For what it's worth, I have a Bluesky account, although you won't see anything particularly new on it that you've already seen here, at least the the time being! After threatening to do so for a long time now, I actually am beginning to push forward on some new adopts, art, and short porn comics, so I may post them to Bluesky before posting them here, and vice versa (after sharing them with my former Patreon patron email list, of course)!

https://bsky.app/profile/corvuspointer.bsky.social

Don’t mind me! Just another processy journal as I work some shit out. I don't expect people to read them. It just helps to write them.

I’m glad to say that a lot of what I complained about in my recent journal is much better. A few lucky breaks meant my finances are stabilized, and my sleep also seems to be improving. I still have a few issues with insomnia and restlessness, but a bunch of increased physical exercise and magnesium supplements have helped tremendously. I’m finally sleeping for more than three hours at a time, and my sleep schedule is much more consistent. If you have problems with insomnia or restless legs, I highly recommend exploring magnesium supplements, specifically magnesium glycinate and magnesium citrate. They may not work for everyone, but I see people raving about their effects more often than not.

-

Another major aspect of bouncing back from the last decade has been going around and locking down all the accounts I abandoned when I was at my worst mental health. As part of a process where I’m tidying up my life and moving forward with a bunch of stuff, which I think will help address at least a bit of my depression, I bit a major bullet and recently logged back into my FaceBook account for the first time in at least seven years. I don’t have many memories between 2016 and 2019, which were the last few years I used it. I knew it would be bad, but it was far worse than I could have expected.

After reading through several of my posts, a tidal wave of despair washed over me. My God. I knew I’d gone insane, but was not aware of the true extent. As much of it has been set to private as possible. Once I download an archive of all my data (for some mysterious reason, I feel compelled to save a record of this period of time), I’ll permanently shut down the account completely.

Everyone, I’m so, so sorry for my behavior. I know I’ve said this before, but I feel compelled to say it again. It was a combination of a terrible drinking problem, raging PTSD, and a nightmarish stack of the worst psychiatric medications that I could have possibly been prescribed (max doses of adderall, wellbutrin, and ambien). I will never forgive the psychiatric hospital and several authority figures who should have stepped in and done something when I was obviously spiraling. God knows that I lost many, many friends, and I do not blame their decision. By the same token, I’m stunned that several people who *were* my friends during that time are *still* my friends today. I’m deeply grateful for everyone who stuck around. If you weren’t there and have only known the “me” of the last two or so years, then I am glad. That is the real me.

I’ll probably never completely grieve the awful embarrassment and shame of having put on such an awful, cringey public display in front of so many people. I may need to say this publicly a few more times before my mind will stop torturing me with profound regret. I think a majority of the reason I’m so skittish and anxious about using things like Discord or Telegram is the unconscious horror that I could make such a fool out of my myself again.

Sigh. Ah, well. It’ll get better. If I can heal this insomnia and anxiety, then I can probably heal the regret, too. Thank you, as always, for reading these, if you do. I know you’re here for the art, and I’ll be getting back to that as soon as possible. The more I can move past all this stuff (and get some consistent sleep!), the sooner I can unlock art again.

Hey, there, everyone, just wanted vent a little and provide another update so I’m not just radio silent. I’m fine, just largely uncomfortable in my own skin for the time being and taking some “me” time.

For some reason, I’ve been struggling with terrible insomnia for the last two or so months. I'm just not sleeping, no matter how tired I feel. The insomnia has been accompanied by maddening restless legs at night and baffling depression during the day. Underneath this is a deep, severe sense of dread, and I’m about two inches away from hyperventilating in panic at any given moment that I’m awake.

It probably has something to do with the fact that I quit both weed and drinking last December after having done both for a long time. Truth be told, I’d already cut waaaay back on drinking about a year ago (I still have a few glasses of wine of a couple shots of bourbon once a month or so), so it’s more likely the weed withdrawal coupled with my PTSD. I was a smoker for the better part of twelve years, and I’ve read in several places that sleep disturbances such as restless legs and involuntary muscle twitches can last anywhere between one to six months after quitting a particular heavy habit. As for the dread, panic, and depression, I smoked weed to deal with my PTSD (all those things), so these may simply be my normal, unmedicated state. I’ll be focusing on adapting to them. My brain screams at me to either drink or smoke myself to sleep, but I just can't. I must relearn how to sleep without them.

New financial stress isn’t helping, so I’ll hopefully spin up adoptables again soon. That’ll at least get me drawing again, which I really want to do.

I’m sorry I’m not more social. When I’m feeling really depressed or anxious, and I am feeling both intensely right now, I really don’t want to make it other people’s problem. I also don’t like pretending that I’m fine by having surfacy conversations, as it seems to intensify the feelings of anxiety and dread, specifically. I’ve tried to do this, but got quickly punished for it.

I’m sure this will get better, I just need to stay focused and put one foot in front of the other. </vent>

I was talking with my best friend of twenty years (we met in high school!) about wanting to start practicing art again, and also about the intense and strange anxiety that arises within me any time I begin to do so. As I've said many times throughout several journals, I miss doing art. Unfortunately, the production of art elicits frustrating panic attacks and intrusive ADHD that grinds any attempt to an immediate halt. Forcing myself to "push through" or "just do it" would only frighten my nervous system even more and ensure that I walk away from the entire enterprise forever. That's why I've effectively taken the year off; I'm doing damage control.

As my friend and I were talking, I listed a series of desires and goals for this year (IF I'm able to resolve this predicament): I want to practice more, something at which I never got really good. I was always working on "finished pieces" and not "practice doodles", which is what I see so many others always doing.

I want to do daily anatomical drills. I want to hoard doodles in sketchbooks. I want to challenge myself to draw novel poses from scratch, without reference, and without the aide of Blender. I want to sit down and study anatomy and gesture, which is something I've never really done in earnest. But in order to do this, I must discover and resolve the core malfunction that exists within my relationship with art.

After going in a few circles, I opened my mouth and absentmindedly said:

"It's as though I'm not able to focus on an art, whether 2D or 3D, until I can afford to make mistakes." It suddenly felt like a gigantic lightbulb switched on above my head, and Richard (my friend) simultaneously exclaimed "ooOOOHHHHHH."

