BlueFoxThom

Alright, everyone, sit down, and listen carefully, coz I'm about to get deadly serious about a matter of grave concern.

You guys remember SOPA and PIPA, and all the outrage surrounding them that got them swept under the proverbial carpet?

Well, it seems the powers that be haven't learned their lesson.

In about a month's time, the US Federal Communication Commission (FCC) will vote on a bill that, if passed, will basically allow internet providers acorss the states to control what we see and do online.

And by control, I mean slow to almost an absolute standstill unless you pay exorbatant fees.

If you're not from America, don't think for a SECOND that it won't affect you.

For one thing, that's where a vast majority of internet servers are, and for another thing, IF this bill gets passed, it'll very likely set it's sights on other countries. It's highly likely England will be next in line if it goes through...then it'll be the rest of Europe...Russia and Australia...the rest of the world.

Websites will dissapear left and right. Only the sites of highly wealthy mega-corporations will remain, as they can afford the fee for normal speed internet.

It MUST be stopped in America NOW, or we might as well consider the Internet GONE.

Posts advertising this outrage have flooded Reddit...and I feel I must spread the word. And you must too. The more word spreads around the internet, the better, allowing more people to be aware of the issue and join their voice to the thousands upon thousands who protest this already.

We need that number to be in the millions if we can get it there.

More info here

For the love of god, spread the word!

Ok, wow…what a year 2016 was. What. A. Year. Holy frijoles, it was a long one.
Feels more like two years, at least!

Eh…screw the list of things I’d like to do over the year I made last New Year’s Day. I failed all but one of them and that was to switch to Barclays bank.

I think the whole set myself up for a YouTube career thing needs to be put on indefinite hold until we’re nicely set up with our own place and our own lives and everything is settled down again.

I suppose I can work on it a little here and there if I have time to kill and don’t feel like doing anything else, but other than that…yeah, there’s more important things to take care of first.

So what actually did happen this past year?

Well, among other things, as I mentioned, I’m with Barclays now. Couldn’t be happier with that.

We went to Romania for a week back in June. That was quite the trip.

And then the UK had that big ol’ referendum vote. Oh my sweet omnipotent deity, if I could go back in time and undo something, it would be to go back and warn everybody I could that Brexit was and is not such a good idea.
I’m holding on to hope that this supposed UK supreme court ruling that the referendum was done illegally converts into a ruling that Theresa May can’t go ahead with it.

We found Lav a job for half a year but she was struggling to cope with it so we got her out.

We then found a course to have her become a dental nurse but we realised right now is not the best time for her to take it. She needs an actual, proper, full time job, not a traineeship.
Even though she told them she wants out, they’re not doing refunds and they still want her to pay the extra fees for the exams she’s not going to take. Urgh.

A Jobs Fair at Stockport Town Hall got me in touch with Work Solutions to work me towards getting a paid job. I need all the help I can get, I suppose. They’ve already helped me with some fresh retail course certificates from Job Gym and some improvements to my CV.
They’ve now set me up with some work at a charity shop in Stockport starting with an interview on the 6th of January. They’re gonna have me do an interview prep on the 5th so I’m ready for it.

I don’t know if I should go through with that arrangement, though…

You see, Lav and I realise we really, REALLY need to find our own place to live A.S.A.NOW!!!

We just can’t continue living in my parent’s house any longer than we have to.

It’s just way too inconvenient, especially for Lav.

