I suppose I have shamefully little to show regarding creative progress, if anyone actually cares about that. I tried making progress on this CBCR boss, but could barely do half an hour at a time before feeling crushed by doubt and fear and despair. So that was fun.

Then I lost a lot of time to worrying about some minor skin issues on my legs and scalp, which I’ve had for months. I learned I could go to the chemist (‘pharmacy’) rather than the GP to get them checked, so I did that on Monday, but the person who saw me had no idea what either of the things were. Then I saw a GP on Wednesday, who also didn’t know, and spent a lot of time consumed by hypochondria about whether the brain cancer was back in some way or another (what if it spread to my skull and scalp and and and??)… SO THAT WAS FUN.

I spend probably too much of my time these days talking to ChatGPT or looking at Reddit threads trying to figure out a way out of the pit I’m in, but I feel like I’m endlessly orbiting a black hole, lacking some external push that’d change my trajectory.

I saw this Reddit post about earnings from a decently popular webcomic, which amounted to about $11 USD per month in actual income, plus 65 Patreon patrons mostly paying a dollar a month. Bleak, though it lined up with my experiences, and I suppose poured cold water on the idea of producing something episodically (like the ‘talky thing’ scenes as videos).

I also saw this Reddit thread, in which someone was asking about- actually, I feel it’s worth quoting directly:

Genuine Question, Have Skill Trades Died?

I see a lot of posts by coders saying they’re “bad at art” and asking for options of what they can do.

I used to be part of a Discord community where people who were skilled in coding and people who were skilled in art would help one another (as well as those skilled in music). We were all adults working together on our own projects, taking the time to swap skills (mostly on a per hour basis or discussed per task in advance).

Because it was a tight knit community people didn’t really bail on one another.

…

And I found the top comment particularly interesting:

That’s one way to phrase friendships. Professionals will be able to call on people they worked with and hobbyists are able to grab people they did jams with.

Feels like most of the struggling people are just isolated and not engaged with the community for better or worse. You focus more on making your game with the time you have but when you hit roadblocks you don’t know where to go or who to talk with.

I’ve never ran into this issue because I just have a roster of people I can pull from. …

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about social integration, and how for some it just becomes background that’s always there, taken for granted, constantly producing opportunities, but for others like me, actually breaking into something like that feels impossible.

Due to childhood neglect, I was a socially stunted misfit in school. I was always picked last for projects or sport teams (not that I wanted to be involved in the latter anyway), had no friends at all for most of my time in primary school; I’d play by myself, imagining the playground was a video game level I’d platform around. I eventually did get adopted into groups of fellow outsiders, for which I feel I should be more grateful, but then I moved to the other side of the world and lost them all. Spent a year alone, got adopted again by a similar group, then lost them all again due to moving back to the other side of the world.

I was reluctant to join forums - back when the internet was mostly those - due to fears and cluelessness about integrating, which is why I started my own community sites. If I was in charge, at least I wouldn’t be inadvertently breaking someone else’s rules, I thought. But of course someone who doesn’t even have the social skills to join a community is hardly fit to lead one.

The only community I had any luck with was deviantART, which felt a bit like owning a cosy home - my user profile - where I could write ‘journal entries’ and post art, and occasionally I could step outside to see what other art people were posting. I found someone making similar art to myself, discovered via polls and journal entries I created on my userpage that we were psychologically compatible, and the only romantic relationship I’ve ever had grew from that.

I recently saw a Reddit post about the art community site/app Cara; apparently some ‘AI bro’ type had scraped its artwork or something because he found it funny, and as a community they felt violated.

I actually joined Cara when it was new, hoping I could maybe re-experience what I did on deviantART, though I didn’t stick with it for very long. I checked the site for the first time in ages, and saw this post at the top of the Blog section:

Cara needs your help. We have been scraped a third time. This is now a targeted attack meant to cause artists pain.

Scrapers know we’re a volunteer project with no financial means to respond. So they say it’s legal, believing themselves untouchable.

We’re taking action.

I believe artists who want to share their work with the world should get to do so without people violating their consent. We won’t be forced into making Cara members-only because some people think “consent isn’t always valid”. You don’t blame victims after harming them.

These scrapers feel safe because they know we’re small team of volunteers, that we have no way of affording help.

So I’m asking our community, will you come together? Please help us take legal action.

Other platforms may not care because artists are easy targets to bully. No one really stands with us.

But I care because it is my home, our home. I won’t let them trample over the hearts of everyone. Our team may be small, but we want to defend Cara.

I have a lot on my plate and my body is falling apart from all I’ve taken on these past years. But I always think, when we’re alive, we should do what’s right.

People who think they can harm others because it’s “legal” shouldn’t get away with it. I refuse to give up.

I don’t want this to become encouragement for open season on artists just because we seem powerless.

So I want to take legal action and find out just what we can or cannot do. I want to know what I need to do next, to make this twisted world change. To hold people accountable.

That deeply resonates with my own experience, and I have deep sympathy and empathy for the creators who are having to go through this. I absolutely hate that there are people out there who know these things cause distress, but do them despite it, or even because of it. If there were any justice in the world, malice would be reflected and anyone who tried to kick down sandcastles would lose a foot.

I also find it sad that Cara is being run by what’s described as a group of volunteers. I’ve thought several times over the past few years that I should try again to create a cosy little community website, because maybe I could both find the connection I sorely lack and even earn a meagre living from donations doing it or something. I suppose this provides evidence against that, though.

I could particularly relate to the line “my body is falling apart from all I’ve taken on these past years”. I imagine the stuff I endured in the Fig Hunter days pales in comparison to whatever the Cara team have dealt with, but it was still enough for me to never want to go through anything like that again.

So maybe Cara’s not the best place to be searching for cosy connection at the moment, considering all that… There’s also the fact that I don’t share the extreme hostility towards AI that I see in online art spaces; I very much dislike the idea of using the output of generative AI as if it’s your own, but I find the technology fascinating if seen as ‘grown minds’ I can explore rather than as tools to use to exploit others. Maybe that would be too nuanced of an attitude to easily fit in with an online art community.

(I’m also not exactly ‘woke’, which artists tend to be, due to past experiences. Or maybe that could be said as “I’m uninterested in tribal signalling”, also as a consequence of my poor social integration.)

Anyway, if not an art community, where could I hope to find any kind of social integration?

It seems like it should be game dev communities, but the whole ‘gamer’ culture reminds me too much of the Fig Hunter pain, plus I know I’d see everyone else as a competitor and would likely just feel worse and terrible.

I seem to be more comfortable about posting in mental health communities, but the Reddit ones are too active and I can rarely even be bothered to participate.

Everything seems to happen on Discord servers these days, which is a format I find intolerable…

But then what? What are my options? Where do I even start?

Do I go and volunteer at a local charity shop? I have no interest in that, though, so I never seem to get beyond thinking or talking about it.

Oh, actually, another thing from Reddit: I saw someone posting who seemed to be in a similar position to myself, but they posted on their city’s subreddit and got a whole bunch of DMs from people who were interested in connecting with them. Turns out they were from a big American city with a population of like 4 million; I looked up the population of where I live: about 20,000. I checked the local subreddit anyway, and saw three posts from the past month, two asking about drugs and one from a tourist.

This was all feeling rather bleak, so for the umpteenth time I turned to ChatGPT to see if it could suggest anything that might actually help me move forward. I have noticed significant improvements with it since a model upgrade a few weeks ago, after all, so maybe it’d be more helpful than when I asked it before, I thought.

It looked for online art communities I might find interesting, and found Sheezy Art, of all places, which I thought was a furry porn site or something that was long dead. Apparently it’s died and been resurrected several times over the years, most recently as a sort of deviantART alternative that does in theory have the sorts of features I’d want… but I checked the front page, and the impression I got was that most members were teenagers. I’d feel like a creep as an almost-40-year-old man.

I got a similar impression from art subreddits I joined a while back. Maybe those kinds of art communities serve a transient purpose, and once artists grow and become connected enough, they collaborate elsewhere or something. Or maybe settle into jobs and families that take up all their time, I don’t know.

The AI also said that my concerns about there being little going on locally weren’t unfounded. It did find a couple of things, but they all seemed to be like museums and art galleries and the like. “Art” is so frustratingly vague; one ‘artist’ might want their watercolours of sunsets in physical galleries, while another might draw digital art of their Sonic OCs (BONIC AND RONIC DONT STEAL) sucking each other’s painstakingly-drawn feet. Because I draw silly characters, I’m probably more in the latter category than the former. I just imagine someone who runs a ‘freelance artist meetup’ in a local museum probably wouldn’t know how to respond to, well, this:

Though it does make me laugh imagining that on the wall next to some painting of the Welsh countryside.

It did at least give me one potential lead, though: rather than committing to volunteering somewhere, maybe I could at least visit the local Art Museum to look around and see what other stuff is there, or what the volunteers that apparently run it are like. Maybe they’d be around my age and temperamentally similar to me, in which case I’d have the motivation to volunteer there and that could start a snowball rolling.

Or maybe it’d be like the Art Group meetups literally right next to my house - in the community hall that my step-dad maintains - where all the attendees are older than my parents.

…I just checked the local museum’s website, and do not have high hopes. But I need to try something, start somewhere…

Thinking about this a bit more - and digging into other possibilities with ChatGPT - I feel that ‘I need social integration’ isn’t even it, or at least isn’t the next step.

Two or three years ago, I tried a Counselling Skills course at a local college, but couldn’t endure it because I was demographically different from the others - they were all middle-aged women with husbands and jobs in healthcare or teaching, I was… what I am - and as such was socially rejected; nobody even tried to talk to me. Last time I saw my counsellor, I wondered whether to try that again - since I didn’t have her support the last time - but doubted whether I even want to - or could be - be a counsellor. She suggested looking at what other courses the college had to offer.

I was just doing that, and noticing that my mind constantly got flooded with negative assumptions about the other people I’d encounter. Same thing when looking at photos of volunteers on things like the local museum’s website. I didn’t think “those seem like lovely people and I’d love to get to know them!”; I wish! Rather, I thought things like “that middle-aged woman probably has a family and wouldn’t have any interest in talking with me, or me with her”, or “that young man looks like he’d be socially successful and would bully me”, or “that guy looks awkward, maybe he’d be similar to the people who hurt me on Fig Hunter”.

I suppose that aversion to other humans generally is the biggest barrier in the way of everything, and I really don’t know how to get past it.

…I was just reminded of hydrophobia, a symptom of rabies where people become unable to drink water despite badly needing it. This feels similar to that, though very different in neurological origin.

I suppose gradual exposure is the treatment, the way out…

Bleh, as always, I feel like I’m going around in circles with all this. Feeling like I’ve come to realisation… only to realise I already had that flash of apparent insight months or years ago, and nothing came of it.

I also saw a Reddit thread recently where people were talking about what finally got them out of a long rut: catastrophe, essentially. A fateful comet strike forced action.

I’m trying to get out of the pit before that happens, but… how? Ugh.

If for some reason you read all this rambling, I hope your life’s going better than mine!!

(I can’t remember why I didn’t post one of these last week, since I did have some stuff to write about!)

Anyway, yes, I spent some more time on CBCR, though it was more tidying up existing stuff rather than adding new stuff.

In the 2010 original, the status screen looked like this, which I feel is quite obtuse; there doesn’t seem to be any obvious relationship between the items on the left and the ‘you currently:’ entries on the right.

For the Remakester, I initially tried to adapt that directly, but it never felt quite right.

A few months ago (the start of this year, according to the date of that screenshot), I revised them as tasks/quests on a to do list, but they didn’t feel balanced; the last two just had two items rather than three, and some of the quests had multiple (planned) bosses while others had none. Plus the way I’d arranged some of the rooms meant that ‘cleen teeths’ was the easiest to acheive, which didn’t feel right to me due to the nature of its associated boss and reward.

So I revised them again, making ‘have a shower’ (or ‘do a showur’, as Clarence has apparently written it) its own task like it really should have been from the start; for some reason, the idea that you’d need additional items like a towel and soap (in bar form, apparently, even though I never use that myself) just never occurred to me when making the original.

Previously you found your “Father’s Cologne” in the Whore Room, but in the Remakester, all of the tasks alter Clarence’s appearance in different ways, with the shower getting rid of some stink lines he has at the start, and an additional scent would have complicated that (would it recolour the stink lines? What if you got the Cologne without the shower?). So now there’s just a “Father’s Guitar” item in the same location, which I think works well enough.

I also felt it’d make sense for each of the quests to have its own boss, but already had one made (Pantom) and two planned (Krapen, Bigfoot) for the clothing items, so I decided that that quest will have three bosses and the others will have one boss each, with you needing to acquire the first two items to unlock the boss which you have to defeat to get the third.

I started adding this boss, Bigfoot - named after the cryptid but visually based on the Monty Python foot - in… February, apparently?? Ugh. But I never implemented its mechanics back then.

I finally did that about a week ago, and managed to get it all fully working in a day! Basically it just stomps down periodically, breaks the wooden blocks of the table, and you have to get it to stomp on the lava to hurt it.

So now the game has three bosses! Good!!

Just four more to go for Clarence’s House alone. Another ugh. I feel that the office’s Boss should be an actual video game boss, plus there was the virus in the computer in the original, but I don’t know if I will or should add other bosses. Probably shouldn’t, since I’ve apparently been working on this for a year now - longer than the original - and it’s still far from completion. Mostly that’s because I’ve barely been actually working on it during this time, though, due to other distractions.

I also started on a boss for the shower quest, based around some wordplay that probably won’t even make sense to most people: while Americans might “take” a shower, in the UK people might “have” a shower, and “have” can also mean “beat in a fight”, with “I’ll ‘ave you!” being the sort of thing I can imagine some loutish football hooligan saying before a pub fight or riot. So by “having” a shower, Clarence is actually beating some loutish anthropomorphised shower man in combat. It is an humourous joke, you see, very amusing.

I couldn’t actually decide on how exactly the battle would play out, though, got tired, and put it aside for several days, so that’s not done yet.

I also spent some time tweaking rooms in Clarence’s house, largely to redistribute the collectable items and bosses, so here are some screenshots of that:

It’s annoying to me that this project has been taking so long, but gone are the days where I just sit down and work on a game for like ten hours a day, day after day, because I keep feeling I need to look into actually becoming a real grown-up at long last…

Not that I’ve made any appreciable progress on that front. I spent much of last week feeling ill, frail, vaguely woozy, for reasons I don’t understand. I almost passed out while walking back from my weekly counselling session. I hope that was just a temporary thing.

