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:
OMORI OST - August/Water
Sometimes, all you want to do is sit down and drink a glass of water... but everything's on fire.
A very dear friend of mine—my best friend for years, to be honest—has been missing for well over a
week now. No warning or explanation; no activity on Discord, Steam, Tumblr, Bluesky; nothing. This
is a girlthing who, for all of the years I've known her, would always always always be active online
on a near-daily basis, responding to any messages that I or her friends would send within a day or
two, even when deep in the throes of sickness or insomnia.
She's suffered with chronic fatigue and other chronic illnesses for all the time I've known her; and
for that matter, she has a very weak heart, having suffered at least one heart attack in the past
despite being in her 20s at the time.
Suffice it to say, I'm deeply concerned.
Meanwhile, in adherence to my moral obligation under the classical virtues, I've been trying to help
my biological family—to the extent that I can stomach—in navigating their little soap-opera-esque
tempest in a teapot. I've specifically been focusing my efforts on my parents over the last few
weeks, as my siblings have been preoccupied with their children both extant and expected.
The squalor in my parents' minds, marriage, and house alike is truly striking.
The condition of the house itself is a perfect emblem of their depressed, wretched state: The parts
that other people see are kept presentable enough, but everything out of sight—closets, bedrooms,
the garage—are piled high with refuse. The holes in the flooring are hidden under rugs, and the slow
leaks are ignored; today's problems become tomorrow's, because today was a long day and they don't
have the time or energy, forever.
As I've endeavored to clean their house, I've felt it. The deep hurt and depression of my mother,
radiating out of the piles of unused charcuterie boards, forgotten board games, and crushed tubes of
old wrapping paper. The reactionary impotence and resignation of my father, his dreams crowded
further and further out by the piles of junk—all but immovable to him—until they sit compressed
against the extreme walls of the house, the only places yet unclaimed, suffocating slowly.
No love is lost between them. The man has slept on the filthy, never-washed couch in their living
room for untold months now, after his wife physically kicked him out of their bed the last time they
tried to share it. They have three jobs between the two of them, yet they've no savings to speak
of, owing to my mother's monumental credit card debt—the exact extent of which is known only to her,
as she flatly refuses to discuss even the most basic details of their budget with my father.
Conversely, in nearly every conversation they have, my father, a slave to his insecurities, somehow
twists even the most innocuous of my mother's words into an attack against him, invariably leading to
him bemoaning how he isn't allowed to have feelings, and how the world is falling apart because
"people aren't willing to talk to each other anymore" when someone bristles at his beat-for-beat
regurgitation of right-wing political talking points.
Divorce, however, is utterly out of the question, between her profoundly traumatic upbringing in a
divided household and his abjectly self-destructive stubbornness in clinging to his marriage vows.
There's more—my lack of a car, the birth of my new niece, the resumption of the war—but for now, my
time has run short, and I want to publish this update while I still have time for it.
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.
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.