Signal Tower

Mexikyou Days 4 & 5 - Decision time

2026-05-21T00:00:00Z

Now playing:
Kirby 64 OST - King Dedede's Castle

Outside of a brief outing yesterday, it's been another two days of me staying holed up in my rental, pacing to and fro as I carefully considered my situation and whether to stay the full time in Mexico or return to the States to be with my would-be partner. After all, tomorrow afternoon is the deadline to be able to cancel my reservation for the latter half of the trip and still get a full refund for my deposit...

HOWEVER!

I've at last reached a decision:
Come late June, it'll be back to the States for me, at least through the next year~

I'm about to pass out as I write this, with all of the energy I've burned getting this sorted out, but I feel it's important to say that, despite the change in plan, I fully believe this trip down to Mexico was NOT a mistake or a failure, because:

I needed to travel here to renew my residency in any case.
I'll still be in Mexico for over a full month, so I'll get a solid idea of daily life here.
Odds are good that I'll move back here in the following year or so, if not to another country—except this time around, I'll (hopefully!) have someone else traveling with me~
These realizations almost certainly wouldn't have happened had I not come down here.

With this finally sorted out (outside of some minor logistics to be handled tomorrow), and that lingering nausea from the start of this week cleared up, I can shift gears to exploring the area and actually enjoying my time here in earnest, heheheh~

Look forward to pictures and more positive anecdotes!

Mexikyou Day 3 - Danger or delusion?

2026-05-19T00:00:00Z

Now playing:
SubaHibi OST - Tractatus Logico Philosophicus

I'm quickly getting over my nausea, but right now, my mind is on my mental illness—or illnesses, plural, heh.

I don't think it's a secret to anyone who's been following me that I have, among other things, some flavor of schizophrenia. I don't think it's worth the time to try and argue if it's plain ol' schizophrenia, or schizoaffective disorder, or maybe schizoid or schizotypal personality disorder, or whatever other salami-sliced psychological term. For the purposes of this post, the relevant detail is that I occasionally suffer delusions, especially paranoid delusions.

They used to be quite severe, to the point that I'd genuinely suspect cars were in active pursuit of me on the road if they followed me for even just a couple of turns. I've gone to great lengths to get my physical, mental, and emotional health under control since the beginning of the Kyou Era, and that's worked wonders to tamp down their frequency and intensity. Even still, however, they're very much a part of my life to this day, and they can still manage to sneak up on me and color my thoughts, feelings, and behavior without me realizing it.

I'm sure you see where this is going, heh:
Do I actually need to leave the States at all, or is this whole stunt a mere product of paranoid delusion?

To be sure, I don't think my thought process was unfounded. Things are genuinely getting dire in the States—particularly if you aren't a cishet WASP, though I expect even a lot of them will end up suffering—and from everything I'm seeing, the situation is only going to get worse before it gets better.

At the same time, however, aren't things getting worse everywhere?

We've committed ourselves to a global economic disaster even in the best case scenario. Far-right political movements (with adherents so delusional they make ME sound sane) are on the rise around the world. The post-WW2 international order is falling in on itself like an underbaked cake in real time, and behind it looms the specter of greater and uglier war. And that's making no mention of how everyone seems to have given up on trying to keep climate change under control, with clean energy projects being actively shut down and coal usage ramping back up even as CO2 emissions break records... but I digress, heheh.

With the situation in the States, my thought process was as follows:

Project 2025, the playbook of the ghouls in power, explicitly seeks to make any kind of "pornographic" or "obscene" art a crime.
My art and that of my community absolutely falls within those crosshairs.
I, being the kingpin and sponsor of the biggest event that's spearheading the growth of this "obscene" artistic community, would make for an easy and obvious target.
Eventually, there'll be a turning point where a bunch of people try to flee all at once, and if I wait until then to make my escape, I'll be Fucked.

Naturally, I don't want to get black-bagged and throw into a prison or "detention center" in god only knows where, if not extradited to some remote corner of the Earth that's thousands of miles from anything or anyone I know...

...and yet, is that not what I'm doing to myself right now, by going into voluntary exile in Mexico without anyone else here to help, support, or accompany me?