"...until I can -afford- to make mistakes."

While living in Houston, especially through the 2018-2022 period, adoptables and commissions were my only source of income. EVERY piece I did had to translate into some kind of money, and it felt as though I could NOT "afford", figuratively and literally, to make a single mistake. "Doing so", I thought, "would slow me down, prevent me from making enough money, and retard my ability to keep a roof over my head and food in my bird's bowls." (I was also completely addicted to video games, alcohol, and marijuana, which is another story. Those certainly did not help).

My brain seemed to think that making a single mistake with a single picture was a literal financial failure, one which "I could not afford". I would then command myself to "BE PERFECT". Unfortunately and obviously...mistakes are inevitable. They are the only way through which one can get better at something, just like one cannot develop large muscles without constant workouts, which are, in a roundabout way, a kind of "physical mistake" ("whoops! I couldn't lift as much as I thought I could!).

With commissions, edits and requests come with the territory, although thanks to my mental health collapsing, the quality of my work was, in my opinion (as well as the opinion of several extremely honest customers), worsening instead of improving. Customers were often pissed, confused why their final product looked years older than the work I'd finished ten years before. This resulted in complete redos and refund demands, thus crystallizing the feeling of "I cannot afford to make mistakes".

I crushed myself with my own wildly unrealistic standards, preventing any opportunity for improvement. I whipped my own back into stinging, bleeding hamburger meat like some self-tortured monk in "The Name of the Rose".

At the same time, I was bombarded with mental illness symptoms and the predicament of being so isolated from my family, friends, and home. Moreover, I was hitting the crescendo of my psychosis and mania, punctuated with all those long, rambling "psychology" posts, journals, and "public diaries" (I'm so sorry about those. I've since deleted them). I was going insane and unable to see that art had become the primary vehicle of my torture.

And because I was barely making ends meet? I literally could not -afford- to stop. I lived in this dungeon for years, helplessly watching my love for art get shattered into bloody ribbons.

Needless to say, the penalty for all this was that art became, effectively, synonymous with shame, horror, fear and trauma. It was no longer fun, to say the least. It became a prison that whipped me when I failed, and my internal sense of failure had reached 100% with every piece I finished, even if the customer was completely happy with the final product.

-

Flip-cut to this year, where I could clearly hear the terrified voice inside my head saying "I can't do art! What if I make a mistake! I'm not allowed to make those! I'll be homeless!!!" Sigh.

-

...THIS is why art needs to just be a hobby for me again, and it should NEVER be my "job". I've suspected it, but have now confirmed it. I can ONLY start rebuilding art once I have PLENTY of money in my checking account, money that I've made in other ways; my nervous system needs to know that it CAN afford to make mistakes, since it is through these mistakes that I will learn, grow, and improve.

And...by convincing myself that "I could not afford to make mistakes", I prevented myself from the very opportunity to improve and grow. THAT is the malfunction, and it is now ***crystal-clear***.

I'm going to go back to square one. I need to relearn how to doodle and sketch and draw things that are *not* intended to be final products, and by no means intended to be "perfect." I also need to learn how to have fun with art again. Fortunately, I'm positive that this is on the table, now that I know what to do and what has happened: only do art for fun, only do adoptables or commissions (?) (maybe commissions, but only for long-time friends with whom I've built a strong sense of trust) when I feel like it and want to, and NEVER do art when I'm nervous about the amount of money in my checking account.

Instead of torturing myself when I make a single mistake, I need to embrace every mistake for what it is: the joyous and happy struggle of getting better and stronger.

I didn't know him personally, but I did follow him and  Musclewolf from the very get-go. Watching  Dineegla suffer so badly towards the end, especially with his health and loneliness, was heartbreaking. I hope he's at peace and with Musclewolf now.

God, what a brutal year.

This is a journal that I’ve wanted to write for some time. First, I should start by saying that I’m so sorry Lyons of Kosma suddenly dropped off. I’m deeply embarrassed and aware that I let many people down. As I’ve stated in previous journals, my mental health took multiple dives over the last ten years with one of the worst happening around 2018-2020 as I was proceeding with chapter 3. At the same time, the only way I could pay my bills was with adoptables, which consumed any possible time I could have devoted to comics.

Going back and rereading the little prologue that inspired Kosma in the first place reminded me that it was, first and foremost, my brain’s attempt at rebuilding an understanding of what was happening to me following a series of extreme traumas that landed me in an incompetent psychiatric hospital with crippling PTSD.

In effect, Kosma was a diary, and my primary mistake was turning it into an entertainment product and trying to make money off it. This opened the door to having a very large audience critique its many obvious flaws. In turn (and since Kosma was a personal diary), I seemed to internalize this criticism as direct criticism of *me*, not just my comic. Now, I don’t blame the people who were criticizing the comic. It’s foolish to post things onto the internet without understanding that public criticism is guaranteed. If anything, it was a very interesting and important discovery of deep naivety on my part.

Still, this experience wrecked my already fragile mental health and basically sent me into hiding. Not being able to make money fast enough and watching the quality of my work deteriorate as my mental health deteriorated alongside it was not helping, either.

However, the story, world, and characters have been alive and well inside my mind. Aside from an unrelated porn comic, it’s all I think about sometimes. I’ve really missed it and noticed my brain wanting to return to it.

I’ve also dramatically changed since I first started it nearly eight years ago. Every time I go back and read it, I shake my head at how obviously mentally ill I was when developing it.

And so, my plan is to redo it. Many people have said “no, keep going,” but I just don’t feel comfortable with that. I’ve changed too much as a person and the comic, as it stands now, is not a reflection of who I am. Now, I’m not going to completely redo it. The story, plot progression, and characters will remain intact. I’ll be replacing character art with my modern style and replacing several backgrounds.

The biggest changes will be the following three:

Change 1: The Breakup Scene

The first half of chapter one was obviously just me raging at an ex whom I realized (much later and far too late) had valid reasons for wanting to breakup with me. At the time, the psychological pain was so great and confusing that I drove myself into a crazed victim mentality wherein I bore none of the blame whatsoever.

