Early Sunsets

"There are no good days here. Just bad days and worse days."

Moral Kombat X. Not gonna lie, it was a bit much for me. Call of Duty is about as gory as I like to go for games.

"Did I not say that you would be a burden? That you would not survive in the wild, and you had no place amongst us? I have never been so wrong in all my life."

That I really want to go to another convention. BronyCon got me obsessed.

When I sleep I have the blinds closed with blackout curtains covering them. Changes in light while I'm trying to fall asleep will affect my already terrible ability to fall asleep, and one of my windows faces the street. During the day the blinds remain closed, but the air conditioning in my room isn't that good so I have to open the curtains and windows sometimes. The bottom halves of my windows are screened, so I rarely open the top halves.

"It's marriage. It's not the end of the world."

So yeah, I wasn't happy with my progress. I cut quite a few corners thinking, "I'm not an experienced fursuit maker, it's fine if I don't put in all the effort I should." I'm just not satisfied with that line of thought, so I scrapped the head and I'm starting over. I want to do this as a profession one day, and that kind of thinking definitely won't be acceptable when I'm making stuff for other people. Luckily I had only put in around seven or eight hours of work, so it's not that much wasted time. The eyes especially were rushed and poorly made. This time around I took the extra few hours to make them properly (I even clear coated them), and they look so much better. Lesson learned; don't half-ass things. Maybe I'll actually learn from these lessons one day instead of forgetting about them a week later. Also, this time I'm going with dual 50mm fans in the head instead of the quad 30mm fans in the last one. The ones I ordered already have a USB plug attached, so that will make everything so much cleaner looking. It should improve airflow substantially, as well. This setup has 24 CFM compared to the previous 8 CFM, and they're still quiet and easy enough to hide. I'm also thinking about putting four 80mm USB fans in the body suit (roughly 100 CFM, which is a lot of airflow for 5v fans this size) since I'll be padding it out with a bunch of foam, which is super hot. It's just a matter of where I'm gonna hide the ventilation. I've got a couple of ideas for that, but we'll see what works.

I'm wondering about everypony's view on foreshadowing in movies, writing, story-driven video games, etc. Despise it? Can't get enough of it? Couldn't care less? I personally am obsessed foreshadowing, as long as it doesn't give away too much and is fairly subtle (in most cases. I like obvious foreshadowing in moderation). Especially in my own writing, I love it when someone picks up on the hidden hints I put in my writing. This foreshadowing scene is my favorite, and it gives me goosebumps every time I read it. Are there any foreshadowing moments in media that you love?

C3 Corvettes. Same?

Schlatt can make anything funny, even an AP Minecraft exam. The first minute is completely unrelated and is one of the funniest things I've ever seen.

I have this model of an SR-71 Blackbird sitting on my windowsill. I picked it up on vacation six or so years ago and I don't really feel like getting rid of it, so it just sits there and gathers dust.

I prefer Xbox and Nintendo since that's what I grew up playing. I just can't get used to the PlayStation controllers; whoever designed them must have been an alien or something.

I used to have a very, very, very strong crush on Rainbow Dash (this was only what, four months ago?). It got to the point where I spent nearly a week in a constant state of depression (light depression, mind you) where I'd sink lower every time I had to remind myself she wasn't real. I still love her a lot and she's by far my favorite character, but I can tell the difference between fiction and reality a lot better now. At the very least, I learned what kind of person I think I'm compatible with because of that experience. I don't think I've ever actually had a crush on a fictional character before Rainbow, at least not that I can remember.

I present circumcised bread

Probably my favorite panel of the con was Thursday at 1am (technically Friday in that case, I guess), called "You Suck, and Why That's Okay!" by Keyframe. It was really chill and funny (someone probably should have age-checked everyone at the door, now that I think about it), and she ran out of things to say at one point and just told a story of how she broke her ankle during a panel a few years ago. Sadly her broken-ankle story isn't in this video since it's only the first 20 minutes, but it still includes a lot of good stuff. Also if you haven't seen any videos of the fursuit parade, there are a bunch of those floating around on YouTube.

