April prologue of sorts

Hi everyone.  Here is what I've been up to for the last couple months.  I'm making this one public so I don't have to try to summarize this in a tweet.

Right at the end of January, I received a cease and desist letter for Lexy's Labyrinth.  It has since been resolved (with no ceasing or desisting required), but I did lose some sleep over it.

[cw fantasy rape mention] February began with the discovery that a familiar and amiable member of a friend group had been entertaining extremely dark sexual fantasies about the rest of us — real selves, not fursonae — without anyone's knowledge, pushing them on a couple of us in DMs, and also taking advantage of folks' interpersonal conflicts to create rapey revenge fantasies to push on them.  Fucking sucks.

Our furnace completely failed shortly before the cold snap, leaving the house (and my fingers) so cold that I had a hard time typing.

I started getting evening headaches and realized I hadn't had an eye exam for five years.  I've since fixed that, but reading my screen was an unpleasant affair for several weeks.  It still is, sometimes, but I can't tell if that's from my eyes or from being sleep deprived.

I took Anise to the vet for a minor issue that turned out to be nothing.  While he was there, they cleaned his ears out, and he must have come home smelling strange because Napoleon immediately treated him like an enemy.  Napoleon kept yowling and hissing at him, and then Pearl went after Napoleon for making a fuss, and it was such a mess that we just had to keep Napoleon in a room by himself until he calmed down.  That took weeks, during which time Ash or I would usually be in there with him to keep him company, so we started to see markedly less of each other.

A couple friends, independently and unrelatedly but back-to-back, took issue with some snarky tweets I'd made (which I'd thought I had toned down from the usual) and it became such a huge and incomprehensible thing that I lost the will to use Twitter for the past month or so.

The shower in our primary bathroom has been unusable for months due to some unfortunate construction decisions by a previous resident, and we're finally getting that fixed, but it has made the whole bathroom nigh unusable in the meantime and the bedroom unusable during the day while folks are in there doing stuff to it.  Meanwhile, I've discovered that the other bathrooms get a piss-poor amount of hot water, so I tried to get that fixed at the same time as the furnace was being replaced, but somehow they incredibly dropped the ball and replaced our water heater with an even smaller one, and two weeks later I am still waiting for them to fix this and meanwhile I only have time to take about 92% of a shower.

Between the various crews of people coming in to fix plumbing and HVAC and whatnot, I keep having to wake up at 9, which is more like 5 in my internal clock's time zone, so I've been gradually accumulating a sleep debt for much of March.  I also must emphasize that I feel on edge every single moment that a stranger is in my living space, doing mystery things to my living space, and also during a pandemic.  And of course this has further complicated the cat situation, since we don't want them roaming free while there are dudes goofing around with power tools.

Also wow this stuff is expensive.

And then blah blah another friend did blah blah.

To cap it all off, a few days ago Pearl was diagnosed with a serious heart condition, and to be frank we have no idea how long she'll live.  Maybe another decade!  Maybe...  not.  Maybe we'll have a better idea of her outlook in a week or so.

I hate when these posts feel like they're full of excuses for not churning out more Things, but hoo boy, the hits just have not stopped coming for a while.

I did make a little 3d game for Ash's birthday.  For some people it doesn't work at all.  No idea why.  Computers.

I want my primary focuses this year to be fox flux, untitled clover game, some kinda goofing around trying out 3D stuff with Ash, and the usual nonspecific art/blogging.  Secondary focuses are the last 90% of Lexy's Labyrinth, GLEAM, and Floraverse web stuff.  Fingers crossed that any of those things happen.