Me, you say?
Well don’t mind if I do!
| Key | Value |
|---|---|
| Name | Malle Yeno |
| Pronouns | he/him or they/them |
| Age | 28 |
| Languages | English preferred |
| Gay | Very 🏳️🌈 |
I’m a furry artist and my fursona is a raccoon-dog (sometimes either in the hybrid sense or outright a tanuki).
I dig through the trash cans of Regina, Saskatchewan 🌾
What do you do?
I work in geography professionally (if you know what GIS means, you get a cookie shaped into your favourite projection 🗺️). Nowadays that’s on the project management side of that domain, but I can still cook up a map app. You might see some on this site! And if not, I can at least point you to some other maps or mapmakers I’m interested in.
Beyond that, I am a furry artist! I have been drawing anthros for… a long time? 😅 I will say I only started taking drawing seriously about seven years ago! I don’t quite remember when I started art in general. It was at least ten years ago and probably before then. I know I’ve been doodling them in sketchbooks since at least middle school.
My biggest hobby is contributing to OpenStreetMap for the Regina area. If you’ve seen a feature in the area, there’s a decent change I’m somewhere in the version history! And if not, then I’m at least active on the OSMUS slack and on the Regina wiki page.
Every week where I can, I stream on Twitch. Usually that’s going to be me drawing, but I also play games to recharge every so often. Or I might just be messing around/doing OSM stuff/working on a vtuber.
What’s your fursona?
Malle is a raccoon-dog/tanuki who gets up to hijinks! I use him as my online representation and in my art as a self-insert (or just a prominent character, depends on the situation!)
He exists in a fantasy setting where during the day, he acts as a jeweler or goldsmith. But at night, he lives his true Spellswipe life, using magic to sneak in and yoink enchanted valuables. Whether he’s good at staying sneaky is something he’s still working out with the palace guards~
Using magic and potions, he is able to shapeshift. But as with all magic-practicing creatures in the setting, the full moon can throw a wrench into the plan. What kind of wrench is something I like to explore in my art and stories!
If I write more about Malle, or make a dedicated reference page for him, I’ll probably link it here!
What are you up to now?
What tools do you use?
For art
I would recommend anyone wanting to pick up digital art to use Krita. People have a stigma against free things as being low quality, but Krita is a shockingly powerful piece of software for artists. Genuinely slept on. But I use/have used everything in the below table
| Tool | Platform | Use | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Clip Studio Paint | Desktop | general raster art, comics especially | Got it with the pay-once pricing and really like it. Not sure I would ever recommend the subscription though. |
| Krita | Desktop/Surface Pro (back when I had one) | general raster art, anything else | Open source, good community, very flexible! If I can’t do something easy in CSP, I open Krita. |
| Aseprite | Desktop | pixel art/animation | Good enough for most things, but I find myself asking “why isn’t this already a feature?” enough to go into Krita a bunch |
| Affinity Designer/Publisher/Photo 2 | Desktop | vector art/publishing | Good enough for a lot of things. But really takes some getting used to. But can’t beat pay once pricing (oh hi adobe) |
| Inkscape | Desktop | vector art, but occasional | Trying my best to get used to it but the interface is tricky coming from other tools. It’s solid though, would recommend learning. |
| Blender | Desktop | trying to learn 3D! | Would loooove to be able to edit or outright make my own vtuber. But maaaan is that a learning cliff. |
| Procreate | iPad | raster art | Pay once pricing and it’s a program designed for touch interactions. Honestly a shocking piece of software that’s available. Not as powerful as CSP or Krita, but what would you expect from iPad apps? |
For organizing/living my life
I’m enough of a nerd to use org-mode for everything in my life. Before org, I used a bullet journal.
If you’re looking to get into reducing stress in your life by getting organized, my recommendation is to start by writing things down (with pen and paper, if that is accessible for you). Digital tools nowadays are all trying to sell you something you don’t need. Start with the simplest and most accessible tools at your availability and grow them as your needs grow.
