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  <title>Signal Tower</title>
  <subtitle>The broadcasting tower of the Kyou System.</subtitle>
  <link href="https://kyou.systems/tower/feed.xml" rel="self" />
  <link href="https://kyou.systems/tower/" />
  <updated>2026-05-03T00:00:00Z</updated>
  <id>https://kyou.systems/tower/</id>
  <author>
    <name>Kyou System</name>
  </author>
  <entry>
    <title>New VN released!</title>
    <link href="https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-05-03_New-VN/" />
    <updated>2026-05-03T00:00:00Z</updated>
    <id>https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-05-03_New-VN/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve been so lost in the sauce lately.  I can&#39;t believe a whole month has gone by already since my
last update here...  Things should be settling down on my end soon, and I&#39;ll have plenty to say
then, don&#39;t you worry~&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In the meantime, check out my new visual novel:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;iframe frameborder=&quot;0&quot; src=&quot;https://itch.io/embed/4535691?bg_color=000&amp;amp;fg_color=ccc&quot; width=&quot;552&quot; height=&quot;167&quot;&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://kyousystem.itch.io/she-couldnt-do-anything&quot;&gt;She Couldn&#39;t
Do Anything by Kyou System&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/iframe&gt;
&lt;p&gt;It&#39;s an adaptation of &lt;a href=&quot;https://kyou.systems/tower/writing/fiction/she_couldnt_do_anything&quot;&gt;my short story &amp;quot;She Couldn&#39;t Do
Anything&amp;quot;&lt;/a&gt; that I made together
with my good friends Guts, Rom, and Mala!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;At some point, I want to upload a version of this VN that&#39;s playable in-browser, both to Itch and
here on Signal Tower, but there are problems with playing it on mobile that result in some text
being cut off near the side of the screen.  I also still need to make dedicated pages here for it
and my other game projects, but that&#39;ll also have to wait until things quiet down...&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;But yes, in the meantime, read my damn VN, pls and ty&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>Beyond here, there are no landmarks.</title>
    <link href="https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-03-29_No-landmarks/" />
    <updated>2026-03-29T00:00:00Z</updated>
    <id>https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-03-29_No-landmarks/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Now playing:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;
&lt;a href=&quot;https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=KJljD__tUiA&quot;&gt;Little Goody Two Shoes - Ceramic Grove of Wheat&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;On paper, everything should be perfect right now.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Earlier today, I finished drafting out the script for my &lt;a href=&quot;https://itch.io/jam/daydrinking-jam&quot;&gt;Daydrinking
Jam&lt;/a&gt; VN and sent it to my teammates.  I&#39;ll get to meet up with
one of them—my cute artist friend—in person for the first time within the next week, both to sketch
out ideas together AND to attend a live concert together with other friends for a band I love.  For
that matter, winter has finally ended, and my seasonal depression has begun to clear up.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;What else?&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;I&#39;ve started chatting regularly with another schizo system I&#39;ve been around for some
time now, and already we&#39;ve had strikingly good chemistry.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;My workout routine is bearing great fruit, with me being strong enough to move as much weight as I
ever have, while I&#39;m also rapidly dropping body fat.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;All of my relocation plans are lined up, with me not needing to do anything more now beyond
showing up at the right places at the right times.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;The community around my jams is flourishing, and it&#39;s looking very likely that this year&#39;s Toxic
Yuri VN Jam will decisively trounce Spooktober, my biggest rival in the jam space.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Things are looking great across the board, really... and yet, I&#39;m haunted by dread.  Indeed, I&#39;m
writing this at nearly a quarter past 2 AM because I knew that I wouldn&#39;t be able to sleep if I
simply tried to lay down.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;So then, what&#39;s on my mind?&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Around a year or so ago now, I received something like a vision or a premonition.  This isn&#39;t
anything out of the ordinary, mind you, but just the latest iteration of the flashes of vaguely
clairvoyant insight I get from time to time (because I&#39;m descended from psychics and I&#39;m favored by
my tutelary deity of fate and fortune, etc etc).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;As usual, it wasn&#39;t anything so clear as a written prediction or some rigidity detailed sequence of
events, but rather a vivid mental and emotional impression of what the end result will be, along
with a through-line that traces through everything which will have led up to it, and which
underscores what will come to pass as a result.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Part and parcel with these premonitions is this sort of spiritual compass readout I get that loosely
steers me in one direction or another, pointing me towards the duties I need to execute—my
&amp;quot;purpose,&amp;quot; as some might call it, or perhaps my &amp;quot;fate&amp;quot;—and away from paths and activities
characterized by what I call &amp;quot;definite wrongness,&amp;quot; which can range among everything from
self-destructive behavior to a nontrivial misallocation of time, energy, and resources that
should&#39;ve been diverted elsewhere for something far more meaningful, etc.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Unlike all of the previous premonitions, however, this one has been extremely potent, persistently
flashing more and more red warning lights at me as time goes on despite my initial doubts about the
severity and scale of the ugly picture it&#39;s painted for me.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;With this premonition, my compass has been pointing me in one direction:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Away.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;But it&#39;s not so simple as just moving out of the country.  No, more than that, I need to manage my
