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The internet may be becoming increasingly threatened and completely controlled by large, privatized corporations, but it’s still ours:

Not just mine, not just yours, ours.

It’s a place to be weird, yourself, not nobody. It’s a place for you to be whatever you want, wherever you want. Whether in elaborately constructed animal character, or a silly JPEG. It’s a place where communities can gather, and cultures can connect,

It may seem like a hedge maze controlled by only 30 or so groups, but it does have exits. Exits that lead to wonderful places. And when one place crumbles, a new one can form just as easily from someone else. And the cycle continues when the same happens, much like life itself.

Running a spot on the Internet may not be the easiest task, both mentally, with all the security measures, updates, and constant maintenance that needs to be done. And financially, acquiring the right hardware to host, paying out monthly fees for hosting an infrastructure, finding the “right” internet, as well as registering and renewing domains. But when you have the ability to reach a large amount of people, it can feel breathtaking to see. Especially without the beauty filters of engagement bait.

Even as robots patrol the tubes, fibers, and radio, snagging whatever data they can for themselves. And then flood them back with hastily crafted sludge. But amount of what they do can ever completely drown out those that make it possible.

The right connections make a large difference, and while big tech may have warped the masses idea of the web with large, free playgrounds that are hard to compete against. It can still be taken back. It’s not easy, but you don’t have to take back all of it.

I have to think about the kids ’90s guide to the internet, and the amount of naivety it shows. Well it still shows a lot of massive corporations in groups highlighted, the ’90s internet still looks like it had a vibe to it. That was fresh, and new. I can’t say for sure, because I didn’t use it at the time, but that’s at least how it looks.

Now that I’ve gotten on the internet, I’d rather be on my computer than doing just about anything!

It’s strange to think, because today, this quote sounds like something of addiction. But I’m willing to wager in the ’90s, when the internet was still new, The internet truly felt like somewhere that was enjoyable to spend hours on.

And in many cases it still is. Though I sometimes wonder if slow downloads and having your connection cut off by the phone would be more enjoyable than trudging through hours of crud.

The fact that the internet has made communities visible, ones that have been seen as taboo (and still might be) or otherwise nonsensical can strive without as much fear is astounding. Groups that a normal person would not bother to think of or necessarily tolerate like Otherkin and Plurals can have a community where they can gather. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to be free from those wanting to disrupt it. But the internet also isn’t necessarily a place that everything can be changed on a whim on it at once. No one has to agree to the changes others put up. And as they said, the competition is always just a click away.

The boom in the exchange of ideas has lead to those with a fear of change to cower at everything new coming in. Everything seems alien to them because it’s not what they had when they were young. .

So overall, if you’re on the internet (which you probably are), keep being weird, keep being rad, keep being kind, and if you can, do look into making your own place on it. Whether that’s through picking up the essentials of HTML and CSS, or using an off the shelf solution like WordPress. And if you can’t do that, at the very least, branch yourself out on the internet. Because you never know what’s going to happen on this crazy world.

I’ve got to admit, Flipnote is a pretty cool application. Well, it’s not one that I actively grew up using. Or at the very least, one that I actively engaged with for art, I’ve still watched a ton of Flipnotes over the years. And recently, I’ve started enjoying a lot of the major Flipnote creators like raxdflipnote and Zane Little. Perhaps it’s just because of how distracted I am anymore. But they’re still a very good distraction, regardless.

Animation is pretty hard, and doing it on a very small screen seems even harder. Especially doing it in an application that lacks a lot of the big-time animation features that most professional grade apps have. Such as Keyframes, Shape Tweens, among a lot of other things that I probably missed when I observed Adobe anime in a middle school STEM class.

Some of my favorites so far

Let’s Go Gambling!!

I’m Gonna Eat This Glass!!

Stay Single

This was probably just filler so that I could feel a sense of justification migrating my blog. But I will call it content regardless.

I have successfully migrated my blog over to a self hosted WordPress install. Hopefully I will be able to get everything working correctly

So these past couple of months have really been the prime time for me to finally get ahold of a lot of the things that I have always wanted. I managed to get a robotic vaccum, a nice set of speakers, and, of todays topic, a 3D printer.