Sure, it's not exactly the same, since I still have full autonomy and agency over my actions here rather than being imprisoned, and can still make my art and run my events, etc. But now that I'm here and mulling it over, it's hard not to feel like I've sort of done my enemies' work for them by turning tail and fleeing—doubly so from the angle of "the cruelty is the point," considering the intense isolation and loneliness I'd be facing if I were to stay here.

My thinking was that, in leaving early, I could keep all of my plans in motion without any fear of disruption or persecution, and that I could theoretically have a place outside of the country where people could escape to. At the same time, however, I've gone to a lot of trouble to make sure my legal identity and such fly well under the radar, and I've made a point to ensure I can trivially pass as a cishet male WASP as needed. I did both of these things very deliberately to sidestep any trouble while residing in the States, and to date, they've been effective.

Thus I wonder:
Am I actually in any danger of being found and captured in the States, or am I just being paranoid?

I'm beginning to believe there was more paranoia at play in my decision-making than I'd originally thought—which is par for the course with my paranoia, since it's often hard for me to notice its presence until after the fact.

I'm also considering how so very, very many people I know in the States are struggling, including my would-be partner, and how I could offer much more than mere words, game nights, and the occasional bank transfer to them were I there in person to support them. Hell, that notion of having a space where I could let my friends crash and lay low would be much more realistic if they could reach me with a mere car or bus ticket rather than having to travel across borders—not to mention how buying property to have a place to shelter my friends would be much easier in a country where I already have a well-established credit history, heh.

To be honest, it feels like I've done nothing but try to talk myself out of Operation Mexikyou ever since I landed here. At the same time, though, I was so stressed and exhausted when making all of the arrangements, and pushing myself so hard to ignore my fears and anxieties, that I wasn't exactly thinking clearly. But now that I have a quiet moment, everything's coming under close scrutiny...

Mexikyou Day 2 - Mental tug-of-war

2026-05-18T00:00:00Z

Now playing:
OFF OST - Flesh Maze Tango

I made some excellent progress today! My legal residency in Mexico was extended for a full three years, rather than merely two or one like I'd been warned might happen~

One big thing with Mexican residency cards is that you're not required to stay in the country for any minimum amount of time in order for it to remain valid. I could fly back out to the States tomorrow and not set foot on Mexican soil again until 2029, and it'd be like I never left, legally speaking.

And as it so happens, I have something similar on my mind now.

The isolation is a big factor. Being utterly alone in a new country, with only a faltering grasp at best on the native language, is an intense and intimidating prospect. Even with how independent I usually am, I'm not sure how well I'd be able to tolerate not having ANYONE I know nearby in the long term, not to mention how much of an uphill battle it'd be trying to find fellow freaks here.

And sure, I could hang out with some of the self-described "expats" living here, but the idea of doing that instead of integrating into the local culture leaves a vile, colonial taste in my mouth. I truly WOULD be an active part of the gentrification problem at that point, and I loathe even to consider it.

More than that, however, I've been confronted with a very positive personal reason to return to the States~

The Kyou System has historically been quite defensive when it comes to letting others into our personal lives. Too many bad experiences with people who'd sooner take out their bad moods on us than try to communicate healthily has made us wary; our consensus is that we'd sooner stay single than gamble on someone who shows nontrivial red flags or consistently rubs part of us the wrong way.

Indeed, this mentality has kept us single for a long time now, so much so that I'd almost written off altogether the possibility of us finding anyone worth keeping around. That assumption, unspoken, had been baked into the Operation Mexikyou plan from the beginning... and of course, no sooner than I put the plan into action, the assumption falls apart.

Things are serious enough between me and the person in question that I can't write it off as some purely online, long-distance mirage. Although we met online, having been part of the same larger "weirdo outsider artist" communities for years now (even before my game jams), I've since met up with them in person.

Not only are they very cute physically, but we've just as much mutual chemistry face-to-face as we do online, if not more so~

I've been speaking very plainly with them as of late, in fact, about taking the next step and trying to live near / with each other, even if I have to pull the plug on my current plans for it. By all accounts, they're very interested—but we also both agree it's a big commitment, and not a decision I should make lightly.

Mercifully, I have some time to think things over: It's not too late to cancel the reservation (and get a refund on my deposit) for the longest part of my stay.

The question I have to answer now is whether things truly are or will become dire enough in the States to justify staying here alone in Mexico, even WITH a very promising romantic opportunity waiting for me back above the border...

