I’m A Worrier, That’s What I Do

Hello from the reaches of space, Asher here reporting from the edge of the outer signal.  Whew, so January has been passing us by!  I’ve been busy doing stuff, cooking dinner, sleeping in the mornings when I’m not supposed to, reading, watching movies, going to therapy, and what have you, and it’s been good… but, no blog entries!  What are we going to do about that?  Well, we’re going to write a blog entry, that’s what.  I’m interested in finishing/continuing some previous blog entries/series I’ve done before, particularly my entries on Dragon Warrior (in this series were up to episode 8 and I’m pretty close to finishing the game), and the series on Programming in C is incomplete (I haven’t even gotten to the most fundamental notion of them all: functions!)  In review of some of my traffic on this blog I’ve noticed there are a few articles that are slightly popular (besides the Essay on Benevolence which, due to its ranking on google is the most popular).  These include the Clock Tower series of posts I did way back, both the English and Japanese post versions.  Perhaps I should finish the trilogy, as I got a little burned out once I got to Clock Tower 3 (that, and the premise and interface to the game changed, missing a bit of its charm.)  Another surprisingly popular article that is in need of a sequel is the proposed series on the HTTP Protocol that I began with one post describing the basic operations.  Trouble is, I’ve just not quite had the personal motivation to do a more technical post this month, though I should.  It’s a bit funny, some of the more popular articles are the ones I did on basic programming knowledge and skills, like the one on Linkers and the one on IDEs.  I wasn’t quite expecting that.

Actually, my game posts are WAY behind.  On my YouTube Channel I’ve already completed Dragon Warrior for the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), and its sequel Dragon Warrior 2.  I’m currently working on the original Final Fantasy for the NES, though my actual published videos are still quite a bit behind where I actually am.  I need to sit down and start cranking out some of this information, I mean, I already have Charlock Castle from Dragon Warrior already mapped out on my Photoshop and uploaded to the site.

There are some proposed and orphaned posts as well, including my Introduction to Philosophy, Introduction to Linguistics, my pseudo-introduction to electricity (I called it “Scientific Magic!”)  I had a notion of doing a series on the History of Counting, but that seems a bit esoteric at the moment for my tastes, but its not out of the realm of possibility.  I won’t promise to get to all of these series ’cause I don’t feel I can really promise that, but I am aware that I’ve kind of put them out there and then left them hanging.  Seeing as how I have zero supporters at the moment, I don’t feel too rushed or pressed to build on them, though that’d probably help the cause.

In other news, meaning my life in the void, I’ve been going to art therapy.  I think I wrote briefly about this before, particularly how I have met an interesting person who is turning out to be becoming my friend.  It’s pretty neat, we even walked home together after the last group, and I couldn’t help but smile to myself as its a bit like the Japanese manga high school love stories I read, where the love interest always somehow ends up walking home with the protagonist and all the importance they place on it.  However, unlike the manga, I’m not interested “in that way,” so it’s not as big a deal, but it’s interesting.  I haven’t really met anyone new or made a new friend in a long time.  It’s kind of cool because they are interested in manga, anime, thinks me being a furry is the coolest, loves the fact I listen to Rammstein and read shojo manga in the same breath, and just generally has the same interests and wavelength as me.  It’s also a bit funny because they’re like, 26 or some such, and here I am being 34.  Ah well, that’s how it always seems to go with me, I always seem to hang out with people younger than me, even when I was in school.  I do have a picture though, that I made in Art Therapy and then finished coloring at Starbucks.  The idea was that we were supposed to create a “body map” of an emotion that we feel.  I decided that I’d do the emotion I chose in check-in: “contented.”  We were given a piece of paper with the outline of a body on it, and this is what I came up with:

I thought it was pretty neat.  The idea was, to me, that when I feel contented I feel like a multi-faceted colorful being.  The ribbons sort of show comfort and support from within, and the colors show all the different multi-faceted sides of me.  I feel like when I’m content it’s because I’m comfortable where I am, and I’m in an environment where all my “magnificent colors” are accepted.  In a way, I’m in a place where I feel understood and I don’t have to necessarily explain or defend myself.  I’m very lucky because I feel this to some degree or another, though not necessarily as completely as when I’ve been surrounded by gay male furries in the past, when I’m with my family.  Speaking of colorful and multi-faceted we still have this in our living room:

It’s Christmas time! #christmastree

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It’s our Christmas tree!  Of course, it’s fake, but we bought it from Walmart a couple years ago when our friend Captain was still living here and going to school.  She helped us pick it out.  It was one of those times where I really felt like Maus and I were a little family, though there’s only the two of us, I suppose like a real couple.  I’m not sure why I felt the “real” part, cause I don’t think we’re unreal, I mean we’ve been together for more than 13 years (that seems real enough)… maybe it was just the feeling of growing older and doing stuff like picking out a Christmas tree for our apartment.  Anyway, we still have this baby up in our apartment.  Maus was funny this week, he’s like, “We should probably take that down, it’s getting kind of embarrassing.”  I’m not exactly sure who we’re supposed to be embarrassed by, no one but us has been in that apartment.  However, he’s probably right, and we’ll probably spend some time this weekend putting it away.  Goodbye Christmas tree!

