Alright, just let me inflate my balloons here and we can get started.

Intro

Hey weirdos, it’s your favorite wolf balloon. Today, I’m going to break my three year silence to talk to you guys about what I’ve been up to, as well as share my side of the story on some old controversies. I’ll also talk about my plans for the future, both here and off of YouTube.

It sure has been a minute, hasn’t it? Sorry about that; I needed more than a few minutes. But now that Daddy’s back from the store with his big jug of milk, let’s dive into why exactly that happened.

To be more specific, I wasn’t actually completely gone. I’ve just spent most of my time focused on my chat group and hanging out with those guys on the weekend.

A lot of people were understandably concerned though when my Telegram account was banned suddenly without an explanation. And I never was given an explanation even though I didn’t violate any of their rules. My best guess is that I was banned for using a VOIP phone number instead of my real one. This was, despite the fact, that I was paying a monthly amount for this phone number.

And it’s very important to do this on Telegram in my opinion because otherwise everyone with a Telegram account who has you as an SMS contact will be notified when you join the service, and this is before you even have the option to change this discoverability setting. Which is probably fine for normies, but less so for furries. Especially weirdo furries like myself. So yeah, I most likely got caught in the crossfire of Telegram attempting to deal spammers that were most likely using the same VOIP service that I was.

It’s really insane to me that I actually got banned from a chat app for caring too much about my privacy of all things. But that’s why I decided to double down on privacy and move my chat over to Signal. At first glance, Signal looks just like Telegram, and it supports DMs and group chats just the same way, but it’s built from the ground up to respect your privacy in ways that Telegram never will.

They offer reproducible builds, so you can actually view the source code of the app and see that all communication is encrypted locally before it ever leaves your device. Signal also doesn’t store these encrypted messages on their servers permanently. It simply delivers them and then it no longer has access to them. This is why whenever they’re subpoenaed by law enforcement about certain users…they basically can’t.

I’ll often be in the voice what while I’m over on Floof, which is a furry-run streaming site mostly for artists, but a few people stream games and movies as well. If you log in with your Groomcord account, you can click on the email button on my page to get notified by email whenever I go live!

I use my Floof channel to stream random games and to facilitate JackBox (and completely legal movie nights) for the group, often while using the Signal group’s VC, so join up if you want the fully inflated experience.

For doomscrolling, I mostly post on X because I’m a lazy millennial. That said, you’re probably not following me because Justin Trudeau personally hacked into my account and deleted around 1200 of my followers. I kind of called him a cuck when he gave a speech here a few years ago and he took it personally. It’s not important.

But if you are still on the hellsite, double check to see if you’re actually following me. I do want to make everyone’s feed objectively worse so please help Daddy re-inflate those numbers. I’m also on BlueSky and Mastodon if you’re weird like that. I like these sites a lot better but it feels like hardly anyone’s on them yet. Here’s hoping that changes in the coming years.

Squeaking of coming, I also puploaded all of my old furry art onto Inkbunny. Why there of all possible places? Well, most of these furry art gallery sites censor furries that they don’t like, and even if you’re willing to ignore that and just gravitate the largest site, it seems to get hacked every other week because it’s made of spaghetti code that hasn’t been worked on for around 20 years. Aside from stylesheet changes, which aren’t really changing the site code, just…making it prettier? Lipstick on a pig, basically.

So…everything’s on Inkbunny now, all the way back to 2007. Except everything Zrcalo-related because I nuked that shit from orbit. And a lot of pics where the artist isn’t a big fan of me anymore…I’ve uploaded half of all of my art to Inkbunny.

So really, the only place I haven’t been lately is YouTube. I made a community post earlier this year about planning to come back, but then I got overwhelmed and kept putting it off. So…I decided that I wasn’t going to say anything else until my big rubber butt got this video done.

And wouldn’t you know it? It’s the fifth anniversary of my first video. Back when I was still thin and fluffy…gross. Funny how time flies when you’re procrastinating.

Why Was Daddy Gone So Long?

I should pawbably re-introduce myself since it’s somehow been three and a half years since I started my murrsonal Spoony arc.

I started this channel as “BlumTheWolf” and later renamed it to “DramaHound” because the name suddenly occurred to me one day and it sounded really cool in my head.

Most notably, I made a series called “Furry Drama Recap” where every month I laughed at the petty pointless bullshit that furries were getting up to. Later on, I made “Furry Beware Breakdown” which individually examined bad actors in the subculture.