resources far more carefully than I have been in the face of a looming economic catastrophe, lest I
end up in a vastly weaker position financially and end up struggling to support my community and the
underlying currents of genuine creativity and artistic passion therein through my game jams—an
important duty of mine that I mustn&#39;t neglect.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Thus I&#39;ve been desperately gathering any materially useful information and intel from wherever I&#39;ve
been fortunate enough to find it, scrambling to prepare myself from the storm of definite wrongness
that gathering on the horizon at a scale so intense and so beyond anything I&#39;ve seen that it
frightens me.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;By the time I&#39;m writing this—nearly 3 AM now—I&#39;ve made most of the changes and adjustments that I
can to harden my position.  You can rest assured, my dear reader, that I&#39;m solidly positioned to
continue my game jams and the like through the next few years, come hell or high water~  All the
same, things look bleak, and my sphere of control is ultimately a tiny, pitiful thing.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Amidst all of my good fortune—for which I am endlessly grateful—I&#39;ve been worried dearly for the
future, for the safety and well-being of those I love, and for what might become of the ideals I&#39;ve
fought so desperately to embody, defend, and encourage in others.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;After all, I might have a ghostly image in my mind about what&#39;s to come, but I certainly don&#39;t know
exactly what will happen, exactly when it will happen, or exactly how it will happen.  It&#39;s all in
broad strokes, since ultimately, the future is not set in stone, and a degree of noise and
randomness permeates everything.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Nevertheless, I&#39;m doing everything I can to appreciate and show gratitude for the fruits of my
fortune and labor, and not to let the dread paralyze me, hence why I&#39;m still joining game jams,
still taking road trips, still making plans to go to concerts with my friends, etc.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;No matter what the future may hold, and no matter where we end up, we must keep living.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>Planning, planning, planning...</title>
    <link href="https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-03-19_Planning/" />
    <updated>2026-03-19T00:00:00Z</updated>
    <id>https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-03-19_Planning/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;&lt;em&gt;Now playing:&lt;/em&gt;&lt;br&gt;
&lt;a href=&quot;https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=MGBAy-SW6s4&quot;&gt;OFF OST - Flesh Maze Tango (extended)&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;What has the Kyou System been up to lately?&lt;br&gt;
In a word, tasks.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Chief among them have been the preparations and planning to relocate to Mexico, including:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Replacing my old and busted phone with some new hotness that supports both eSIM and
&lt;a href=&quot;https://grapheneos.org/&quot;&gt;GrapheneOS&lt;/a&gt;, then copying my data over&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Making arrangements (e.g. flights, lodging, etc) to travel and stay in one state to renew my
residency card&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Reaching out to my immigration facilitator[1] to prepare the necessary documentation for the
residency renewal&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Making arrangements to move subsequently to a &lt;em&gt;different&lt;/em&gt; state for my long-term lease&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Researching the steps I&#39;ll need to take to begin building a credit history in Mexico&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Strengthening my Spanish by getting comprehensible input whenever I can&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Indeed, I&#39;ve found that, more than anything, the process of moving to another country is extremely
fucking tedious, doubly so when you&#39;re doing it alone.  The financials and the psychological
barriers are very difficult obstacles, to be sure—not to mention learning a second language—but
there&#39;s something uniquely mind-numbing and isolating about having to piece together and decide upon
every stage of the logistics all by yourself...&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;But wait, there&#39;s more!  I&#39;ve also had to swing by the local state office to replace my driver&#39;s
license, update my insurance, and switch around my car registration after moving states recently, in
the off-chance that conditions improve in the States and allow me to return safely.  Just earlier
today, I went out to get an eye exam done, as my current glasses are over five years old now and the
blurriness at a distance is starting to become a nuisance.  And to top it off, I&#39;ll need to do
laundry this weekend.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;It&#39;s a good thing this rock rolled back down the hill: Now I have something to do!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;hr&gt;
&lt;p&gt;At the same time, it&#39;s certainly not been all bad~  Since the last update, I took a road trip to meet
up with my delightful friends &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.deaddeaddeath.red/&quot;&gt;deaddeaddeath&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://killjill.neocities.org/&quot;&gt;KillJill&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://fisher.vnfreaks.com/&quot;&gt;Fisher&lt;/a&gt;,
&lt;a href=&quot;https://kazehai.com/&quot;&gt;kazehai&lt;/a&gt;, &lt;a href=&quot;https://ppilotco.faith/&quot;&gt;Pilot&lt;/a&gt;, and a couple others!  Although I
did &lt;em&gt;not&lt;/em&gt; end up having an opportunity to teach or play backgammon with anyone as promised, I had a
very nice time all the same, heheheh~&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://kyou.systems/tower/assets/images/toxic-yuri-scrabble.jpg&quot;&gt;
&lt;img loading="lazy" src=&quot;https://kyou.systems/tower/assets/images/toxic-yuri-scrabble.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;
A photograph of a set of Scrabble letters spelling out &amp;quot;TOXIC YURI&amp;quot;.