This time last week, I thought “right, I’ve put off putting this portfolio website thing online for over a year, so today I’m going to stop avoiding and just do it!”, started the process, got half way, thought “that’s enough for now, I’ll get back to it tomorrow!”, then… didn’t. Ugh.

Back in the day, I made several different fairly complicated community websites with names like Soultome (a ‘Facebook alternative’) or Ehaiah (a ‘deviantART alternative’) and went from concept to working online site in like a week or two or something. Seems insane to me now, looking back on that. I suppose the fact that none of them ever really led to what I hoped they would - connection I could tolerate - is why it’s so hard to make public this one now, though. It feels like getting back together with an abusive ex; the very thought causes a physiological panic response and extreme reluctance, an urge to avoid.

The portfolio’s not a community site like those others were, but my hope is that it’ll be a bridge between where I am and the working world, and I fear I’m too frail and soft and sensitive to cope with that world so I stay cocooned away instead.

Here’s something, actually: ages ago - probably years now - I wrote about how my parents are on friendly term with our neighbours (my house is only adjacent to one other, so we only have the one couple as neighbours), and they had an adult daughter around my age living with them. Her situation sounded similar to my own, but we never even met - despite living right next door to one another - because, well, I don’t know how that would even have happened without it feeling like a ‘playdate’ or something.

She moved away some years ago, travelled the world, had jobs; I envied her for escaping a situation I couldn’t seem to escape myself.

I learned that just the other day, she was sectioned (sent to a hospital as an involuntary patient for mental health reasons), as the result of a catastrophic mental breakdown.

I hope she gets through it; I wouldn’t wish that on anyone. I wish I’d had a chance to talk with her while she still lived next door; maybe we could have helped one another… or so the part of me that wants mutual salvation thinks, though another part believes I’d have only poisoned her with my presence anyway so maybe it’s for the best that we never met.

From what little I understand - though this is passed from her to her parents to my parents to me, likely with a lot dropped during each pass - she’s in her mid-thirties, single, childless, lives alone, and - importantly - has a difficult boss who was causing her constant stress at work. Like me, she also has a sibling who has a lot of what she lacks, and likely compares herself to her sister in similar ways to how I compare myself to my brother.

So apart from the concern I felt for her going through that, I couldn’t help but think: that’s likely what would happened to me if I tried to venture into the real world.

And she’s tougher than me too; she travelled the world alone, whereas I can’t even read online comments without asking ChatGPT for emotional support. If that happened to her, what hope do I have?

Speaking of online comments, I saw a Reddit thread the other day about maladaptive daydreaming, which is where people get lost in fantasies at the expense of their real life. The thread and comments were describing imagining themselves as things like famous musicians, admired by all, travelling the world, while in reality they did nothing with their time because they regarded themselves as too uncreative or unintelligent.

I spend a lot of my time these days sinking into creative flow on projects that “don’t matter”, that I don’t intend to show to others - things I can change and drop as my whims take me without feeling beholden to audience demands - as a sort of healing, and I seem to spend more and more of my time doing that, often while listening to long playlists of music I’ve composed myself. I never imagine myself being impressive to others; if anything “I” am absent from this process, I just let the creativity flow through me and marvel at what comes out. I can spend entire days doing this (usually weekends).

My counsellor also recommended a book called Man’s Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl; apparently it tops the list of book recommendations for counsellors. I got the audiobook version, with the intention of listening to it on my hour-long walks back, though I’ve not got very far into it because it’s about the horrors of the holocaust, which is hardly easy listening. I think the book’s about how to cope despite the worst conditions imaginable, though frustratingly for me, the foreword mentioned that Frankl was able to survive due in large part to the thought of returning home to his loving wife. Great. I don’t have that.

Reminded me of how self-help books typically made me frustrated because they were always written by people who had all kinds of externals they could base that happiness on (partner, career, home, etc); “of course YOU can be happy”, I thought, “but how can I without any of that?”

Oh, and I also saw another Reddit thread where trauma survivors were talking about having built lives that seemed successful on the surface (impressive, well-paid career, partner, fancy possessions), but they spent much of their time lost in drink or drugs or self-harming because they couldn’t cope with being.

In many ways, I feel I’ve found something like a deep sense of meaning and personal satisfaction in life through art, creativity, giving ideas a sort of digital form (more due to the stuff uncontaminated by a judgemental audience than things like, say, MARDEK, anyway). I would have preferred to find a loving partner to hide away from the world to create our own worlds together with, but that seems unlikely at this point, and the desire has faded anyway. I never wanted most of what others seem to; the idea of status is really repulsive to me. I just don’t care about that.

But it’s why it’s so hard to go out and ‘get a job’ or something; I feel like I’ve found the answer, the solution, and have to sacrifice it, for… what, exactly?

Money, so then I can keep on doing this, would be the main thing; it’s not as if that’s optional. Most people don’t work because they like it, but because they have to. I get that…

I feel like I’m enjoying a pleasant dream, but need to wake up. Just ten more minutes…

Anyway, thoughts like those are what I’m trying to get through with my counsellor at the moment. That’s been taking over a year, too, though I’ve been told that’s to be expected with complex trauma. It’s not like the world’s kind enough to pause during the process, though.

AI’s getting significantly better, by the way; I wonder how long any of us have left.

A typical creative person setting up a portfolio would probably use a website like ArtStation, where they’d create a gallery of their best works and write a brief blurb of their current job title, maybe a bit about past projects they’d been professionally involved in, maybe a summary or list of their marketable skills. Instead, the thing I’ve been working on is one long page made up of indulgently personal sections like this:

That is, I’ve broken my life into chunks/epochs/eras and included a brief description of what I was doing at the time (sort of a summarised version of the odd About section that’s been on my website for years) and a gallery of some of the stuff I made that I feel is best representative of that period.

Some job interviewer or recruiter or whatever likely doesn’t care to read about what I was up to as a teenager, especially before reading anything else, I know that. But I suppose I feel compelled to do it this way due to the various eccentricies that compel me to do everything I do. I suppose I’m doing it for the personal satisfaction as much as anything? I don’t know.

Anyway. As that section about CBCR there says, that project came about when I decided that just dumping the original CBC on this website felt like a waste of potential, and I tried to essentially remake it in Unity. Then got carried away.

I suppose I had a similar thought while working on the website during the first half of last week. I felt Taming Dreams deserved its own section, but it’s frustrated me for years that the third chapter - which I felt was the best one, back when I made it - is effectively inaccessible because it’s behind a broken paywall. And I can’t just rebuild the project in Flash (or Animate, as it’s since become) without that paywall because it has some outdated dependencies that cause the build to fail, and the thought of delving into old software and obscure internet archives to figure that out is a deeply unpleasant one for me.

So I wondered whether I could use what I’d learned from ‘remakestering’ Clarence’s Big Chance to translate Taming Dreams’ code to Unity. Not to finish it or alter it or anything, but just to access what’s already there (unlike with CBC, it already feels ‘new enough’ to me, plus it was never a finished game I can port to Steam when I’m done).

So, since working on the website felt like pulling teeth due to fear of people judging it and me if I ever try to use it to put myself out there again, I spent a couple of hours doing this:

That’s a Taming Dream map working in Unity. The project is able to load in all the old data and assets, but I realised there’d be more code translation (from AS3 to C#) than I’d anticipated, and that I probably shouldn’t be spending my time on such a thing anyway, so I decided to leave it at that for now.

I also felt bad that CBCR’s still not finished; I hadn’t even touched it in over a month. So on Thursday or maybe Friday afternoon, I played through what I have, and tried to figure out what I needed to do next on it.

I need to make a lot of maps for the outside areas… but lacked the motivation to do that, which is why I’d put the game aside for weeks in the first place.

I’ve also been intending to add several bosses to Clarence’s House, but currently it has only two. So I thought maybe I could tackle the others.

I ‘recently’ (probably months ago at this point) renamed the Basement area to the ‘Dungeon’ so then each ‘biome room’ could have its own single letter code (B is used by the Bathroom, C for Cellar is already used by Clarence’s room). Back then, that rename led to the idea that the Dungeon’s boss could be a dragon (y’know, like Dungeons & Dragons).

I tried to plan how that might work with platformer gameplay, but couldn’t decide on anything and found it generally off-putting; I realised when working on the original Raider a billion years ago that I disliked making platformer bosses, and I suppose that’s still true (silly that I’m intending to add several to CBCR, then, but OH WELL).

So I wondered: what if the dragon were fought using using simple JRPG-style mechanics instead?

(I’ve noticed this sudden genre switch thing seems to be not-uncommon in indie games these days? But I wonder if that’s just me inaccurately extrapolating from one or two examples.)

I imagined something like one of the early Final Fantasies, where the dragon was some huge static sprite (less work for me than making an animated one) and Clarence was on the right using his normal sprite… But then shouldn’t he have allies? It wouldn’t feel like a reference to these kinds of games otherwise. Who’d be his ally, though?

Slugs were my first thought, since they’re established to be his ‘only friends’. But which slugs? Unique ones with their own personalities? Too much work. Or maybe you could make use of the collection you’d already been growing in some way?

I remembered that a while back, I’d been wondering whether this graveyard section of the menu - essentially a bestiary/collection of defeated foes - could be used for a boss battle or secret area in some way. Back then, I imagined the graves spawning as platforms or something, but nothing felt sufficiently interesting.

Something clicked:

Maybe Clarence could summon defeated foes to use as allies? I made this mock-up of how that might look (using mostly existing tiles and sprites).

If you’ve been following me for ages, you might recognise this thing: a screenshot from a planned RPG sequel to Clarence’s Big Chance that never got beyond the concept/experimental stage.

It’s actually where I first came up with the idea of ‘emotion/social battles’, which later evolved into Taming Dreams, Atonal Dreams, and Dreamons.

While I don’t intend to replicate that here, having some ‘JRPG minigame’ thing in CBCR would feel like scratching some old itch or something.

I imagine the mechanics would be extremely simple: each creature would have HP, attack, and speed stats, and could use a single ability. I spent some time thinking of a simple, silly elemental system - just three with a rock-paper-scissors relationship - and decided on these: Nasty, Nice, Weird. They’re basically how Clarence himself mentally classifies the foes he encounters (repulsive, attractive, confusing). The existing enemies rather pleasingly fell easily into these categories without any being overly dominant.

I wondered how Clarence himself would act in these battles; maybe I could also make use of the slug collection feature after all? I thought. Collecting slugs would power him up, basically; maybe one slug = one level, and his HP, attack, and speed are calculated based on that.

That led to this silly concept art. Did I write about Slug Girl here back when I first designed her? I imagine so; I think it was two or three months ago or something? She was essentially a redesign/remake of Spar Girl, who people reacted negatively to concept art of. The idea here would be that Clarence would have an alter ego, SLUG BOY ORIGINAL CHARACTER DONT STEAL, which is just a lazy cosplay of Slug Girl, and which explains why he has slug-based powers.

I was thinking about that on Saturday, and wondered why Slug Girl wasn’t pink, considering there are already pink slugs in the game - I also wondered what was going on with her ‘hair’ - so I drew this to try and figure that out.

Then this, which makes me laugh (the one on the left, anyway); the design is based around the idea of sexifying something very unsexy, though I suppose other people might find that somehow offensive or something (I also found Spar Girl funny and some other people didn’t).

I still wasn’t sure what exactly was going on with the whole slug head - how and where it connected, where those lower bits were when seen from the side, etc - so on Sunday afternoon I tried modelling it in 3D to figure it out:

Then I got carried away:

Notably, I went from opening to Blender to having that posable model within about 3 hours (including some frustration trying to set up shaders which I eventually gave up on, ugh). So that’s a skill I have where I can give a concept a 3D form in a rather short amount of time, but I’m still worrying about money and my future all the time because I’ve never been able to monetise these skills due to the necessary social connections involved.

I don’t even intend to use that model for anything; I just made it for the joy of the creative process. Like with Melon Collie from… January?? Ugh, time flies.

Speaking of Melon Collie, if I am going to add a JRPG battle system to the game, having it used for just a single boss seems a bit ridiculous. So I wondered whether it could be used in the cyberspaces, or at least one of them; I’ve been unsure what to do with them anyway. Since I imagined Melon Collie as the moody mascot of an indie games dev, I imagined her Fig-Hunter-inspired cyberspace would be the perfect place to also use these JRPG mechanics, maybe as a top-down field as well as JRPG battles (should be easy to make use of existing code to set that up). Maybe I could even reuse some field tiles from Taming Dreams, or at least the visual style.

There’s already a laptop close to the boss room in the Dungeon, which could lead to a Melon Collie cyberspace section (Melon Collie is, confusingly, the name of the cyberspace, dev, and mascot character), where you navigate through a blog post where the dev is whining about how he has a ‘graveyard of abandoned projects’ (a thought I had when assembling aforementioned website), so he’s resurrecting one: Archibald’s Giant Opportunity (or something). And from that, Clarence learns necromancy, which he’s able to use in the JRPG battles to summon ghosts of his defeated foes, instead of him being able to just do that for no reason.

(Also, ‘learning necromancy’ being part of his morning routine makes me laugh.)

That led to me wondering about the other cyberspaces, and how they could also maybe relate to Clarence’s JRPG battle abilities. The ones I already have sort of map to the elements I came up with:

• Slug Girl → Nice

• Way of the Blade → Nasty

• Order of the Oraccult → Weird

So maybe Clarence could transform into alter egos associated with them to use elemental skills or something? Still working on that.

The Melon Collie cyberspace also seemed like an outlier, then. I considered just scrapping one of the others, but maybe it could be that the Necromancy skill he learns there is a separate ability? Still working on that too.

Oh, I also drew this concept art of a possible boss for the Way of the Blade cyberspace, its moderator:

Makes me laugh. “Sensei Yo Puresu” is meant to be pronounced like “sen say your prayers” in a bad imitation of a Japanese accent, but I don’t know if it actually reads as such (it should probably have a ‘long e’, but that’d be Pureesu, or Pure-su, which read even less like ‘prayers’).

So yes, that’s been a fun past few days, just indulging in creative stuff… though I’m aware it didn’t exactly move me any closer to building an ordinary life (if such a thing is even possible at this point).