Once in a while, I also did a video dedicated to different topical situations that I thought called for it.

This content made me notable in furry drama spaces for a while, which inevitably leads to people trying to denigrate your character. You know how people are online. Every accusation is real, everyone who ever makes enemies with anyone is secretly a piece of shit.

No one knew this better than my best friend Near, who after years of dealing with harassment, took his own life on June 26, 2021. Because he had done so much for the world of emulation over the years while publicly being a non-binary furry, he was the target of a lot of jealousy as well as a lot of hate from other developers. At one point, someone went out of their way to dox virtually every person close to him, and told him that this was his fault. And being the softie that he was, I think he believed them.

I got to be with him online in the hours leading up to his passing. He never really liked furry drama, but he told me that he liked what I was doing with the channel. I was giving people a source for furry gossip other than the proudly racist fursecution board. I was trying to spread the message of not believing everything you hear, rather than mix information with libel for “entertainment’s” sake like that board tends to do.

In the end, I couldn’t do anything to stop him, since I didn’t know where exactly in Japan he was staying, and I didn’t have any way to guide emergency services as a result. This is sadly what usually happens when someone is having these kinds of thoughts; they do everything in their power to not let it on. They want to keep it a secret from you, so that you can’t stop them from doing it.

Please don’t ever do this. If you ever feel this way, I promise that your head is lying to you and that things WILL get better eventually.

So naturally, I needed some time to grieve after this, as you’d expect. I’d love to say that I bounced back 6 months later, but fate had other plans for me, and it wasn’t going to be safe for me to come back for quite a while. Namely because of two individuals: Zrcalo and Coyote Lovely.

Now these two hadn’t lit themselves on fire quite yet, so I didn’t have the knowledge and context that I have about them nowadays. I was also a bit slow to follow the news on these two because of the grieving process. So as far as I knew at the time, both of them were perfectly fine people. Oh how wrong I was.
Following the days of Near’s passing, both of them suddenly ghosted me after I stated that it was going to be a while before I made another video. As it turns out, both of them were only giving me the time of day because I was a growing YouTube channel. They were both there for the clout and didn’t actually like me that much as a person.

I wound up making one of the worst mistakes you can make, which is buying into the sweet nothings of fake people and not knowing who your real friends actually are. This is why, when my best friend passed away, the other people in my life that were to close to me suddenly ghosted me. It was because I was too depressed to help them gain clout for a few months.

This was actually the biggest reason that I decided fade into obscurity for a while. I wanted to see who was actually going to stick around with me in the long term. I didn’t know who my real friends were, and I needed to see who was going to stay with me even if I wasn’t doing the YouTube thing anymore.
I wanted to starve out any remaining parasites and find out who my real friends actually were. That way, the next time I have to deal with a loss that heavy, I’ll be surrounded by people who actually give a shit about me instead of some fucking grifters.

To be clear, it wasn’t exactly a cathartic feeling for me to watch these two light themselves on fire and destroy their reputations. It was more annoying than anything, because at the end of the day, I didn’t have any idea what these two were up to, and suddenly I was getting blamed for their actions by association.
The fact I didn’t support, condone, or even know about their behavior didn’t matter. Random grifters would claim otherwise without evidence as they tend to do. You know the type; they think the “burden of proof” fallacy was specifically invented to protect sexual predators.

I couldn’t help the fact that an insane zoophile was extremely good at hiding. I couldn’t help the fact that he deceived me, and dozens of others for years. It’s not my fault that he woke up one morning decided to replace his entire personality with child grooming right after my best friend passed away. What the fuck even is that?

It’s important to keep in mind that beyond his child victims, everyone who was on good terms with this freak was also a victim here. He turned himself into a reputation nuke and did a lot of damage to everyone who ever trusted him. In my case, he even lied about me in order to try and get unbanned from some collectible pins chat.

Moving over to the topic of Coyote, I’m not as mad at him, even if he did ghost me when I needed a friend the most. He was being a YouTuber trying to be friendly within his own content genre, and it’s hard to blame people for trying to get along with their peers when we’re talking about a genre as volatile as furry drama of all things. And let’s not forget that Coyote isn’t a zoophile and didn’t go around grooming minors. Coyote’s stuff is also more allegations as I understand it, whereas Zrcalo was openly doing this stuff on Twitter. It was still called that back then…simpler times.