&quot;&gt;
&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Shout out to Jill for finding the letter Y here, which somehow evaded me at length.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://kyou.systems/tower/assets/images/bracelets.jpg&quot;&gt;
&lt;img loading="lazy" src=&quot;https://kyou.systems/tower/assets/images/bracelets.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;
A photograph of several people extending their arms forward, revealing bracelets around their
wrists.  The bracelets are handmade from beads, and the different bracelets feature text including
&amp;quot;THERA&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;RYONA YURI&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;MARMITE&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;VORE&amp;quot;, &amp;quot;BIG SIS&amp;quot;, and &amp;quot;POCHETTE&amp;quot;.
&quot;&gt;
&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Jill made bracelets for everyone!  Can you guess which one of these is mine?  Heheheh~&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://kyou.systems/tower/assets/images/keychain-critters.jpg&quot;&gt;
&lt;img loading="lazy" src=&quot;https://kyou.systems/tower/assets/images/keychain-critters.jpg&quot; alt=&quot;
A photograph of several acrylic plastic drawings of different characters, laid out on metal foil on
a baking sheet.
&quot;&gt;
&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Pilot made these adorable acrylic keychain doodads~ Most unfortunately, the Kyou-chan she made for
me (shown here in the bottom right) promptly fell off of my keychain at some point without my
noticing, and I&#39;ve yet to find it...&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;hr&gt;
&lt;p&gt;One last thing: I&#39;ll be working with my friends &lt;a href=&quot;https://catgirlvomit.dev/&quot;&gt;Guts&lt;/a&gt; and
&lt;a href=&quot;https://rombuffer.online/&quot;&gt;Rom&lt;/a&gt; on a submission for the &lt;a href=&quot;https://itch.io/jam/daydrinking-jam&quot;&gt;Daydrinking
Jam&lt;/a&gt;!  One of my short stories, as it turns out, is an ideal
candidate for the types of VNs this jam is looking for, and I&#39;d already been planning on working
with my friends to adapt it to a VN even before this jam was announced, so here we are, heheh.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;hr&gt;
&lt;p&gt;[1] If you&#39;re looking to relocate to Mexico, I highly recommend you use &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.saulgarciaimmigration.com/&quot;&gt;the immigration services of
Saul Garcia&lt;/a&gt;!  He&#39;s been highly professional, quick to reply,
and very friendly throughout all of the time I&#39;ve worked with him; and with his help, the
appointment I had with the immigration office in Mexico to get my residency card went smooth as silk~&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>THERA 3 dev log - Screen resolution</title>
    <link href="https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-03-01_Screen-resolution/" />
    <updated>2026-03-01T00:00:00Z</updated>
    <id>https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-03-01_Screen-resolution/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;The first proper devlog for my game engine (the Ultraviolet Engine, as I call it) in ages~!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;So, if you&#39;ve played THERA 2, you probably noticed the window is locked to 800x600, with both resizing the window and making
it go fullscreen disabled.  I made that change ages ago, and I never really noticed it until recently, when I replaced
my laptop and discovered just how tiny it looks on a screen with a half-decent resolution.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The truth is that older versions of the engine allowed you to change the window&#39;s resolution to a number of different
presets, as well as going fullscreen, but... well, frankly, it was kind of broken, lol.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Here&#39;s what happened: Past!Kyou, in an fevered state of artistic perfectionism, did not want to have to scale the screen
or their pixel-perfect sprites by a non-integer factor.  With pixel art, scaling up by whole numbers is fine, with a
perfectly clean result; fractional scaling (e.g. 1.5x zoom) with the nearest-neighbor scaling method used for pixel art,
however, mucks up the lines and edges slightly.  It&#39;s not really all that noticeable or significant, in retrospect, but
past!Kyou wasn&#39;t having any of it.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Instead, they opted to bake in a fixed set of supported window resolutions, and for each of those resolutions, have
different scaling factors and heuristics for each part of the rendering pipeline—the backgrounds, the isometric map, the
portrait sprites, the textbox, etc.—that the engine could use to reposition everything without ever having to scale up
the assets by a fractional value.  What&#39;s more, they wanted to let the player change the screen resolution on the fly
while the game was running, whenever the menu was accessible.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In addition to it never reaching a functional state, implementing this idea was very tedious and extremely painful.  I
won&#39;t bore you with the details of how and why it&#39;s broken; suffice it to say, I just ended up dummying out the screen
resolution options in the options menu and left it at that... until now~&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;By making use of Love2D&#39;s canvas functionality, I&#39;ve gotten the UV Engine set up in such a way now that it&#39;ll draw
everything internally as though it&#39;s running in an 800x600 window, but will automatically scale everything up to
1200x900 or 1600x1200 depending on the size of the display it&#39;s running in when the canvas is drawn to the screen.  It
was SO much easier doing it this way, and despite the fractional 1.5x scale factor for the 1200x900 window size, all of