Mexikyou Day 1 - Torrid emotions

2026-05-17T00:00:00Z

Now playing:
Ill-Advised Records - Be Careful, the Sun is Setting...

Finally, after so much time, energy, and planning, I've arrived.

Already I'm reminded of why and how much I enjoyed my first trip down to Mexico. Everyone from the border agent who checked my documents to the customs agents who examined my luggage have been friendly and patient with me, especially after I started talking to them in Spanish.

Speaking of which, my Spanish is better than I thought it'd be, even in the aftermath of a long travel day while running on 4 hours of sleep (with several days of only 5-6 hours of sleep before that)! I've still got a long way to go before I reach anything near full fluency, to be sure, but I'm happy to say that I'm more or less conversational~

But let me not be too sanguine here.

The isolation is, in a word, formidable. I know vanishingly few people in Mexico, and none of them reside anywhere near where I've planned to stay. My last few relocations have been softened in their intensity by having friends nearby, but I'm completely on my own out here.

In fact, there's a part of me that's worried this whole endeavor might be one huge mistake, and that I should turn around immediately, aborting my plans and catching the next flight out of the country.

That would be terribly rash, of course: Even if I do abort this operation, I at least want to renew my residency with the immigration office first. I suspect it's chiefly just my fears and anxiety flaring up sharply because of the huge new changes, lingering exhaustion, and maybe some slight cold or chill I think I picked up just before the move.

I've had much more than just this on my mind, however, and want to discuss it very soon, but for now, I should probably just rest...

New VN released!

2026-05-03T00:00:00Z

I've been so lost in the sauce lately. I can'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'll have plenty to say then, don't you worry~

In the meantime, check out my new visual novel:

She Couldn't Do Anything by Kyou System

It's an adaptation of my short story "She Couldn't Do Anything" that I made together with my good friends Guts, Rom, and Mala!

At some point, I want to upload a version of this VN that'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'll also have to wait until things quiet down...

But yes, in the meantime, read my damn VN, pls and ty

Beyond here, there are no landmarks.

2026-03-29T00:00:00Z

Now playing:
Little Goody Two Shoes - Ceramic Grove of Wheat

On paper, everything should be perfect right now.

Earlier today, I finished drafting out the script for my Daydrinking Jam VN and sent it to my teammates. I'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.

What else?

I've started chatting regularly with another schizo system I've been around for some time now, and already we've had strikingly good chemistry.
My workout routine is bearing great fruit, with me being strong enough to move as much weight as I ever have, while I'm also rapidly dropping body fat.
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.
The community around my jams is flourishing, and it's looking very likely that this year's Toxic Yuri VN Jam will decisively trounce Spooktober, my biggest rival in the jam space.

Things are looking great across the board, really... and yet, I'm haunted by dread. Indeed, I'm writing this at nearly a quarter past 2 AM because I knew that I wouldn't be able to sleep if I simply tried to lay down.

So then, what's on my mind?

Around a year or so ago now, I received something like a vision or a premonition. This isn'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'm descended from psychics and I'm favored by my tutelary deity of fate and fortune, etc etc).

As usual, it wasn'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.

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 "purpose," as some might call it, or perhaps my "fate"—and away from paths and activities characterized by what I call "definite wrongness," which can range among everything from self-destructive behavior to a nontrivial misallocation of time, energy, and resources that should've been diverted elsewhere for something far more meaningful, etc.

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's painted for me.

With this premonition, my compass has been pointing me in one direction:

Away.

But it'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't neglect.

Thus I've been desperately gathering any materially useful information and intel from wherever I'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've seen that it frightens me.

By the time I'm writing this—nearly 3 AM now—I've made most of the changes and adjustments that I can to harden my position. You can rest assured, my dear reader, that I'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.

Amidst all of my good fortune—for which I am endlessly grateful—I'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've fought so desperately to embody, defend, and encourage in others.

After all, I might have a ghostly image in my mind about what's to come, but I certainly don't know exactly what will happen, exactly when it will happen, or exactly how it will happen. It's all in broad strokes, since ultimately, the future is not set in stone, and a degree of noise and randomness permeates everything.

Nevertheless, I'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'm still joining game jams, still taking road trips, still making plans to go to concerts with my friends, etc.