Now if those allegations are true and Coyote wound up getting flirty with some predator for a while, I’m more inclined to think that he can learn a lesson there and bounce back. I would be a complete hypocrite after all if I held it against someone for falling in with the wrong crowd for a while. If the thing did happen, I’m sure it was a case of him getting manipulated by one of the subjects of his work and then regretting it later.

He’s not a fucking skinwalker like Zrcalo, hiding his attraction to animals to make false friendships with people who’d never support him otherwise. Squeaking of Zrcalo, he didn’t really know Near by the way. They only spoke once for 20 minutes in a group voice chat. Zrcalo ran with this and pretended to be even more hurt than I was, even though he had no real connection with the guy. This made me very uncomfortable and began eroding our friendship long before the truth about him came out. He was fake-crying over the passing of my best friend for attention while ghosting someone that this actually affected by this.

So as infuriating as it was to be abandoned by people I trusted and smeared for things other people did, I decided that my best course of action was to fuck off for a bit. Balloon didn’t want to be popped by pitchforks, even if he was in the mood to make things. And to be fair, I really wasn’t.

So I kept to my group chat, doing movie and game nights and doing my best to cheer up and enjoy life in the moment with my friends. Taking some time to heal for a bit while trying to stop myself from searching up what kind of brazen debauchery Zrcalo had gotten up to this time.

Eventually, I felt good enough to start thinking about the future. I decided that I wanted to do more pawsitive content (with a W) when I came back. I know that it’s important to talk about serious things once in a while, but admittedly I was already growing tired of the over-enthusiastic bad-news-guy angle. And since I had time to kill anyway, I figured it was a good idea to work on myself for a bit. So that when I did come back, I could actually be sincere when I was making upbeat videos about things that actually interest me.

I think if I tried doing that while I was still down, it would just come off as fake and gross. Kind of like those videos I did about Kero. I tried to ignore how I was feeling to hop on the big drama of the time for views. It felt fucking awful. To be clear, I’m done chasing views. I just want to make fun videos that I’m actually proud of as a hobby. I no longer care how big and round I get on YouTube, as long as everything’s polished to a fine sheen.

And thus, balloon reflected

So on my journey to cheer the fuck up, it was important to understand that I had actually been ignoring my mental health pretty much my entire life. After getting out of an abusive home on my 18th birthday and going straight into the work force, I kind of just did whatever and figured I’d cheer up eventually. Which…never happened.

I’ve also always struggled to socialize properly because of mild autism. I never fit in while I was in school, and I only made one lifelong friend until I found furry in my teenage years. Furry is not exactly an appropriate place for a teenager to wind up, but it was the best I had. And it did help me find understanding and even some comradery with who also struggled with autism. Still, I made many social mistakes and struggled with basic people skills until my early 30s.

These social issues were very apparent to my first roommates in my early 20s. They tried to be understanding of the furry stuff for a while, but eventually gave me an intervention over it, which inflicted a lot of self-hate and anti-furry sentiment onto me.

I was pressured to be a “normal” person going forward. And for a couple of years, I was "no longer furry". Eventually, I compromised and became a so-called vanilla furry and expressed contempt for the NSFW side of things.

This attitude left me especially vulnerable during the turbulent times 2017 when a Twitter user with the handle Len Gilbert (now going by Furry Respector) went around recruiting self-hating losers for his furry hate group. At the time, I was happy to buy into the rhetoric that the fandom was “degenerate” and needed to be “cleansed”, because I had been pressured to hate myself by people that I trusted.
As a funny aside: Len personally put me into contact with Foxler, BigKK, Zrcalo, Saul Skunk, Connor Goodwolf, and Furry Valley Simba among many others. One of the biggest criticisms my haters have of me is, how could I possibly be a good person if I rubbed shoulders with so many bad apples. But in reality, it was literally all because of Len.

That said, it IS important for me to accept that it was my own fault that I wound up there. Len didn’t force me to join his community and throw my reputation away for the sake of staying there. People that cared about me begged me to pull my head out of my ass, and I didn’t listen. I really should have known better, I should have steered clear of the dumpster fire that was #AltFurry. But I think it’s important to establish an understanding of the timeline that allowed me to wind up there, even if it was my fault.

