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.
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...
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...!