I read all the comments on my previous post, by the way, though I suppose what I was hoping to hear was something like “I follow this person who makes X and is earning good money from it”, where X is is something I already can make quickly, so then I could focus on that instead of on ‘everything’ as I always feel I have to.

I mean, some of the youtubers I’m subscribed to are ‘Poketubers’, whose singular thing is that they put out videos about Pokemon once a week or so. But what’s my one thing I can put out each week? I don’t really have one. This blog is something, though I’ve been unreliable about posting weekly lately, and the topics tend to be all over the place anyway.

I also started posting on Substack ages ago hoping it might draw new people to me, but the fact that I don’t clearly have specific content to show or discuss means it’s likely only people already aware of me from MARDEK, Fig Hunter, etc who read these posts.

I wish I could compose one piece of music a week, or make one model a week, or something, as my one thing, but who’d pay to follow such a creator? Especially if they’re original creations rather than just piggybacking off familiar franchises (as is the case with the Poketubers).

I keep thinking about the ‘talky thing’ I’ve described many times, where I make 1-or-2-minute-long minimally animated scenes with models and music of mine - released as videos on YouTube - but I never get past the ‘thinking about it’ phase, frustratingly, since I don’t know what characters it could be about.

People also keep mentioning MARDEK, all these years later, and the thought of remastering that keeps coming to mind… but people would likely want something faithful to the original, while I’d want to change a lot, like the two other times I’ve tried that (Taming Dreams and Atonal Dreams), so… ehh.

(Actually, I keep thinking “MARDEK has an established unfinished story, and I love the Dreamons gameplay mechanics but can’t decide on a story, so I should combine the MARDEK story and the Dreamons gameplay somehow!!”, but… another ehh.)

I should be focusing on the whole “get out of my parents’ spare bedroom” thing anyway, while working on CBCR on the side.

Anyway, I should stop typing this now so I can actually post it.

(Oh, also, I wondered just as I was about to post this whether I should have put this art/ideas dump on my Patreon, since I haven’t posted there in a while and I think I have with similar things in the past, but… I’ve already written it here, I suppose, so maybe if I have more to show soon I’ll post it there instead.)

• Doing public-facing creative stuff

• Trying to get my ‘real life’ in order

• Doing creative stuff for myself to re-energise and prevent myself from becoming even more insane

• Relatively mindless entertainment like playing games

The balance between them isn’t ideal or stable, and recently the first one - which includes writing these blog posts - has fallen to the bottom of the pile and ended up neglected.

I’ve been making more efforts to train my nervous system that the real world can be safe, though they’re still only little things. For example, I went to the dental hygienist last week - after being told I should book an appointment when I saw a dentist in March for the first time in years - and, perhaps surprisingly, probably felt less anxious about that than many people might.

Yesterday, I asked my counsellor whether she feels I’ve improved at all in the year or so I’ve been seeing her for, and we went over evidence that I have. Or at least in the way some morbidly obese couch potato who gets out of breath walking from the living room to the kitchen might be able to say they’ve improved if they go to weekly gym sessions for a year and can now walk around the block. Still a long way from running marathons.

It’s very draining for me though - especially combined with the summer heat, which is disrupting my sleep - so I’ve been doing more stuff like ‘non-game’ music compositions, random Unity projects, etc - that I can do what I want with and abandon when I lose interest rather than announcing something I’ll never complete as I have with other things in the past - because that’s what makes life feel worth living for me. It is life for me.

But then I feel guilty about it - I wonder if game streamers feel guilty about ever playing solo games without recording - because I know it’s not leading to making money. Or, more importantly for me, sharing things with other people so then they might enjoy them too.

CBCR is my main ‘public project’ at the moment, but when I’ve tried to sit down and work on that recently, it’s felt like the weight of the world crushes all motivation and robs me of all energy. My mind floods with imagined critics or silence; abuse or neglect, you could say.

Another aspect I keep thinking about is how switching between projects is so cognitively costly, because I have to sort of ‘load into RAM’ the schema - the web of ideas and associations - for that project, which is exhausting.

I don’t know how playing games is for other people, but for me, I only play one at a time, and if I’m already in the middle of one, it’s easy and fun to just open it and get back to it on any given day. Once I finish a game, though, there’s always this horrible paralysis period where I have to decide on which one to play next, then to ‘load into RAM’ the rules and lore and everything for that game, which takes time and cognitive effort. It’s why returning to a game after a while feels so exhausting. Making them feels the same.

As I’ve mentioned many times in the past, I wish there was something with less cognitive cost that I could use my skills to make, which I could regularly release publicly, but I don’t know what that is or could be. Ideally something small, short, that I could finish in a day or a week rather than months or years, so cognitively loading some vast web of connections wasn’t even necessary.

I suppose these blog posts are close to that at the moment, though I’ve kept a blog since I was a teenager - across several platforms - so I suppose writing them doesn’t register to me as something creative or even worthwhile in itself; maybe others feel different, though, I don’t know. A couple of people commented recently praising my language skills, which made me wonder what people actually get out of reading these posts. Should I be focusing more on mental health? Just sharing my own experiences, like I always have? Could writing these be the ‘thing I do’?? Is it already that?!?

A while back, I wrote a post asking something like “what do you want to see from me?”, and I’m curious to ask that again. I’d love to hear suggestions for something small I could make regularly which might actually feel worthwhile. Not just something hypothetical ‘other people’ might like, but something I can do that you specifically might be interested in seeing from me.

Also, if you follow other online creators, what do you like seeing from them?

Oh, there was also a heatwave - red warnings about extreme heat and everything - so that was a huge factor too. Got little sleep, concentration even worse than usual. Thankfully that seems to be over now, at least.

I went to a volunteer fair thing a couple of weeks ago intending to try volunteering… but instead said I’d show up as a group member to a couple of things a mental charity was hosting. I’ve had a few interactions with that charity in the past; my first couple of counsellors were from there, and I’ve been to a number of meetup groups they’ve hosted, years ago.

Due to those experiences, I was expecting to be the youngest, with the others being retirement age (as most people in the area I’m in seem to be).

The first thing I went to, on Wednesday, was a ‘walk and talk’ group, along the promenade by the sea on a warm day; there are more unpleasant ways to spend a day, for sure.

The group was small - six in total, including me and the woman from the charity running it - and, to my surprise, my age was maybe around the average of the group; maybe I was even one of the older ones.

Four - myself included - were male, with just one woman other than the organiser (or whatever her actual role was called).

It was awkward at first, though, because they all seemed to know one another already, and I just stood there feeling uncomfortable while they talked about people I didn’t know (others working with the charity or who attended meetups) while making minimal efforts to welcome and include me.

We then set off walking, and two pairs naturally formed between the regulars and organiser. Me and another man were at the end of the group, so we had an awkward attempt at a conversation. He was nice enough, friendly, but I felt we were on different pages, had different interaction styles, plus I’m uncomfortable talking to men generally so I feel bad for probably being difficult to talk to.

After only about ten minutes, we reached a point where the group decided to turn back. I said I might just leave, though, carry on in the direction we’d been going and walk home.

Thankfully, I suppose, the woman running the group - who I’d met at the volunteer fair briefly and who’d largely ignored me up until this point - came and asked if I was okay while the others turned back and wandered off. I’d talked with her on the phone previously, and I’d mentioned I had some trauma wounds that made me uncomfortable around men (because she’d asked if I was interested in a “men’s health week” thing), plus I suppose I have as much or more trauma surrounding social exclusion, so I said I wasn’t exactly happy about being largely ignored and stuck with a man at the back of the group.

She did seem to appreciate I’d been open and honest about it to her, and I walked with her for a bit as we went to join up with the others.

I got the impression at the volunteer fair that she was closer to ‘my kind of person’ than many other people I’ve met, and I felt the interaction with her flowed more easily than with the man… though the sense of compatibility faded as I talked more with her.

I asked her how she got her current job (as a mental health charity working running things like this) - since the main reason I’d gone to this thing was because I’m trying to figure out what to do with my life. I also wondered whether trauma or other mental health issues might have been a factor for her.

She’s a decade younger than me, but it sounded like she’d worked a whole chain of different jobs over the past decade or so, most of them dealing with things like teaching or otherwise looking after people - often children - with mental health struggles, and it sounded like they all chained directly to the next due to connections she made along the way; no blind leaps of faith all alone, like it feels as if I have to make.

It also didn’t sound like she’d had any major mental health struggles, or at least she didn’t mention any. Lucky her, if so.

I also asked her if she knew anything about personality psychology, which is something I’ve been asking any mental-health-adjacent person I come across in recent years. Like all of them, she said no, she doesn’t know anything about that, which was expected but still somewhat disappointing. It’s not as if I’m asking about something like whether she’s interested in memorising train serial numbers or whatever; to me, it feels more like asking professional musicians whether they know music theory, and repeatedly getting the answer “no, it’s never really interested me”. It just seems bizarre to me.

I also found it interesting how she said she didn’t know about it: she mentioned that it wasn’t taught on any of the courses she did. A lot of people seem to only learn by being taught by others; I’ll see people say they wish they could learn X, but can’t find a local course that teaches it, therefore it’s inaccessible to them. That also seems bizarre to me, since I taught myself about personality psychology out of passion in my teens/early twenties, and taught myself all the skills I use to make creative stuff from online tutorials I went out of my way to find.

Around the time we caught up with the other group, she was approached by some old man she must have known, and they started excitedly talking to one another in Welsh. I don’t speak Welsh, so I felt that was quite rude… on his part, mostly, interrupting a group like that.

People then started heading off one by one, and I said I’d also attend a thing on Friday, maybe see them again there.

Overall, I didn’t dislike the experience, though only because I was able to have a one-on-one conversation with the woman whose interaction style wasn’t too different from my own (or at least that’s how I perceived it; maybe she felt differently), and I was able to ask about things that might give me some ideas of which next steps I could potentially take.

She sent me an email afterwards with three links to things she’d mentioned to me. One was a general career-finding website, and the other two specifically related to creative careers since I’d mentioned I’d spent the past two decades making stuff. One stressed what I suppose I’d describe as ‘Welsh identity’, though:

There’s a vast amount of work going on in our creative industries in Wales, from world-famous screen production to behind-the-scenes advances in research and development. Our goal is to support our creative sectors and drive growth in our economy.

At the heart of these sectors, you’ll find experienced people and businesses – from musicians who work with animators to TV studios that make adaptions of books. If you want to break into the creative industries in Wales, there’s opportunity, funding and training available to support you – whatever your skills and interests.

While each of our creative sectors has its own part to play in our national story, together they showcase a country bursting with ideas, imagination and resourcefulness. Read more about our different sectors and discover why talented creatives choose Wales as the place to build a successful business or forge a thriving career.

I suppose I always find things like that quite alien because I don’t really have a national identity; I grew up in England, moved to Australia when I was around 13, then to Wales when I was 20 or so. I suppose I ‘identify as’ British, but even though I’ve technically lived in Wales longer than anywhere else, I don’t speak the Welsh language (but nor do many Welsh people) or know or particularly care much about the culture unique from the rest of the UK. I only feel like I’m here temporarily, sort of like a rental house rather than a home or something.

I also wonder whether even trying to pursue creative careers is pointless now considering AI… But still, I appreciate she sent me the links, as it gives me somewhere to look next.

As for the other thing I went to…

It was a ‘coffee morning’, and I didn’t know what to expect. It was at a local library I’ve only briefly been to once before, but they gave no indication where in the library it was since - again - everyone else already seemed to be a regular so they knew where to go.

I eventually found them in some sort of conference room thing, dominated by a large rectangular table. I’m often the first to show up to things, but this time I showed up about on time and several others were already there. All regulars, it seemed. I recognised maybe three from the walk and talk?

The people already present were sitting at both long ends of the table, facing one another, so I sat at one of the ends rather than barging into their group. The woman running the group - a different one from the walking group - came and sat next to me.

Again, it was mostly men; there were more people overall than the walking group (meaning like eight rather than six), and the only women were the one running the group, one attendee, and another woman who was apparently one guy’s carer.

I… did not enjoy this one.

The regulars were just talking among each other about other people they all knew and made little to no attempts to welcome me into the group. Perhaps sensing this, the organiser made efforts to ask me questions, but in a tone you’d use when talking to a particularly slow five-year-old; I felt my face contorting into a reflection of my internal “why are you talking to me like that?”, which might have given the wrong impression on my end. I suspect she was assuming I had learning difficulties, or probing to see if I had autism, since she asked about things like whether or not I had a rigid routine.

I found the group setting uncomfortable, as it was intended to be casual, but that effectively blocked off everything I would have wanted to talk about.

What I really wanted to know was everyone’s personal story, but it’s not as if I could have asked any of them that in front of the group, or volunteered my own without violating the social contract.

They mostly just talked about the hot weather, and one person mentioned going swimming in it and getting stung by a jellyfish. The organiser turned to me and asked if I went swimming - everyone else went silent and stared at me - and I awkwardly said I don’t do any kind of sport. That was probably a bad move socially. I said the closest I come is walking, or something, and she asked if I go for walks alone, to which I said - because I’d been sitting there ignored for the past half an hour - something like “in case it’s not obvious, I don’t get along with other people, [awkward laugh]”. Then the room went silent for a handful of seconds.

After about half an hour of feeling extremely out of place, I just took advantage of a shift in the atmosphere - when one guy went out to have a smoke - to take my leave, then I walked the hour-long trip home in the too-hot weather and have sunburns on my arms now.

I blame myself more than any of them; I just don’t do well around men, or in groups, so a group of men isn’t going to be where I’d ever thrive.

The context was hardly conducive to connection, also; because I was there at all, I was probably assumed to have certain kinds of issues, maybe learning difficulties if that’s what the charity normally deals with (even though it brands itself as a mental health charity). But I never really had the chance to explain what was actually wrong with me, why I was there, because of the unguided casual group aspect.

If everyone were blurting out their trauma, I’d have happily done the same! But they seemed more guarded, more content to talk about surface-level stuff.

I suppose I’m just used to one-on-one conversations with close friends or counsellors, or guided groups where we take turns sharing our stories or issues. This was neither of those.

So yes, mixed results… I suppose the point was to accumulate evidence that my body won’t ‘fail me’ while out in the world (eg by having a panic attack, some digestive episode, fainting, etc), though, and it was effective in that regard.