the graphics look just fine, heheheh~&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;https://kyou.systems/tower/assets/images/20260302_012911.webp&quot;&gt;
&lt;img loading="lazy" src=&quot;https://kyou.systems/tower/assets/images/20260302_012911.webp&quot; alt=&quot;A screenshot from THERA 1, upscaled from 800x600 to 1200x900.  Some slight distortion of the finer details on the
textbox lettering&#39;s font and the sprites of Hera and Despera is visible.&quot;&gt;
&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m considering adjusting it to make the exact resolution and level of scaling user-configurable, as well as figuring
out a way to leverage this approach to draw the game in fullscreen; but for now, I&#39;m leaving it like this.  I still need
to finish making assets for THERA 3 proper, after all~&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>Recovering as the world sickens</title>
    <link href="https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-26_Recovering/" />
    <updated>2026-02-26T00:00:00Z</updated>
    <id>https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-26_Recovering/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;Over the past few days, I was sick with some manner of cold.  It wasn&#39;t anything too serious—mostly just lethargy and a
low-grade fever—and I&#39;m largely recovered by now, if not all better by the time you&#39;re reading this, heheh.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In terms of webdev, I&#39;ve started fleshing out the Links page, copying over most of the links and website buttons from
the old version of Signal Tower.  If you&#39;re one of my lovely friends and you&#39;re not yet on the Links page, please let me
know and I&#39;ll correct that, doubly so if you&#39;re already linking back to me, heheheh~&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, the state of affairs here in the States has become yet more grim, the spread of definite wrongness continuing
its acceleration as has become the norm.  I&#39;ll hear no argument against it: Any government using its power to inflict
senseless cruelty and terror upon any part of the population it&#39;s meant to guide and serve is undeniably definite
wrongness, and the very notion of it should bring shame to all of us as the inheritors of the Western tradition.  I
won&#39;t delve any further into the specifics now, since it&#39;s very late in the evening when I&#39;m writing this, but it&#39;s
deeply troubling, to say the least.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;As ever, many dimensions of the worsening situation remain beyond my control, but what I &lt;em&gt;have&lt;/em&gt; done is set up a
recurring monthly donation to &lt;a href=&quot;https://tcpipeline.org/&quot;&gt;the Trans Continental Pipeline&lt;/a&gt; to help them in
response to the huge spike in demand and traffic they&#39;re no doubt struggling with.  If you can afford to do so, I
encourage you to do likewise.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>Advice for Self-Care and Self-Loathing</title>
    <link href="https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-23_Self-care/" />
    <updated>2026-02-23T00:00:00Z</updated>
    <id>https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-23_Self-care/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;Earlier today, I put together a brief write-up for a friend about how to get started with proper self-care, as well as
how to fight against self-loathing.  Since I expect others might find it helpful, I&#39;ve reproduced it below.  Take care
of yourself~&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;hr&gt;
&lt;ol&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Eat 3 real, substantial meals every day.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Drink at least 8 full cups of water every day.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Aim to get 7-8 hours of sleep a night.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Get some minimum level of light exercise (e.g. walking around for 20-30 minutes a day).&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ol&gt;
&lt;p&gt;And most importantly:&lt;br&gt;
FIGHT YOUR CRITICAL INNER VOICE TOOTH AND NAIL!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Seriously, don&#39;t give it even a centimeter of slack!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Every time that nasty little voice tries to talk down to you, telling you you&#39;re bad or pathetic or not worthy,
suggesting that your friends don&#39;t actually care about you, there&#39;s only one thing to do:&lt;br&gt;
TELL IT TO FUCK OFF!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Make it shut up by thinking loudly over it!&lt;br&gt;
Mentally shout obscenities back at it!&lt;br&gt;
Do whatever you have to do to make it stop undermining your self-love and self-worth!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;And as your mental fortitude grows, you can even go toe to toe with it, dismantling its weak, illusory arguments brick
by brick!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Also, if you struggle with insomnia keeping you from sleeping:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ol&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Add blue light filters to all of your devices that activate in the evening.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Stop using all devices for at least an hour before bedtime.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;CBD gummies can help you fall asleep, and exercising in the day will help you stay asleep.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ol&gt;
&lt;p&gt;It&#39;s a painfully slow process, and sometimes it&#39;ll feel like you&#39;re not getting anywhere with it at all—or are actively moving backwards with it, even.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Just remember: Perseverance is power~
If you keep fighting it, I know you&#39;ll overcome it~
Everyone believes in you, heheheh~  🖤🤍&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>It feels like my head is trapped in a vise.</title>