That said, I’m going to make the breakup scene much less one-sided; I want to expand upon Andrew’s mental illness its effect on the breakup. Andrew will be convinced he was the only victim of the breakup, but slowly start to realize his own role in bringing it about and how his original accusations against Mark were mistaken.

My own real life breakup was due to the wild transformations I underwent due to psychiatric intervention and PTSD symptoms. I blamed him, but in retrospect, it was obviously me. It’s embarrassing to read the opening scene and bear witness to my behavior and beliefs at the time. They were the product of chemical and traumatic insanity that I will grieve for the rest of my life.

If my ex is reading this: I am deeply sorry, M.B. I can see now what I put you through and cannot begin to imagine how confusing it was. It was grossly unfair of me to lash out in the way that I did, and the fact that you held on for as long as you did was a testament to the kindness of your character. If anyone who knows him could relay this, I’d be very grateful.

Change 2: A bunch of additional content showing how the parents discover Andrew is alive.

Something that always bothered people was the question of how Andrew’s parents ultimately found out he was alive. I’d placed a bunch of context clues within the backgrounds of the scenes on Earth, but I think they were too vague and not effective. The original plan was to have them find Andrew using a GPS chip that was implanted under Andrew’s skin. I now find this too unbelievable (even for an autistic cartoon furry fantasy comic), and am changing the “implant” to a much more powerful GPS wristwatch that Richard builds for Andrew following the event that left the latter with PTSD (a terrorist attack and kidnapping). I’ll also expand on the technobabble of how they can track the watch to Kosma.

Furthermore, I think I rushed the story of the parents putting their rescue plans into action waaaay too much. I was so intensely looking forward to the Twister-esque Department of Defense scifi tornado chase scene that I skipped over a ton of much needed exposition. Therefore, we will see a lot more of Richard and Maria’s life as they grieve Andrew but also start to discover clues that me might still be alive. I’ve already drafted this out, and it works so, so much better.

Change 3: The Language

I want to redo the language completely. It was supposed to be an original fantasy language, but I’m going to scrap that in favor of an idea I like much more:

Andrew arrives in a world that is enslaved by an evil psychiatric authoritarian dystopia that doesn’t allow any of its citizens to learn any language other than a broken form of Esperanto. I’ve read some interesting research that suggests the quality of your knowledge of your first language can impact how well you can form thoughts and arguments. This would be an interesting way to keep a population dumbed-down and more controllable.

This new language will replace all the speech bubbles in chapter 2. I don’t think I’ll add translations since I really do want the reader to feel as confused as Andrew when he doesn’t understand the people around him. However, you’ll be able to simply use Google translate and find out what they’re saying.

In conclusion.

I love this comic and have missed it terribly. Again, I think this it’s my diary, and so I’m just going to treat it as such. This time, I’m not going to be making it for a specific audience or for Patreon or for my checking account. I’m going to be making it for me and then sharing it with you. That’s all. I need to make sense of the last ten years of my life, and I want to do so by letting my brain build a world and tell a story.

I’m not sure when I’ll have anything to post, but at least wanted you to know my plans and intentions.

Hey guys! I’m going to distill my two recent Patreon journals.

Tl;dr:

Have you ever been one of my patrons? Would you like to get free, occasional, exclusive art updates from me in your email box as a thank you for being one of my patrons during a difficult period of my life? Please shoot me an email to Corvuspointer(at)gmail.com with the subject line “Please send me art updates” along with the email you use for Patreon (if it is different than the one you use to contact me) and you will be added to my list!

Long version:

Due to the unpredictable nature of my mental health and real life, I must conclude that I cannot produce enough consistent content to justify having a Patreon. I made this decision many months ago and stopped charging my active members. I’ll be shutting it down in full by the end of this month or the beginning of the next. I’m sorry I did not come to this conclusion sooner, but my mind has only recently cleared up enough to finally realize this.

I think the fear of letting my customers down turned into a vicious cycle that prevented me from accessing the head space necessary for creativity. "I cannot get work done; I am letting people down" -> I beat myself up and experience an increase in overall anxiety; I get less work done -> "I cannot get work done; I am letting people down" -> I beat myself up and experience an increase in overall anxiety; I get less work done -> etc etc. It's time to break this silly pattern. I really miss making art.

At the same time, in spite of such terrible inconsistency, so many people remained my patron and supported me. I’m wildly interested in expressing my gratitude to those who tossed me money over the last few years, and have a proposal:

I’ve downloaded spreadsheets of my patrons over the last few years and decided to create an email list to shoot occasional packs of art to. After thinking about it, I realized that this could be considered spam to some people, and that I should probably actually ask who would like to be included in art update emails.

Would you like to be added? As I said above, just send me an email to Corvuspointer(at)gmail.com with a subject line like “Please send me art updates” and you will be added to my list! You’ll get random little packs of adopts, comics, and any WIPs I’ve got on my bench in front of me.

If you’ve been my patron before, please include the email you use for Patreon. Again, I downloaded a copy of all my patrons over the last few years, and will make sure that the people who have supported me the most get first dibs.

I would be sending these emails using the blind carbon copy feature (BCC) so that only your email would show up any time I send you something.

And if you ever want me to stop, please don’t hesitate to let me know.

I’ll be closing this Patreon page at the end of this month or the beginning of the next. Apparently, you can reactivate it if you wish, so we’ll see if I get my art production back to a point where that seems appropriate. Until then, like I said before, I think I need to return to art as more of a hobby than a job as I rebuild my connection with it and try to move past the utter, embarrassing failure of my life over the last few years.

I’m doing this because you guys have supported me during my worst years, and I don’t know how to properly thank you. Let’s start with this.

Thank you for enjoying my work and thank you for sticking by me. The least I can do is give you a sneak peek at what’s on my bench as I reactivate.

Hey guys, I’m sorry for being so quiet again. I just need space to think about and process some shit following the departure of pets from my life. I've been through a few arcs of intense, crazy depression and anxiety. Slowly but surely, the part of my brain that "does" art is regrowing and getting used to all the new normals. Thank you for being patient with me. I owe a lot of you a response on various platforms. I’ll also be resuming uploads fairly soon once I punch through one or two more layers of social anxiety.

That said, I have a public question for you, especially those of you who collect adoptables. I’m currently in the process of bouncing back and getting a new slate ready to go. As I’ve laid the ground work for a new series, I found myself second guessing theme ideas.