EVERY time she tries to use the bathroom for anything, my dad needs to use it and complains that she’s hogging it. And he doesn’t seem to need it ANY other time. I swear it’s deliberate.
Even when he’s out of the house, if she pops in the bathroom, he suddenly arrives home and immediately needs the toilet.
We’ve even tried asking him beforehand if he needs to use the toilet at all before Lav uses it, and he’s said no, he’s fine, but then 5 minutes later when she’s in there, he’s pacing outside sighing angrily and cussing to himself that it’s occupied.
It’s fricking ridiculous!
It seems to be only affecting her, though.
Other than that, there hasn’t really been any toilet-related clashes.
Also, my dad gets so drunk every night that when he uses the bathroom he leaves his …well… ”leavings” all over the place…on the toilet seat, on the sink…sometimes even on the floor and walls. He should be classified as a toxic hazard and we should have men in hazmat suits coming to decontaminate everything.
Lav is very upset by it. She’s even saying we’re gonna have to go out on the streets just to get out of this situation because of the problems with my dad. But then, what’s she supposed to do for a bathroom and a place to change for work?
Yeah, she has another job lined up in January thanks to one of the job agencies she signed up to.
We don’t have all the details yet, but regardless, she needs the bathroom so she can get cleaned up and ready for work each day when that job starts, which she can’t do when we’re stuck with my parents like this.
Originally we were hoping she’d just have to wake up early in the morning just to have some time free in the bathroom, but nope, just this morning my dad had to wake up for the bathroom early in the morning too, so we can’t even rely on that anymore!
Also, my dad seems to get angry quite easily, especially when drunk, and his anger scares poor Lav.
We’ve raised these concerns about my dad with my mum, but she just laughed and said to just ignore him…um…exactly how does she propose we do that?

Places that accept housing benefit near Stockport are just very hard to find, it seems.
However, there appears to be a whole bunch up in Oldham! At first, I was a bit unwilling to go all the way to Oldham for a place to live, but…well…when you’re desperate as we are…I guess I may have to step out of my comfort zone of living in the Stockport area all my life…and besides, it may only be for a little while until Lav’s been at her job for a bit and maybe I find some work too and then we can grab whatever rental we damn well please.

We asked on Reddit for some advice about our situation as well, and they suggested we contact Shelter for some advice too.

We did that, and they told us we can speak directly to the council for help with our situation.
They said our situation can be classified as straight up homeless since it’s so bad.

Regardless, we gotta wait at least a few more days yet. Everywhere that can help us with housing is shut for the Christmas and New Year Period and won’t be open until the 3rd.

Yeah, it doesn’t help that we only found out off Luna about getting Housing Benefit to pay the whole rent for a fairly decent place in the run-up to Christmas. Not a good period of time to be trying to deal with this sort of thing.

If only either of us had thought of asking her how she got her place sooner. Granted, she got it because she happened to be friends with the landlord (HOW?!?!?) but maybe she would’ve given us some tips on how we can find our own place sooner, and we may have had something by now!

Eh…no matter…we just didn’t know. Learn from your mistakes.

We just gotta survive until the 3rd…then hopefully we can quickly find a solution to our housing problem.

…so yeah…we may end up living in Oldham…which doesn’t make it too convenient for that Work Solutions work experience placement in a charity shop in Stockport, now, does it? Hopefully we can find something in or near Stockport first.

In the meantime, later today as I type this, we’re gonna go view a place in Rusholme. It doesn’t accept DSS but Lav is hoping we could pay the deposit and one month’s rent for it and then pay subsequent months with the salary she’ll be getting at this job she has lined up in January.

It looks quite the bargain actually. Very modern and nice looking for only £410 a month for couples.
We’re getting a little over £450 a month from Jobseeker’s so we should be able to afford it long enough for Lav’s salary to take over at least. We just gotta not tell them we’re technically on Jobseeker’s now and will be getting the job later. I don’t think the landlord would like that.

So yeah. That’s our plan for 2017.

1) Get our own place as soon as we possibly can.

2) Since Lav already has a job lined up, get me into paid work somehow.

Anything we can do beyond that is a bonus.

Ciao For Now,

Cordially, The Blue Fox.

Read my official online blog here

So I found out about this site through Reddit.

It's called Furvilla. It's basically supposed to be a fluffier version of Gaia online, and hopefully one that'll not turn into a spam / drama mess-storm like Gaia did.

It's pretty new, created a few days ago, and still in open beta.

They have forums and chat, but they're currently closed because of idiot furs trying to ruin it with their stupidity. So they're hunting for mods to help keep an eye on discussions and keep the idiots from ruining things.