The specific model I got isn’t particuarly exciting. It’s a random Chinese brand called Flashforge, and the model is the Flashforge Adventurer 5M. I got it at the beginning of February, and it arrived while I was sick. But I immediately pulled the strength that I had to haul it downstairs and set it up.

During the process, however, I accidentally managed to break the hinge on the display. So, after a few weeks of waiting for a replacement and fiddling with the display ribbon more to get a minimal amount of picture to set up a few things, the printer had been fully completed.

3D printers are interesting because they’re not exactly like regular printers. Unlike a regular printer, a 3D printer isn’t always successful, and it’s pretty rare that you would need to print out something again with a regular printer (barring running out of ink, paper jams, etc.)

But the entire 3D printing process is a very intricate one, one that involves precision and is codependent on everything being exactly right. Of course, if you maintain your printer well, you don’t have to worry as much about it messing up. But even then, not everything is going to come out exactly the way you want it. From what I know, a 3D printer prints by following the instructions it is given. These instructions simply command the printer to extrude filament that is hot enough to bend into shape, but cool enough that it quickly hardens so that another layer can be placed on top of it. Repeat this process hundreds of times, and eventually, you end up with a finished product.

As you might guess, just like building a house by laying all the bricks together, this is a delicate process, and a desired result isn’t always garunteed to happen on the first try. Problems I’ve already ran into include:

• The filament gets jammed. Leading to nothing being printed as the nozzle moves around
• The build is knocked over, causing the printer to try and lay filament on air (that falls to the plate, creating a mess
• The printer extrudes too much filament at once. Resulting in a giant mess of filament stuck together at the nozzle
• The build gets stuck to the nozzle. Leaving an unfinished build with a giant goopy substance attached to it.

Many of these problems can be fixed with some common troubleshooting I picked up in my A+ certification, and often just involve running some functions from the printer itself. But it definately doesn’t detract from the dissappointment of a failed model and all it’s wasted filament.

Why I wanted a 3D Printer

In addition to thinking that they were cool, I wanted to be able to print a lot of the things that I had been considering ordering off of Amazon, but didn’t really want to because it just didn’t seem worth it to spend 10-30$ over and over again on random things made out of plastic. Especially compared to making a one time purchase, plus multiple purchases of filament that could could make a lot of those things. Coupled with a little DIY, I could probably save a lot of money and make something that looks just as good, and more customized as well.

At least right now, I can do that, provided there’s an STL file available. In terms of creating models, I’m only a little bit good with Blender, and FreeCAD feels like it’s way out of my territory for something I could learn. A lot of the stuff behind it feels like something that an engineer would do (I wanted to be a software engineer at one point, but only because I thought that the title “engineer” sounded really nice and important).

Instead of going off that though. I think I would rather just infodump a lot of different information about the 3D printing pipeline so you can get an idea of it and how interesting it can be.

How the 3D printing process works

The printing process starts with the model you want to use. This would probably be in the format of a Stereolithography (STL ) file. There’s a few other formats as well, but this one is the most common and compatible out there.

Whether you made this model, or downloaded it off the internet, it’s first stop is the Slicer. For me, this one is OrcaSlicer, an open source application based on PrusaSlicer and BambuStudio.

The slicer is where the model is inspected, adjusted, checked if it’s physically possible to print as shown (and make adjustments, such as adding supports, if needed) and converted into instructions that the printer can use to adjust it’s settings and know what paths it should take for extruding filament. It converts the model into a programming language called G-code (which was first made in 1963, according to Wikipedia). It kind of looks like Assembly with code that looks like this:

;WIPE_START
G1 F3000
G1 X-21.395 Y-9.05
;WIPE_END
G1 X-14.638 Y-5.5 Z.6 F30000
G1 X.099 Y2.242 Z.6
G1 Z.2
G1 E.8 F2100

Basically, a lot of function names and commands that instruct specific adjustments the printer should make to it positioning and settings. The G1 command specifically tells the printer it should move the print head in a straight line.