To be sure, I could come up with no shortage of ideas; tribal warriors, modern soldiers, pirates, martial artists, steampunk mechanics, fantasy harnesses, etc., etc., etc. This is what I used to do, but I’m starting to worry that this may not produce characters that are exactly useful for your purposes.

I wonder which themes would actually be useful to my customers, and I ask myself questions like “will a pirate themed lioness actually be useful to someone’s tabletop campaign, or should I skew her costume to be more modern / minimalist?”

I could also generate a bunch of adopts that don't feature any costume at all, but then that makes me wonder something else: perhaps people *don't* want NSFW adopts. Perhaps there's a market for purely SFW adopts that I've not been serving. I realized that so much of what I used to do was anchored on NSFW. Something I'll definitely be doing is including many, many for SFW options.

I want to keep the offerings as varied as possible, but I don’t want to just throw darts at a dartboard to come up with themes that won’t ultimately be useful for you. I don’t want to just generate a bunch of impulse buys that end up collecting dust. I really like these guys, and I’m also delighted beyond words when I see people really developing their new OC and commissioning art.

So, I’m curious; would you buy them more for role playing purposes, or for personal world building purposes? How do you think I could design them in order to be maximally useful to as many potential buyers as possible? What do you look for when shopping for an adopt, especially one that you plan on making a primary OC?

Thank you for any feedback you could offer.

I awoke this morning to find my little girl budgie, Penny, at the bottom of the cage. She is with the Budgie Spirit now. Fortunately, I had just placed clean bedding in the cage a few days ago (a fluffy bedsheet), so she was able to pass in a clean, soft, warm place which was also her home.

Goodbye, my sweet baby girl. I hope you are flying like a comet through the Australian stars with your brothers and sisters at your side.

I’m going to shutdown comments for this because I’m nervous that journals like this look like I’m trying to harvest attention or pity. I’m not looking for consolation. I’ll be okay. My only goal here is to provide more information about what's going on in my life and continue to organize some thoughts.

One of my intentions this year was to await the return of consistent creative production before I started posting on here again and promoting my Patreon more. I was doing so well there for a while, but another series of setbacks has wiped away the progress I was making.

Unfortunately, after taking a hard look at my patterns over the last year, it doesn’t look like my brain will ever return to the same consistency I enjoyed when I was getting stuff done. I need to come to terms with this. I simply cannot produce enough content to justify a monthly Patreon nor consider myself "active".

The death of my friend has affected me more than I realized. He was the first IRL friend I’d made in many years. While it’s easy for me to be friends with people I already know, I am a very, very awkward and introverted person in real life. It is extremely difficult for me to make new friends in person. This has resulted in me having lots of online friends, but very few IRL friends. Somehow, Gary was not affected by these personal foibles and became one of my best IRL friends.

While married and straight as an arrow, he was fascinated in my experience with furry porn and the fandom. He shared my love in classic science fiction, especially Star Trek TOS and TNG, classic Doctor who, and the scifi movies of the 1950s and 60s. He was aware of how incompetent the modern psychiatric industry has become, and was deeply interested in helping me bounce back from my experiences in Houston. I finally had a new friend, and I deeply loved him.

He was also an extremely important mentor who was teaching me and my best friend a suite of machine shop skills in addition to computer skills. As a master electronic engineer, auto-mechanic, and machine shop wizard, his death represents a titanic loss of skills and competence. It’s as though an irreplaceable library has burned down in a decaying world that has ceased building new libraries.

Last weekend was the viewing and internment. My best friend and I carpooled to both, cried like children, and have begun the process of adapting to a world without our teacher, mentor, and friend.

At the same time, both my budgies have become quite sick. I’ve taken them to the vet who was unable to provide any useful feedback other then “they are getting old and may just be winding down”. It is heartbreaking to watch them succumb to old age, stop playing, and stop singing. I am currently surrounded by death and dying.

This whole experience has radically transformed who I am and what my brain is willing to go along with. One of the things that is completely gone is my sex drive. It has vanished in its entirety. It might come back, but I do not see it happening for a long time. As I’ve discovered the hard way through the symptoms of depression and the side effects of SSRIs, this has also effectively erased my ability to draw adult art and possibly art in general. When I try to force it, it feels like I’m whipping a frightened and grieving horse into doing something of which he’s just not physically capable.

I think I need to downgrade my relationship with art to just a pure hobby. What that means is that I need to stop trying to make a business or living out of it.

I’ll probably shut down my Patreon in the next few months. Until then, I will be pausing monthly charges every month until I pull that trigger. Any current patrons will no longer pay a thing for the work I post on there.

I tried so hard to regain consistency, but I think I need to finally admit that consistency is off the table, and that it’s not right for me to keep trying to run a storefront. My mental health (let alone real life) is just too unpredictable. Furthermore, the latest Patreon / Gumroad / credit Card companies’ shenanigans have rendered me rather skittish in trusting these platforms at all.

Moreover, I wish to repay the loyalty of so many. What I intend to do is compile a list of those who remained my friend through all this as well as download a history of all my Patrons. I’m going to then either create a shared folder or build a gallery website that I’ll share with this list of people. They will then get links to anything I’m working on a few months before I post it anywhere. You won’t pay anything.

A side goal to this intention is to build a “Nextcloud” server. Nextcloud is an open source alternative to dropbox and Google. My best friend Richard and I have been learning how to install this software and establish all the necessary databases. I’ve gotten to a point where I can install the main program and its various software packages fairly easy. The only thing left for us to figure out is how to secure the thing. Once we do that, I’ll basically build my own Dropbox / Discord / Google, and can generate usernames and logins for my own private channel and gallery that I can share anyone I want.

I'm going to try to finish the porn comic I'm working on. There are also art pieces that I want to do for a handful of people. Once that's finished, I am going to redo Kosma; I'll try to post a journal about my goals with it soon. It's my diary, and I need my diary back.

I’m sorry. I feel like I’ve let so many people down. I’ll do my best to bounce back from the last ten years, although they have clearly demolished me. Thank you for being there when I was at my strongest. I wish I could go back to those days.

I just learned that a very dear friend died of a heart attack today.