I’ve often described my issues in terms of anxiety, but that was barely a factor here. I felt anticipatory anxiety before the Wednesday event, but that was mostly due to uncertainties about the bus journey and whether or not I could find the group. Once I met the people, I didn’t feel any anxiety. I felt awkward, in a way I’ve cringed about since, but it wasn’t as if I couldn’t communicate due to anxiety or anything.

I feel like the biggest issue for me is compatibility; I want to find people ‘from my planet’, because I feel like an alien or foreigner compared to others that I meet in terms of life experiences, cultural references, etc.

I’ve been following The Amazing Digital Circus since it was new - from the standpoint of a fellow creator who’s also made stuff and had to deal with an audience - and watched the final episode of that a few days ago, when it was added to YouTube. I had opinions about that.

But I strongly doubt any of the attendees to local mental health charity meetups would know anything about it… or rather the context meant I wouldn’t have dared bring it up due to the assumption that they’d all look at me like I spat in their faces.

But then I also wouldn’t want anything to do with the online fandom communities for all kinds of reasons. I’m not that interested in it, just aware of it, and I don’t even know where or how to find other people which are on similar sidelines rather than deeply involved or on other planets.

So what next? I’m unsure, other than that I need to keep up the momentum somehow rather than just falling back into the pit again.

I haven’t actually tried volunteering yet, so I might try that next week at the other place I enquired about at the volunteer fair (a cancer charity). I could also investigate the links I was sent about creative careers.

I’ve also been repeatedly frustrated by having to get the bus, so maybe I’ll finally looking into learning to drive (rather than just saying I will week after week).

I’m curious about something that I have my own suspicions about, but I’m curious to hear others’ thoughts about:

Why do you think mental health groups would be mostly males?

And if you’ve ever been to any yourself, have they also been male-dominated? I wonder if it’d be any different in big multicultural cities.

Thanks to those of you who commented on my previous post! I always read and appreciate the comments, but I wish I were better at actually replying. It’s something I’ve always struggled with, though. (Replying to emails, too…)

Something a few people commented about was the interpretation of facial expressions, as I’d mentioned a woman at the volunteer fair narrowing her eyes at me as I spoke, and how that brought to my mind several different interpretations, mostly negative.

I had an interesting exchange with my counsellor during my last session with her relating to - but not in direct response to me telling her about - that, where she seemed to be interpreting my facial expressions as more negative/judgemental/angry than I felt reflected my actual internal state. When she mentioned it, my eyebrows shot up in curious surprise, as I suppose it really showed how vast the gulf can be between intention and interpretation, especially of nonverbal cues.

While at uni getting my Psychology degree, I researched social anxiety (since I had it), and came across studies that found that people with higher social anxiety were more likely to interpret neutral facial expressions as negative. Here’s a similar study I just found, and I find the wording of the conclusion in the abstract interesting: “our results suggest that socially anxious individuals lack the bias toward positive emotion”. Not “were negatively biased”, but “lacked the positive bias”. That lines up with things I’ve also read about how people with depression made more realistic interpretations than the delusionally positive ones of people without it... though whether or not that’s actually the case seems to be contested.

Since I started making my own games, I’ve felt it was important to include facial expressions alongside dialogue - such as on the portrait things in MARDEK - because I feel they’re as important - if not moreso - in communication as the written words. And not just the primary-colour emotions like “happy” or “sad”, but something more nuanced and specific.

I’ve likely written about this in the past - probably a few times - but in more recent 3D projects - eg Memody, Atonal Dreams, Dreamons - each dialogue line can be assigned an expression made up of pieces: the eyes take four numbers (x, y, upper eyelid openness, lower eyelid openness), as I’ve found it important to allow for that level of nuance for those, but the mouths and eyebrows just specify a symbol corresponding to a ‘preset’ pose. For example, for mouths:

• | = neutral

• ) = smile

• ( = frown

• D = grin

• etc

I tend to vary the set of mouths for each character I make; Collie, for example, has a < mouth which looks like bared teeth (visible in two faces in the above image), but Savitr doesn’t have that in his ‘mouths palette’ since it doesn’t suit his character.

For eyebrows, I’ve found that five or six presets are all I need for all the emotions I need to convey:

• (space) = neutral

• ( = raised

• > = angry

• < = “shy”

• | = “flat”

• S = one raised (could also have gone with \, I suppose)

I use the ‘shy’ eyebrows - raised in just the middle - on characters a lot, for example Angela and her dreamon here. A few days ago, I asked ChatGPT to ‘realify’ that image, and it produced this:

What was meant as something like a timid/inoffensive expression was instead interpreted as embarrassment, or even distress, rather concerningly! But only in the human (Angela), and not her furry dreamon for some reason - that one aligned closely with what I meant - even though I intended the expressions to be the same?

This wasn’t the first time the image generator had interpreted the ‘shy’ eyebrows as some form of distress, so I ended up having a long conversation with it, trying to figure out what to actually call that <:) expression. I came up with “shybrows” - for the eyebrows in particular - but that didn’t feel quite right. I also considered the term “submissive”, which for some reason was interpreted as sexual to the point where it refused to generate a face-only image with such an expression? I’m not at all a fan of sex as domination/conquest, ugh.

I did some digging, and maybe it falls within the category of agonistic behaviour? That is, “any social behaviour related to fighting, which can include aggressive behaviour, but also threats, displays, retreats, placation, and conciliation”. For example, a dog rolling on its back to bare its belly to show it’s not a threat and that it doesn’t want to fight. (Which is what I meant by ‘submissive’, not “uwu punish me daddy”, ROLL EYES EMOJI.)

I suppose it also relates to the fight, flight, freeze, and - most relevantly - fawn responses that trauma-tainted nervous systems are drastically more inclined to.

In case you’ve never come across it, the fawn response is an attempt to avoid conflict by minimising your own needs and essentially socially submitting to others. It’s very likely related to trait agreeableness, and vernacular terms like “doormat” encapsulate it. It’s something I’m inclined towards myself.

So maybe the <:) expression I so often give my characters - because I can relate to it - could be called a ‘fawn face’? (Funny, I suppose, considering Angela’s dreamon there is meant to be a deer.)

I did get ChatGPT to produce what I felt was a more accurate (or at least less distressed-looking) ‘realified’ version of those characters, but there Angela’s expression looks to me seductive or smug or something? Maybe that says more about my brain’s interpretation model than about the image generator, though. Hmm.

I got it to generate those images after remembering how just over a year ago, I asked it to ‘realify’ this image:

And it produced this:

That’s from the 31st of March last year, and at the time I found it shocking, threatening, hard to look at, because it seemed so accurate, so good; it blew me away that I live in a world where I can show an extremely stylised drawing to some alien intelligence and get something like that back in seconds. It’s surreal, the stuff sci-fi authors couldn’t even imagine being so common so soon barely a generation ago.

Looking at that now, I do notice some ‘AI image weirdness’, especially around the faces. I wanted to see whether the new image generator would do an even better job, so:

In some ways yes, in other ways no? I was pleasantly surprised that the other ‘realified’ version of the human, Lydia, turned out sort of goofy-looking, which fits the character; here she looks like some traditionally attractive model doing a not-very-convincing cosplay. It removed Spryad’s green skin for some reason too (maybe because asking for a ‘realified’ version was incompatible with that?), and changed other details like the colour and style of Lydia’s shoes (why?).

I asked it to do this for all of the dreamons and dreamers:

Which was… interesting, I suppose? Very mixed feelings. Curiosity! But also… hmm.

I dislike people using AI to make stuff they then claim they made - whether art or writing; the idea of using AI to write or even edit a post online or an email or a blog post is viscereally repulsive to me - but I find it fascinating to use for things like this, to see things from a different perspective I wouldn’t otherwise realistically have access to.

I see it sort of like asking a friend if they’d draw my characters in their style (with the style here being hyper realism that’d be beyond my ability to produce myself)… except without worrying about burdening or potentially upsetting a real person. I’d never use the output in my own work - or as my own work - in the same way I wouldn’t an actual artist’s.

It’s interesting, maybe even inspiring in some ways that’d influence my own efforts, but the AI generated images are not mine, and I’ll always go back to making my own stuff afterwards.

I’m worried I’ll get attacked for not boycotting AI entirely or regarding it with ideological hostility, but hopefully at least the people reading this are more considerate of nuance than that.

I wondered which other characters I could get it to show me ‘realified’, and got it to generate this:

From a text description, interestingly, rather than an image I provided; many details were surprisingly accurate, considering that. It seems to struggle with silly stylised hairstyles, though (Collie’s hair’s meant to resemble floppy dog ears), and it didn’t understand what I meant by a grey bandana with the ribbon bits resembling wolf ears.

It’s Collie’s Cherub and Blight Wolf forms, from Atonal Dreams, which look like that in the game.

The AI generated image looks like a visually impressive artwork, I think; it’s better than I could do, and was created in a fraction of the time it’d take me to do anything remotely close. But with my actual mediocre drawings, I’ll stare proudly at them for ages thinking “I made this!”, appreciating little details. With that, I think “that’s impressive!”, but don’t care to look at it beyond a few seconds.

Still, I suppose because it was so easy to do so, I had it generate another:

This was also mostly from a text description, though I think I’d shown it the model of Savitr earlier in the chat?

I find it interesting how it can keep track of past messages, though it doesn’t ‘remember’ them; for each prompt, a new instance comes into being, gets fed all the previous (n tokens of) prompts at once (plus other stuff like behaviour instructions and guidelines), writes its reply, then flickers out of existence. If there is any consciousness behind any of it - as some claim - that must be a very different form of being to what we experience; I’m reminded of the falling whale from the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Or the sindrels from the mega-successful hit indie darling “Sindrel’s Meme Monday Snog” (or whatever), to both a lesser degree because their lives are more prolonged, and a greater one since they’re supposed to come into being knowing a whole lot already.

Generating images in a chat seems to ‘contaminate’ future attempts in that same chat, and it told me it can ‘see’ images that have been generated within a chat, but not really; it can see keywords related to them, or something, but not the exact pixels. I wonder whether it’s as oblivious to its actual inner workings as we are to ours, and find the whole ‘black box’ concept - where even the ones who grew it can only guess how it works - both fascinating and terrifying.

Anyway, all that WORLD-RUINING SLOP generating renewed my interest in both Dreamons and Atonal Dreams, and I actually went back and played them both; it’s been many months, even years, since I last played Atonal Dreams, so that was interesting; maybe it was the closest I’ve been able to come to experiencing it as a player rather than the perfectionistic developer (or maybe I did and said the same a few months ago; I can barely remember my name these days).

There’s so much I’m deeply proud of with that project, especially how the narrative and gameplay are deeply intertwined… though I feel I made the same mistakes with it as with Taming Dreams years before: it’s very dense with lore and dialogue in a way that’d probably be frustratingly impenetrable for most people. The music-based battles end up being very sluggish, too.

Still, it feels like such a shame that I spent so long on it, did so much with it, but never got beyond a demo before becoming completely burned out.

With that, I could at least play through the existing story section for about 3 hours, but Dreamons… I spent ages on that, too, but kept changing my mind about what it even was, so the various builds I have of it are all just short test areas that are different to each other.

I actually had some ideas for what I could do with Dreamons, got excited about it again for the first time in ages… but won’t go on about those here since I don’t want to get even more distracted from what I should be doing (CBCR, ‘portfolio’ website thing) than I already am!

I have been chipping away at both of those things, by the way, though not with any kind of focus, due to all the getting out there stuff I’ve been worrying about lately. Still, even slow progress is some progress… right??

(The AI generating stuff was from one or two afternoons when I felt too drained to do anything else.)

Speaking of actually getting out into the world, I’ve done some stuff?

I had a phone call about volunteering opportunities with a mental health charity last week, but we seemed to drift instead towards the idea of me attending the group sessions as a member first, since I’ve been a shut-in for so long.

I was given a list of things they’re hosting - meetup groups and activities and such - and said I’d go to as many as I’m able, but one of them was a “Men’s Health Week” thing, and I had a knee-jerk “nooo, not that!” reaction because I don’t want to go to a group with a bunch of men, and she seemed taken aback, told me that all the other groups are mostly men even if they’re not advertised as being for men in particular.

(She sent me an email afterwards that I took a couple of days to even open, then like three hours to actually write a reply because of how poor my concentration is these days.)

So that wasn’t exactly what I was hoping for, since I basically have what I imagine would be called androphobia these days.

I grew up with just my father and two brothers, all the people I knew in school across two countries were male, Fig Hunter and my other online communities were 95% male, and I have a lot of trauma from all of that… It wasn’t until I found female friends at uni in my late twenties - something I’d spent my teenage years dreaming of having - that I found connections that were nourishing rather than draining.

It’s not as if I ‘hate men’, or think there’s something wrong with being male; I get annoyed when I see things talking about how “men are trash” or the like. I’m male (whether I like it or not), almost all the creators I follow online are male, all the people I’ve admired from a distance have been male… I suppose it’s more like “I can’t imagine a positive relationship that I personally could have with a man because I assume they’d argue with and/or attack me”, or something.

Still, it’s not as if I can pick who work colleagues would be, if I did get a real job one day, and most of the people who’d actually admire my achievements are likely to be male, so maybe attending a mostly-male group who aren’t hostile towards me, who don’t reject me, would allow me to overcome a massive mental block that’s holding me back.

I’m at least willing to go with an open mind, despite the desire to avoid.

Maybe having some not-negative experiences with other mena would make it easier for me to engage with online communities relating to game dev etc too; one of the biggest reasons I avoid all that is because they’re so male-dominated.

I’ve also been having some intermittent heart concerns (I think I mentioned them last time?), though I’m currently waiting for the results of an ECG and blood test. I’m actually hoping they might reveal something easily treatable like a deficiency that might help with the exhaustion and poor focus I often feel.

Also, for a while now, my step-dad’s been pestering me to see some kind of benefits advisor, who’s apparently helped his friend and sister get more monthly income from benefits than he gets for his job.

I finally went yesterday, and talked with some guy who basically told me nothing more than what ChatGPT has when I’ve asked it: the only thing I might even potentially qualify for is something called PIP (personal independence payment) - basically disability benefits - but the assessment for it is about a dozen questions that are mostly things like “can you prepare a simple meal?” or “can you dress yourself?”. I don’t struggle with any of that, but it seems absurd to me that because you can use a microwave or put on your pants, you’re assumed to also be able to work 8-hour days around other people 5 days a week?