There are other commands as well, each of which look something like the ones shown but with a different number and letter. And tell the printer a variety of things from:

• Adjusting the fan speed, plate level, and extruder temperature
• Starting and stopping certain components
• Turning and moving the print head in different directions

Overall though, it’s not particuarly important to know this if all you want to do is print. But it’s good to know so you can understand whats happening, especially if you want to start playing with more advanced, open source firmware like Klipper that rely more on you setting up different macros and having much more fine grain control of your printer.

The point is, the slicer converts the model into G-code, and gives you a preview of what the model might look like when it’s printed. From there, you can either export the G-code file, place it onto a flash drive, insert it into the printer, and print it from the on screen menu. Or in my case, directly send the gcode file to the internal storage of the printer and automatically start printing.

If it helps any, you can think of the slicer as essentially being the Print Dialog Box you get whenever you press Control/Command + P. It has a ton of options, but chances are, depending on what you are doing, you may only need to press a single option, or none at all. It just so happens that printing a 3D model to a 3D printer isn’t something that one does everyday to justify including a slicer in every app.

What can I Print?

The thing that I have printed the most, with 3 of them. Is #3DBenchy, which is a popular little tugboat model that serves a calibration model of sorts. It’s symmetrical design with lots of overhangs and caves, coupled with it’s ability to be printed in place (sliced without changing any settings), it’s quick print time (a little over half an hour for me) as well as how cute it looks, makes it a popular model for testing if your printer is working correctly. In fact, as of right now, it’s actually one of the most downloaded models on Thingiverse, and recently entered the public domain as well.

Conclusion

These printers, while a little cumbersome to work with, and involving some things that are a little bit beyond my scope of knowledge. Are ultimately very interesting to work with. As long as you make sure to adjust your expectations, and know what it is that they can and cannot do. I would recommend getting one if you have the ability to.

So, a while ago, there was this huge uproar over this company called Sonos, which is a manufacturer of wireless speakers, mainly because of a new version of their app that they deployed,

While the whole idea of this uproar was essentially to stay away from the speakers, it drew me in closer to the idea for some reason.

Basically, to talk about what makes Sonos speakers unique, there’s a little bit of background. In addition to being relatively high quality speakers (disclaimer: I’m not an audiophile, nor am I affiliated with Sonos), Sonos speakers are essentially within their own ecosystem that consists of speakers capable of having their audio playback grouped, ungrouped, and transferred between speakers. If this sounds familiar to what AirPlay (also available on speakers) or what select Google Cast devices can do, that’s probably because Sonos was the one to popularize the concepts behind it.

What separates Sonos from these devices however, is that unlike these services. Sonos speakers play audio directly from a streaming source. Which can be configured to either be a popular streaming service, or a local SMB library of your own music, and this is mostly the only thing they do. In addition, these speakers aren’t just individual endpoints to play to, multiple of the same speaker can be setup to work as if it was a stereo system. Essentially, these speakers let you create an entire home audio system without the need for excessive wiring or drilling through your home.

The app itself functions essentially as an audio remote, as well as the main place to manage the settings for your speakers and quickly setup new ones.

Despite needing to create an account for speaker setup and music streaming linking, the app has no cloud connection to it unlike most IoT apps. Meaning that you need to be connected to the same network as the speakers in order to control them and adjust their settings. However, other users can also download and join an existing system to their app, as well as start playing and controlling audio without needing to sign in or create an additional account (signing in is needed in order to adjust settings, however)

One of the major benefits Sonos puts off about their app is the fact audio can continue playing, even while there’s a phone call. Since the app doesn’t rely on any system media players and simply streams the audio directly to the speaker. I’ve personally found the app a lot nicer for playing streaming radio stations (something I can get through Apple Music as well as their own in-house, Ad supported, radio service. The latter I only really use for the Ad-free white noise and rain stations)

While I’ve never seen the original app, I can tell that the new app is likely built on some cross platform framework, and, while not as drastic as some users have complained (much of the work at Sonos had gone into damage control over the app as newer products were pushed aside, so it’s likely many of the greater issues had been worked out), I have had a few hiccups here and there with the mobile apps.