For the last two years, he was one of my landscaping clients, and I did things around the house for him and his wife, building up a very tight bond and friendship. I didn’t have many IRL friends in Richmond when I returned home a few years ago. He was one of them and was very important to me. I hope he knew that.

This is hitting me very hard. I wish I could have my friend back.

I’m going to freeze my Patreon this month and possibly next and take some time off. It’s hard to feel creative when your heart is broken. I was also already going through some bad depression towards the beginning of the month and wanted to keep quiet about that and push through, but this has kinda cinched it.

I was on such a roll the previous month and feel disappointed that I couldn’t keep that up for you guys, but I know it’s not my “fault”. This happens. I’m just learning how to roll with these punches.

I’ll still post some art soon, although I may need some time before resuming production.

Hey guys! Just wanted to replace my previous journal with something a bit fresher and happier. I've been quietly chipping away at some silly porn images and a new porn comic in order to dip my toes back into art. Bouncing back from the last five years has been difficult and embarrassing, but it's been worth it. I'm sorry for all those rambling journals. I guess I just needed to figure some stuff out and my poor psychotic brain chose that method to do so. Sigh. I'm amazed I still have any watchers at all. XD Thank you for being patient with me.

Here's my current goal: once I get three or four more pieces up on Patreon, along with around 10-15 pages of the new comic, I'll post the rest of the second Kosma porn comic on FA, along with several other standalone pieces that have been Patreon exclusives for the last year or two. Once -that- is up and roiling, I'll instantiate the goal of creating fresh content each month into my norm and get back to regular posting. I'll keep new stuff on Patreon for two months or so and then drop it onto FA. I just want to first prove to myself that I can consistently do this for two more months before I start advertising anything.

I've also got some new adopts in the works, although from now on I'll be doing far fewer of them as well as doing them more for fun. With luck, and if my brain plays nice, I'll have lots of new species and characters to share. :>

Thanks to this sabbatical I've placed myself on, I was able to figure out and fix a huge chunk of what has been going on within me, and have found the words to successfully communicate some very specific feelings. It's extremely difficult to solve a problem that you cannot name or identify, and finally doing so has given me much of what I need to start rebuilding.

Like I keep saying, I know you guys aren’t here for this, and I do not write these journals with the expectation that people read them, nor am I childishly seeking attention. They’re just for me to gather my thoughts, and then maybe provide context for my recent reclusive behavior, as well as my psychotic behavior between 2014 and 2021 (the exact dates I was in the "care" of a psychiatric hospital). I guess this is a kind of non-fictional story I'm telling to myself, with the intention of expediting my return to art.

By posting these journals online, I think it forces me to be very careful about making sure they make sense. If I try to write them so that they make sense to the reader, then there’s a good chance that they’ll make sense to me, too. My mind has been a very mixed up, garbled place, and doing exercises like this has helped organize it.

The better I’ve gotten and the clearer my mind has become, the more I suddenly realize the scope of my behaviors and the psychotic state of mind that I put on full display in front of many people for over nearly a decade. Not just a few people. Hundreds or maybe even thousands of people. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then I’m glad. The fewer people who remember this, the better.

I have been so utterly embarrassed and crushed over the returning memories of what happened, that I’m wasn't sure if I could mentally come back from it. I froze in horror and found myself totally unable to talk to -anyone- as the memories started to roll within the theater of my mind. The psychotic streams. The insane behavior in chats. The crazed, manic arrogance. Thanks to my clearing mind, I can suddenly remember those moments with crystal-clarity; getting better has been a weapons-grade double-edged sword. The more I’ve remembered and processed, that more I was wracked with thoughts of quitting art completely and leaving the fandom.

As I said in my previous journal, It’s like I had this horrible fever dream where I did absolutely despicable, cringey, psychotic things in front of a lot of people and to a lot of people, except I’ve now woken up and realized that it all happened.

Here's what set all this in motion: I was drugged and violently raped out in the middle of nowhere in New Mexico eleven years ago. I tried to ignore it and hide it from people, including my poor ex, for a long time, until I finally snapped and was hospitalized in a psychiatric "hospital" in Texas. I use scare quotes, because this "hospital" ended up doing more damage to my mind and sense of self than the initial insult. Hospitals should make people better, not worse.

At the time, I trusted therapy and psychiatry. I loved it. I knew that if someone could help me, it would be this field. What happened next was a psychiatric coma fueled by amphetamines, wellbutrin, and ambien. They left me on this regimen for seven straight years. I took pure amphetamine salts for SEVEN YEARS. I inevitably spiraled into extreme alcohol and marijuana use as my poor body unconsciously responded to a series of uppers with a series of downers, transforming me from an introverted artist into a raving, psychotic loon. Why the hospital put me on this bombshell cocktail will be a question I will struggle with for the rest of my life.

I trusted the system. I loved therapy and psychiatry. Now, I look back, and find that these two fields nearly killed me, and certainly set me up for ultimate humiliation. Everyone got to watch my complete mental collapse in plain view, a mental collapse that was fueled by ignorant, psychiatric quakery and breathtaking psychotherapeutic incompetence.

After the dust settled from my initial collapse, there was a period of time where my style tanked along with my mental health, and some people -hated- their commissions. I should have stopped trying to make money with art much sooner, but due to excruciating PTSD, art was the only way I could make money, trapping me in a very vicious circle that, thankfully, I’ve since escaped.

Through all this, I started to hate my own art. Despise it. Every neuron in my nervous system detested it, to a point where my eyes refused to completely focus on it. I literally could not focus my eyes on the computer screen well enough to work, forcing me to relearn how to look at it.

Furthermore, there have been periods of time where I completely, totally, utterly lost interest in art, furries, sex, comics, everything. They’re gone, like how my taste and sense of smell were gone when I had covid. As a consequence, there was a period of time over the last few months where I wondered if I was completely finished as an artist. I’m making plenty of money as an IT guy, and have found myself in a place where quitting art would be perfectly optional.

At the same time, I’ve seen so many other people quitting; big names, too. Artists saying that they’re completely burned out and walking away. As I read through several of their journals, I found myself thinking “you know, I don’t want to quit art,” nor do I want to leave the fandom. I just need a lot of time to myself as I have a series of conversations with the fractured creatures inside my psyche. Thankfully, my aversion to my own work has subsided. I can not only look at it again, but I love to look at it again. Also, my sex, creative, and social drives have started coming online, too, which has been a stupendous relief.

