About

coyote

  • a buff-gray to reddish-gray swift carnivorous mammal (Canis latrans) of North America that is closely related to but smaller than the wolf, has a narrow pointed muzzle and triangular ears, hunts singly or in small groups, and is known for its various distinctive vocalizations (such as barks, yips, and howls)

conundrum

  • A riddle in which a fanciful question is answered by a pun.
  • A paradoxical, insoluble, or difficult problem; a dilemma.

Welcome to A Coyote's Conundrum! This site functions as my personal hub for my interests, which includes the act of desigining this website. My main name on the internet is SomeOtherStranger. A bit of a mouthful, but I'd like to think it's a cool name.


As stated on my home page, I'm a Christian, which is absolutely the most important part of who I am. I was saved by the LORD Jesus Christ somewhere around 2015. With my own two hands I was lowering myself into an abyss of sin, but the LORD pulled me back up and filled me with new life. I've made a lot of mistakes since then, but the LORD has remained faithful where I've faltered and has carried me through thick and thin.

As for particulars, I affirm the Nicene Creed and my overall view of the faith aligns with Reformed Protestantism.


As for why I theme myself and my website after coyotes, animals have been used throughout the history of every culture to represent ideas and traits, and I find the characterizations of the coyote to be particularly interesting. They were clever tricksters, cowards, creators and fools. They also have a strong association with the desert and the Wild West.


As for my general interests, I'm a big fan of science fiction genres, particularly those involving aliens. I also love spaghetti westerns and its affiliated motifs. I'm a big fan of mythology and folklore, and I'm also a big fan of anthropomorphic animal characters. I love dynamic fight choreography, like the kind done by the late Monty Oum. I also love theology and Christian history. I'm also a big fan of video games, with some of my favorite franchises including Sonic the Hedgehog, Super Mario, Mega Man Zero, Metroid and Halo.



Tools of the Trade

So, what do I prefer to use for my work? Mostly open-source stuff 'cause it's free, with an exception or two.

I use Krita for most of my digital artwork. It's got a solid set of tools, features, and a great brush engine, and is completely free.

For handrawn 2D animation, I use Tahoma2D for large projects and Krita for smaller prjects. Tahoma2D is a fork of OpenToonz that is slightly more stable on Linux (so far) and has a simpler interface and additional features to boot. Tahoma2D/OpenToonz are fully featured open-source animation programs, and I'd highly recomend them to anyone looking to get into larger animation projects.

For spriting I use Aseprite, which is specifically designed for pixel art and I would highly recommend for such work (though you can theoretically use any image editor to do this, even MSPaint). It's a paid program, but with a little technical know-how you can build it from the source code for free (which isn't what I did, I just paid for it lol).

For project organization, I use Zim Desktop Wiki. Its organization is that of "Notebooks" with pages and subpages, and every page is saved as a .txt file, which means that everything is still accessible even without Zim Desktop Wiki. Notebooks can also be exported as HTML, so you could theoretically make a wiki-esque website with it (hence the "Wiki" part of the name).

For sprite animation I'd theoretically use Macromedia Flash 8 Professional, but I haven't delved very far in this area as of yet.

For video editing I use Kdenlive.

For random music-making shenanigans, I use LMMS. For audio editing, I use Audacity.

For image editing I also use Krita because I'm familiar with it and can't be bothered to learn GIMP kek.