    <link href="https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-22_01-vise/" />
    <updated>2026-02-22T00:00:00Z</updated>
    <id>https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-22_01-vise/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ll be honest with you: Things have not been easy for the Kyou System as of late.  My material condition is stable,
mercifully, but everything about the future in the near, middle, and long term is murky if not concerning outright.  The
seasonal depression isn&#39;t helping matters, certainly, but there&#39;s so much right now that I&#39;d be troubled even if we were
in the dead heat of mid-summer.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Discord and Community Fragmentation&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;March is no more than a week away now, at the time of this writing.  Even if we&#39;re generous with Discord&#39;s fuzzy
deadline of &amp;quot;early March,&amp;quot; there&#39;s no way we have more than 2 or 3 weeks before it comes into effect.  If Discord shuts
me out, and none of the tricks or glitches to bypass it work, I&#39;ve no recourse but to leave—and the same will be true
for several of my close friends as well.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Friends and others alike continue to examine and debate the pros and cons of the different alternatives, but I&#39;ve no
real confidence that a viable winner will emerge from the crowd between now and the deadline.  Hell, no one can even
agree on which one is the least bad option, even as a stop-gap.  I&#39;m deeply worried that the community will end up
splintering apart, and at such a bad time for it, too.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We need to be as coordinated as we possibly can, in order to combat this dangerous rising trend...&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Increasingly Aggressive Surveillance and Censorship&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m quite sure that the incident last summer wherein the big Western payment processors pressured Itch into delisting
and taking down games during the Toxic Yuri VN Jam was a shot across the bow.  I expect we&#39;ll encounter yet more stiff
resistance this year, especially since our adversaries are emboldened, the prize pool will be larger, and we&#39;re looking
to double down on encouraging people to write about &amp;quot;icky&amp;quot; themes this time.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;To be clear, we WILL be running the jam to completion this year in any case~  In fact, the other judges and I have
even discussed the idea of setting up an independent website of some kind if Itch cracks down on us hard enough.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;More broadly, however, I&#39;m growing more and more concerned with how omnipresent surveillance tech is becoming here in
the States, doubly so considering how these systems are monitored hypervigilantly by a thousand unblinking eyes of an
army of ML-powered bots.  All of this while the Totally Not Secret Police are gunning down innocent civilians without
accountability or justice of any kind, not to mention inflicting Milya only knows what manner of torture and abuse on
those unfortunate souls held in their detention centers—which they&#39;ve surreptitiously funneled tens of billions of
dollars into buying and constructing yet more of across the country.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;They also want to criminalize the very existence of practically anyone who isn&#39;t a cishet WASP, and are working
feverishly to build massive databases of information (tied to people&#39;s legal IDs) that can be used to determine whether
any given person meets their ever more narrow criteria of acceptability.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;And all of this leads into my next concern...&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;h2&gt;Should I Stay or Should I Go?&lt;/h2&gt;
&lt;p&gt;No matter what foreign country I end up moving to, the simple fact of the matter is that I&#39;ll be very isolated for some
non-trivial amount of time.  Granted, most of my friendships are online anyway, and it&#39;s not like I won&#39;t end up
organically meeting people and making friends as I settle into a routine wherever; but at the same time, the thought of
moving alone to a foreign country without anyone I know nearby is quite intimidating.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The alternative would be to stay here in the States, which would certainly be easier, but I have very low confidence
that I&#39;m going to be safe here for too much longer, in light of the points detailed above.  At an abstract level, part
of me argues I should stay and &amp;quot;fight for my country and my community,&amp;quot; but that strikes me as hopelessly idealistic,
considering the immense level of technological sophistication and military might at my adversaries&#39; disposal—not to
mention how my would-be community is scattered far all over the country in tiny pockets.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;What good would all of my plans, ambitions, and resources do for anyone if I got myself shot and killed in the street?&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;hr&gt;
&lt;p&gt;It&#39;s all so much, all at once, and they&#39;re all issues that either no one in my community yet has a good answer for
despite us putting our heads together, or are personal matters that I have to decide for myself.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;We&#39;ll find some way through everything, no doubt; but in the meantime, it feels like I&#39;m having to fight not to
asphyxiate, while all of the air is sucked out of the room...&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>Operation Mexikyou has resumed!</title>
    <link href="https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-21_01-Mexico/" />
    <updated>2026-02-21T00:00:00Z</updated>