Speaking of Walmart, we were there the other day getting some groceries, pens, and underwear, when we spotted this:

My new handbag #joking #glitterpoop #walmart

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What is this nonsense?  It’s a handbag with a glittery poop emoji tacked on to the sides.  I joked that it was my new handbag, and my sister-in-law put a surprised face on my Facebook post.  It’s too funny.  I want to know what girl wants to wear this thing around?  What fashion statement is this making exactly, perhaps I can be enlightened.  I know when I think of accessorizing the first thing I think of is the unicorn poop emoji.

I wrote about Gorehound’s Playground, located in the Drake shopping center in Fort Collins, in my last post about the New Year.  Well, it’s been fun as Maus and I have seen multiple movies at it since then:

Reanimate double feature at gorehound #gorehoundplayground

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The first movie we saw was Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards.  You might remember Ralph Bakshi as the guy behind Fritz the Cat and the animated Lord of the Rings movies in the 80s and 90s.  The above picture is of the Reanimator double feature we saw: Reanimator and Bride of Reanimator.  I didn’t know this when I decided to attend, but it’s actually based on a H. P. Lovecraft story.  It was goofy, but gorey as well and I wouldn’t recommend it for queasy stomachs.  Although, it was a bit unsettling at first, because there was this young couple sitting to the side of us, and for a bit every time there was a gorey scene the guy would laugh.  I don’t know, maybe it was just me.  The movies got more goofy as they went on, particularly the second movie.  We actually went again to see The Witch Who Came From The Sea:

This movie was bizarre.  At first it was funny, because the acting was so bad.  But once you get into the backstory of the lead character, well, it wasn’t very funny anymore is all I can say.  It’s weird, the main character had the worst acting in the beginning, but as the movie progressed she got better and everyone else seemed to get worse.  Again, although I think this may be the case for every movie at Gorehound, I wouldn’t recommend this for queasy stomachs.  This time it’s not because of gore, but because of the subject matter.  Victims of sexual abuse might have a hard time watching.

Well, I’ve been reading manga these days.  I can kind of finally see why Maus can be so into comics.  They’re fun!  Actually, they’re a bit like crack, I found msyelf at one point out of book-form manga to read and I was like, “Ah well, I guess I can read something normal, you know, without pictures.”  I started with the Orange series, about a group of Japanese highschool students who receive letters from the future with instructions to save their classmate Kakeru.  It was by Ichigo Takano, and was pretty fun:

It also included a bonus story, Haroiru Astronaut, which I also enjoyed.  Since then I’ve been hooked and I’ve read several other mangas.  Orange: Future is suposed to come out sometime around February 6th, and I can’t wait!  The next series I got into was Chobits by the manga artist group CLAMP.  They’re responsible for the more known Card Captor Sakura series, which I plan to also read.  I also read an interesting manga that I suppose can be classified as shojo, but told from a boy’s perspective called The Flowers of Evil.  It’s named after the book of poetry Baudelaire published.  Part 1 ended on a cliffhanger, and the second complete volume won’t be out until around February 27th!  Aagh!  Flowers of Evil is by Shuzo Oshimi, whom I’ve discovered since then has also written a vampire story.  At one point, this was my manga collection:

Chobits was an interesting story.  It dealt with the idea of computers in the form of androids called “Persocoms.”  It was a love story, but it dealt with some of the ramifications of having such entities as Persocoms around, though in a quit Japanese way.  Chi was an interesting character, as well as the landlord Chitose and her back story, which is revealed in the end of Part 2.  I have to say, I kind wish I could be Minoru, the sixth grade rich child genius who builds his own Persocoms custom made, but one can dream right?  Since Orange, Flower of Evil, and Chobits, I’ve read some other mangas, but nothing too heavy.  I actually got an idea for my own manga, well really I adapted a three year old game idea I had called Fata Morgana.  I might describe it as a Pokemon-ish type story with a heavy emphasis on whimsical fantasy, which is what inspired me to do a bit of manga research and get the first volume of Pokemon Adventures manga, this one focusing on the story of Red and Blue from the video games:

