Howdy! My internet name is "SomeOtherStranger", and welcome to A Coyote's Conundrum! This place is a personal hub for my interests, which include art, animation, storytelling, original characters, and various media franchises that I may sometimes hyperfixate on! (Mostly Sonic the Hedgehog if I'm being completely honest).
As stated on my home page, I'm a Christian. I affirm the Nicene Creed and my beliefs generally align with traditional Reformed Protestantism.
My journey was a bit of a rocky one. I grew up in a Christian household, so I had some knowledge of Christian beliefs, though I didn't quite understand the significance of the issue of sin and the need for redemption until the mid-2010s when I was in my mid-teens. At that time I had hit a low point in my life due to falling into grievous sin, and, realizing my guilt, I threw myself at Jesus' feet, begging Him to deliver me.
This marked a turning point in my life, albeit the road ahead was yet rocky still. I still wasn't going to church, so I wasn't baptized until way later. I also didn't seek out other Christians either at that point, so I had little in the way of fellowship and guidance. There were a lot of key questions and points that I didn't really get at that time, like how prayer and the Holy Spirit was supposed to work ("am I supposed to hear God?"), and so on.
I did spend time with a lot of online friends that were not Christian though, and this resulted in another rough patch, as each of my friends ended up becoming more and more "progressive" in their beliefs, I found myself doing the same in order to conform. I compromised on a lot of important things, and I found myself becoming a pretty terrible person as a result.
This led to yet another turning point where I realized what I had done, repented, and then made the difficult decision of leaving that crowd. Part of me still feels like I could've or should've handled that better, but in hindsight it was probably the only thing I could really do at that time.
The sudden lack of friendships in my life was awful at first, and to make matters worse the dreaded lockdowns of 2020 had began almost right after. I had felt so alone, and I was afraid of trying to find friendship again for a while afterwards and held off on making new social media accounts. Even so, I still had a draw towards finding friends, so I slowly eased into it. Yet another turning point at this point was finding...
Christ Centered Gamer! I initially made a forum account, as I was afraid to make a new Discord, but because forums are dead these days (R.I.P.), I joined the Discord somewhere near the end of 2020. It was in this server that I found the fellowship and religious discourse I was sorely lacking, and through them God brought about a lot of growth in me.
From there I made friends, received some much needed guidance and correction, developed an interest in theology, and eventually found a church and got baptized proper!
Even though life still has its challenges, and I still have moments where I struggle, whether it be with anxiety, despair, or invasive thoughts, I'm in a much better place now mentally and spiritually than when I started out thanks to God and the efforts of many solid Christians around me. Life is a struggle, and we all carry burdens, but those who place their faith in Christ are never alone in the trials they face. It may not be easy, but by grace through faith we will persist.
I ain't too good at describing myself, but I suppose I might as well give it a shot.
I grew up in the Northwestern United States, starting with Alaska and ending up in Montana, where I've spent the majority of my life so far. My main interests include drawing, animation, video games, spriting, storytelling, the late 90s / early 2000s, science fiction, spaghetti westerns, myths and folklore, history, theology, technology (especially older tech), and anthropomorphic animal characters.
Aside from just plain liking animals and animal characters, I find the motif of the coyote being both intelligent and foolish fascinating, as it's a duality that I can relate to.
But it's mostly because coyotes are a cool canine with a strong association with deserts and the wild west. XP
A question that I'm unsurprisingly asked a fair bit, but the answer is no. While I am a fan of anthropomorphic animal characters, I'm not really part of the furry subculture and I don't have any interest in being part of it either.
Krita - open source, I use this for most of my digital artwork and smaller animation projects.
Tahoma2D - open source, fork of OpenToonz with emphasis on simplcity + some additional features. I use this for larger animation projects.
Aseprite - pixel art / spriting software, can be built from source for free (or otherwise bought prebuilt, which is what I did kek).
Zim Desktop Wiki - desktop wiki software, organizes things by Notebooks with pages and subpages. Useful for project organization and story notes. Everything is saved as a .txt file (ensuring accessibility) and can even be exported as HTML.
Macromedia Flash 8 Professional - ideal tool for sprite movies, albeit I have not gotten around to learning it yet.
Kdenlive. Open-source video editor, pretty robust, stability may vary.
LMMS. Open source music software, for my very random and infrequent music making shenanigans.
Audacity. Open source sound editor, useful for when I need some sound files spliced or editied.