    <id>https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-21_01-Mexico/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;The wheels of my escape plan are once again in motion: As of today, I&#39;ve start making actual bookings and reservations
for my one-way return trip to Mexico~&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In the interest of good opsec, I won&#39;t be posting any specifics about where and when publicly just yet.  Once I&#39;m safely
outside of the States, I&#39;ll share more details—indeed, one of my biggest motivations for getting this new website set up
was to be able to keep a detailed daily blog after I relocate, heheh.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I will, however, say this much: My plan is to be in Mexico before this year&#39;s Toxic Yuri VN Jam begins.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;For those of you who don&#39;t know, I already have legal residency in Mexico.  Part of the chaos that was 2025 for me
comprised navigating all of those bureaucratic hurdles and traveling to the country to obtain it.  A retrospective post
about the Kyou System&#39;s 2025 is still in the works, in which I&#39;ll be explaining how that all played out (and why I&#39;ve
not yet relocated despite having the residency).&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I&#39;m hoping I&#39;ll at least be conversational with my Spanish by the time I travel down there—though, even if I&#39;m not, the
total immersion will no doubt help me get there in a hurry, heheheh~&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>Welcome to the new and improved Signal Tower!</title>
    <link href="https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-19_01-launch/" />
    <updated>2026-02-19T00:00:00Z</updated>
    <id>https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-19_01-launch/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;After much copying of old content, adding in newer works and commentary, and poring over MDN docs to get the CSS styling
just right, I&#39;m pleased to announce that Signal Tower version 2.0 is now ready for public release!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;To be sure, there&#39;s still a ton of other stuff I&#39;ve yet to add—the current lack of any music or external links to my
friends&#39; websites is especially glaring.  I&#39;d also love to have a page showcasing all of the fanart I&#39;ve gotten for my
work over the years, just like &lt;a href=&quot;https://nadianova.neocities.org/fanart&quot;&gt;the fanart page on my friend Nadia&#39;s website&lt;/a&gt;
&lt;strong&gt;(NSFW)&lt;/strong&gt;.  There&#39;s enough here now, however, to where I&#39;m comfortable launching it, heheheh~&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Also, there&#39;s an RSS feed now—there&#39;s a link to it on the footer at the bottom of every page—so you can get updated in
real time as I publish more pages here!  In the meantime, I hope you enjoy your stay here, and that you appreciate all
of the new content here that never ended up getting uploaded onto my old website~&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;One last thing: Huge shout out to my my talented friend &lt;a href=&quot;https://bagenzos.house/&quot;&gt;Kate Bagenzo&lt;/a&gt; for making the
&lt;a href=&quot;https://strawberrystarter.neocities.org/&quot;&gt;Strawberry Starter&lt;/a&gt; template I used to make this website!  Using her template
to build this page has been a hundred times easier than my old approach of manually editing static HTML pages every time
I wanted to add or update anything, heheh.&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>Getting crowded out</title>
    <link href="https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-18_01-crowding/" />
    <updated>2026-02-18T00:00:00Z</updated>
    <id>https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-18_01-crowding/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;Hello there~  If you share a Discord server or some such with me wherein I used to post on a regular basis, and have
been wondering why I&#39;ve perhaps not been quite so active there as of late, this post might give you some insight~&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;It&#39;s like this: There&#39;ll be a nice, pleasant little online community, right?  It might not be the biggest or the most
active space, but that&#39;s fine—it&#39;ll be thriving in its own way all the same.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;But then, someone will say, &amp;quot;Hey, I want to invite more of my friends, is that OK?&amp;quot;  More often than not, since there&#39;s
a great deal of trust and respect and what have you between the community members, the answer is yes.  And in the cases
where only one or two people are invited at a time, there&#39;s usually not a problem... but that assumes a certain degree
of conscientiousness on the part of the server&#39;s operator(s) in handing out invites, which is often not the case.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Unfortunately, the issue I&#39;ve been repeatedly running into is that the community will suddenly have a large group of
people join all at once: Three, four, or even five or more new members, typically who all already know each other rather
closely (as well as the user who invited them).  Very quickly, the space becomes their new primary hangout spot, and all
of their hobbies, their in-jokes, and their shitposting begins to crowd out the old atmosphere and culture.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I&#39;ve seen it happen over and over, where a gaggle of new users will join all at once, then the old members—my
friends—will begin either to go silent or to leave outright, one by one, until all that remains is the new group.  And
then, as the server loses its charm and appeal due to the members who made it that way no longer being present, the new