I don’t care about being popular or making money. Since I’m happily making what I need to live and more with a day job, I can be a completely free agent. Art can be my hobby and my diary again. I can also do the art for friends and patient commissioners that I've been dying to get to for a while now.

I want to see if I can reinvent this account into something new. I have a new porn comic coming, "The Lion Prince." It's where my imagination has been in hiding. My next journal will be about Kosma and where I'm taking it. The short version is that, after I get the first "The Lion Prince" porn comic finished and posted, I am probably going to redo Kosma. Not completely from scratch. 90% of it would remain exactly as it was presented, and I'll probably keep many of the backgrounds. But I super duper want to update the character art, and I have much better ideas about Andrew's past and his predicament. I miss the characters terribly. However, I’ve changed so much as a person, that the psychiatrically tortured artist who wrote the original form of the comic is now basically dead. Well, he's not dead. He's me. I've changed, and I think Kosma has changed a bit, too. I'll write more about that later.

I'll stop here to prevent this from going on too long and will continue these thoughts in another journal. To those who stuck around and continue to be friendly to me, thank you for being patient with me and for being so kind. I'm basically having to completely rediscover every facet of who I am from scratch. Fortunately, as far as I can tell, that seems to be exactly what the furry fandom is for, meaning that I'm not going anywhere.

Incredibly, after several touch-and-go moments, my elderly budgie Biscuit pulled through his illness. As I suspected, the issue was a cold that set in during a surprisingly heavy molt. This combo zapped his energy to the point where his poor body language was screaming “I am about to die” for three straight weeks. As I may have already shared, my first bird died in my lap of molting shock, so I at least knew what I was looking at.

Fortunately, it looks like my interventions helped him through. He’s really slow now, but he’s playing and singing once more, which is something I was -certain- I’d never see again. I’ll bet I get one more year with him, and will be extremely grateful for any remaining time I get. The next time he gets sick and eventually dies, I won’t be caught off guard.

As all this was distracting me, my mom contracted really bad pneumonia and landed in the hospital. She’s better now, but I’m starting to realize that this parade of upsets will pretty much be “life,” so I’ve shifted my thoughts towards learning how to roll with the punches. "Prepare the child for the road, not the road for the child" comes to mind. And, God knows, I've read journals that freeze my blood. There are people out there who have it way, WAY worse than I do. That, too, motivates me to quit whining and adapt.

Regardless, the sudden shock of all this made a bunch of things fall into place. I’ll share these things in a follow-up journal. The gist is that I spent 2014-2022 in a manic, waking coma made of amphetamines, alcohol, ambien and psychiatric quakery. Due to a complete absence of my prior shyness as a consequence of this psychotic-cocktail, I proceeded to make more friends that I could consciously track, and then ran my life and career completely off the rails.

I am only just realizing what has happened. Now that I’ve quit all these things as of 6-12 months ago, it’s as though the “me” that I was for seven years has vanished, leaving the current “me" with scores of upset and confused people asking “what happened?” I really do feel like I’ve suddenly “woken up” after an insane dream, only to find out that the dream was real, and that I’m completely surrounded by the debris of my errors. It’s a very disorienting feeling, one that's taken a few months to finally articulate.

I haven't changed too much, however. I am still a very loyal person, and the sudden sense that I have betrayed or misled dozens of people that I care deeply for has frozen me in a state of existential horror. It doesn’t help matters that my innate shyness has returned with a vengeance. Anyway, I’ll share more on this later. Eight years of my life, at least, were drug-addled cringe. Sigh.

For the first time in my life, words are helping me more than pictures. It’s unexpected, but I’ll take the assist. I really want to better develop my understanding of English grammar and writing.

This is all just to say that “I’m fine.” I’m just very quiet and focusing deeply on writing, learning apache and php, and rebuilding a sense of self, let alone a new connection with art. Please forgive me for not responding to people right now. I’m still powerfully shy, and my body has been asking me to limit social contact to my one irl friend and my family. I’ll be reaching out to people real soon.

I’ll most likely be freezing my Patreon charges again this month. I’m feeling better, but don’t want to force my brain to do art when it’s still somewhat in wound-licking mode, nor do I want to charge for a month of no activity.

Thank you for putting up with journals like this. I do this only so that I can fix my sense of self and get back to art.

Woooo, boy! Last week, I had a sudden return of extreme, intrusive anxiety that’s been haunting me ever since. It’s nothing I can control, and is more akin to a severe allergic reaction where the immune system overreacts and does more harm with its intervention than good. But instead of the immune system overreacting, severe anxiety is when the "F.E.A.R." (Fuck Everything and Run) systems overreact to a similar degree.

One of my budgies became really sick last week, which seemed to set this off. He's finally getting better, but he’s getting old, and I’m having a series of conversations with myself about the importance of grieving him now so that his actual passing does not debilitate me. I cannot let these things continue to prevent me from getting better and resurrecting my capacity to make art.

I’m probably going to pause my Patreon this month. Hopefully I’ll still have something to post, but just in case, I’ll spare my incredible Patrons having to deal with my issues.

I also tried to talk to people again on various platforms and got heavily punished by my broken mind with terrible, pointless anxiety that made focusing on anything nearly impossible. It looks like, somehow, I’ve developed a serious and sharp phobia of “talking to people one-on-one.” I seem to have no problem with talking to people in public, like in journal or submission comments, which is strange. But one-on-one? Woof, it's surprisingly difficult. It’s been just as bad in real life, as I’m now down to two people in real life that I talk to twice a week. It’s simultaneously painful to engage with people and then deeply lonely. Don’t develop fear of people, kiddos, it can destroy your life. (Hasn't destroyed mine yet, because I have no intention of letting it. Grumble.)

But it’s not all bad. Prior to that, I had two extremely good months. I’ve successfully wrapped my mind around Krita, and I’ve learned how to setup computer networks and set static IP addresses for anything from a computer to a webcam to a printer. So, I’ll take all that as evidence that I CAN get through this, and that I’m on the right track. Woo!