Read this light fun thing today. #manga #pokemon #pokemonadventures #book

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I liked it!  It wasn’t like, the most complex or nuanced story, but it was fun light reading.  I also learned how something like Pokemon can be adapted to manga form, and some ideas for my own manga series involving fantastical creatures.  I don’t want to talk to much about my proposed manga series, not because I think someone’s going to steal it, but I’ve discovered when you tell too many people about your ideas sometimes you lose the wind in the sails to actually make them a reality.  However, Maus helped me some in fashioning the first character we thought up for the series Fygment.  Here’s what Maus drew as a very rough draft:

I made another purchase at Barnes and Noble (cause I had a coupon, and they have their 3 for 2 manga sale) and I have to admit, guilty pleasure, I bought the next two volumes of Pokemon Adventures and the first volume of another series that caught my eye before, Waiting for Spring by Anashin.  Just look at this thing:

Yes, this is my guilty pleasure… shojo manga.  I love the sweet little love stories, even though I know the intended audience for this is probably female Japanese middle-schoolers.   But, I like it, so I’m not ashamed.  Just like a good manga volume, it had its ups and downs with some character development and then ended the first volume with a shocking character introduction.  Can’t wait to read volume 2, but unfortunately, that may be a while as I wait for more savings from Barnes and Noble. Luckily, I have Pokemon Adventures volumes 2 and 3 to keep me busy.  And if I finish those, I have Ray Bradbury’s The Toynbee Convector (a gift from one of my my mother’s customers at the Fabric Nook in Granby), as well as the robot non-fiction In Our Own Image, and the book I got from the Eclectic Reader.  So many books, so many blog posts, so little time!

In terms of Japanese, I’ve made progress.  I’ve been using this site called WaniKani by the guy(s) behind Tofugu, to learn how to read Japanese.  It covers radicals, kanji, and vocabulary (jukogu words and otherwise) using what is  called the SRS system.  The idea is that the system paces out a flashcard like system that quizzes you on certain items in such a way that you hopefully have maximum memory retention.  Supposedly when you’re just about to forget something, and then refresh at that moment by having to recall it, it cements it in your mind even more.  So, in this respect, there are multiple levels of mastery for a given item, from apprentice to burned.  When you’ve completely mastered in item they call it a “Burned Turtle.”  I joined the site sometime in July/June of last year and this week I finally accomplisehd my first Burned Turtle!

Burned my first turtle on wanikani.com! #wanikani #burnedturtle

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Speaking of comics though, we actually got an American comic cause I thought it sounded interesting and piqued my furry interest, Exit Stage Left: The Snagglepuss Chronicles:

Acquisition from Gryphon Games today #gryphongames #fortcollins #snagglepuss #comics

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We got this comic from Gryphon Games located near Gorehound and Eclectic Reader in the Drake shopping center.  It was an interesting read, though I would’ve preferred it was the whole comic and not just half, with the other half taken up by a preview story of some superhero I can’t remember the name of right now.  I know it was an introductory issue, so it had to introduce the characters and such, and only really kicked in the potential conflict at the very last page, but I wish it had been longer.  I warned Maus, as I read it first, he might not like the portrayal of Gigi Allen, because I thought she was a fictional character they made up to riff on Ayn Rand (she looks just like her in the comic), but Maus informed me that Gigi Allen was an actual person!  So there went that theory.

I’ve also posted on my Instagram the fact that I’ve finally finished the official canonized Seth Material (being the original publisehd books of Seth):

My Seth collection #sethspeaks #janeroberts #sethmaterial

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It took a long time, but I’ve finally read them all.  It’s an interesting read, though a bit repetitive here and there, of course, that’s expected when it’s supposed that each book might have a chance of standing on its own.  The final book Way Toward Health, is less a Seth book than a cataloging of the final days of Jane Roberts as a person an medium.  Unfortunately, I let the book reviews (and other reviews) I was doing on the books slide, and have only completed the first two reviews of The Seth Material and Seth Speaks.  I’d like to someday delve deeper into the books on my blog, but I can guarantee you even to write a review, I’d have to re-read the books so they’re fresh in my mind.  I’m not sure if I’m ready to do that just yet.  That was a lot of stuff to read, and as from above, I have plenty of books on my plate at the moment.