Other features

Music playback aside, the app lets you set up quite a few other features as well. For example, alarms can be setup within the app. Which basically just play a predetermined song at a certain time. There’s also sleep timers that can be setup as well, which basically work like most sleep timers on other platforms where the song fades out after a set amount of time.

The speakers themselves also work with Apple AirPlay, allowing Apple devices to cast audio to them, or asking a HomePod to play audio in a specific room. And can be setup to be controlled from Alexa, as well as Apple and Google Home. The former being a little more limited, and can only actually control playback from speakers currently using AirPlay.

One of the other features that can be setup is Trueplay, which as an equalizer that is setup either using an iphone held upside down and waved around the room, or by using a speakers built in microphones to measure the acoustics of a room, and adapt the audio to it. Whether or not you hear any enhancements will depend on the shape and size of your room, as well as the method of calibration you use. I personally found the former to sound a lot better.

The aforementioned microphones also can double up for speech recognition with a voice assistant. With Alexa being the main supported one through the Alexa built-in program. While I don’t actively use Alexa in my home. Alexa on the Sonos speaker is better suited as being a satellite to a home already using an Amazon Echo as opposed to being the main set of devices due to the inability for a Sonos speaker to function as a Matter controller for neither Wi-Fi nor Thread.

In addition to Alexa, Sonos also maintains their own in-house assistant as well called Sonos voice control. It mainly just functions as a companion to the main app, letting you perform some of the most common functions of it with our the need to actually open it. But other than that and a few other minor things, that’s mostly all it does.

API

In my opinion, one of the biggest saving graces to Sonos over the app fiasco was their well crafted local API. While they do have a separate cloud based API for more cloud based control (such as creating content providers the speakers can stream from, or 3rd party web apps), there’s a more local API as well relying on open standards like UPnP. While it’s not as documented as their cloud API’s, it’s still great that the speakers even have such a local API. While it won’t really save anyone if the company shuts its doors and all the cloud functions go offline. It still gives more ways for other apps to latch on.

One of these apps is on my list of favorites… Home Assistant. Sonos is actually a featured integration within HA. And the experience really shows as speakers are automatically discovered and added, and also update in real time. Including a couple of HACS cards that can even show you the exact playback time on a speaker.

Ironically, while writing this. The Sonos API documentation introduction has actually given me a better understanding of what Sonos products do compared to their actual marketing pages.

Verdicts

Personally, I would recommend Sonos to anyone with an Apple device, or anyone who is looking for something more streamlined for music compared to the bells and whistles of most smart speakers.

Compared to the competition of other smart speakers. The speakers can seem much more limited at a much higher cost. But overall, Sonos is really a product category that isn’t really in that of smart speakers Like Echo or HomePod. It’s not just a regular Bluetooth speaker (though some do have that functionality), but being an assistant isn’t it’s goal either.

I have found Sonos speakers much better for playing audio in part thanks to their well designed (if not well coded) app. And it feels like a device I actually want to play music to (and feel a twinge of guilt constantly that I’m not making the most of the one sitting on my desk aside from falling asleep to white noise). While AirPlay suggestions on iPhone make it a little easier to find a device to play music to, casting from any device can sometimes be frustrating (especially during the process of disconnecting). Considering the way you get most smart speakers to play music is by asking for a specific song, which can be wishing upon a star sometimes as you get the same song, but from a different album, or another song entirely. If all you are wanting to do at a given moment is just play something around the house, the app feels really well designed for that, even if it requires a few extra seconds of grabbing your phone. And the fact I can share that ability with my family, without the need for them to go through the process of signing up, was a really great design choice.

My only real concerns about Sonos have been a few class action lawsuits around the company and some general uncertainty around the amount of security updates products get, but other than that. They do work exceptionally well, and I wish I had the ability to acquire more of the speakers for my home.