No matter what the future may hold, and no matter where we end up, we must keep living.

Planning, planning, planning...

2026-03-19T00:00:00Z

Now playing:
OFF OST - Flesh Maze Tango (extended)

What has the Kyou System been up to lately?
In a word, tasks.

Chief among them have been the preparations and planning to relocate to Mexico, including:

Replacing my old and busted phone with some new hotness that supports both eSIM and GrapheneOS, then copying my data over
Making arrangements (e.g. flights, lodging, etc) to travel and stay in one state to renew my residency card
Reaching out to my immigration facilitator[1] to prepare the necessary documentation for the residency renewal
Making arrangements to move subsequently to a different state for my long-term lease
Researching the steps I'll need to take to begin building a credit history in Mexico
Strengthening my Spanish by getting comprehensible input whenever I can

Indeed, I've found that, more than anything, the process of moving to another country is extremely fucking tedious, doubly so when you'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's something uniquely mind-numbing and isolating about having to piece together and decide upon every stage of the logistics all by yourself...

But wait, there's more! I've also had to swing by the local state office to replace my driver'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'll need to do laundry this weekend.

It's a good thing this rock rolled back down the hill: Now I have something to do!

At the same time, it's certainly not been all bad~ Since the last update, I took a road trip to meet up with my delightful friends deaddeaddeath, KillJill, Fisher, kazehai, Pilot, and a couple others! Although I did not end up having an opportunity to teach or play backgammon with anyone as promised, I had a very nice time all the same, heheheh~

Shout out to Jill for finding the letter Y here, which somehow evaded me at length.

Jill made bracelets for everyone! Can you guess which one of these is mine? Heheheh~

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've yet to find it...

One last thing: I'll be working with my friends Guts and Rom on a submission for the Daydrinking Jam! 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'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.

[1] If you're looking to relocate to Mexico, I highly recommend you use the immigration services of Saul Garcia! He's been highly professional, quick to reply, and very friendly throughout all of the time I'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~

THERA 3 dev log - Screen resolution

2026-03-01T00:00:00Z

The first proper devlog for my game engine (the Ultraviolet Engine, as I call it) in ages~!

So, if you'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.

The truth is that older versions of the engine allowed you to change the window's resolution to a number of different presets, as well as going fullscreen, but... well, frankly, it was kind of broken, lol.

Here'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's not really all that noticeable or significant, in retrospect, but past!Kyou wasn't having any of it.

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'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.

In addition to it never reaching a functional state, implementing this idea was very tedious and extremely painful. I won't bore you with the details of how and why it'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~

By making use of Love2D's canvas functionality, I've gotten the UV Engine set up in such a way now that it'll draw everything internally as though it's running in an 800x600 window, but will automatically scale everything up to 1200x900 or 1600x1200 depending on the size of the display it'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~

I'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'm leaving it like this. I still need to finish making assets for THERA 3 proper, after all~

Recovering as the world sickens

2026-02-26T00:00:00Z

Over the past few days, I was sick with some manner of cold. It wasn't anything too serious—mostly just lethargy and a low-grade fever—and I'm largely recovered by now, if not all better by the time you're reading this, heheh.

In terms of webdev, I'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're one of my lovely friends and you're not yet on the Links page, please let me know and I'll correct that, doubly so if you're already linking back to me, heheheh~

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'll hear no argument against it: Any government using its power to inflict senseless cruelty and terror upon any part of the population it'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't delve any further into the specifics now, since it's very late in the evening when I'm writing this, but it's deeply troubling, to say the least.

As ever, many dimensions of the worsening situation remain beyond my control, but what I have done is set up a recurring monthly donation to the Trans Continental Pipeline to help them in response to the huge spike in demand and traffic they're no doubt struggling with. If you can afford to do so, I encourage you to do likewise.

Advice for Self-Care and Self-Loathing

2026-02-23T00:00:00Z

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've reproduced it below. Take care of yourself~

Eat 3 real, substantial meals every day.
Drink at least 8 full cups of water every day.
Aim to get 7-8 hours of sleep a night.
Get some minimum level of light exercise (e.g. walking around for 20-30 minutes a day).

And most importantly:
FIGHT YOUR CRITICAL INNER VOICE TOOTH AND NAIL!

Seriously, don't give it even a centimeter of slack!

