Now playing:
Shovel Knight: Plague of Shadows OST - Waltz for One
I've been kept quite busy as of late, with much on my mind, as is usual these days. As such, an
update is long overdue, with everything that's happened.
As the title suggests, I'm moving. Again.
The good news is that I've gotten my hands on a car of my own again to make this happen, and
moreover, that this relocation will be putting me in a genuinely nice area, where I'll be close to
several friends and peers of mine. Fortuna willing, this'll be the last time I have to pick up and
move for at least a few years.
The bad news is that this will NOT be together with my would-be partner. Rather, after us taking
some time to talk things over, we've both concluded that, our respective circumstances being what
they are, neither of us are really in a position to be dating, much less pushing ourselves to
make some big move happen between us. Thus we've called everything off, amicably but indefinitely.
My dearly beloved friend and partner in crime, who adopted the rejection-of-a-name alias Nameless,
is still missing. Indeed, at the time of this writing, she's been gone without a trace for over 3
months.
Obviously, the outlook for her reappearance has grown quite bleak.
Roughly two weeks ago, I hired a private investigation firm to help look into and resolve the
situation. I should be receiving an update or report of some kind from them any day now; whatever
the news may be, I'll certainly post here again about it.
While I expect things will (glacially, gradually, eventually) become easier to bear, her absence has
only been affecting me more deeply as time has gone on.
Judging for Toxic Yuri VN Jam 2 has been progressing
steadily. I won't make any guarantees about exactly how much longer it'll be until we're done, but
suffice it to say that the other judges and I are all very motivated to finish up the judging in the
near future.
It'd be almost an understatement, to say that I've been deep in thought about these jams of mine:
Contemplating what I've hoped to accomplish with them, and whether this approach is still viable for
it; watching the shifting tides of attitude among the participants and community at all levels,
particularly as the events have ballooned in size and popularity...
Once the jam is finished, I'll be publishing a post-mortem that encapsulates not merely TYVNJ2 but
the entirety of this "running VN jams" side project of mine.
I'm still losing weight. I'm still doing my strength training regimen four times a week. I'm still
playing backgammon and Go. I'm still ruminating on my games and stories on a daily basis.
My only wish, for the remainder of this year, is to clear away the noise that's engulfed me so
ceaselessly over the past few years, and to find at last a long, sustained moment of quiet...
Exactly as the title suggests, I've finally put together an updated torrent for all of the
submissions to Toxic Yuri VN Jam 2, this time including
all of the games whose files are hosted externally~
You can download the torrent file here, or you can grab the
magnet link
here if that's more your speed, heheh.
Take care of yourselves, and happy reading~!
Now playing:
Azealia Banks - Desperado
Today I watched the Backrooms movie, and I was very pleasantly surprised by how good it was! I'd
fully expected it to be bad or some low-effort attempt to cash in on a popular internet trend, but
it actually did justice both to the idea of the Backrooms itself and the associated ideas of things
like liminal spaces, etc. Above all else, the atmosphere was EXCELLENT~
Additionally, today I made a tidy little profit on a small side investment I'd made earlier this
week~ Thanks to that, I've recouped pretty much all of the money I burned on my little excursion
down south of the border, heh heh heh.
Things have been much quieter for me lately overall, but I've still not had a good opportunity to
sit down and write a longer blog post. For now, this post will have to do.
Other highlights from the past month or so:
- This year's Toxic Yuri VN Jam has begun in earnest!
I'm unsure if I'll end up making anything for it, after my very recent VN release, but I encourage
anyone reading this to join in~
- I've moved back to the States, and currently am providing emotional support to my bio-family after
a soap-opera-level sequence of events led to my younger brother moving very abruptly to Hawaii
with his less-than-6-months-together now-pregnant girlfriend.
- Later this summer, I'm planning to move to go be near my partner, and we're both very nervous and
very excited~ It'll be a big change for both of us, and we both have a history with online
relationships having gone south, but we're confident we can adjust and grow together, heheheh~
- I bought a cigar humidor! I've become quite partial to smoking the occasional cigar, but I've had
a devil of a time with my cigars drying out and becoming utterly unpalatable—and with how
expensive any cigars worth smoking are, it's not worth buying them if I can't store them properly,
you know?
- Speaking of cigars, my current favorite is the Romeo y Julieta Wide Churchill, but alas, I can't
get my hands on any more Cubans now that I'm back in the States...
- I've been watching a lot of Twin Peaks, having just recently watched (and rewatched) seasons 1 and
2 plus Fire Walk with Me. More than anything, the red room sequences have left a strong impact on
me, and have been filling me with inspiration for THERA~
- I've started active development on THERA and my game engine for the first time in what feels like
ages! I'll write more on this soon, but my main goal is to recycle and update a lot of my old
content that Basically No One has seen, played, or read into new subchapters of THERA.
- After weeks and months of not really touching them, I've been making time to play at least a
little bit of backgammon and Go per day, just to dust off the ol' board game neural circuits and
get warmed back up with them, heheh.
In addition to all of that, I know I still need to finish uploading stuff here on Signal Tower
(especially my games and my music), and I'd also like to publish some new music before it gets too
late into TYVNJ2, in case people might want to use it for their submissions. For now, though, I'm
wishing all of you the best of luck~
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~