Also the open beta is supposedly going to close on July 8th, and new account registrations with it, so if you're interested, reserve your username now.

If you do register, there's a thing that allows you to say you were referred to the site by somebody. Feel free to put my user ID down as your referrer, I can get some cool rewards. Here's my profile

Whelp. Here we go with another brand new year. So long, 2015.

Alright, let’s go through the checklist from last year’s New Year’s post…

1) Go for a walk at least 5 days a week. Don’t get so nit-picky about going the same places over and over in rapid succession. You never know, you might see something rare.

Status – Fail

Yeah, I knew I’d fail this…let’s face it, I just do not have the energy for any kind of regular exercise…but it’s cool…I have another way to keep myself reasonably healthy…

2) Join Weightwatchers. Pretty self-explanatory.

Status – Succeed

…And these guys provided it. The help and info these guys offered really helped a lot. I took it all on board and am still using it, to an extent, even after having to leave them due to the fact that I was only going to their meetings to weigh myself, when I have scales at home, so basically I was sinking over £6 a week to find out whether or not I lost a pound or two.

I would definitely recommend Weightwatchers to anybody looking to lose weight and have tried everything EXCEPT them. It’s not just for women, either. They may only show women in their ads, but they accept all genders, ages and nationalities…as long as you can afford the fee for membership, you’re in.

3) Buy a new desktop computer. Whatever they got that you can afford without too much hassle that’s still decent. And yeah, decent software to go with it.

Status – Succeed

I am SO happy with my precious HP Pavilion 550-059na Desktop PC, This thing is pretty awesome…very few issues so far…pretty much everything I’ve encountered I’ve managed to fix with some help from my more-tech-savvy-than-me beloved Lav.

There is one issue we can’t resolve right now, though. My External Hard Drive, what I’ve been using to back-up my files, has stopped working with it. Looks most likely to be a compatibility issue of some sort. No idea why it would work at first but then kind of suddenly stop, though…the fact that we discovered from finding the packaging for the E.H.D that the free warranty expired back in October might have something to do with it, though. Typical.

4) Buy a PS4 and some games to go with it, such as Watchdogs, Tom Clancy’s The Division, Infamous Second Son, Destiny, and Minecraft PS4 version.

Status – Fail

I’ve decided to put this on hold until I’ve started with my YouTube Gaming Channel and have uploaded Let’s Plays of the PS1, PS2 and PS3 games I want to put on there. There’s a fair few to get through, though, so it may be a while.

No biggie, the price for the console and the games will drop a fair bit in the meantime, I’ll probably find a good deal when I finally get around to this.

5) Look into how to create multiple YouTube Channels. You already got one for real life. You also need one for general internet shenanigans with your fursona and pony shenanigans with Typhoon, and one for gaming, doing lets plays and whatnot.

Status – Fail

I’ve decided it’s no good having multiple YouTube channels if I don’t have any YouTube videos to upload to them, so first I want to make a whole load of vids ready to upload, and THEN I’ll look into getting more channels to upload them to.

I’ve also decided to merge the my little pony stuff with Typhoon channel idea into my main general internet shenanigans one with my fursona, because essentially Typhoon is an extension of my fursona, plus I don’t think I’ll really be doing much with my ponysona anyway.

First I got to finish up writing up scripts for all the YouTube Videos I plan to do…there’s a fair few I’ve thought of, and no doubt many more video ideas to come…

…then, of course, I got to actually edit these YouTube videos together…gonna be a lot of hard work, but my drive to realise my dream of becoming famous should keep me going.

I’m really excited about this, and hopefully I can make a very profitable career out of it like famous Youtubers like Pewdiepie and Jackscepticeye did.

Okay…so let’s update you on the situation with my girlfriend, Lavander.