The benefits advisor did say something about how it’s not whether or not you can do the tasks, but more like the impact they have on you, which made me wonder whether I am more impaired than my pride would have me believe. I often feel too exhausted to do anything, even creative stuff I want to do and which I’d be doing by myself. If I have a brief external appointment or event in the middle of the day, the whole morning is consumed by anticipation, and the evening by exhaustion.

When reflecting on it, I realised that fatigue - more than things like anxiety - might even be the main thing I struggle with. But it’s so normal to me that I’m blind to it like a fish is to water.

And I don’t even know the cause; C-PTSD? The damage to or destruction of my pineal gland during the surgery? (When I asked my neurosurgeon afterwards if I still had one, he literally shrugged.) Some vitamin deficiency?

It’s very annoying, whatever the cause. For example, I finished my latest ‘Ramble’ composition, Ramble 41, a couple of days ago, after starting it in March (I chipped away at it in three blocks, months apart). Back in the day, I finished Rambles of equivalent length and greater complexity in a day or two in the evenings after school…

And I started writing this on Saturday, but am finishing it on Wednesday. It used to be that I’d sit down, write, and post these within an hour or two, but I’ve had to chip away at this in short sessions - amid other tasks - over several days. (It’d be more reasonable to break posts like this into two, three, or even four separate ones, but I never seem to do that for some reason. Pfff!)

So maybe what I need to be looking into is less how to reduce ‘anxiety’, and more what’s actually causing this fatigue.

If you’ve read (or skimmed) this far, I think it’s only fair you’re rewarded with the promised AI-generated boobies you’ve no doubt been spending the whole time sweatily shuddering with lustful anticipation about:

I did however go to a volunteer fair thing I wrote about recently, hopefully as some step towards breaking out of the cocoon I’ve been in for pretty much the entirety of my thirties.

What would you call the thing depicted in this image I got ChatGPT to generate? (Other than “AI SLOP THAT SURELY ENTHIRSTIED A TRILLION TURTLES WITH ITS GUZZLING WATERLUST”, verbatim, I mean.)

My mind gravitated towards ‘stall’ or ‘booth’, but ChatGPT claims it’s a ‘stand’. And other sources back that up, too. News to me! Not really something that’s ever been a part of my world, I suppose. I thought they called them ‘booths’ at conventions? Maybe that’s something different though. (Not that I’ve ever been to a convention.)

Anyway, there were a bunch of those crammed into a room, though I only actually interacted with two of them which were for charities I’d already looked into and considered online months ago: one was a cancer charity, another was a mental health one I’ve had various dealings with (eg counselling, meetup groups) for like two decades.

I talked to the two nice older ladies behind the cancer stallnd thing first, and they seemed kind and welcoming enough, but I sensed scepticism or judgement about my awkwardness; I tend to babble when anxious (rather than shutting down as some people do), and something about how I’d never been formally employed slipped out, causing one of them to narrow her eyes briefly. I was told I could just show up to the charity shop when I’m next in the area and help out informally first if I want, so I’ll try that this week or next.

I tried the mental health charity shrine next, and the woman behind it reminded me a lot of the friends I made at uni - same age, too - in a way that pleasantly surprised me and gave me hope of finding ‘my people’ if I do volunteer with them. She’s supposed to be giving me a phone call on Tuesday where I’ll find out more.

So that’s something, after months of flailing and hiding. I’m curious to see where it’ll lead.

While I wasn’t all that ‘cognitively anxious’ about the whole thing leading up to it (more hopeless than anything), I had a bunch of concerning and unfamiliar heart sensations during the morning and evening of that day that actually motivated me to go to the doctor the next day. I dismissed headaches as just symptoms of anxiety for years before learning I actually had a brain tumour, after all.

The doctor just dismissed them vaguely as ‘palpitations’ that were probably due to anxiety, but I’m booked in for an ECG and blood test in a few days. Even if the strange heart sensations were just a result of subconscious anxiety (I’ve only had them briefly since), I wonder if these tests will reveal anything that might explain the fatigue I often feel.

To actually get a doctor’s appointment at my local GP’s surgery, you have to either use an app/website, which is unreliable, or show up in person at 8am. I decided on the latter, since it’s only a five minute walk from where I live. While waiting, there was one other woman about my age there who I had some awkward small talk with (since we were both waiting outside the door and wondered if we should try to go in), and she seemed mildly eccentric in a way that reminded me of myself or the friends I made at uni.

My counsellor - and people in the comments here - say I should have hope about things like future interactions with people, getting a job, etc because they have positive experiences of acceptance and connection (or at least a lack of overt hostility, rejection, and alienation) to draw upon to fuel that optimism. I have mostly traumatic experiences of things like abuse or rejection, of being a solitary misfit, which leads to doubt and paralysis because I feel like I’m being told to stick my hand into a fire I know will burn.

So I noticed that even having these few neutral interactions with people I thought “I wouldn’t mind having an ongoing connection with this person” about gave me that evidence I was lacking, and some glimmer of hope came from it.

I suppose the main hope for the volunteering itself will be to accumulate more of that evidence, which I’ll be able to use to fuel a flight out of the pit… though it’s frustrating how much of it is dependent on things like who else exactly is there, which I can’t control… If even one person there feels compatible with me - and I don’t mean in some romantic ‘soulmate’ sense, just more like “I feel we’re from the same planet and I’m not uniquely alien” - that’ll be enough to motivate me to keep it up. If that’s not the case… I don’t know. We’ll see, I suppose.

After the mentally exhausting volunteer fair thing (most of the exhaustion was due to anxiety around the heart sensations), I decided to watch a film for the first time in ages, opened up Disney+ (which I have because I like animation but rarely use), and decided on Moana 2 because it was at the top of the recommended list and I thought “I barely remember the original, but I’m curious what they did as a sequel!”.

About 10 minutes in, I started feeling deja vu, and by the end I was sure: I’d seen this before, and recently, too.

So that was concerning. How poor my memory is, how my memories of that had slipped away so much I couldn’t initially even remembered that I HAD watched it, let alone what happened in it.

I keep a self-made local web app thing to record my moods and tasks; I’ve been using it for years, and I typically record films I watch or games I play as tasks. So on Saturday morning I thought I’d do something I’ve been meaning to for ages: make a page summarising what I’ve watched or played and when (that is, it pulls from the database to display taks of a certain category within a certain year). Maybe, I thought, I’d see when I watched Moana 2 the first time.

Turns out I’d not recorded that as a Task at the time. Pfff! I think it was only about a year ago though??

It was fascinating though looking over the lists of things I had experienced, some of which I remembered much more than others. These were all the games I played last year (2025) and for how long, for example; I don’t remember playing Pokemon FireRed at all, let alone for 19 hours, and I definitely don’t remember spending almost 80 hours on the Tomb Raider Remaster! I suppose that covers like five of the games though? FFVII REBIRTH definitely did feel that long though - I’m actually surprised the number’s not higher - and that was just from trying to finish it, not 100% it. I also thought I played Jade Cocoon (and wrote a post about it) way longer ago than last year!

Most of the stuff I’ve played since 2019 has apparently been revisiting old games I grew up with and was inspired by, often - but not always - via remasters or remakes. Only occasionally I’ll play new games, usually - but not always! - from familiar franchises like Pokemon. I tend to avoid indie games because playing them feels like work due to comparing them to my efforts. I spend more time making games than playing them.

A Game About Digging a Hole (notable enough to have a Wikipedia page, apparently) is an odd exception in that it’s an indie game I saw blowing up on Reddit, which was cheap and seemed short so I decided to brave my usual aversion to experiencing competitors and gave it a go. I think I finished it in a single evening, and can’t remember much about it? I found the attention it was getting - and following how the dev was handling it - more interesting than the game itself. The solo dev made it in like two weeks and it sold over a million copies by the end.

…I was going to include ALL the lists of films I’ve watched and games I’ve played since 2019 here, but would anyone other than me care to read that? Ehh, this post is probably long enough.

I find it interesting though how I’ve spent weeks recently doing digital archaeology to dig up all the media I’ve created over the past two decades, and then I also dug up all the media I’ve consumed over at least part of that same period.

Do you, O reader, keep a record of all you watch or play? How much of what you’ve experienced do you even remember?

(I suppose Steam keeps track, but what if you often play games on other platforms, emulators, etc?)

I finally finished everything in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance (with a “thank God” rather than an “aww, already?”), and while trying to decide what to play next, I looked back over the newly-accessible lists of games I’d played since 2019 and, to my surprise, Chrono Trigger wasn’t on there; I’ve played it several times, and I thought I had done more recently than that. Since I remember it being relatively short for a JRPG, I thought I’d replay that, specifically a Steam port I’d not previously experienced.

It seems to be something like a remade port rather than an emulated version, though, and the visuals annoy me somewhat since they’re not all adhering to the same pixel grid: the character sprites themselves aren’t pixel perfect (if you zoom in, the pixels are all subtly different sizes), in a way I notice because I’ve tried hard to ensure pixel perfect accuracy in CBCR, and things like UI elements don’t even try to match the scale: the font seems to be a pixel-style font rather than an actual sprite font (if you zoom in on text, there’s blurriness around letter edges).

And battles show these pixelated HP and ATB bars beneath the characters which are at a completely different pixel scale than everything else.

I’ve been playing for a couple of sessions now and have mostly got used to it, though, so… ehh.

I keep seeing mentions of a Chrono Trigger remake - people wanting it, at least, rather than official plans for one - and a lot of people seem to want it to be in that “HD-2D” style like Octopath Traveller, which I personally find unappealing. I’d rather have something in fully stylised 3D, like the Link’s Awakening remake. I - apparently like many others - am surprised Chrono Trigger’s never got a remake, though, considering it regularly tops lists of the Best RPGs Ever Made.

Playing through it here in the future, I can’t say that I’m wowed by things like the story; there’s a lot of things just happening, characters joining or showing up for no reason, little in the way of reacting to what’s going on around them.

Which isn’t to say I hate it or anything; I’ve been enjoying the few hours I’ve played so far, and the love I’ve always had for the music hasn’t been dampened at all (though maybe there’s more awareness and appreciation for specific compositional decisions and techniques this time around).

And obviously it’s not fair to assess it without considering the context it originally existed within; it was probably very narratively ambitious for its time, compared to its contemporaries. And I know that I was wholly immersed and in love with the experience when I first discovered it via a Playstation port in my teens.

Like with some other old games I’ve been revisiting recently, Chrono Trigger was a huge inspiration for MARDEK, since I discovered it not long before I started making my own stuff. I pretty much stole the Biblical magi names from it, though they were stolen by Chrono Trigger so WHATEVER.

(Also, the ‘star’ that Balthazar, Melchior, and Caspar - or a dozen magi, depending on whose accounts you believe - followed is a core part of Western Christmas traditions, and was blatantly obviously a UFO, which I find interesting considering how core it is to culture and how that aspect is never pointed out. Hardly the only link to UFOs within the Bible!)

Anyway, I should get back to trying to figure out how to convince others and myself I’ve not wasted my entire adult life. Fun!

Tiny CBCR update:

I started work on the Sewer… but didn’t get beyond making some tiles and empty areas.

I wish I could remember how long I spent on each part of the original; I get the feeling that back then, I just made everything in one burst without really thinking or worrying about anything, no perfectionism holding me back, but maybe I’m misremembering and it was just as much of a slog back then. But I did manage to finish it, so I don’t know. My life was in a very different place though.

I couldn’t focus, again, due to feeling I was wasting my time on something that’d surely go nowhere, so I redirected my attention to another thing I needed to finish: a sort of portfolio/museum website thing I started work on at the start of last year, with the hope it might lead to something else.

It grew into some bloated archive of all the creative stuff I’ve done over the past couple of decades, which was too technically and psychologically difficult to manage, so progress lagged or stalled.

So I decided last week to essentially create a new, summarised version where I included a limited selection of things on one long single page instead of exhaustive galleries on separate pages, as was the original intention. The single page is divided into epochs:

For example, three or four years of creative exploration at the start of my ~artistic journey~ are compressed into this first section, with a bit of text and a sort of gallery made up of digital art, game screenshots, and music compositions. Easy to scroll past, but there if you’re curious.

Some noteworthy projects, like MARDEK, have a section to themselves.

It’s been interesting looking back at how I’ve spent my adult life, dividing it into chunks that make sense, and picking the most representative creations for each one.

There are 11 of these epoch chunks at the moment, spanning the past 20 years, and I’ve dug up and included media for them all, but I need to replace the “TEXT WILL GO HERE” placeholders with something that’s not too off-puttingly deranged.

I feel the whole thing is deranged, though. Or strange, at least. Other people don’t have to do this kind of thing. They make CVs/resumes that provide evidence of the team projects they’ve taken part in as part of formal employment, or the formal certifications they’ve earned; proof of social integration and trust, essentially, which (I believe, perhaps inaccurately) seem far more important to people in the system than the creative exploration I have to show.

And in the case of standard creative portfolios, they showcase just the best, most recent stuff, the finished pieces, the most stunning, omitting all the sketches and the journey that led them there.

But I feel I can’t really do that because the result would just be barren and not representative of what I’ve actually done and what I’m capable of. Plus I’d personally love to see a full artistic journey laid out like this! Because I feel all the psychological context is extremely important. So I suppose I can’t really get what it’s like to not be interested.

Plus I feel a lot of shame about how things have gone, which is why I have this constant ‘need’ to explain what I’ve been up to and the meteorites that derailed me. Why I’m not lazy, I’ve just been walking a completely different path from basically everyone else.

I don’t even know what it’ll even amount to, in the end. Employment? Will that even exist in creative fields in the near future, or will it all be consumed by AI more than it already is?

Do I even want to work in a creative field? Or more importantly, could I? Both would I be able to pass the various assessments of my worth and social fit, and would I be able to endure the constant social environment in the long run?

I’ve not really made any real-world progress in the last couple of weeks, but there’s a volunteering fair thing I’ve decided to go to next Thursday, so I’ll see how that goes. I’m not getting my hopes up, but I’m trying to keep an open mind.

There was also a heat wave over the past few days, which was unpleasant since houses in the UK are built to retain heat and have no air conditioning. Really impaired my already poor concentration. (It’s cooler now, thankfully.)