The Spring 2025 Semester has been quite a bit seething for me. Mainly because I feel like I’ve been helpless. There’s been a ton more group work to do, and a lot of assignments that have forced me to bend over backwards in uncomfortable ways that have resulted in me needing to do more work than I need to . While this could be a fear of change taking over. It’s mainly just that when you hear the excuse “well you better get used to it because you’ll have to be doing this all the time at work”, at least at work, you get paid for your trouble, which gives a valid incentive. When a college tuition is thousands of dollars for hundreds of hours of work, you expect that you should just be able to submit things without much hassle.

I should probably start out by actually describing the way I work:

The way I work involves 85% preparation, and 15% work. I spend more of my time getting setup and ready than I do actually working. As such, I hate having to set everything up again.

When you’re doing online learning, that means most of the time, software is going to have to be your lifeline to doing anything. And these are the apps that have been giving me the most trouble:

Discord

One of my biggest frustrations this semester has been Discord. Discord isn’t (as far as I can tell) an officially supported University application. But that hasn’t stopped the students and professors from relying on it.

Discord is a frustrating app that goes beyond its status as nagware. It’s a fundamentally flawed app with serious usability issues, and while quite a few of it’s issues have been solved over the years (including the addition of an official server rules onboarding process, easier role selection). The process of engaging with a server still feels more intimidating and cumbersome, especially when you have a goal in mind, than it should be.

My second biggest gripe about Discord has, and always will be its blatant usability issues, especially surrounding moderation and server management. Discords power for collaboration can only be obtained by someone willing to expend hours configuring it correctly, and there are plenty of servers (especially for smaller, more casual conversation ones) that simply do not need 6 dozen channels of everything from #general, #memes, #cooking, #vacation-photos, etc. And simply try to police the flow of conversation without actually questioning if there is much of a need to do so.

While bigger, more prepared servers may not have these problems, and may even have a genuine need for creating. For an average person looking to set up a small group. Discords server functions lull them into a false sense of superiority that they have more than everything they need, but in reality, have actually very little need for it.

It’s choices to eschew a channel selection list (similar to what Slack offers, or in most IRC clients through /list) in favor of simply muting channels and toggling “hide muted channels” means needing to wade through the entire list to find every channel I will never visit and turn it off.

One of my professors has made a server that includes channels for literally every single one of his classes. Resulting in an extremely long laundry list of channels to wade through. His rationale for us creating yet another account (and also stating that the web app will not suffice for the class despite only ever needing to sign in to the server for an initial set of points for the class) is simply because of wanting to bypass Slacks message retention (despite having plenty of other professors who live with it).

This alone puts me at a disadvantage, because while the University may have access to plenty of other, more accessible, less obnoxious options. Many will simply stick with what the professor recommends because they simply don’t care.

I won’t blame people too much for not liking email. It can be frustrating to learn not only the process of working in email threads, but email just isn’t acceptable for long term collaboration among most people. The Linux kernel may be able to develop through one. But that’s also because of the use of an external tool like Git.

The biggest gripe that’s been impacting me about Discord however, has been it’s absolute lack of account flexibility that likely stems from the fact that Discord wasn’t really built to ever be a productivity platform to begin with.

I have two Discord accounts, a personal one with my online alias, and a more limited account using my real identity (to comply with my professors demands) with it set with a ton of privacy restrictions and notes on the account to discourage others from contacting me there as much as possible. I even noticed 40 or so days after that my professor requested to start a PM with me on the platform (having toggled off direct messages and turning on message requests). Perhaps it could backfire one day, but at this point, I don’t care.

My main gripe about all this however, is how difficult it is to switch accounts on Discord. It’s flat out not possible without logging out on mobile, and even on desktop, while you can still be logged into multiple accounts, only one session can be active at a time. This makes it incredibly difficult for me to balance classwork and life.

It essentially feels like a punishment for being more conscious about online privacy and not treating everything like Facebook where you use your real life identity for everything.

