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~ 🖤🤍
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...
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~