Doing so allowed me to notice something that I had overlooked. While I did fully disavow #AltFurry in 2019, it took a few more years to get rid of my self-hate. I turned to irony poisoning, and making excuses for my contradictory behavior rather than accepting myself for who I was. The truth is: I’m…really fucking weird. And you know what? That’s okay! I enjoy it, and it’s not hurting anyone.

That’s why, in 2022, I accepted that I love immoral fiction; I love artwork and stories of messed up situations. I love violent video games and dark fantasy content. I’ve always. Or at least since Ren & Stimpy fried my brain as a kid. I went into denial about this in my early 20s because of that intervention, and I forgot who I was.

When I realized this, I reached out to Everest Dragon and a few others that I had previously fursecuted over dark fantasy content to apologize about my projection onto them.

This doesn’t mean that I’m okay with real-life harm. MAPs and zoos are not welcome anywhere near me or my groups. There IS a reason I disowned Zrcalo so harshly, after all.

Anyway, I’ve been working on a dark fantasy lore project called Squirkverse that’s essentially my own personal messed up Wonderland. It provides the groundwork I need for a bunch of related projects. I want to write a book set in this universe, and maybe a game and a comic one day. I’m even learning how to draw specifically so that I can illustrate content for Squirkverse projects.

Aside from learning to feel comfortable in my own squeaky skin and apologize to those I judged for doing so in the past, I realized that it was important for me to reach out and apologize to another group of people; those that I hurt by joining #AltFurry back in 2017. There were some disturbing parallels there to Zrcalo going full groomer mode; I had essentially flipped overnight back then, and people who trusted me received reputational damage over my dumbassery. Being a hateful idiot isn’t nearly as bad as becoming a pedozoosadist, but the point still stands.
Reaching out them was admittedly very scary, and I received more than a few justified tongue-lashings from my former friends. Still, I was actually able to salvage some of these friendships. In one case, I was able to reconnect with a friend of 10 years after a 6 year gap.

This was a massive burden lifted off my shoulders. I didn’t realize how much of an impact was having on me to lose my friendships with these genuine, well-meaning friends of yesteryear. I was way too headstrong back then, and I needed to learn how to listen to people that care about me. If I had done so seven years ago, I wouldn’t have been alone when Near passed away. The loneliness I felt then was punishment for being so selfish.

My final bit of reflection was to realize that I had actually been holding onto anger my entire life. I had to learn to let go of the hatred that was instilled in me from childhood abuse. I looked back at certain memories through the lens of generational trauma to understand that this behavior wasn’t personal. I never physically abused anyone like they did, but I was a massive jerk to my friends for years, and there are some parallels there.

Poor socialization can make it difficult to recognize when you’re acting inconsiderate and abrasive. There can a lot of bad behaviors that you need to unlearn, and many people never get around to doing so. I don’t think I can bring myself to like the people involved, but I can at least go of what happened after understanding it better. Because s Gautama Buddha once said, “Holding onto anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die”.

It’s just like with Zrcalo; even after all I said here, I don’t hate the guy, I just don’t think that he should be participating in civilized society until he gets a lot of help. Probably more help than this lifetime can afford him. But either way, he’s not my problem anymore.

Future Pawspects

As the last smoldering coals of Zrcalo and Coyote start to go out, I’m actually starting to feel pretty good about the future. I know that I’m going to loose subscriber because a lot of people signed on for the fursecution of dark fantasy content. Those folks, I’m sure, will see my authenticity as a sort of betrayal and have some colorful language for me. I also expect the usual suspects to whip out the old slander in a desperate attempt to get me to fuck off again. I’m not going on your stream bro unless your name is Jim, Dank, or Shoe. Your ass isn’t relevant enough for a balloon as decidedly based as yours truly.

What I am going to do is make a whole new catalogue filled with furry nonsense and tearable, perforated puns. That’s why all the old videos are unlisted, by the by. But you can still find them on a channel playlist if you really want.

I’m also kind of torn on what my next video should be. I have a really old project with a custom-drawn thumbnail from 2014 that I’d love to finally make, but I’d also love to talk about the history and inner-workings of #AltFurry at some point. Murrhaps that can wait though. What do you think?

Let Daddy Blum know down in the comments. Which video should he make first? Are you glad Daddy’s back, or are you a hater now?

Spanks fur watching!

Don’t furget to like the video and cubscribe if you’re not already. Follow my socials and join my objectively based chat down below. And never furget gamers, to be cringe is to be free! To be truly based is to be pantsless and shiny. :3