Here’s the latest development in my life though: I might become employed in a short while.  I’ve been going to therapy at the local mental health center, and we completed what they called a “treatment plan.”  In the treatment plan I put out there that one of my goals was possible part-time employment.  What I didn’t expect was my therapist to put in a referral for me into the local Spirit Crossing Clubhouse to work with a guy who does an IPS program for employing persons with mental health issues.  They called me yesterday to see if I wanted to become a member of the Clubhouse or just work with the guy directly.  I said I wanted to work directly, and she said he’ll call me in a week.  I wasn’t expecting this to move so quickly, and to be honest I’m not sure if I’m completely ready for a job.  My biggest fear is that I’ll end up in a job I won’t like and feel like I don’t necessarily have recourse.  My other hesitation is that if I get employed, while it’ll help the bottom line in my personal life, it’ll also mean I’ll have less time to myself to just do whatever I want.  Right now, that time is set at maximum (as I don’t have a job and can kind of do whatever I want), but I think to myself that normal life includes these kinds of compromises and that I need to suck it up and deal.  To be honest, I just get anxious thinking about it, and I’m not sure what I’m going to do.  I think I want to work in retail, mostly as a merchandiser, basically doing routine stuff like stocking shelves and setting up displays, or maybe at the library reshelving books (that was one of the jobs I saw last time I was at Spirit Crossing.)  Jobs are difficult subjects for me, and I get very discouraged because, I have programming skills… but no formal education.  And every time I’ve taken a programming job, it’s overwhelmed me.  I was looking at Craigslist job listings the other day, and the way people write those things is like, man, anxiety inducing.  They write, “fast-paced dynamic workplace” and I read, “highly demanding workplace.”  And I think, “I could never do that job.”  Which is a shame, cause programming jobs pay well.

Oh well, we’ll see how it goes.  Maybe I can get myself into a part-time job I will actually like.  I mean, my last job was to dress up in a dinky dog costume and hold a sign for three hours on the side of the street.  If I can do that, I should be able to do whatever is thrown at me.  I just worry, cause I’m a worrier, and that’s what I do.  Speaking of worry and anxiety, I’m actually attempting to lessen my Ativan usage with the guidance of my doctor at The Wholeness Clinic.  He doesn’t like Ativan as a drug, and I’ve been taking it chronically .25 mg every morning and evening.  Well, I decided I’d stop doing that and just take it on an PRN basis (as needed) meaning, only take it when I work myself up into an anxious tizzy.  Well, since the appointment I’ve had to take it two times because in the evenings I have a habit of ultra-focusing on something worrisome and then working myself up into an anxiety attack.  However, I did this last night and realized that’s what I was doing and I was able to calm down and reset my system without the use of Ativan, so there’s progress.

So there’s the signal.  As I tend to say, “That’s my story.”  Whew!

photo credit: wbaiv B29A CAF Fifi – center of cockpit – 95-15-0A-light via photopin (license)

Asher Wolfstein

I'm a wunk (half-wolf half-skunk) anthromorph from the future that's stuck here in the past. Throughout my travels, I've learned that being true to yourself is one of the most important things you can do. On my blog I write about my life, interests, projects, observations, struggles, and whatever catches my fancy, otherwise I write reference/educational material on How To Program Anything and open-source software at Press Accept Software. Sometimes I make computer games. My projects are generally concerned with websites, computer science, linguistics, video game design/programming, and (animal/furry) costuming (fursuits). I study Japanese (日本語), read technical books, manga, self-help, cookbooks, and just about anything else, cook, make, and play games for fun. You can sometimes find me virtually on Second Life as kadar.talbot where I head up Falcraft Square, the premiere Cybercadia sim housing, among other things, Original Pursuits LLC's virtual office.

私は未来から来たワンク(半狼、半スカンク)の擬人化体で、ここに過去から立ち往生しています。 旅を通して、私は自分自身に忠実であることが最も重要なことの一つであることを学びました。 私のブログでは、自分の人生、興味、プロジェクト、観察、苦労など、気になったことを何でも書きます。それ以外の場合は、参考/教育資料やオープンソース ソフトウェアを書きます。 時々コンピューターゲームを作ります。 私のプロジェクトは通常、ウェブサイト、コンピューター サイエンス、言語学、ビデオ ゲームのデザイン/プログラミング、および (動物/毛皮の) 衣装に関係しています。 日本語を勉強したり、専門書、マンガ、自己啓発本、料理本などを読んだり、料理したり、作ったり、ゲームをしたりして楽しんでいます。 Second Life 上では、kadar.talbot として仮想的に私を見つけることができます。そこでは、ファルクラフト スクエア、プレミア サイバーカディア シム ハウジング、とりわけ Original Pursuits LLC の仮想オフィスを率いています。

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