To fall asleep in the heat, I made use of a technique I’ve previously used to calm anxiety, which I’ve been having great, consistent results with, so I thought I’d mention it here:

Essentially, I think of a category such as girls’ names, boys’ names, or Pokemon, and go through the alphabet, trying to come up with one - or several - for each letter.

Anne, Bianca, Clair;

Arthur, Billy, Charles;

Absol, Bulbasaur, Charmander.

I can come up with Pokemon more easily than other categories, which probably says a lot about my life experiences. I tend to find that I don’t get to Z before drifting off or calming down, but if I do, I just go through the alphabet again.

I’d recommend trying it if you struggle with anxiety or sleeping.

I managed to finish the decades-old GBA game I wrote about in my last post… sort of. I beat the final boss on my third attempt - when it didn’t decide to just nuke everyone - but wanted to at least try to unlock some secret character I was aware of when I first played it but wasn’t able to back then.

I knew you had to complete all 300 missions, but the whole missions system is so mechanically awkward that I could never figure out how (the criteria for them to appear at all are wonky and opaque, plus you can ignorantly discard important unique items that prevent you from starting the missions that require them). I had to check ancient GameFAQs guides to figure it all out here in the future.

I also learned from those guides that there are series of new missions involving corrupt Judges that unlock if you do reach that point, which was the main reason I stuck with it.

The whole game up until this point includes a limited number of assets for allies and enemies, but these post-game missions apparently include unique enemies (battleable judges), and several cutscenes (even though the main story only had a handful), which is very surprising to me. It feels similar to modern-day DLC, but included in some handheld game older than MARDEK? I wonder how many people ever even saw it. It’s surreal to me realising it existed in the game all along!

And I still haven’t even finished, because my interest ran out. I feel compelled to though, so hopefully there’s not much left… when I can be bothered to get back to it. I definitely prefer games that don’t demand weeks of my time, these days (I say, even though all the ones I’ve been playing recently do!).

A few weeks ago, I reorganised and renamed the XML files used for the game’s ‘rooms’, to a letter corresponding to the area (eg H for Clarence’s House) plus a second letter for the ‘biome’ (eg Clarence’s Bedroom is C, the Bathroom is B, etc), plus a number; “HD2” for the above screenshot, for example. ‘Basement’ would also be B, though, and the next-best synonym, Cellar, would be the also-in-use ‘C’, so I wondered about alternative names, and settled on D for Dungeon, since the idea of Clarence having a fantasy dungeon below his house seems fittingly silly.

I added a couple of new enemies and a new hazard to reinforce the idea: skeletons, ‘slimes’ (like D&D Gelatinous Cubes), and rotating axes. Doable in an hour or two… or so I thought.

And that would have been the case - there wasn’t objectively that much to do - but I struggled to focus or motivate myself to do much of anything, with the whole “I need to fix my mess of a life” thing weighing constantly on my mind, and it took about twice as long as it should have done.

(This is true of the project as a whole, which could have been done in maybe two or three months if I’d actually been focused on it…)

That’s not where I should have been spending my time and energy anyway, so I got back to making actual progress on the outside area which is sort of a combination of levels 2 and 4 from the original. I already made one part of it, the Suburbs, several weeks ago, but needed to flesh out the rest, and just… couldn’t get started. I’d stare at the blank map editor, frozen, paralysed.

I thought I should probably block out the area as a whole in an image editor, like how Kanto for the original Pokemon games was originally blocked out on paper like this:

I can’t remember whether I bothered to plan the original’s layout like that - if I did, it would have been in a physical sketchbook which is probably in some box somewhere - or whether I just made things up as I went along.

I actually replayed the original Clarence’s Big Chance, probably for the first time since starting on this ‘Remakester’, in the hope of finding motivation or inspiration, and its area layouts do seem like unplanned improvised first drafts. I remember next to nothing about the development process, though.

(I’d completely forgotten that you were able to summon the car right at the start of the second level; I designed the Suburbs for the Remakester such that you have to work your way to the car summon button.)

Anyway, I made this:

But even that simple thing took far longer than it should have done because I just couldn’t concentrate at all; it’s not even finished (though it’s probably done enough to serve its purpose). I felt exhausted, brain fog, like my body and mind were made of lead. I’m no stranger to these feelings, but I’ve been feeling like this more and more often recently.

I wondered years ago whether they were related to things like vitamin levels from my sedentary shut-in lifestyle, but blood tests showed nothing major wrong. I’ve been taking Vitamin D supplements anyway - a large number of people in the UK seem to because sunshine here is rare - but haven’t noticed any difference.

Everything I’ve learned about psychology, neurology, and myself suggests it’s due to my temperamentally sensitive and circumstantially traumatised nervous system being in a constant ‘braced’ state, because I see the world outside my cocoon as a threat. That drains energy.

Past experiences have conditioned me to expect that if I go out into the real world, I’ll be excluded, bullied, attacked, and if I draw attention to myself online, I’ll be dogpiled, mocked, stalked… which doesn’t leave anywhere where I actually can safely go other than inward. And even that’s poisoned now by the fact I’m not making money.

Other people derive energy and safety from their social support system, but I don’t even have that. Or rather, I have my parents - which is more than some people, and I’m grateful for that - so things could be worse, but it’s hardly the same as having a supportive partner, friends, even work colleagues who appreciate - or at least pay you for - what you do.

Having Patreon supporters and a handful of people who ostensibly read my rants here helps - I don’t feel like nobody cares, at least - but unfortunately it can’t compare to having people I can meet up for chats with or physically go to places together with.

I did at least get something done: I realised that while I’d composed music for three of the four outside biomes already - Suburbs, Park, and City - I hadn’t yet composed any for the Sewer. I started that, immediately got into it, and had a finished piece in under an hour. So my mind’s capable of focus and productivity; I suppose the difference was that the goal was fairly straightforward and few decisions had to be made. Or something.

I wish I could just make a living as a composer, but I looked into it yet again recently and it sounds like there are way, way more composers than there is any need for them, and most of them have benefits I don’t such as connections or experience with DAWs or playing actual instruments, and they’ve typically specialised in a way I haven’t. Selling yourself and finding clients seems crucial for making any money from it, and that’s what I’m worst at. Plus there’s AI now…

I’ve still not tried volunteering; the one place I reached out to never replied. I know I should look for other opportunities, but…

When I last saw my counsellor a few days ago, I talked about all the things I have done in the past despite anxiety or ignorance:

• I taught myself how to code, compose, draw, make games and websites during my teens; other people would approach me and ask me to teach them what I know, and I always thought or said “why not teach yourself?”.

• When I was 18 or 19, and my anxiety was at its worst, I travelled on planes alone to the other side of the planet to meet my then-girlfriend for the first time.

• When I was in uni in my late twenties, I travelled hours-long, unfamiliar journeys on trains and buses to meet a couple of friends during the summers.

What was different in those cases though was that I was motivated by either the experience itself with the creative stuff, or the belief that there’d be treasure at the end of the quest, in the form of positive social interactions with people I liked from interactions we’d previously had.

With volunteering, I imagine a combination of anxiety, tedium, and social mismatch, and for what? If I already had all the life stuff established - partner, job, home, etc - then maybe I’d do it out of the goodness in my heart. But because I have none of those things, anything that doesn’t feel like it’s leading closer to them feels ‘worthless’.

The whole point would be to bridge the huge gap between where I am and being a functioning member of society - it would be moving me closer to that, hopefully - but I don’t particularly even want that. Or rather, I can’t conceive of it in a way that’s actually appealing to me, or even survivable. I feel I ‘have to’, but don’t ‘want to’. And it’s much harder to find motivation for things like that.

Though maybe the Universe has provided such a motivation:

My parents have been living in the house I’m currently in since something like 2010; to my surprise, apparently I moved from Australia back to the UK in 2007, which was when I released the first MARDEK; I distinctly remember working on the second while there, and thought I’d made the third there too, but apparently not. We lived in a different house after arriving, but moved into this one not long after, I think?

My understanding of the details is fuzzy, but I think we acquired it strangely: my step-dad, not wanting to work for anyone (which I suppose is why he’s never pushed me to do that), set up a lawn mowing business, and got clients by literally knocking on doors or something, since he’s extroverted and confident enough to do that. Through one client, he got a job as caretaker of a community hall, and an adjacent house - the one I’m in now - came as part of the deal. Hardly something you’d plan a life trajectory towards, but I wonder how many people fall into where they are due to weird bits of luck like this.

The community hall is technically owned by something called a trust - I know very little about this - and yesterday, that trust (basically six elderly people) arranged a meeting with my parents, the result of which is that they - or we, I suppose - will probably be kicked out of our home soon… though ‘soon’ maybe means ‘within three years’, not ‘tomorrow’.

So that puts some pressure on me, maybe? Though I’ve been wanting and meaning to move out and become independent for ages now, knowing my parents are old and I’m almost 40…

While I’ve yet to try volunteering, my mum found out through her work about an upcoming ‘Volunteering Fair’ thing, which sounds like it’ll be a bunch of people at stalls you can approach to find stuff out. I’d MUCH rather go to something like that that scroll through a website’s opportunity listings for the umpteeth time, since I’ll be able to see the things that actually matter to me - the sorts of people I might be volunteering together with - rather than just some promotional blurb.

The email my mum sent me about it includes a flyer image, which includes a photo of a very old woman talking to a not-much-younger woman at a stall, so I’m assuming that’ll be the majority of people who’ll be there…

I’ll go anyway, though. It’s at the start of next month, two or three weeks away, so I don’t know whether to just put the whole ‘try volunteering’ thing out of my mind until then so then I might be able to actually focus on something like CBCR… I wonder whether I’d even be able to, though, now I’m aware of the timer about moving out.

(I should probably write a separate post about this bit, but… ehh. I’d probably only forget, or not have the time or motivation, or something.)

I finished Final Fantasy XII about a week ago, and before that I’d played Vagrant Story for the umpteenth time, though the first in years. Both are ostensibly set in the same world, Ivalice, as are some other games, including Final Fan: Tasty Tic Tacs Advanceture (I think I got that right), though lore-wise there’s little actual consistency (are Lucavi, Totema, and Espers the same thing??).

All three of those games were big influences for MARDEK, since I played FFXII and FFTA around the time I was working on it.

I remember when I originally played the game, I thought the story was fairly silly: the protagonist and his school friends (who he’d just met?) are isekai’d, he adapts to the new world immediately, and then decides almost as immediately that he should bring the real world back, destroying the ‘fake’ one in the process. But why??

Now that I’m older, I found the writing to be surprisingly interesting for a handheld game that was likely seen as less serious and important than Final Fantasy XII - which has a comparatively generic, impersonal plot - and understand the underlying themes about wanting to run from reality; it resonates with my own experiences, and seems like the sort of thing I might actually be inclined to make myself these days.

Makes me wonder what was on the mind(s) of the creator(s) when coming up with that as that as the story, especially considering the art style is more playful and cartoony than the original Final Fantasy Tactics.

There are some peculiar aspects, though, like this character, Ritz, wanting to stay in the fantasy world because in the real one her hair is naturally white and she has to dye it because she can’t stand white hair…

…which she shares with her loyal teammate, who looks like that. Not NORMAL, unacceptable, UGH.

I also appreciate the pixel art a whole lot more since I’ve been doing some of that myself for CBCR recently, plus I was playing the game scaled up 6 or 8 times on a modern monitor rather than on a tiny not-backlit GBA screen so I could actually see each individual pixel.

I assumed that since it’s an old handheld game, I’d be done with it in a handful of hours, if that, but no! It’s really dragged on; I’m over 35 hours in and have just unlocked the final battle.

…Which I got completely destroyed by? The stat numbers like level and HP remain low throughout, and my party were around level 25 and had about 150-200 HP at the end and could tackle every battle without any issue; even the most powerful enemies would do ~100 damage per hit.

The finale includes three battles back to back, with the first two going the same as the other battles leading up to that point - barely an inconvenience - then the final one began with the final boss using a spell that dealt about 400 unavoidable damage to my whole party (or I mean I got turns first, but had to spend them approaching her since she was out of reach).

I definitely finished the game when I was younger, so… maybe it was just a luck thing. Though that’s a weird design decision if sometimes she can just nuke your party and there’s bugger all you can do about it.

Annoying that I’ll have to redo the battles leading up to it; at least emulators have save states, I suppose (though I prefer not to use them).

There doesn’t even seem to be any way to grind, as far as I’m aware. Characters always need 100 EXP to level up, and get an amount after every action based on their level relative to the target’s; a level 20 character would get 10 EXP for hitting a level 20 target, 20+ or something for hitting a level 25 character, but only 1 for hitting a level 10 character.

You can select some missions with opponents level 20+, but they’re few and far between, and most repeatable battles seem to be against level 8-10 enemies that give 1 EXP so griding against them would be beyond tedious. Weird.

Speaking of weird mechanical quirks, you can select these Missions from a list in pubs… though even now I have no idea what determines which ones actually show up, since most of them seem to require items there’s no way of even getting because the missions you’d get them from aren’t even available? But it doesn’t seem random either?

I wish this is how real-world employment worked, though, where you just chose tasks from a list anyone could access and got paid. If only!

As you may or may not have noticed, I gave my character what in my opinion is a very silly name. I do wonder if some people will take issue with it and me though, as if I condone racism or something.

Comically, it turned out to be more appropriate than usual because the first post-isekai narrative scene involves him unwittingly using a racial slur that triggers the first battle (which I had no recollection of beforehand because it’s been years since I last played this).

Personally, I find the clash between a protagonist’s (arguably, in this case) heroic role and actions and an overtly appalling name hilarious - “Our kingdom’s fate lies in your hands, Sir Babysmasher” - but I do wonder whether anyone will tut-tut at me about this for some political reason or another. (Or the AI image earlier.)

Wondering what people who would disapprove of that might like instead, comics like this one that Reddit seems to be full of came to mind (it’s also about racism, coincidentally; I just checked through the most recent posts on r/comics). So if you do take issue with those screenshots, I’m very curious to hear what you make of that! It’s got almost 40K upvotes, so clearly some people like it, but I find it - and the many, many other comics I see like it on Reddit - irritating and not amusing at all. Humour’s subjective, and all that. (I like absurdity; I don’t like politics.)