So that notary letter we sent out to her mom? Yeah the tracking on it said this weird message; “Undelivered, not at address, office closed” repeated for a number of days…so we figured it was sitting in a post office in Romania somewhere, so we had her mom check things on her end with the tracking code…

…turns out the postman gave it to the next door neighbor for safe keeping, or accidentally slotted it in the wrong envelope slot, or something like that…we’re not quite sure what, exactly, happened, all we know is the next door neighbor had it and was kind enough to give it to the mom.

Fast forward a couple of weeks, and one last visit to a certain rental later (Her mom can’t know she’s moved in with me yet, it’ll raise suspicion), we have our Graduation Diploma and relevant documents from the nursing school. Perfect.

We reckon we might not even need to translate them, since the care home only asked for references…

We asked the local GP, but they don’t even give references to people they know. I guess some GPs do it and others don’t? No matter, because we decided to use the Headmaster of the nursing school and a teacher who said they’d give a reference but then got sick.

The Nursing home actually wants to check them. We were kinda hoping they wouldn’t, but no big deal, The only issue I can see arising from this is the fact that we didn’t ask prior permission from the school to use those references, and they’ll say “Hey, hang on, we weren’t asked for permission to be used for a reference, ergo, we refuse to give one!”

I mentioned this concern to my mom and she reckons it won’t be an issue and they’ll give a reference anyway. Here’s hoping.

If they do, the Headmaster will likely refer to the school records and give a professional reference saying she passed with a really high score, yes, she’s more than qualified for the role, and the teacher knows Lav on a more personal, friendly level, and will hopefully at least mention how good a person she is.

At any rate, we’re definitely not gonna get an answer for another couple of days at least due to the Christmas/New year period…the school will be closed, so the care home won’t get a reply until it opens again.

EVEN IF this fails…hey, we got these documents saying she’s pretty much a nurse already, we just gotta get some kind of official translation that’s just as valid legally…the UK’s health system being as desperate as it is, I’m sure SOMEONE will take her on faster than we can say “lickety-split”…I’m sure our best bet to get her out there is through a job agency.

Yep, even though not everything goes quite exactly according to plan for us, we always have a back-up plan ready, and this one in particular is practically fool-proof…there’s NO WAY an agency can fail at finding a job for a qualified nurse with the health industry begging for more staff as it is.

I really do want my love to get a job of some kind…so then she’d at least be self-sufficient and not having to rely on me…then even IF things don’t work out between us relationship-wise, she can still live out her life, and I can go back to mine.

But I highly doubt anything will go wrong with our union…we’re such an amazing match…

It’s not “perfect”, but then, nothing is perfect in this world, that’s a known fact.

I must admit I do find it just a teeny bit annoying that she keeps asking if I’m upset at her about something, or if something’s wrong. I have no idea what it is about my demeanor that seems to prompt her to do this so often or even WHY my demeanor would prompt her to ask to begin with, but it happens.

Anyway, once she gets a job. We’re then going to renew our search for a couples rental somewhere in or near Stockport that’s reasonably cheap…I know we’ll have at least £800 a month to play with, but we want to save up as much of that as possible and see about moving up the property ladder later down the line of our lives.

Me making a living out of making YouTube videos will hopefully help out a heck of a lot towards that, depending on how well I do and how much attention I get.

It just amazes me to think…we met by complete random chance…that fateful day in Second Life…if I hadn’t taken that friend up on his offer to visit that club that was opening, I never would have met Lav…

…I probably would be a lot further along with my plans for YouTube…and she would probably be hedging her bets on an event her Nursing School was having for students who want to work in England, she probably would have found a random nursing job there, and be jetting off to work in some random UK hospital, and neither of us would be any the wiser.

But I definitely believe that neither of us would be as happy without each other in our lives as we are being together.

MAYBE we would have found love elsewhere…who knows?

Fate works in mysterious ways, I guess.

Before I met Lav, I have heard countless times from various people that I would find “the one” when I least expect it…I never believed them…but now…this is actual, living proof there’s some truth to it, and yes, I have since gone on to tell that same line to other people looking for love, too.

We shall see what the future holds, but right now, it’s looking pretty bright.