group eventually grows bored with it and wanders off elsewhere, leaving the server a husk of what it once was.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;In some cases, it doesn&#39;t even have to be multiple people.  If you have a small and relatively quiet space, even a
single new member can have an outsized influence, doubly so if they post very frequently and join nearly every single
voice call, and triply so if their attitude is abrasive, or if most of what they post is strange, shocking, or
deliberately controversial, etc.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;It&#39;s for this reason that, in communities that I&#39;m actively moderating, I make a point of reaching an agreement with the
other staff ahead of time that someone &amp;quot;failing a vibe check,&amp;quot; as it were, can and should be grounds for kicking them
from the space at least temporarily, even if they technically haven&#39;t broken any rules.  But I don&#39;t have that kind of
control over most of the servers I&#39;m in—nor would I want to, considering how lousy some of my past experiences as a
moderator have been, heh—so this problem keeps resurfacing, and I keep having to move from place to place afterward.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;One of these days, I&#39;ll make a proper Kyou System community and rule it with an iron fist...!&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>A Forgettable Monday</title>
    <link href="https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-16_01/" />
    <updated>2026-02-16T00:00:00Z</updated>
    <id>https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-16_01/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;The more of these I write, the more I&#39;m realizing that I&#39;ve had a ton of shit ricocheting around in my mind without a
proper outlet for any of it in quite some time, heh.  I&#39;m between best friends at the moment, as it were, and most of
the communities I&#39;ve been in have either withered away or left me sidelined, so I&#39;ve not felt as willing or as able to
vent as much as I&#39;ve probably needed to.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;At least now I have this online journal, where I can write and write and write until the storm of emotions passes~&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;...Or so I say, but once again, it&#39;s late, and I&#39;m too tired right now to write about some of the heavier stuff I&#39;ve
been contemplating in a way that&#39;d do it justice.  It&#39;ll have to wait a little longer.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The events of today were fairly unremarkable:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ul&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Chest day of push week at the gym: I hit 6 reps of 170 lbs on bench press&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Washed, dried, and put away two loads of laundry&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Got a couple of hours&#39; worth of Spanish comprehensible input&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Played R.E.P.O with some friends of mine&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Added a custom background image to the website and changed how some subpages were organized&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ul&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Here&#39;s a Youtube mix I&#39;ve been listening to quite a lot lately:&lt;br&gt;
&lt;a href=&quot;https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=U8YCbEcmlfM&quot;&gt;uk garage pop for the girlies&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>Comments on comments</title>
    <link href="https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-15_01-Comments/" />
    <updated>2026-02-15T00:00:00Z</updated>
    <id>https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-15_01-Comments/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;I keep finding myself writing these blog posts in the dead of night, right before I go to bed.  I&#39;ve been so preoccupied
with working on the website during the day that I end up putting these off...!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Even though I&#39;m tired, however, I want to say two things:&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;ol&gt;
&lt;li&gt;Apparently, this website template supported adding comment sections to posts?  I might experiment with it later on,
though I might also take a similar approach to &lt;a href=&quot;https://www.deaddeaddeath.red/&quot;&gt;deaddeaddeath&#39;s website&lt;/a&gt; and have
links to off-site comment boxes for my games or other pages of interest.&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;li&gt;As ever, my seasonal depression brings out the worst in me.  As happy as I am when I see my friends and fellow
artists receiving tons of praise, attention, and glowing comments about their work, some insecure part of my mind,
inflamed by Winter&#39;s touch, sulks with envy: &amp;quot;Oh, so we get barely so much as a trickle of views on any of our stuff
even on release, while they all get thousands of downloads and dozens of comments about how these games changed the
commenter&#39;s whole personality, cleared up their acne, opened their third eye, and made them curl up on the floor
while crying and vomiting profusely for hours?  Are all of our games just complete shit by comparison or something?&amp;quot;&lt;/li&gt;
&lt;/ol&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Expanding on the second point there, obviously I recognize that comparing my games to those of my friends is like
comparing apples and oranges.  We&#39;re clearly telling very different types of stories, and a great deal of my work is as
strange and inscrutable as anything else about me, while their games are vastly more grounded in reality (and thus
vastly more accessible, say, to the average Itch.io commenter).  And in a community of predominantly queer and trans
folks, it&#39;s to be expected that the stories centered on widely shared queer and trans experiences will get far more
