So a weird thing's happened! I'm drawing stuff and people like it:

"Okay, well, maybe that's just how active I've been with the community on Sheezy. Let's check FurAffinity."

Well, alrighty then! I didn't post anything of them to this journal (or my long-neglected static HTML art gallery on mari@macintosh.garden, which I'll update when I get back), but I drew both Cammy and Colton in separate drawings, and both of them have done remarkably well basically everywhere I post art (save Weasyl, but no one uses Weasyl except the fatfurs). I don't post this to brag (mostly), I post this out of bewilderment, if I'm honest.

I got used to being easily ignorable earlier in my art journey, and really, understandably so—no idea of eyes, expressions, 3D space, texture, style in any capacity. Still, it did put me off posting my work publicly, knowing it'd get somewhere south of no reaction at all. Now that I've improved and I'm actually making an effort to post art again though? I'm getting a reaction! From people I've never even met! It's genuinely been really encouraging. I feel like there's a lot there to build on.

I'll be sure to give you guys more art soon. If you're wondering, I post now to DeviantART (newly returned, since it hasn't disintegrated further and I find more art I like on there than anywhere else), Weasyl, FurAffinity, and the recently-relaunched Sheezy. Sheezy is limiting signups to donors at the moment, but if you had an account on the original site, your account and art will be there waiting for you. I donated to get in, and I've been very happy with the site functionality and the community (even if a lot of them aren't like me, to put it bluntly).

This does all leave the potential for Cammy to start posting his art even more places—Newgrounds might like what they see, maybe? Perhaps Twitter? (Iffy on that last one, but at least Caby would retweet my stuff.) It's funny—I feel like I'm uniquely the only techie person who gets along better with the artsy crowd. Perhaps it's because they spend less of their time trying to be Correct on the Internet.

So it turns out, when you let Cammy loose in a foreign country with his Staples money, he buys a shitton of CDs with it. Have a nice look at what I'll have to get through customs in two weeks:

There's nineteen in that stack. A few were grabbed from Sister Ray in London (which was honestly pretty unremarkable, though the CD selection was nice), a few more from Spillers once more, and the rest (probably half the stack) were grabbed from the absolutely legendary Kelly's in Cardiff Market.

I don't think my old post "A Tale of Two Welsh Record Stores" accurately describes the wonder that is Kelly's. Other record stores have distributors; Kelly's stock is literally whatever people sell him. He apparently owns his entire top half of the balcony in Cardiff Market. My man doesn't even use a scanner with barcodes to check you out, he adds up all the price stickers on the albums on paper and then tosses a price at you. The CDs are all at impulse buy prices, practically. My haul today, consisting of the seven records from Bush, Matchbox Twenty, Brendan Benson, Better Than Ezra, and Remy Zero, came out to £19.

Seven CDs for 20 quid, lots of it stuff I literally never expected to see in a record store over here. Kelly's is officially my favorite place to visit in Cardiff, bar none.

Anyway! Gonna rip all these probably on Sunday and get them uploaded to the home server. Tomorrow, we visit Castle Raglan, stream, and drink cream liqueur on stream. I have another journal entry going up tomorrow; I'm officially in backlog territory with these now. Good times though! Much on my mind, much to say.

Think like you haven't ever, try to remember the days
When we would talk 'til the light, before morning
Your summer neck is burned with salt and sand
I lost my fingers trying to find your old hands

In time, maybe
We'll discover we
Could've been closer to the core, yeah

In time, maybe
We'll discover we
Could've been closer, closer

It's funny, how perspective works. I've mentioned this before, but I've really sequestered myself these past few years. There's only so often you can watch things blow up in your face before you stop having the desire to talk to anyone outside the group. It left me with a surprising amount of social anxiety, frankly. I stopped having good chats and friends to balance out the sheer number of bad experiences I'd had in some unbelievably catty Discord full of grown men.

Part of the issue was expectations. It's hard not being mari, the big bad Flareon, when you've always been that to people, especially when that's grown out of my frustrations talking to people and positioning myself as this highly active and highly reactive social force. If you think that sounds silly, let me put it another way—it's hard to shake a bad first impression. People's first impressions of me were, for a long time, polarizing, and my first impressions of other people were similarly colored. It was still stressful, even when I'd talk to people I (thought I) was on good terms with. There's a reason "It's a violent way we have, even when we smile" is one of my favorite lyrics ever written, and one of the ones I had in my footer on mari_nc1. Interpersonally, with people I was close to and people I wasn't, that was the feeling.

Anyone who goes "well just stop doing that" is missing the point. It was something I had to grow out of, and even when I grew, the people around me didn't, necessarily. It was still the same old environment, the same Discords, that caused me to act out in the first place. You can't just expect an alcoholic to not drink even when they're still around alcohol all day, it's a fault in our brain wiring. My solution was to give up socializing completely, and that meant giving up on a lot of things that I loved. A lot of community, a lot I can contribute to projects outside the group, and living as a digital hermit. It was pretty miserable.

I'm starting to climb out of my shell again, which has been super nice. It's not perfect—I still have occasional moments of being basically convinced that folks quietly hate me, which was absolutely terrible early this week and thankfully has abated. I still have a hard time considering myself to have mental health issues, but I really can't think of any other way to describe it—it was effectively two days of me being stuck in this oppressively miserable imagined mental exile, which isn't ideal over Valentine's Day, I must say. Feeling much better now, thankfully!