I would not recommend org-mode as your first daily driver organization solution. Yes, it is extremely powerful and flexible. It works perfectly for me. But for it to work for you, you have to be an emacs user or willing to become one. With a barrier like that, it is easy for org (like any other digital system) to be a thing you constantly work on rather than a thing constantly working for you. (To be fair, it is fun to work on org-mode. And now that I have it working for me, it really works for me. But you should enter with the expectation that you will need to work a lot on setup.)
| Tool | Platform | Use | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| doom emacs | Desktop | using org mode | I love doom, it lets me use vim keybinds within emacs and the decisions used in its implementation seem sensible to me. I work lightning fast with it when it comes to org-mode. |
| org-mode | Desktop | organizing my personal life | The organization tool that’s as flexible as you need it to be and as powerful as you can handle. I schedule tasks when they need to start, deadline them when they need to be done, have tags that are dedicated to contexts (so I have tasks that I can only do in specific places), and it’s easy to make dependencies by using subtrees. It’s simple, it’s powerful, it’s great. Don’t use it (unless you’re okay to use emacs) |
| orgzly-revived | Mobile | using org mode on the go | Really glad people picked up orgzly when it stopped being maintained. This app’s great: it gives you alerts on schedules, lets you have the agenda, loads all your org files and keeps them in sync locally and remotely. A good compromise if you’re not willing to use termux for org-mode. |
| Syncthing | Mobile/Desktop | keeping org-mode synced | 10/10 sync experience. Easy, fast, and it works. |
For writing
I write in Obsidian.
That’s it! It’s available everywhere I need it, it’s fast enough for me, and it let’s me do non-trivial writing things without making me pull my hair out. Can’t ask for anything more.
For streaming/v-tubing
- I use OBS! I wouldn’t touch any other streaming software.
- VNyan and VSeeFace are used in combination for a 3d tuber. It works and I can extend it, yipee.
- Veadotube Mini is my goto for pngtubing. It’s simple enough for me to appreciate, but I am looking forward to the next release because I would like to do a bit more with my pngtubers.
- I used to use Sammi with a pngtuber software that is slipping out of my head. I stopped using it because it made my OBS setup way too complicated and I wasn’t using most of the features.
- I am experimenting with using Inochi2d for 2d vtubing. I am trying out with making my own tuber! Hope to write about how that goes.
- My go-to bot is Firebot. I’d recommend Firebot to anyone starting out. It’s FOSS so you can fix problems you run into yourself (which you will. Trust me. No bot is perfect.) And it has plenty of features built in.
This website
Who made the art I’m seeing?
Me! Hope you like it 💚
If someone else made something, I will credit them in the caption (or a footnote, if I can make the themeing put the footnote right next to it somehow).
Who wrote the posts?
Me! Hope you enjoy reading them 💚
This is a personal blog and I don’t really expect to have guest writers. If I like someone’s work, I’ll probably link to it in a post and add my own thoughts in my own post.
This is as good a time as any to ask: please don’t request to guest write something here.
Do you use AI for anything on this site?
No, I didn’t, I don’t, and I won’t.
And please don’t use anything on this site to train/test an AI model. That’s for both the text and especially for my artwork. Please be respectful of the effort I took to make what you’re seeing.
How did you make this site?
This website uses Quartz (see footer), the Quartz Syncer plugin, and Github Pages. It’s all static (I think/hope) so hopefully it’s pretty snappy.
Why Quartz?
I wanted something that uses Obsidian because that’s what I write notes in and I can write with it anywhere. If I could figure out how to integrate it with org-mode, I would.
I used to use Jekyll for this site, and it worked. But it had a lot of overhead for me to handle (making templates, reworking templates, making data pages and configs) that got in the way of me just putting things up online.
Why don’t you use something like Eleventy?
I thought about it and experimented with it a bit. I like how snappy it is. But it didn’t solve the problem I was having with running a site: it needs to work with what I already use and not present significantly more work than writing posts. Right now, it seems Quartz is able to do that for me, so that’s the tool of choice!
Why no comments?
I thought about implementing Disqus or similar to let people put up comments. But I decided against it for the same reason I don’t have analytics turned on: I don’t want any kind of metrics attached to this place. I have the kind of brain that would see “article A had five comments and article B has 2. What went wrong?!” and I know that kind of thinking will kill my enthusiasm to write here. (Plus I don’t want to have to moderate comments.)
If you want to reach out to me about one of my posts, you are absolutely welcome to find me on whichever platform we share that you can find on the main page. You’re also welcome to share and link to my posts.