Google Workspace

Google Workspace is a little more tolerable, but I mostly dislike the vision of Google. The vision of all of your work being done in a web browser (especially Google Chrome), coupled with a heavily abstracted “cloud” that hides away most of the system. My mother recently had to change jobs as well to a new one that uses Google Workspace after having used Microsoft Office for 20 years, and the change for her has been quite rough.

I’ve had to use Google Workspace (formerly G Suite, formerly Google Apps) ever since middle school, when the district decided that they would be implementing a 1:1 learning program with the cheapest, most sluggish, most locked down Chromebooks possible. No BYOD, no looking at alternatives, not even changing your homepage or miserably insecure default password (which happened to be are fixed student ID for lunch plus two zeros at the end).

Simply put, the entire system was built around making sure that there were absolutely no excuses for a K-12 student to not be able to get any work done by locking down the system so much that there would be no way to break it.

The result was a Chromebook we had to carry around in the bulkiest case possible (there were technically reprimands for not doing so, but nobody really cared). And the system only continued getting worse. In high school, they announced that they would be scaling back some the government mandated web filtering (In the US, the Children’s Internet Protection Act of 2000 requires all public schools and libraries to implement filtering for pornography and other obscene content in order to qualify for government funding) in favor of an MDM mandated monitoring and blocking web extension.

This extension was miserable, while others had been used before it pretty much eradicated all hopes of being able to get around the system, even if you had a good reason to. It also monitored your every page and sent it back with proactive alerts (I would know because I was boredly browsing Wikipedia during class one day, clicked on the article for Suicide, and promptly got a call down to the councilors office 15 minutes later).

This, coupled with other recent programs in high school, such as the recent (now also considering to be mandated by some sates. And is also the primary reason I invested in Apple Watch) of placing your phone in a holder, resulted in a lot of frustrations that you don’t get much control over.

I can’t get too mad in some places about the system. Schools, especially publicly funded ones, are always miserably underfunded by the government. And this was during the mid 2010s when everyone knew they needed to get future students ready for working with the computer, but simply do not have the IT resources or funding to make this happen. And considering that Google, in a completely unsustainable move that would hook customers, offered schools unlimited storage for years until they didn’t. They managed to get a lot of bait, and make the concept of Degoogling unrealistic for many young students (but that’s a topic for another post).

Thankfully, during the second semester of my senior year in 2021, I did manage to sneak out a bit more freedom in working the way I wanted as the COVID-19 pandemic forced the school to pretty much improvise a lot of things (even with systems they already had working), so I pretty much had the ability to take advantage of the clutter by bringing (I was technically even exempt from wearing a mask due to having a disability, but I chose to wear one anyway out of the greater good)

Having access to better computers now and not just the cheapest netbooks possible, Google Workspace isn’t nearly as unbearable as I found it in high school. But it still isn’t a favored platform compared to the tradition of local desktop editing.

Anyway, back to Google Workspace specifically, my University pays for both Google Workspace, as well as Office (while disabling OneDrive). And of course, having this many options, means that professors basically get to mandate what gets used. And simply put, right now I have an assignment that only accepts a URL for a submission, and not a DOCX file for whatever reason.

(Yes, this is a wall of text that has mostly just listed a bunch of minor inconveniences . But I really want to drive just how much my tolerance for these things wasn’t just some singular mishap, but something that has been continuously eroding for years.)

It’s a pretty open secret at this point that many, but not all furries love inflation. Not with the economy (overused joke), but rather, body inflation. Seeing myself blown up like a balloon has become an oddly pleasant satisfaction, and something I can take a bit of comfort within both ways.

That said, there’s also a set of schticks that an even smaller number of furs are into. It’s a hard group to explain so I’ll provide a handful of examples from pop culture in an easy to web search format to give you an idea:

• The reveal of Judge Doom from Roger Rabbit
• The 2004 Pinball video game “Mario Pinball Land”
• The various shapes of Tom from Tom and Jerry

Simply put, there’s a group of furries (among others) that enjoy various cartoon tropes along these lines with their own characters. Being flattened, stretched, and squished into various shapes and sizes. It’s kind of hard to put it explicitly under the category of Transformation because of how narrow it is, and the process doesn’t always tend to be the focus of it, so I’ll just simply refer to it as Toon (of course, one’s interests can always overlap. And there is a lot here, especially with inflation being a common cartoon gag as well).

