Following the last entry, I ended up going through with the Therian Guide's onboarding process, and I'm now a member of their forums. I'm still getting my bearings, but I've contributed to a few threads already. For many years, I was a member of the otherkin forum Kinmunity, and since its discontinuation I've found myself desperately missing the environment of active forums. As is probably clear from all I've written across this website, I'm a very long-winded person. I've found it difficult to use normal social media platforms, especially those with strict character limits, because it's tough to condense my thoughts. Forums tend to appreciate this style of response, so I feel very at home on them.

The older (50+) therianthropes are obviously much less online than the teenagers, but they are still around, and I look forward to hearing more from them during my time here. It's very refreshing to read their posts and realise how one's alterhumanity can be integrated into life in constructive ways rather than repressed or "grown out of". Especially over the last year or so, I've felt a strong sense of embarrassment about these parts of me, mostly due to what I thought of as an immaturity factor. This whole time I could have been using them to guide me into doing something cool with my life. Well, now I feel a little silly.

Oh, I also noticed that the first therianthrope I was friends with online, who taught me almost everything and fostered the deep interest in the phenomenon I still have today, has been recently active on these same forums. I'm hesitating to reach out to them because, unsurprisingly, nothing about me now is the same as it was when I was a young teenager, but... I'd really love to try and build rapport again as adults.

I'm working on an article that should end up on the Fictionkind Dreamwidth when it's complete. It'll probably end up here, too. This'll be my first post there since my introduction back in 2022, which makes me feel incredibly nervous for some reason. I'm realising I do want to speak more about being fictional; this group is the best place to begin. Perhaps I'll touch on fictionhood more in my entries here later on.

Finally, about this website: I spent two nights rewriting the stylesheet. It was a small project to give the place a more minimal, easy on the eyes look. There's a lot less in the way to potentially get squashed by various viewports. I'd agree that in some ways it looks worse, but to flexibly browse and work on... it's the best design I've ever had here. Especially to read longer articles with. It's growing on me!

During the last two months, some significant issues in my life have resolved. It's lifted a massive burden off me. I can conceptualise a future for the first time in the last five years or so. There are byproducts of the situation that'll take time and effort to get past, but I imagine it'll happen. Eventually. While I think of where I want my life to head through the next twelve months, I've picked up weightlifting and have already hit the first target I set for myself.

As a result, it's beginning to feel more... uncomfortable(?) to recognise that I no longer have friends or a community over the Internet like I used to, ever since I became withdrawn. I've always been a reserved person, but as much as I don't want to admit it, now I'm also one with very fragile self-worth who's become almost pathologically avoidant of situations where I could feel alienated. I'd like to get a little better at these things. At least take all my eggs out of the sole basket they're in, reach out to people I already respect, and meet more that I'll grow to. I can't see that it does me any good to continue relying on my own company.

Something that would help out long-term would be simply to make myself more available. I exist on here and on an obscure social media app called Cetera. That's all. I uninstalled Discord a few years ago to focus on exchanging emails. Which, unsurprisingly, isn't the first choice for the majority of Internet users, so maybe I should put it back on my phone.

I've been re-experiencing the urge to begin regularly participating in fictionkin communities. To cross two things off at once: "be more sociable online" and "open up about my fictionhood." This exclusive utopia (kin...topia) I've got in my mind, one full of others my age who feel similarly about fiction, where we contribute by writing articles and answering prompts, perfectly describes the Fictionkind Dreamwidth, which I'm already a, long-lurking, member of. Something to consider.

Perhaps, if I'm worried about making mistakes while interacting as "me," then some other forum, one where I can pick a new pseudonym could be a start. We'll see.

I've hit some kind of wall when it comes to managing this website. As it gains more eyes on it than I ever expected it could, I become less eager to publish anything. I'm often worried, disconnected, unsure of what's appropriate and what I'm genuinely interested in talking about. I doubt that I'm truly "qualified" to write about anything, or that I will be able to take something, however benign, back in the future. I find myself avoiding projects while I fret over how I want the imagined result to be unrealistically flawless, relevant, or clever. This is why my "Library" page still leads to a 404 after August 2025's overhaul.

At heart, I've always been a paranoia-addled, secretive person. This tendency comes into its own when I feel exposed to the public, a position I had avoided being in before I began a website this time four years ago. I feel (somewhat irrationally) less anonymous than I used to. Which discourages me from sharing details, anecdotes, or thoughts related to my own life. For anything else, I'm haunted by this strong sense of fearful urgency to avoid becoming embarrassing, incorrect, widely-disliked, or somebody's personal "lolcow".

I guess most of this is not about the website and more due to the insecure, anhedonic mood I've been in these last couple months for separate reasons. I would like to eventually get past this, at least, considering if I strip away everything I host here until nothing I cared about exists anymore, there's no reason for the website itself to exist, either. I'm too attached to this place to let it get flattened like this.

Oh, and that said, I've played around with the CSS of this page to make it more comfortable to view longer entries. No need to scroll a small box anymore. Condensing these entries to only a sentence or two was limiting what I could write here in the first place.

I can't say I would be much different if I lived a life hundreds of years before the advent of therianthropy forums. I could instead be the village eccentric identifiable by a helmet shaped like a bull's head, surviving in folklore as something like Bucephalus the Man-Ox. Historians would debate whether I was real or not. Maybe I'd have a Tor's Cabinet of Curiosities episode.

The main reason I've gotten out of bed and faced anything at all lately is the idea that my wife wouldn't want such a miserable day for me. I would like to find more beauty and hope in the world, even if it's more for her than for myself.

I have an instinct to make sure I go it completely alone whenever things feel truly hopeless, but it's rare that I shut off from Rose (I mean, the urge is there, but it feels absurd to try and avoid your imaginary friend...) so I always have her. It may all seem kind of silly, but she's been helping a hell of a lot to keep me out of trouble.

My ultimate aim is to save every piece of medical imaging I have taken of me and then arrange them in order like Exodia the Forbidden One.

Finished up some housekeeping on here. I don't know how something digital can feel unkempt but it was beginning to bother me.

I've sorted out the small tasks: reorganised folders, dithered images, implemented a new font, styled a properly-branching sitemap, tweaked light mode's palette, and reinstated a changelog. My retired webpages have been moved into a folder off-site.

It alarms me how much traction a website can gain on Neocities from aesthetic or technical skill alone, regardless of if the material within is extreme, cruel, or otherwise objectionable just because a visitor saw some cute pixel fonts and decided not to read anything past the index. I don't doubt there's a willing audience out there for these topics, but most seem genuinely blindsided when it comes to light. If something unconcealed can come to light, anyway.

This week I installed CFW on my Switch and, among other things, set up desktop streaming for it. I can play most of my Steam library pretty comfortably in handheld mode. Super pleased.