Every time that nasty little voice tries to talk down to you, telling you you're bad or pathetic or not worthy, suggesting that your friends don't actually care about you, there's only one thing to do:
TELL IT TO FUCK OFF!

Make it shut up by thinking loudly over it!
Mentally shout obscenities back at it!
Do whatever you have to do to make it stop undermining your self-love and self-worth!

And as your mental fortitude grows, you can even go toe to toe with it, dismantling its weak, illusory arguments brick by brick!

Also, if you struggle with insomnia keeping you from sleeping:

Add blue light filters to all of your devices that activate in the evening.
Stop using all devices for at least an hour before bedtime.
CBD gummies can help you fall asleep, and exercising in the day will help you stay asleep.

It's a painfully slow process, and sometimes it'll feel like you're not getting anywhere with it at all—or are actively moving backwards with it, even.

Just remember: Perseverance is power~ If you keep fighting it, I know you'll overcome it~ Everyone believes in you, heheheh~ 🖤🤍

It feels like my head is trapped in a vise.

2026-02-22T00:00:00Z

I'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't helping matters, certainly, but there's so much right now that I'd be troubled even if we were in the dead heat of mid-summer.

Discord and Community Fragmentation

March is no more than a week away now, at the time of this writing. Even if we're generous with Discord's fuzzy deadline of "early March," there'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've no recourse but to leave—and the same will be true for several of my close friends as well.

Friends and others alike continue to examine and debate the pros and cons of the different alternatives, but I'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'm deeply worried that the community will end up splintering apart, and at such a bad time for it, too.

We need to be as coordinated as we possibly can, in order to combat this dangerous rising trend...

Increasingly Aggressive Surveillance and Censorship

I'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'll encounter yet more stiff resistance this year, especially since our adversaries are emboldened, the prize pool will be larger, and we're looking to double down on encouraging people to write about "icky" themes this time.

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.

More broadly, however, I'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've surreptitiously funneled tens of billions of dollars into buying and constructing yet more of across the country.

They also want to criminalize the very existence of practically anyone who isn't a cishet WASP, and are working feverishly to build massive databases of information (tied to people's legal IDs) that can be used to determine whether any given person meets their ever more narrow criteria of acceptability.

And all of this leads into my next concern...

Should I Stay or Should I Go?

No matter what foreign country I end up moving to, the simple fact of the matter is that I'll be very isolated for some non-trivial amount of time. Granted, most of my friendships are online anyway, and it's not like I won'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.

The alternative would be to stay here in the States, which would certainly be easier, but I have very low confidence that I'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 "fight for my country and my community," but that strikes me as hopelessly idealistic, considering the immense level of technological sophistication and military might at my adversaries' disposal—not to mention how my would-be community is scattered far all over the country in tiny pockets.

What good would all of my plans, ambitions, and resources do for anyone if I got myself shot and killed in the street?

It's all so much, all at once, and they'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.

We'll find some way through everything, no doubt; but in the meantime, it feels like I'm having to fight not to asphyxiate, while all of the air is sucked out of the room...

Operation Mexikyou has resumed!

2026-02-21T00:00:00Z

The wheels of my escape plan are once again in motion: As of today, I've start making actual bookings and reservations for my one-way return trip to Mexico~

In the interest of good opsec, I won't be posting any specifics about where and when publicly just yet. Once I'm safely outside of the States, I'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.

I will, however, say this much: My plan is to be in Mexico before this year's Toxic Yuri VN Jam begins.

For those of you who don'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's 2025 is still in the works, in which I'll be explaining how that all played out (and why I've not yet relocated despite having the residency).

I'm hoping I'll at least be conversational with my Spanish by the time I travel down there—though, even if I'm not, the total immersion will no doubt help me get there in a hurry, heheheh~

Welcome to the new and improved Signal Tower!

2026-02-19T00:00:00Z

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'm pleased to announce that Signal Tower version 2.0 is now ready for public release!

To be sure, there's still a ton of other stuff I've yet to add—the current lack of any music or external links to my friends' websites is especially glaring. I'd also love to have a page showcasing all of the fanart I've gotten for my work over the years, just like the fanart page on my friend Nadia's website (NSFW). There's enough here now, however, to where I'm comfortable launching it, heheheh~

Also, there's an RSS feed now—there'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~

One last thing: Huge shout out to my my talented friend Kate Bagenzo for making the Strawberry Starter 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.