In fact, at one point between 2016 – 2022, there was a group known as The Squish Gang (Archived Link), lead by Arcaxon the Arcanine-Corgi (A toon and transformation enthusiast), that served somewhat as a de facto hub for these kinds of enthusiasts. While the group wasn’t explicitly limited to furries, of the close to 1,000 members in its Discord server before its closure, it was run and occupied by them. And frequently engaged with users in production with raffles, and other cool projects made by its users and operators. And with plenty of cartoons being occupied by anthropomorphic animals, there was plenty of content to enjoy for all.

While it might be easy to dismiss the concept of toon as just another weird furry kink (for starters, it’s not explicitly limited to furries or furry characters), it’s also an overlapping group of users who also just enjoy cartoons in general, especially those from the golden age of cartoons. But that being said, it is still a kink to many (though not all), and Rule 34 still very much applies here, so you will find explicit content as well. But there’s a pretty healthy mix that makes it hard to call it a kink alone.

Some artists in the community I like are:

• Will Mofield, a Gray Wolf with pants from the UK.
• Wringed, as Taylor the Lemur.
• Malletspace, as Malus the Hyena. With a striking blend that looks like a mix of Western Animation and Anime.
• EccentricChimera, an Eastern Dragon in a top hat.
• Matt Valkyrie the Lion, who draws balled up, buff looking critters.
• UnknownBoy the Incineroar-Tiger, who I just recently got a commission from at the time of writing.

There are many more out there all around the world, and there are plenty of other folks as well that I like and follow closely as well.

Where I sit in the group

I, as I mentioned before, am a toon enthusiast as well. While I wish my OC was much more of a Toon character, similar to many of those that I follow. I’m also not sure what I could change either about it. And I don’t really know if I would either since other interests make my mark on my wolfself as well, a bit of a fantasy buff (I was inspired to name myself “Soulfire” because I was initially making a D&D character and thought the name sounded very Warriors inspired, despite never having read the books, only seeing a bit of playground roleplay when I was younger), there isn’t that much about the fire, it’s just cool. I just don’t think anyone has ever seen a fiery toon wolf before. And I’m not sure how I would execute that.

Of course, it also doesn’t really matter either. It’s who I am, so I can do what I want.

I consider myself Therian. Perhaps it’s an odd way to cope with autism (if it’s actually coping). Even as everyone around me locally would likely think that I’m crazy (I’ve occasionally described to my mom how nice it would be to be a wolf, and she’s just responded “you are human”), and I only found out the concept of the thing a few years ago. It’s still something that clings onto me closely.

Maybe it’s just growing up lonely that drives one crazy, or maybe it’s the fact that the Autism spectrum puts you through a lot of challenges. But I just don’t feel like I fit in with a lot of others. I don’t think I have since I was in early elementary school.

Sometimes, especially during extreme bouts of emotion (good and bad), I begin to feel a bit like I have a tail. It doesn’t really wag or anything, but I can feel it at the back. Of course, I look at myself and I know that I’m human, but deep down, it would be truly nice to be something not human that better represents me. More body language, better abilities, but I’m not sure that’s what the whole concept of Therianthropy is about.

I look at myself in the mirror, and I feel like I’m simply contained within a vessel of some sort to my actual soul. There’s just a sort of feeling of disconnection between myself and my body during most moments. And there’s just this feeling inside of “is this me? Or is that me?”. Maybe it’s an identity crisis forming, maybe it’s a more pragmatic side, maybe it’s something more.

Is all of this something I’ve hypnotized myself into thinking? Is it truly a part of me? Is it just a phase? Am I just replacing the word “hand” with “paw” ironically? Is this just some kind of metaphor to me? All those questions are something I don’t think I’ll have the answer to…