As for where I've been! Been hanging out with the good folks at Aftersleep (site is currently down, but we're currently in #aftersleep on Rizon as a backup, and I think I'll be parked in that channel permanently now)—I missed talking site stuff with people. It was cool seeing yoshi join too, after what happened with him in the past. I'm just some fucking guy figuring this out. I genuinely don't harbor ill will towards people, and I'd hope they don't towards me. If we can be friends again and folks can avoid being fried out shitheads, that's the ideal.

I've also lined up a little contributor spot with Protoweb, which is a beyond-cool Web proxy that dishes out restored old 90s websites to retro browsers. When I get back to the US, I'm gonna be working on getting Gopher support finalized, both restoring period Gopherholes to browse and helping map out how their funky custom HTTP proxy should serve up Gopher data. I've really been enjoying peeking in their Discord once or twice a day and chatting between Caby drawing goff dogs and alien cats on the PC. Feeling free to not be stressed out all the time for once—highly enjoyable.

I'm also now on sheezy.art! I paid for early access so I could snag the name cammy on there, and even with a late upload and a small active userbase, my first drawing on there got a surprisingly nice reception! Honestly, same with DeviantART (where I'm active again—it's the place my drawings did best and it's where I find the most art I actually like) and FurAffinity; I gained watchers just from this one Cammy drawing. So I guess uploading art more regularly and seriously is also back on the menu!

Again, it was anxiety that kept me from pursuing it, but y'know what, spring is coming, the time is right, I miss having a presence, and I miss talking to new people. Let's do it.

I write this sitting in Caby's family lounge! I would stream tonight, but I've just gotten situated in Cardiff with all my logins and shower stuff and I've been recuperating. The world can wait a week.

I am rather glad we stayed in London a day less this time. It's a lovely city, but it sure is noisy. And big. And we had a few snags navigating back to Cardiff. We had to contend with line maintenance—the Piccadilly Line that normally services Heathrow was partially closed, leading to us using the District and Elizabeth lines to avoid resorting to the buses—and missing our coach and having to buy tickets for another. We arrived in Cardiff on a cold, late night, crampy and a bit nausesous, immediately had chippy, and all pain was healed.

That said, we did do a little bit of adventuring in London! We made our way out to Soho and visited Sister Ray, one of those fabled London record stores, and one we looked very out of place in. Honestly, the store was pretty unremarkable, great selection, prices pretty typical for a used record store, but Soho is kinda the artsy part of London, and two big teenagers in sweats and hoodies is not their typical clientele, let's say.

I did pick up a disc I've been after, My Bloody Valentine's EP's 1988-1991, some old favorites, the first Pretenders record and the CD single for Eels' Novocaine for the Soul (I tried Beautiful Freak as a whole and found it to be a pretty unlistenably maudlin record, but that song is killer), and one I really want to try again, the Breeders' Last Splash. I do love me some Breeders, but I have never quite gotten into this, their biggest, record like I have their others. (They're not the only band I can say that about—I still have to give Queens of the Stone Age's Songs for the Deaf another go.)

Aiming to write some tomorrow! For now, I'll just keep chatting on Aftersleep and watching Caby clean the piggo cage. (The piggos don't like me yet. Moonie was alright with me though, she's my favorite.)

It really feels like I don't write on here as often as I used to, but apparently, I wrote seven entries in January. So I guess there's still stuff going up all the time? News to me.

I've spent the past two days packing and getting last-minute technical stuff situated for my departure tomorrow, making sure server stuff is automated and accessible halfway across the world, loading some more games and music on my 3DS, that sorta stuff. I'm gonna use the next month like I used the last semester of college: I want to spend it wandering whenever I want, eating, sleeping, hanging out with Caby, and writing stories (and doodling now!). I want to reconnect with that creative urge that I've been stifling because I have Something Else to work on first. I'd like to indulge myself more.

Her parents have been nothing but supportive—apparently without Caby even being involved, they were looking into the best way to get me moved over there, and they've (again without her prompting) offered to take me in while her and I look for a place. I'm in a really privileged position to be able to do this, honestly, on both sides of the Atlantic. I want to enjoy it, and I have an idea I've been really excited for for a long time to work on while I'm there.

Funnily enough, I've not felt this free of anxiety in a while now. I really think it was hearing that MiloHax literally celebrated the one year of me departing their server. Something clicked in me when I learned about that on stream—I felt for a long time like I was cast off and forgotten unfairly, but now I have proof of how much I affected, that I am the most important person in that server's history. Seriously, imagine a whole-ass server of hundreds of people celebrating the departure of a single one, complete with announcements and server icon changes. lol. lmao, even.

I really think their well dried up. All the big Deluxe projects dropped when I was still there, one of which has my sticky hands all over it, and they're not talented enough to figure out the real crazy shit with those games, like model replacement (which is about the only thing we still can't do with GH2). They literally made new Neocities accounts with reuploads of the sites I made for them, plus censored versions of my callouts (you can see these links for the uncensored ones, there is no protecting the guilty). I'm so awful! But all my contributions to Deluxe are probably still in those mods, and they'll still reuse the sites I made for them.

I won. I won! I went and made an album and drew a ton of shit and wrote a book and hung out with my GF in person and they can't even make new sites. I won.

I was poking around at my chart testing disc again last night. Shit is still so awesome, I'd forgotten how great everything I did on that game was. Great charts, great songs (with a ton more still left to do), and some nice new features to boot. Internet drama isn't the only reason I put marfGH on hold; I want to be better at drawing first as well, especially being able to draw my Flareon boy marf, so I can retexture all the menus. Still, goddamn, what a cool bunch of charts.

I have some more fingers in some more pies at the moment, stuff outside Somnol. I'm feeling more social than ever, honestly. Think 2024 is going to be a killer fucking year. Hopefully will update this while I'm over there, given that there will be no later trip diary as said.