attention and acclaim than the Kyou System&#39;s opaque attempts to recreate the more lurid images of their nightmares.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;I also have to consider that a huge proportion of the traffic going to their games, especially on Itch, comes from their
games both featuring and being tagged as containing adult content.  This fact also helps to account for the difference
in the number of comments, since a significant fraction of them appear to come from people who stumbled across these
titles while looking to masturbate and ended up getting blindsided by the emotional depth of the storytelling and
characters.  Meanwhile, I haven&#39;t released any sex games yet, so I don&#39;t see any of that traffic, which necessarily
means my work will systematically receive less attention on Itch.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Not that it really matters all that much at the end of the day.  These intrusive flare-ups of insecurity aside, I love
the work I&#39;ve been doing on my projects; and even if my games are never included alongside those of my peers in the
&amp;quot;Awesome Games / VNs You Gotta Play Right Now&amp;quot; recommendation posts, I&#39;m going to keep making them anyway, heheheh~&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;And I truly am delighted that my friends&#39; works are getting so much praise!  In all honesty, they deserve every last bit
of it: They&#39;ve all improved so much as artists even just in the time that I&#39;ve known them, and they&#39;ve been releasing
some truly excellent VNs lately!  The gratification of my ego is infinitely less important than the fact that the
community is growing and everyone is supporting each other as we express ourselves together~&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>Happy Hallmark Holiday Day~</title>
    <link href="https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-14_01-Valentine/" />
    <updated>2026-02-14T00:00:00Z</updated>
    <id>https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-14_01-Valentine/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;First things first:&lt;br&gt;
&lt;a href=&quot;https://inv.nadeko.net/watch?v=ayYaBS0hDa4&quot;&gt;When You&#39;re Happy Being Single&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Even though I&#39;m plural, the Kyou System is single, and despite Old Man Winter&#39;s best efforts to
undermine my moods, I really don&#39;t mind living by myself~ I&#39;ll take freedom tinged with isolation
over the emotional anguish that characterized too many of my past relationships, certainly, heh.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Indeed, I might not have gone out on any dates today, but I &lt;em&gt;did&lt;/em&gt; finally finish assembling the new
art gallery on here, as well as finding some of those Bandcamp-style music stream embedding
frameworks I was looking for~ I&#39;ve also fixed the broken favicon, and learned more about how this
SSG template translates the directory structure of the input files into an actual website!&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Though, on the subject of romance-type things, a &lt;a href=&quot;https://ophanimkei.com&quot;&gt;good friend of mine&lt;/a&gt; made
a point of telling me recently that at least one mutual friend of ours has (or previously had,
perhaps) a secret crush on me—but my tendency to vanish from the internet for long stretches of
time, combined with my general inscrutability, has made me very difficult to approach.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Perhaps so.  Monoe is my favorite NPC from Yume Nikki for good reason, after all, heheheheh~&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;Sometimes the psychic damage from social media platforms is too much, and I need to mute everything
for a while for the sake of my own sanity.  I don&#39;t anticipate that changing anytime soon,
especially with the way things are going with social media as of late.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;At the same time, part of my hope with this new website is to have a much more consistently active
and easily followed online presence.  It&#39;s more for my own sake than anything else, granted, since
I&#39;ve been in need of an outlet and a non-cancerous platform for logging my gamedev updates for a
while now.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;If it also ends up helping me communicate to my cute friends, however, that I am, in fact,
harmless—and by extension, both available for and interested in cuddling and biting—then that&#39;s all
the better~&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
  <entry>
    <title>Wherein the Kyou System Builds a New Tower</title>
    <link href="https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-13_01-webdevving/" />
    <updated>2026-02-13T00:00:00Z</updated>
    <id>https://kyou.systems/tower/posts/2026-02-13_01-webdevving/</id>
    <content type="html">&lt;p&gt;(I&#39;ve had this file sitting open for a while; let me actually write something here...)&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;If I have one goal in working on this new version of Signal Tower, it&#39;s finally to have a website that won&#39;t be a
gigantic pain in the ass to keep updated and blog on.  I don&#39;t know if the way I&#39;m setting up my website on this
template is exactly how Katey had intended it to be used, but hey, templates are made to be modified, yeah?&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;The new Hall of Images, complete with new commentary, is almost finished.  I&#39;ll probably make the site public once
that&#39;s done, then steadily add updates with the writing, music, etc later on.&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;With the music in particular, I remember seeing a website styling template somewhere that lets you set up your website
like a Bandcamp page, which would be perfect.  I&#39;d love nothing more than to let people stream all of my music from
here~&lt;/p&gt;
</content>
  </entry>
</feed>