BJ @bj@xeno.chat

Testing this is still up, and - sure enough, it is. Good.

Dreamt last night I was in a crowded but joyous place. There was a fountain, an arcade, live music, and a bookstore that served the few college classes that were held there (in auditoriums off to the side of the main plaza, far enough away that noise wasn’t a problem). It was a bit of a maze to get around, though, and shortcutting through the restrooms or jumping down from balconies were ways I ended up getting around.

"Whalefish"? Eesh. I meant #Whalebird. And this time I've properly hashmarked it.

Whalefish is a pretty nice Masto client. Frankly there's something about a Linux desktop - like, properly installed on live hardware instead of running in a VM - that feels cozy to me.

There we go. A few steps into getting this whole new system set up, and it's starting to feel pretty comfortable.

I live! I have some ideas now that are going to give this account some purpose. This is called XenoChat, after all. I have a new logo for the whole Xeno project (which I'll be installing later on), and a whole fictional universe (okay, a whole fictional city; universes are big) waiting behind the doors here.

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Felt like drawing Lillian again. I was watching anime at the time, though, and so the pose turned into this sort of ready-for-action thing. She's got a new jacket, but those are still the same pair of jeans she's had for decades now. They're cozy.

I ought to start using this account more. It's been sitting here untouched while Elseways is kind of on hold as a project - the intent was to build that up to something bigger, but it's been hard getting started on actual content. This is a perpetual problem of mine. I love building the engines, but I never have any fuel left over to run them.

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The same adventurer as yesterday, casting a Hover spell. They're a Kinesthete, a physics-themed mage/athlete whose spells can make things lighter, heavier, faster, slower, or in this case hover. They're good at non-elemental effects and have a good balance of physical and magical power.

Feeling more and more lion-y lately. I don't know whether it was permission, acknowledgement, or encouragement I got, but I want to explore that more.

Interesting effect of how federation works. I was following people from this account here, but my timeline has a gap in it that started on July 2, so even though the server was technically running (but inaccessible) this whole time, it wasn't receiving anything from my follows.

Hello again. We were down for a while because of some DNS screwups, but I think we're back now.

There we go. Now I have a neat little monogram logo.

A little frustrated that I can't (even in the server admin options) set this place's Favicon. The generic Mastodon logo is okay, but I wanted to replace it with Xeno.Chat's own X logo. Ah well.

I also really need to upload an icon for myself, and I think I know what it should look like...

The thing is, I don't particularly lean heterosexual or homosexual. I'm not interested in bare breasts, turned off by genitalia of both kinds, and frankly humans in general I find kind of off-putting. But I don't feel right calling myself asexual either, because there are things I am very into. But there is no convenient flag for what I am. There should be, even as a kind of "miscellaneous" category.

Where even is the line between "fetish" and "genuine sexual orientation"? Because what I'm into cuts across the usual lines and refuses to fit into a recognizable box. The feeling is real. I still have it. But I don't have the vocabulary to convince anyone of how real and how deep it is.

The multiple-limbs thing goes back a long way. I remember, as a kid, obsessing over:
• Kary (aka Marilith) from Final Fantasy, and generally all D&D mariliths (plus Secret of Mana's Hexas)
• Goro and Kintaro from MK
• The two-headed snake enemies from FF2/4, to the point where I was trying to figure out how to make a costume
All of these were around when I was 11-14 or so. Other boys obsessed over pictures of naked women. I had … that.

Okay, I've gotten Amaroq signed into this account now. Neat.

"Multiple arms and divided loyalties," she said with a smirk. "How singularly appropriate. But never forget your origin. Væri didn't rescue you, she took you from us and claimed you're better off there."