Please pardon any delays. I’ll at least post an update journal once a month or so in order to not completely disappear. I’m still here and, believe it or not, quietly use FA more than any website now.

One of my goals for 2024 is to be 100% on Linux, which means leaving behind Photoshop. This also means I have to basically, completely reinvent my entire art style. Fortunately, the open source "Krita" is proving to be quite the replacement in which to chip away at this goal.

I'm honestly pretty surprised about how good Krita feels and how well it works. The learning curve has been fairly steep, but not anywhere close to what I was expecting. The program, especially the hotkeys and interface, are absurdly customizable. Surprisingly customizable. It feels more like Blender than it feels like Photoshop. I've installed Krita next to photoshop, for now, and have been translating my custom shortcuts and user interface settings. It won't be a perfect match, but it'll be close.

Several of the features are mind-blowing. The brush engine is the best of Photoshop, Painter, and Sai, as far as I know them, all combined into one program. What Krita lacks (filters, a decent text editor, .kra files don't open in material slots in Blender) it more than makes up for with this brush engine. It's bananas. I'm only just starting to scratch the surface. Fortunately, the official Youtube channel has a SPLENDID tutorial series available. They only have 72K subscribers, which is criminal, given the quality and straightforward nature of their in-house tutorial series.

Also like Blender, something else I really like about Krita is that it's open source. It's free, and it's yours. The small print emphasizes that -you- own the software, and -you- own the art you wake with that software. In fact, you own the copy of Krita. It will never dial home, and it will never spy on you. The open source nature of this software provides a very safe and secure platform on which you can make art that can't be switched off by the parent company. The program will never change. There will be updates, but you may use whichever version you feel like.

I've found the proposition of using 100% open source software to be very attractive, and I'm so happy to being so close to that. It's way more doable than I ever realized. Meanwhile, I can't believe what I'm seeing with modern companies suddenly altering or even taking programs away, programs that people needed to get work done.

I can't recommend Krita enough. The thing even has a 2D animation engine.

Sorry I'm always so quiet. I'm a very weird person, as it turns out. I'm sure that as I continue getting better, I'll be less and less weird and more socially available. In the meantime, I'll probably babble on here about cool things that captured my attention for one reason or another. Krita certainly did.

Thank you guys, so much, for bearing with me. The break I'm taking from chat programs and social media is working like a charm. It's unbelievable how the "noise" of such things, especially social media, completely threw off my ability to concentrate and hear myself think, let alone get art done. The modern algorithms are freaking maddening.

I'm currently seeing a lot of new success with my own art, especially with my 3D / Blender work.

It'll be a while before I become more extraverted and socially active; I wanna ride this wave for as long as I can. In the meantime, I don't mind people poking me through notes. :>

I have continued to do a lot of thinking since my last journal, and have drawn up a few more conclusions and a new strategy that I hope will make art happen again. I can't believe I didn't come to these conclusions sooner. I guess it really did take multiple rambling journals to finally figure this stuff out.

Now that I’ve completed all refunds and closed as much person-to-person business as I can*, I am going to take a break from all live chat services (Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp, etc.) for an extended period of time. It won't be forever, but I'm thinking two to five months would be extremely beneficial. There are roughly four reasons for this.

Reason 1: I cannot respond to direct messages fast enough.

Reason 2: My primary way of making money is physical labor, which further curtails my overall availability.

Reason 3: I am not getting enough sleep due to talking to people in different time zones.

Reason 4: Due to all the above, I am not making art. I want to make art again.

---

Reason 1: I cannot respond to direct messages fast enough.

I got completely overwhelmed with messages about three years ago and it’s only gotten worse since then. I’m sorry. I just can’t keep up. Some people can do an internet-based social life, but it seems that I'm bafflingly bad at it.

It's like I'm trying to spin plates on sticks, but hundreds of plates are falling and shattering all around me, and I'm left bewildered and unable to act.

I’m going to take a break away from chat programs and will only use them again if I need to have a voice conference with someone or in some other rare circumstance. I'll return when I can and have gotten my art under control. I will continue to use email, notes, and some DMs, although please keep the above in mind and remember that I have a weirdly hard time with these things.


Reason 2: My primary way of making money is physical labor, which further curtails my overall availability.

In order to make my monthly bills, I’m now doing all physical labor jobs and computer building / repair. These jobs just leave me with no time to relax or talk to people when I’m home. After a heavy landscaping day, I’m usually so tired that I collapse into bed.

Moreover, it’s especially hot right now, making it even more difficult to maintain satisfying conversations due to physical exhaustion. This will, however, probably get more manageable in the fall when things cool down.


Reason 3: I am not getting enough sleep due to talking to people in different time zones.

I need to be getting better sleep. Unfortunately, so many people are in a much earlier time zone than I am. This is forcing myself to stay up late after I get back from labor work, thus preventing me from sleeping. I love talking to my friends around the world, but I'd better make sure I'm sleeping, too.

I hope you know that I’m not saying “I don’t want to talk to people in different time zones anymore,” I am instead saying “I need to sleep so that I can make money for bills.”


Reason 4: Due to all the above, I am not making art. I want to make art again.

I’m not making personal comics, and it’s killing me. Comic art was my favorite and most useful diary, I think, and I did severe damage by depriving myself of this activity. Also, people don’t want to hear me talk about how I’m struggling. They don’t want to read these stupid journals. They want to see my art, and I agree with them, honestly.

Therefore, I need to get my creative projects back up and running. I’m going to throw myself into a series of personal stuff, specifically a new porn comic. Once I get a few dozen pages under my belt, I’ll be returning to Kosma, too.

I also have several projects I want to do for friends, projects I've been daydreaming about for years now. Once I get a few personal things finished, I'll pivot to those, too.


-- Concluding thoughts --

I’ll be making this my last personal journal for sometime as I shift to art.

In the meantime, I’ve been seeing a large amount of real-life success due to my daily efforts. I have resolved all my debts, I have lost 70 pounds, and I’ve been learning random little tricks from a bunch of different trade skills as I help on construction projects, such as plumbing, carpentry, welding and LAN maintenance. I'm not a pro by any stretch. Just a skilled layman who's ready to learn more. That is just to say, I'm relieved to at least report that the worst of my mental problems seem to be over. Not all, but many. This break should help me get over even more of them, thus unlocking more potential for art. That's the idea, at least.