I was originally gonna make a punk Rarity suit (from that one episode of MLP), but I couldn't find a purple leather jacket that looked quite right and I don't really feel comfortable making it from scratch. So instead, I'm opting to go the route of dealing with her normal, incredibly difficult to make mane since I'm fairly confident I can make that look at least decent. Also, if I make the mane magnetic I can make the punk Rarity suit in the future just by making the mane, tail, and clothing, which is much easier and more space efficient than having two separate suits for one character. So anyway, I made the bucket head, attached the muzzle, and figured out where the ears will be so I could add the removable fans (the fans and the switch are Velcro'd in so I can remove everything to wash the head, and also to make air travel less of an annoyance since it's a good idea to take heads as your carry-on item). I just finished doing all the soldering and stuff. I have four 30mm fans wired in parallel (two inlet fans in the muzzle, two outlet fans in front of the ears) running off of a regular battery bank for a phone. It's 24k mAh and can supply 5V 2A, so depending on how much I wear the suit, it should be able to run the fans for an entire convention without needing to recharge (the fans are 5V and draw 0.18A). It's also got a switch wired in to the back of the head, so that makes things easier. Man, I think my two and a half years of physics class are actually paying off. Ignore the exposed wire in that spot where the shrink tubing slipped off, I'm going to fix that. Also the botched left eye. I cut it wrong the first time and I need to add in some foam to fix it. I'll probably wait until I put the eyes in to fill the gaps. Another thing, fan #2 doesn't really have anywhere to draw air from yet, but I'm waiting to do that until I get the eyes in so I know how much space I have to work with. Surprisingly the fans in the muzzle don't touch my face, and the fans in the ears don't cause a problem as long as I wear the balaclava. I tested out the temperature (even though it's not really an accurate gauge yet since neither the mouth nor eyes are in) and even though the fans don't move a whole lot of air, it still makes a world of difference. Even so, I might go with 40 or 50mm fans next time around just to make things a bit cooler. At least these fans are nearly silent. I'll probably wait until I'm patterning the fur for my next WIP since heads always look like crap until they're furred. It's just a fact of suit making. Even professional suits look bad until they're finished, at which point they suddenly look incredible. Unlike mine, which just look less bad once they're done.

I went to work for about seven hours, wasted a good four hours playing League, finished writing a chapter for my fic, proofread it, and published it.

"You be careful out there in the real world, all right? Everyone's not as friendly as us."

This was by far my least spectacular year. Not only did I not make many memories, I just didn't enjoy marching band quite so much that year. But man, am I glad I stuck with it nonetheless. My best friend finally joined My childhood friend had planned to join marching band our freshman year, but for whatever reason (laziness, I think) he only showed up to the first practice. He actually stuck with it that year, and we had so much fun just messing around. We started a tradition at band camp where every year we would claim a bunk in a corner of the cabin. He'd get the top bunk, and I'd get the bottom. We did this junior and senior year, too. My interest in playing bari sax (the best sax) grows Me and my friend liked to mess around a bunch. One thing we liked to do was take our pep songs down an octave and blast low C's and Bb's. It was so stupid, but so much fun. More shenanigans with my friend We sat next to each other on every bus ride and just dicked around, basically. I remember one time we decided to listen to Falling in Reverse and My Chemical Romance really loud and head bang for a solid thirty minutes (I had long hair back then). I woke up the following morning with a splitting headache. It wasn't fun Praise Cthulhu I don't remember how his started, but it did. We invented a weird hand sign and would chant "Praise Cthulhu" on occasion. I think it started at the state football game (on a Christian college campus, to make things funnier) the previous year. Our football team winning state champs in triple overtime I'm not a huge football fan, but that was an exciting game. I remember watching the football sail through the goal posts, and there was about a second of stunned silence before the stadium suddenly erupted in noise. A bari sax apparently appears out of thin air near the end of the school year So there was an old bari sax sitting in the back of the instrument storage room that my friend and a couple other people just found one day. Nobody had known it was there (not even our band director). Nobody knew where it had come from. All I knew was I was finally going to get to play bari sax, but I guess that might technically be a memory for junior year. I get dumped (or more specifically, cheated on) Fun memory. It wasn't a great time, let's just leave it at that. So yeah, not a very exciting year. Junior year was much more exciting, and senior year was so full of memories I don't think I'll be able to fit it all in one blog post. Band camp alone from that year could probably fill one or two posts.