Ah, well, I'm spending too much time on this, later
arnanak: oriental shorthair furry taking a mirror selfie with the phone covering his face (Default)
January 29, 2025

A day off after a string of closing shifts, let's go.

Frankly, the day is already thrown off schedule by the fact that I have to overcome my phone anxiety several times in a row to call my representatives and urge them to fucking do something about the federal funding freeze. Of course, they won't. They're all republicans with a desperate desire to be reamed by every nazi they see. Not that democrats are any better, I think they lose on purpose because they get more donations by people desperate for them to win, then. But that's just infuriating, and I've been under enough stress lately as is. Endless rage isn't good for the heart.

Well, anyways.

I've been a boring adult lately. I'm finally at a point with my new job where I actually have leftover money from each paycheck, and so I'm learning more about savings and investment and shit for it. Only short term for now. I only wanted a new place to park my savings, as my normal banks saving account interest rate is literally like 0.002%.

Yesterday I made a high yield savings account with a 3.8% interest rate and put the savings money there. Keep it far away so I can't impulsively dip into it all while it at least generates *some* interest.

I've also started playing around with stocks again. I apparently left $12 in my Robinhood account so I've been fooling around with it. For example, I am currently up $0.13.

I was also thinking about T-bills but frankly that shit's confusing as fuck so I dunno.

In other news, I'm contemplating embedding this blog onto my Neocities. But the thing is, I am quite private... I feel apprehensive about more than 2 or 3 people reading this. But I'm sure Neocities inflates its viewer stats, and embedding would only bring it up to 5 viewers after all, but dang, still, y'know? Eh.

It's also time for me to lock the fuck in with my side business because now that I'm feeling recovered enough to dedicate time to, well,  anything beyond survival... Well, I should do it.
arnanak: oriental shorthair furry taking a mirror selfie with the phone covering his face (Default)
January 26, 2025
First off, hello, I've purged my old too-personal posts and archived them privately. I would like to return to blogging regularly, but with a much healthier relationship to it and without sharing too much of my business. Really, the problem was involving other people's business. So I'm gonna keep as much as I can isolated to my self.

I got an Internal Family Systems workbook while out shopping yesterday. I... Recently realized my trauma is significantly worse and deeper set that I had ever in my life anticipated. So part of this revelation is involving some self-help stuff on top of discussing more frequent and intensive therapy. Out of all the workbooks that I'd skimmed through while sitting on the floor there, the IFS stuff stuck with me the most and had the most relatable and notable content.

Cause like... It's already quite notable that I have multiple parts of myself all working together. I am not a system (a person with Dissociative Identity Disorder) clearly as none of these parts are deep enough to have their own thoughts or dialogues amongst each other, but instead it's just like... I don't know. You say one thing to me, I have three different responses in my head to process and generate a worded response with. Like how in Disco Elysium all of the skills give their interpretations and feedback and then you have to decide what to say next?

I'm hoping that even if this work does nothing for me, I will at least come out of it with a deeper understanding of myself and my complicated contradictory thoughts.

I am inspired in part to try this out by Luigi Mangione as looking through an archive of his Goodreads, one sees he tapped into a lot of different self-help books. I'm so used to the online "left" / Tumblrina sort of conditioning where you are expected to have a 100% understanding and deep support of the "media" you "consume" so being reminded that you're allowed to pick up books and check them out and come away with any sort of conclusion is... Well, it was something I needed to be reminded  that I could do.

I need to leave and go to work now. and I'm drinking a mango flavored Pepsi, hooray.

Update

Aug. 1st, 2024 11:31 am
arnanak: oriental shorthair furry taking a mirror selfie with the phone covering his face (damian)
August 01, 2024
My birthday was nice. I self-sabotaged but then made plans last minute. We also had some set-backs, ended up leaving for the mall an hour later than intended because a friend needed help with something, and that was bad because we were set to visit BF's grandma after the mall day and we'd already given her a time estimate which meant that was an hour less of birthday time, and then we got into perhaps 30 minutes of roadwork, and I have car-based anxiety mind you, so, it was a rough start and we postponed grandma time by an hour to compensate.

But then BF and I finally arrived at the mall and just walked around a bit. Well, first, we got sushi. I just got a california roll. One roll is the perfect size meal for me. I'm never stuffed, but I am full. I suppose the portions are perfect for keeping up the "eat until you're 80% full" idea.

I drank water while eating but afterwards we went to a coffee shop and got boba. We got iced matcha with blueberry bubbles to share. Then we explored the mall. We kinda just browsed around a few stores, but then stopped in Lush for a good while.

I'd seen that you get discounts if you bring in old plastic Lush containers to recycle, and I certainly had plenty of those, so I brought in all the ones I'd set aside for the occasion. I wasn't set on buying anything, but certainly on turning those in to be recycled. I browsed around a bit, sniffed plenty of things, then eventually found a section full of "knot wraps."

They were variously-sized square cloths meant to be used for... Anything you can think of. They're inspired by furoshiki, which are Japanese cloths used to wrap things to carry or for gifting. I browsed around a bit and found one that fit my aesthetic sensibilities and also was quite interesting. This one that I liked was a collab with Atelier Element Present, a Japanese art studio for artists and designers with Down Syndrome. I thought that was cool.

Photo of a large square cotton sheet with a design thats beige canvas with multicolor square brush strokes and stark brown and yellow lines cutting across horizontally

I hope it is not weird to say but I love an article that has a fun fact and story. I love having things to make a conversation out of. I feel like nowadays our items are all without souls so it's valuable to me for something to have slightly more intent and story behind them than simply "It is profitable to make this generic item of this solid generic color."

I deliberated a lot on getting it but then realized if I didn't like it... It's a limited edition Lush item that will never go bad. I can absolutely regift or resell this thang. Which re-assures me against buyer's regret. But, I am happy with it still some days later. It is pretty and it will be very useful to carry things and also, it's the perfect size to be a fursuit bandana as well. Also it was basically nothing after the recycling discount and stuff. Very agreeable to me.

After that we went to Barnes and Nobel and browsed the books. It's so aesthetically satisfying, that store. Everything's overpriced but still, isn't it all pretty though. Especially all the stationery and candles and mini-home decor. It's like I'm making a mental Pinterest board when I'm there.

But yeah I went in with the goal to buy Authority and I did just that. I saw the 10th anniversary covers for the rest of the Southern Reach Trilogy but I got the classic cover because I prefer it and it will match my copy of Annihilation. I cracked into it already, even though I typically don't read multiple books at once. I'm already in the middle of Jurassic Park but I couldn't help it.

Photograph of the muted yet colorful knot wrap folded up in my lap with the book Authority sitting on it. The book is solid yellow with black text and the cover art is of a rabbit sitting next to a smart phone, the artwork's thin lines being a shining holographic sapphire blue

And thus that was my day :) Yesterday for part two of my birthday, and as part of another friend's birthday hang-out, we watched Godzilla Minus One. I had just seen it, but I will ALWAYS rewatch Godzilla to see my friends' reactions to peak fiction. Another friend who couldn't make it told me that he'd like to marathon some older Godzilla flicks with me since he couldn't make it to this movie night, and now I am excited for that as well.

April 2025

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