Getting crowded out

2026-02-18T00:00:00Z

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've perhaps not been quite so active there as of late, this post might give you some insight~

It's like this: There'll be a nice, pleasant little online community, right? It might not be the biggest or the most active space, but that's fine—it'll be thriving in its own way all the same.

But then, someone will say, "Hey, I want to invite more of my friends, is that OK?" More often than not, since there'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's usually not a problem... but that assumes a certain degree of conscientiousness on the part of the server's operator(s) in handing out invites, which is often not the case.

Unfortunately, the issue I'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.

I'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.

In some cases, it doesn'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.

It's for this reason that, in communities that I'm actively moderating, I make a point of reaching an agreement with the other staff ahead of time that someone "failing a vibe check," as it were, can and should be grounds for kicking them from the space at least temporarily, even if they technically haven't broken any rules. But I don't have that kind of control over most of the servers I'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.

One of these days, I'll make a proper Kyou System community and rule it with an iron fist...!

A Forgettable Monday

2026-02-16T00:00:00Z

The more of these I write, the more I'm realizing that I'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'm between best friends at the moment, as it were, and most of the communities I've been in have either withered away or left me sidelined, so I've not felt as willing or as able to vent as much as I've probably needed to.

At least now I have this online journal, where I can write and write and write until the storm of emotions passes~

...Or so I say, but once again, it's late, and I'm too tired right now to write about some of the heavier stuff I've been contemplating in a way that'd do it justice. It'll have to wait a little longer.

The events of today were fairly unremarkable:

Chest day of push week at the gym: I hit 6 reps of 170 lbs on bench press
Washed, dried, and put away two loads of laundry
Got a couple of hours' worth of Spanish comprehensible input
Played R.E.P.O with some friends of mine
Added a custom background image to the website and changed how some subpages were organized

Here's a Youtube mix I've been listening to quite a lot lately:
uk garage pop for the girlies

Comments on comments

2026-02-15T00:00:00Z

I keep finding myself writing these blog posts in the dead of night, right before I go to bed. I've been so preoccupied with working on the website during the day that I end up putting these off...!

Even though I'm tired, however, I want to say two things:

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 deaddeaddeath's website and have links to off-site comment boxes for my games or other pages of interest.
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's touch, sulks with envy: "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'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?"

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'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'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's opaque attempts to recreate the more lurid images of their nightmares.

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't released any sex games yet, so I don't see any of that traffic, which necessarily means my work will systematically receive less attention on Itch.

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've been doing on my projects; and even if my games are never included alongside those of my peers in the "Awesome Games / VNs You Gotta Play Right Now" recommendation posts, I'm going to keep making them anyway, heheheh~

And I truly am delighted that my friends' works are getting so much praise! In all honesty, they deserve every last bit of it: They've all improved so much as artists even just in the time that I've known them, and they'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~

Happy Hallmark Holiday Day~

2026-02-14T00:00:00Z

First things first:
When You're Happy Being Single

Even though I'm plural, the Kyou System is single, and despite Old Man Winter's best efforts to undermine my moods, I really don't mind living by myself~ I'll take freedom tinged with isolation over the emotional anguish that characterized too many of my past relationships, certainly, heh.

Indeed, I might not have gone out on any dates today, but I did 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'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!

Though, on the subject of romance-type things, a good friend of mine 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.

Perhaps so. Monoe is my favorite NPC from Yume Nikki for good reason, after all, heheheheh~

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't anticipate that changing anytime soon, especially with the way things are going with social media as of late.

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's more for my own sake than anything else, granted, since I've been in need of an outlet and a non-cancerous platform for logging my gamedev updates for a while now.

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's all the better~

Wherein the Kyou System Builds a New Tower

2026-02-13T00:00:00Z

(I've had this file sitting open for a while; let me actually write something here...)

If I have one goal in working on this new version of Signal Tower, it's finally to have a website that won't be a gigantic pain in the ass to keep updated and blog on. I don't know if the way I'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?

The new Hall of Images, complete with new commentary, is almost finished. I'll probably make the site public once that's done, then steadily add updates with the writing, music, etc later on.

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'd love nothing more than to let people stream all of my music from here~