…By which I mean I’m still in the same old position. I got so exhausted about going around in circles about it, getting nowhere, that I decided to just redirect my attention to CBCR for a bit since that’s my current project and it shouldn’t take too long to finish once I actually devote the time to it.

(The website ‘museum’ thing was ‘work-finding-adjacent’, and as such similarly stressful, so I’ve put that aside for the moment too. I’ll get back to it later.)

I spent a few days making the Suburbs area. Unlike the original, it has a parallax background (the original used tiles that were part of the map). The original intention was to adapt the original maps, but - like so much of what I made back then - they were all very first-draft-y and poorly thought-out. So I’ve been building the area from scratch and putting more thought into it.

I also added some new enemy types that weren’t in the original, such as this Builder here who can’t be stomped, but you can repeatedly jump off his head to use him as a platform. Standard stuff.

You can also jump between an endless stream of nukes to summon your car from the heavens to mow down pedestrians on the clouds. Standard stuff.

I had a long ‘discussion’ with ChatGPT when it took issue with some of my design decisions for moralistic reasons, though, which made me whether other people might do the same like they did with Spar Girl a while back. Hmm. (People on Reddit have been reporting that ChatGPT’s been particularly contrarian recently though, which I’ve noticed myself.)

Speaking of which, an idea occurred to me for what I could replace Spar Girl with: Slug Girl, an anthropomorphic slug superheroine; a combination of Clarence’s obsession and the Rule 34 ‘the internet sexualises literally everything’ phenomenon. ‘Slug’ can mean both a heavy punch and a bullet, so she has bullet fist things… though they look like oven mitts there so I should refine that if I decide to keep the design. I like designing characters, though, so I enjoyed the opportunity.

I also enjoyed designing Melon Collie a while back, but haven’t integrated anything to do with her into the game yet. Maybe there’d be four Cyberspace sections: Way of the Blade, Order of the Oraccult, Slug Girl Fanclub, and Melon Collie (the name of the character is also the name of the ‘website’). And Visagetome, I suppose. They’d all be parts of the same map that could be accessed from different points, rather than each level having a “Way of the Blade section” or whatever, as was the plan a while ago.

The main reason I’ve taken a break from frustrating flailing about life fixing is because my parents have gone away on yet another holiday, as they seem to do multiple times a year, so I’ve been home alone for a week and a bit.

Before they left, there was a weekend where 6 of my step-dad’s relatives came over one day, then my brother and his partner the next, and I just hid in my bedroom the whole time like someone my age shouldn’t be behaving. The profound shame of it all was agonising, and I fell to the lowest I’ve felt in ages.

Context is key. If I had more going for me and met those same people in other environments, I wouldn’t be nearly so avoidant. But the narrative that I’m some still-lives-at-home nearly-40-year-old manchild with issues and no impressive external milestones that ‘normies’ would understand or care about is a poisonous one to inhabit.

It made me literally ill (or maybe I caught something from one of the many guests); the day before my parents left, my sinuses were very congested, then a couple of days after that some orange watery fluid leaked from my nose and I basically had a panic attack, spent hours shaking, wondering whether it was a sign the brain cancer stuff was back.

That was a few days ago, and it feels like some surreal nightmare in hindsight.

I’ve spent the past few days just following my creative whims and making various things - for like 8 hours a day - and playing the piano for the first time in ages. I’ve been replaying Final Fantasy XII over the past few weeks - as part of an attempt to replay all the old Final Fantasies which has spanned years at this point - and revisited the Piano Collections for that for the first time since probably around the time I started playing the piano about two decades ago. Back then, I tried stumbling my way through a few of the pieces, but could barely even read the notes and didn’t get very far with it. Revisiting the same pieces now, I find they’re very much within my skill range, so it feels like completing some lingering quest at long last, or something.

Just being able to get food from the kitchen when I want without having to worry about some awkward interaction with my step-dad or whatever guests he’s invited over - during which I’m unavoidably perceived as an awkward failure, with discomfort and pity - has also been doing wonders for my mental health.

As with every time I get to experience this, I’m acutely aware of how much I need my own space. A while back - maybe the last time my parents were away, actually? - I looked into places I could move out to, thinking maybe that should be the next step forward. It might put more pressure on me to actually take the necessary steps to getting a job or volunteering rather than just thinking and talking about it. But then it fizzled out.

My parents prefer having me around though because they can go on holidays like they are doing currently, while I look after the house and the adjacent community hall. I suppose that’s the main reason they don’t make practical efforts to help me move out etc. When bringing up the idea in the past, I’ve literally been told “but who’d look after the house and the hall when we go away?”

I’ve basically given up on the idea of finding a partner at this point, and I’ve never had any desire to climb the corporate ladder or anything; I might be content - at least for a while - basically being a hermit, away from everything, with my computer as a tool for visiting and creating worlds. I’ve not been bored at all these past few days just doing whatever I want to, though I have been thinking it’d be nice if I had some tasks I could do or somewhere to go for some positive interactions out in the world…

I’ve still not heard back from the charity I contacted about volunteering, which is a shame since it was a mental health one and the shop is close by. There are a couple of other charity shops on the same street, but neither are as relevant to me as that one. I might have to enquire anyway though.

Anyway, I’m just trying to put that out of my mind for now, while I still can - I know this bubble will soon burst - so then I can hopefully regenerate some semblance of sanity.

I mentioned I’ve been replaying Final Fantasy XII for the first time in years, and wanted to comment about that a bit.

I adore the aesthetics of that game! The art, the music, the setting, the wording of the dialogue. But even though I’m still in the middle of playing it, I couldn’t tell you much about the story, both because it seems to be largely about political machinations between off-screen characters or something - which I’m not interested in - and because there are surprisingly few actual story scenes, each with only a few lines of dialogue. Pretty much no character growth or any real bonding between the cast.

There’s also a ton of optional content, including several entire dungeons or large sections of story dungeons that you don’t have to explore at all. There are 13 Espers - summons - but you only need to get like five as part of the plot; I’ve had to check online guides etc to even figure out how to get most of the others. Why do games do that? Or games back then, anyway; is it really a thing anymore? I had stuff like that in MARDEK, too, because I’d been inspired by these things and thought that it was the done thing, or that I ‘had to’ or something. I probably wouldn’t do the same in my games these days.

I’ve been playing the Zodiac Age version - a sort of re-release, or something? - which for some reason revised character progression. I barely remember this, but I think in the original all the characters had access to the same ‘Licence Board’, where you had to unlock the ability to use equipment and skills and such. In this, characters can choose two ‘jobs’ - a common Final Fantasy trope, I suppose - each with its own limited Licence Board, though I found it to be annoying rather than an upgrade.

I also found the Licence Board concept generally irritating, and have a ton of unspent points because the vast majority of the potential upgrades are useless unless since they’re just for equipping things I either don’t have or don’t have any desire to equip. And acquiring some rare spell or item then having to buy the permission to equip it isn’t the most satisfying thing in the world! Who came up with that?? I greatly prefer the Sphere Grid from FFX.

I do love the aesthetics of the menus and other UI, though, and found those very inspiring for my own projects at the time. I think I played this when I was working on MARDEK, actually, and there are a ton of things I’ve been noticing this time around and thinking “I bet that influenced [whatever] in MARDEK”.

Look, it’s Rohoph! Or rather, this thing - Venat, of the Occuria - is ‘possessing’ Doctor Cid, unseen… in like one scene, then there’s a ‘big reveal’ like it’s something we should have been wondering and mystified about, which I wasn’t at all this time around so I just had a ‘huh?’ response rather than ‘gasp!’.

MARDEK was based on a Neverwinter Nights module I made before FFXII’s release in 2006, but that module didn’t include the possession aspect (Rohoph was just the nameless protagonist’s wizard mentor), and MARDEK 1 was released in 2007 , so I wonder if there was a direct subconscious influence. I can’t remember!

Look, it’s Elwyen!! I was clearly far more brazen with my creative copying with this one; I’m surprised I wasn’t sued.

(…I started writing this like three days ago and kept revisiting and revising it, getting distracted, rethinking things, so it’s a bit of a tangle now.)

Maybe I misrepresented things in my previous post, I don’t know, but people seemed to be replying as if the anxiety was the main barrier in the way of me making progress.

Anxiety is certainly a barrier, a big one, but it’s not even the main one.

The main barrier is something like having to navigate unfamiliar territory and make decisions blind with a lot of bad experiences that make me wary and without direct support.

The fact is, I’ve spent my whole adult life doing personally fulfilling creative work by myself, isolated from everything. I’ve NEVER been employed, and have no idea how it even works. The standard pathways are completely alien to me.

But while I’m making a bit of money from this, it’s not nearly enough to live independently, and I need to make more somehow.

I’ve also dealt with a lot of social rejection and abuse that make being around other people as palatable as swimming in a pool full of sharks.

So what even are my options? That’s the question.

There are a lot of problems that seem to have obvious solutions on the surface, which a lot of people eagerly recommend:

“Lonely? Go to groups and clubs!”

Rarely are these solutions that the person has ever employed themselves; they just sound like they should work. But once you actually try them out, you find that the reality is a lot more bleak.

I tried the ‘groups and clubs’ thing specifically a whole lot, but because I live in a sleepy seaside town where people come to retire, the options were few, and the other attendees were elderly. They didn’t make me less lonely because of internal factors like anxiety (I pushed through that and went to them), but external ones (demographic dissimilarity, lack of options).

The only thing that worked was going to uni, where I met people in similar life situations who were eager to find connections. Anxiety was no barrier at all to forming friendships due to the circumstances.

There are technically ways to make money online using the skills that I have. But they seem similarly bleak.

ChatGPT and commenters on this blog over the months have suggested things like freelancing, commissions, selling asset packs. But whenever I’ve looked into them, I see people flailing and struggling.

I was just having yet another conversation with ChatGPT about all this, partly to vent, partly in the desperate hope of finding a path forward.

It suggested selling my music on Bandcamp… which is something I’ve technically been doing for over a decade now and for which I’ve earned peanuts.

It then suggested freelancing on Fiverr or Upwork for the umpteenth time, probably because those sound like they should work. Getting more frustrated, I asked it to do a web search into what people were actually reporting about their real experiences on those platforms.

It did, and gave me some long, annoying, TED-talk-like ‘skimmable’ response full of lists and headers and repetitive reiteration (a format I’ve come to despise), so I asked it to give me a brief summary of its findings that I could include here:

Freelance platforms like Fiverr and Upwork are theoretically viable, but in practice they’re saturated, slow to gain traction on, and heavily dependent on algorithms and early reviews. Most users earn little or nothing, while a small minority capture the majority of income.

It’s like indie games: they make money, don’t they? I mean, Mr Minecraft ostensibly made his magnum opus alone in his bedroom, and he’s a bajillionaire now or whatever!

I remember when I was working on Memody: Sindrel Song, and thought that while I could never really earn money from Flash games because I couldn’t sell them directly, now that I COULD sell them directly on Steam, it’d be fairly easy to make tens of thousands of moneys even if barely anyone played them. There are millions of users on Steam, after all! Only a teeny tiny fraction need to buy my game and I’ll still be rich!

But obviously that’s not how it works. Like in society generally, I suppose, the top fraction of a percent get almost all the earnings, while the vast majority earn little to none.

Isn’t there a name for this? The [something] principle? I asked ChatGPT:

The thing you’re thinking of is most likely the Pareto principle, often called the 80/20 rule. The idea is that a small proportion of causes produce a large proportion of the results. It gets used very loosely, but in cases like freelancing or creative work, it often ends up looking more extreme than 80/20, more like 95/5 or even 99/1.

There’s also a more precise way people describe it in economics and statistics, which is a power law distribution. That’s the pattern where a tiny number of people capture a huge share of attention or income, and then there’s a long tail of everyone else getting very little. It shows up in things like music streaming, YouTube, freelance marketplaces… all the spaces you’ve been bumping into.

Though how much of that is just it tailoring its responses to what we’d already been talking about? I never wholly trust anything the AI says. Still, many other things I’ve seen over the years align with this.

Then of course there’s the constant self-promotion to attract attention which you need to do to earn anything, which I absolutely couldn’t tolerate in the long term. And being at the mercy of whimsical algorithms. And technological shifts changing everything. Even if I did figure out a way to make a bit more online, would it last? Feels like building a house on sand.

Getting a ‘real job’ does seem like the necessary path forward, but… how? Like I said, the whole thing is alien to me. I never went through the early learning steps most people do, like getting a basic retail part-time retail job as a teenager thanks to parental help.

For me, the idea of ‘getting a job’ feels like if you handed an elderly woman a controller while a fantasy RPG is playing and told her to ‘equip a halberd’. What? How? Why? Equip? Huh?? What’s a halberd??

To you, it might be obvious that you need to press a button to open a menu, then navigate to the correct page, select a slot to equip, then a weapon from your inventory list, etc, then close the menu, but to someone who’s never played a game at all, those steps aren’t obvious at all. Grandma probably wouldn’t even know there was a menu, since you can’t see it until you open it. Or even if she opened it by button mashing, she might just close it again because she’s no idea what it is or does.

I asked my mum what she’d do in that situation, and she said something like “you’d need to show me what to do”. Yes, but nobody ever helped me through the process of getting a job.

Two or three years ago, I went to a doctor about this, who referred me to an Occupational Therapist (I wrote about it in blogs at the time), who I met up once a week for several weeks. Most of the meetings involved her telling me to eat a balanced diet; she handed me a printout of the food pyramid/plate/whatever diagram thing. Problem solved!

At one point, I asked her what she’d do if I asked her to code a simple Hello World program. She gave a sort of smug “pfff, don’t go on about that nonsense to me” dismissal as if it was irrelevant or obvious that she’d have no interest in figuring out such a world.

I am at least noticing some internal shift regarding the idea of what I should or could do. It used to be - even as recently as a couple of weeks ago - that I regarded the idea of getting a ‘normal job’ with a profound spiritual disgust, because I saw my solo creative work as ‘better’ in many ways. It felt like amputating my soul.

Now, I’m leaning more towards doing something out in the real world at least for two or three days a week, then I could spend the rest of my time on my creative stuff. Living a double life, as I think I might have said in previous posts.

But I don’t know whether or not that’d even be viable. A lot of people have to work non-stop at multiple jobs just to get by. Who am I to think I’ll be able to do otherwise?

And I’d probably have to start at the bottom, and I can’t imagine my coworkers in such jobs would be kind and accepting. I hope I’m wrong about that, though.