I learned quite a few things this past year…most prominently, I learned that here in England, when you’re looking for a rental place to live in in real life, look at the price per month, not the price per week, because the price per week is an EFFing LIE!!

Like, seriously…£55 a week DOES NOT EQUAL £325 a month…I wish I realised that before getting Lavander into that place in Rusholme.

Oh well…at least we got out of it by finding that replacement tenant…so we also learned if we want out of the rental before the agreed end date of our lease period, just find a replacement tenant, and it’s all good. Handy to know.

I forget what else I learned this past year…I guess nothing too important…

I know I said last year that 2015 was the year to get things done...but now 2016 feels even more so like a year to GET…THINGS…DONE!

It’s like it says in this Reddit post

2015 was just a warm-up…2016 is definitely MY YEAR now.

I just got to keep motivated to do the hard work that chasing my dreams requires.

Maybe listening this guy will help a bit to begin with…I feel once I get going, I’m sure I’ll motor through the hard work no problem.

I have found myself able to motor through a task quite a bit once I get going, especially if I got some awesome tunes playing into my ears as I’m doing it.

So I’m going to make a list of stuff to do this year that will help me achieve my goals.

1a) Help my lovely Lav get a starting job in the health industry

I could pretty much already count this as done if the references work like we hope.

1b) IF my love successfully secures a job, acquire couples rental for us to move into.

We need our own place, we can’t stay with my parents forever. They’re awesome for helping us out the way they did, though. Why can’t more people’s parents be awesome like mine?

2) Finish all the scripts for the YouTube video ideas I have so far.

It’s no good making a video without a script…I need to know what I’m talking about…a lot of scripts are done or mostly done but I have to finish them all before I even BEGIN recording a SINGLE voiced line.

3) Make vectors of my fursona and ponysona to layer over my videos.

I’m gonna copy some YouTube reviewers here, and make it look like my fursona and ponysona are talking…I can’t make them fully animated, though, that’d take too much time and effort. Besides, I’ve seen semi-animated vectors used with voice-overs before, and it’s very effective.

4) Get some decent screen-recording software.

Obviously I’d need to be able to record footage of what I’m talking about. I can probably get most, if not all, of what I need off of YouTube. I just gotta watch I don’t use mirrored footage…I learned YouTube is automatically programmed to flag mirrored footage from a YouTube reviewer who got a strike against his channel recently and learned it was because the footage of a TV episode he was reviewing was mirrored and he didn’t realise it.

5) Move my bank account to Barclays Bank

My bank account with Santander was opened back when they were still Abbey National, I joined them pretty much because my parents were with them. Well, I don’t like being with that red bank anymore. I wanna switch to the nice, blue Barclays.
I’ve basically already made it so I only need to find out how to change to my new bank details with KNOWHOW for my computer’s care plan and with Photobucket so I can continue to pay for exceeding the limit given to its free users.

Oh, actually, maybe I can look into why I’m using so much space with my Photobucket and maybe I can look into deleting some stuff I don’t need, or maybe creating multiple accounts and spreading everything out over the multiple accounts, so I don’t have to pay for that anymore. We’ll see when I can be bothered to have a look properly.

I think that’ll do for goals to achieve THIS YEAR for now.

Then, for goals to achieve in the next few years, I got;

1) Edit together all the YouTube video ideas I have.

2) Start recording Let’s Plays of the games I want to do that with.

3) Look into how to create multiple YouTube accounts.

4) Get some PC games.

5) Get a PS4 and PS4 games once I finish the PS1 / 2 / 3 game Let’s Plays.

6) Get the latest Samsung Galaxy S number mobile phone.

7) Get an android tablet. Probably Samsung again.

And then we’ll see where we go from there.

Okay, I think that’s pretty much everything.

Wish me luck, Internet.

Ciao For Now,

Cordially, The Blue Fox.

Non-furries and furries alike have wondered why us furries do what we do. This video offers up a pretty decent explanation.



Watch it. Then help me spread it round the internet.