It feels like my head is trapped in a vise.

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...