Furthermore, seriously, I cannot wait to share more of my upcoming porn comic. I have not been this excited about a personal project in a long time, and it feels so good to have fun with my own characters and stories again. I'll be advertising the Patreon links, soon.

So, here's the plan: If I make comics, I can boost my Patreon and my income. With that boosted income, I can rely less on landscaping work and rely more on comic work. If I can get to a point where I'm ONLY making comics, I will go into overdrive. I want Kosma back. Bad. Once I have a ton of comics up, I'll have much more free time and be in a much better position to leap around chat services. I don't know what the time table will look like, but I'm gonna go for it.

My hope is that this will be a win-win for everyone.


* If I have NOT refunded you or you have NOT heard from me or some business is STILL open, please email me at Corvuspointer[at]gmail.com

I hope you guys don't mind if I do more off-topic journaling. It seems to help me figure stuff out.

I’m so sorry I’m still having a hard time with getting onto chat programs or social media sites. I’m working very hard on it. Over the last few years, I've developed terrible agoraphobia, and this seems to have translated to things like chat rooms, chat programs, and social media. I'm also still having a hard time with weirdly powerful depression. This time, however, I've been able to identify a pattern that keeps arising, in a cyclic fashion, in both my mind and feelings. Finding a way to interrupt this pattern will be key.

The pattern has been:

I start feeling better →
and because I feel better, I can more clearly understand some new characteristic of a trauma that happened to me in the past, and how it shaped who I am today →
this understanding is deeply and profoundly shocking, enough to activate moderate to severe depression →
the depression aggravates my agoraphobia, which makes using chat programs and interacting with other people very difficult. So, for about two to three weeks, I will be both hard to talk to a little down in the dumps →
I begin the process of integrating this knowledge, which is not easy, and can take a week or two. →
I start feeling better →
and because I feel better, I can more clearly understand some new characteristic of a trauma that happened to me in the past, and how it shaped who I am today →
this understanding is deeply and profoundly shocking, enough to activate moderate to severe depression →
the depression aggravates my agoraphobia, which makes using chat programs and interacting with other people very difficult. So, for about two to three weeks, I will be both hard to talk to a little down in the dumps →
I begin the process of integrating this knowledge, which is not easy, and can take a week or two. →
I start feeling better →
Etc. →→→

It's something like that.

Some good personal news is that, every time I feel better, I feel slightly better than the previous time. Over time, I’ve begun to notice this pattern intensifying and becoming more visible. If possible, my goal is to remove the "this understanding is deeply and profoundly shocking," and by extension, "the depression aggravates my agoraphobia," stages. I just need to grind and punch my way through this wall of “trauma* scar tissue," I think, and I seem to be getting close to breaking through. If I do that, I'll be able to freely hang out on chat programs again without being distractingly and obviously anxious.

(*When I say "trauma," I am not talking about romantic breakups or personal drama. I am only talking about three specific experiences of a violent nature that were permanently tattooed directly onto my nervous system back in 2012. The nervous system, by the way, never goes back to "normal" after such an insult. It assumes that "one danger equals to possibility for more similar dangers," so it remains constantly online, for the rest of your life. Hey man, this shit is what kept animals alive as they fought to survive in the nightmare of evolution, and we have a nervous system very much like they did.

Honestly, the PTSD is 50 times worse than the original upset. I wish I could tear my nervous system out of my body and slap it in the face in order to snap it out of its wild panicking. It can make you crazy. Sometimes literally.)

Anyway, I'm still working a lot of this stuff out, but with the drugs completely out of my system, I can see it much more clearly. I can't blame myself for what’s happened to my career and reputation. The damn PTSD, combined with the baffling and unnecessary drugs, rendered me manic and psychotic. What happened to me over the last ten years was not my fault. It was not intentional. Parts of me watched in horror, aware of what was happening yet unable to do anything. It’s just a puzzle of the nervous system that I've had to adapt to and solve. Thankfully, I know what I need to solve it, and I really am feeling better than I have in a very long time.

Please just give me a few more months (maybe less) to figure some of these things out. Once I've exhausted most of their supply, I have no doubt my attention will return to full time work. I'm giving it my best. I have a shit load of art I want to do.

Thanks for reading this if you have. I'm not writing them with the expectation that people read them. I feel so crazy sometimes, lol.

Hi there, everyone.

This is the first of a few journals where I’ll share what’s been going on with me, and what my current plan is.

I have recently discovered that I have an autoimmune disease that worsens when I am under stress. Unfortunately, I also have severe and debilitating PTSD. This was all greatly exacerbated when I was forced to rehome my parrot this last February.

Furthermore, I take my obligations so seriously that the obligation of finishing commissions and making art fast enough began to literally cause surprising, visible damage to my hair and sensitive areas across my body. I had no idea that this is possible, yet here I am. This situation made it harder and harder for me to produce artwork over time, until it got to a point where my nervous system frozen in baffling, indecisive cognitive paralysis. After that, those very frightening medical problems started to show up on my body, leading to a series of visits to the doctor.

My social phobia has almost destroyed me. Please forgive me for being a recluse. I've simply had too many panic attacks whenver I've loged onto Discord and seen so many messages, and these panic attacks were damaging me.

The doctor's conclusion is that I needed to be released from all obligations in order to stop the progress of these autoimmune problems, so my body can heal, and so I can make any art at all. I have also concluded to no longer take commissions, ever. I will still offer custom art to those who are interested, but will use a completely new system that I have not created yet.

I have spent the last few months working physical labor jobs in order to earn more than enough to money to pay anyone back who is either still waiting for art or never got art.

I have also been figuring a lot of my shit out. I am sorry that I’ve been so odd for the last nine or ten years. They have been hell for me.

The good news is that I intend to get back to a full swing once I thoroughly conclude that I haven’t missed a SINGLE refund or forgotten customer.

If you are still waiting for art from me, please email me at: twickhord[at]gmail.com

You will get a refund, an apology, and the assurance that I will still finish your piece of art. I miss art, and I want it back.

I’m gonna see if I can plow forward now.