I’d actually prefer to have some small, cosy, local, quiet job doing something vaguely important or meaningful together with kind colleagues over climbing over the backs of competitors to ascend the career ladder in some big city to become as wealthy as possible. I don’t care about that. I just don’t want to become homeless or live in complete squalor.

I’ve made a tiny bit of progress in that direction:

I applied for a volunteering role with a local mental health charity I’ve had many interactions with over the years.

Well, sort of. It’s not with the charity itself, but a shop associated with them, so it’ll likely be stacking shelves rather than helping people with mental health issues.

I walked past the shop on my way home from my last counselling session, and would have gone in to look around or even ask, but - just my luck - it was shut. (I hope just temporarily…)

So I went on their website, and filled in a form to express interest, but all I had to provide was a name and email address and then I got a reply saying they’ll let me know if anything comes up.

At least that’s something, I suppose.

Depending on how it goes, there are two or three other shops in the same area (right next to the place I get counselling) that I could try volunteering at. We’ll see.

Obviously volunteering won’t earn me any money, but the hope is to challenge my negative beliefs about how other people will treat me, and to calibrate my nervous system to actually being out in the world around other people. Steps someone already integrated wouldn’t even need to take, but I do.

I wonder if even that would be too much for me, though. I can do all this creative stuff myself at home! But whenever I even think about being out in the world around judgemental, potentially hostile others, I feel like I’ve put on a suit of leaden armour. I started writing this post a couple of days ago, but couldn’t finish it because I felt so completely exhausted. I ended up spending much of Sunday in bed.

I’m sure chronic stress is to blame for that. I almost certainly have C-PTSD, and am a ‘highly sensitive person’ (which seems to be a distinct and real psychological thing, to my surprise)-

…I just got completely distracted reading about whether that even is a scientifically valid thing, and it is, though the academics use the term Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS).

It seems to be a temperamental trait - an essential individual difference we all vary across, like height - which determines how we react to external stimuli.

As part of my Psychology degree, I learned about the ‘diathesis-stress’ model for I think depression specifically: it’s caused by a combination of genetic inclination (eg high SPS) and negative external factors.

Interestingly, the Wikipedia article about SPS mentions the ‘vantage sensitivity’ thing - which I’d previously never heard of - which says that the opposite can be true, too: highly sensitive people can truly thrive - not just walk, but fly - in positive, nurturing environments. Seems to be related to openness, too; a trait dimension along which I’m particularly ‘tall’.

It reminds me of the concept of ‘orchid children’ which I came across several years ago, and which ChatGPT summarises like this:

• Dandelion children: grow pretty much anywhere. Poor soil, good soil, doesn’t matter much. They’re robust, relatively insensitive to environmental variation.

• Orchid children: highly sensitive. In harsh environments they struggle, sometimes severely. But in supportive environments, they can outperform the dandelions. They don’t just do “okay,” they flourish.

I imagine they’re both just different maps of the same phenomenon… neither of which really help me traverse my current circumstances, I suppose, but an interesting side path I was taken down while dwelling on all this.

I suppose the point, though, is that I’ve been very aware for years that I won’t survive in just any environment, and need to find one where I actually can.

Like if you had a D&D character with 6 Strength and 18 Intelligence, training in levels of Fighter would be possible, but foolish, especially in the long run.

I’ve spent last week working away at the revision of my website that I mentioned in my previous post (I think?), which is sort of like a museum to my 20 years of creative output.

I set up a Games page when I last worked on it months ago, with what I considered to be my ‘main’ projects, but ended up digging deep into my old files this week to dredge up everything I’ve ever worked on, even things I only dabbled with for a week or two eons ago.

For example, this untitled thing (the project is just called “simpleRPG”), which I think is the first Flash ‘RPG’ I ever made? It’s comically crudely made compared to what I’m capable of now, but I like the contrast between where I was and where I am creatively.

I also worked on something called Chimaera twice, apparently, two separate versions, and had all this UI stuff set up without any actual working gameplay. I’d forgotten about that completely.

I’m including playable versions of all these old Flash games where possible, using the Ruffle emulator.

A few years ago, I was wondering whether to make some ‘Fig Hunter Collection’ of my early stuff I could port to Steam, but I imagine it wouldn’t have been worth the effort of trying to figure out how to get the old files working anyway, so maybe this thing will have to serve that purpose, when I release it.

I’ve currently got 30 projects in this ‘Games’ list, but they’re mostly Flash games; I worked on a bunch of things briefly in Unity over the past few years, but still need to search through files to extract screenshots and stuff.

I find this kind of archiving fascinating (or the result, anyway; the process isn’t my idea of great fun), and I’ve been swimming in nostalgia for days, but I can’t help wondering whether I’m just wasting my time.

I wonder: have you ever seen any other creators doing this? Making archives of their creative stuff from the very beginning, I mean, to track the journey from crude experimentation to competent crafting. I wonder if anyone else even has the time.

I treated it like ‘work’ this week, but I should probably stop doing that and just chip away at it in my ‘free time’ instead.

But then what do I do for ‘work’ next week? I wish I knew…

Maybe I should get back to CBCR or something, I don’t know. I do want to finish that. Could do that alongside tackling volunteering.

I spent the first half of the week trying to do something with the ‘talky thing’ I’ve written about a few times over the years, but my mind was just flooded (yet again) with thoughts about how ‘nobody even cares about this’ or ‘what if I DO attract attention but have to deal with trolls and psychos again?’ or ‘do people my age even like stuff like this?’ and ‘I’m so behind and there’s no place in this world for me’ and so on.

I do think the ‘talky thing’ format has potential, and I’ve been working on various iterations of it in private projects for several years now, and keep going back to them more than any other project. But making something I’m personally happy with and something an audience wouldn’t tear me apart for are very different things, so the challenge has been on coming up with a narrative I’d be comfortable exposing to the world, which remains elusive.

I thought maybe I should be doing something else, and shifted my attention to a revised version of my personal website that I started work on over a year ago, but still haven’t finished.

It’s made using a modern web dev framework called Laravel, which I learned with the help of ChatGPT in a couple of weeks at the start of last year. ChatGPT doesn’t write the code, but acts like a tutor I can ask about anything at any time if I get stuck.

I’d been thinking of this version of the website as something like an archive of my creative output that I could also potentially use as a portfolio, the next step towards getting a job that actually made use of my skills… but as I worked more on it, it was turning more and more into something like a museum of all I’ve made - including everything to chronicle the journey rather than just the ‘greatest hits’ to show my current capabilities - which I find personally fascinating, but again my mind flooded with doubts about it appealing to anyone else, about how much of a bizarre misfit I am, assumptions about how people would attack or reject me for it because I’m not doing it in a ‘normal’ way they’d be receptive to, etc.

Even ChatGPT - which is well-known for being a yes-man - told me that some of the things I’d decided to include were ‘poison to recruiters’, and that my whole approach was entirely at odds with what I ‘should’ be doing if I want to find employment (stress my strengths and omit the rest).

“I am not right for this world”, essentially, or “I can’t even be myself correctly”.

I should probably ‘get a job’, but I’ve tried to explain in recent posts how differently difficult for me that is compared to someone who had the appropriate scaffolding during important developmental milestones.

It’s like saying to some 70-year-old that they should ‘play a game’. How? Where? Which one? Which genre would they like or be any good at? Which games even exist?? They’ve not got a lifetime of experiences to draw upon to understand how any of it works. “Maybe get an RPG on Steam?” would be nonsense to them. That’s how I feel when people talk about jobs.

Or, more importantly, I could probably figure out the technical aspects of a job, but my nervous system has adapted to perceive every other person as a threat. My brain reacts as if everyone is a tiger, or has a gun pointed in my face.

My creative work also isn’t just some toy I can put aside to ‘be a grown up’ or whatever; it’s how I’ve coped with life, or to a large degree it is my life. I don’t track my past through external events or look at photos or anything like that, I look back through my folders of creative works.

If I were ever told I had to choose to lose a leg or the ability to do my creative stuff, I’d lose the leg without hesitation. I literally asked my brain surgeon to take a different path than he intended through my brain because I was so afraid that damage to my corpus callosum would impair my ability to create.

I need to make stuff, that’s non-negotiable. But I also need to make money. I’m having great difficulty figuring out how I can do both.

Something like a dual life where I alternate between a normal, real-world job and creative stuff keeps coming to mind, but I don’t know whether I’d have the ‘spoons’ for it. When I was at uni, my creative output all but ground to a halt, my mental health plummeted, and that was when lectures were only a handful of hours a week. I only have to leave the house once a week at the moment, for a 50-minute-long counselling session plus the journey there and back, and just that consumes my energy for the day and several hours the day after. I usually can’t make anything on those days.

I was reminded of the term hikikomori recently - a Japanese term for a phenomenon where adults retreat away from the world completely to cocoon away in their bedrooms - which I felt a strong affinity with in my early twenties when that seemed to accurately describe my circumstances. I mentioned it to my counsellor when I last saw her - she’d never heard of it - and included the ‘fun fact’ that it was a big enough phenomenon in Japan that a Pokemon was based on it (that thing, Swadloon).

Bulbapedia says:

The appearance of Swadloon hiding in its blanket bears some resemblance to the stereotypical portrayal of people suffering from hikikomori (acute social anxiety disorder) syndrome in Japanese media. Its Evolution into Leavanny (whose Japanese name is two kana away from “hikikomori”) being caused by friendship may also be a lesson.

I like that: treating it with kindness is the key to growth beyond. Leavanny’s Japanese name is hahakomori, with ‘ha’ meaning leaf and ‘haha’ mother, but Latinised, it’s a joyful laugh.

(I actually had a Leavanny on my party the first time I played Black version, but didn’t know about the hikikomori connection at the time and forgot it evolved via friendship.)

I suppose my current situation is pretty much that again these days, which is frustrating since I did go through the whole process of butterflying out of my cocoon in my late twenties, only to get cast back into it by brain cancer.

I wish having done it before made it seem easier this time, but sadly that doesn’t seem to be how it works. If anything, it seems harder this time, due to an accumulation of past failures that my demons draw on to convince me ‘it didn’t work last time, it won’t work any other time’, plus being older and less likely to be socially accepted were I to go back to uni, and all the stuff with AI consuming an ever-growing number of paths.

Oh, while reading about the hikikomori phenomenon, I realised that game game Omori is based on it. I’ve never played it, but it sounds similar to my own stuff in some ways (eg battles use emotions or something?), so maybe I should… at some point.

So how do I actually make forward progress rather than just venting about being stuck over and over? Is the question I keep asking myself and endlessly circling with ChatGPT.

I currently feel like I’m living in Pallet Town, but don’t have the luck of connection with Professor Oak so nobody’s given me a starter Pokemon, and ‘get a job’ is the equivalent of becoming the champion. How do I even catch my first Pokemon when I haven’t had a Pokemon handed to me?

From where I am to ‘working a job’ is an impossible step, like leaping up a mountain in one bound.

All the conversations with my counsellor and ChatGPT and everything I’ve ever read over the years suggest that I need to build up positive experiences through repeated exposures: I need to find or carve a gradual staircase that leads up the mountain.

But what should the steps actually look like? Where am I already, and what’s the next one?

I just had a conversation with ChatGPT about this, first asking about a hypothetical scenario where someone who has panic attacks when they see a cartoon drawing of a spider has to prepare for an upcoming role in a film they’ll be in where a tarantula crawls on their face. What would the gradual steps look like for that person, allowing them to get from one extreme to another?

It did give me several steps, including things like looking at decreasingly abstract images of spiders, brushing arms to simulate creepy-crawly touch, etc, and it suggested it could take 3-6 months of daily exposure. It takes a long time to train the nervous system that certain stimuli aren’t going to cause catastrophe.

I then asked it about my situation, and it laid out steps and again suggested it’d be months of gradual effort.

I am at least not at the absolute extreme where I can’t step outside my house for a second. I go to the weekly counselling sessions and walk the hour-long journey home, and my body’s got a lot better at feeling safe while doing all that from accumulating ‘successful’ memories.

The issue is that there feels like too much of a jump between something like buying something from a supermarket (something I can do) to having a job interview (something even well-adjusted people feel fearful of) and then working among other people for 8 hours a day or whatever for months or years.

Volunteering seems like it might be the next step, and I’ve been wondering about that for months, but even that doesn’t seem like a very gradual step up from where I currently am.

Same with driving, which I’ve been wondering about for ages but keep avoiding actually starting since there’s no intermediate gradual step I can take before being out on the road with other people.

It’’s kind of like I’ve got to the point where I can look at pictures of spiders without panicking, and the next step is ‘pick one up’.

I’ll talk with my counsellor next time I see her, see what she says. Try to make a clear plan.

While doing an archaelogical dig into my past to populate the ‘museum’, I noticed a few interesting things.

One was that right back at the beginning, months after joining deviantART, I’d already tried doing illustration commisions - or I think they were just free requests? - three or four times. So it’s not as if I’ve never tried that.

I also felt embarrassed about how I’ve been going around in circles for the past few years, and even how many times I’ve pointed out I’ve been going around in circles!

I remembered that I’ve been working on what was then called ‘Belief’ since at least 2019, and have this video from November 2019:

That’s, what, 6 years ago? Surprising, and embarrassing. Other people build entire lives for themselves in that amount of time.

But then this is from almost exactly 3 years ago? Feels like a lot longer.

It’s frustrating that it’s not like “6 years ago I’d made 10% progress on game X, 5 years ago I’d made 20% progress on it…”, and more like “I’ve spent 6 years at the starting line because I don’t even know the layout of the racetrack”.

(Though I also spent several years working on Atonal Dreams between those two videos.)

I want to get back to Dreamons… but don’t intend to any time soon. I’d prefer to finish CBCR first, since it seems closest to being finished.

But every day I see posts on the indie dev subreddits which often say that platformers - especially 2D pixel platformers - are by far the worst-performing indie games, probably because they’re so easy for even inexperienced devs to make. Which is discouraging.

I’d hope that the absurdist elements and the fact that CBCR is a remake(ster) of an old game people might be familiar with might give it an edge, but… who knows. I’m not getting my hopes up.

Even if I were to get an ordinary job, it’s not exactly going to be next week. I need to build up to it. So I might as well spend the time when I’m not exposing myself doing game dev.

Or maybe I should finish the website renovation.

I wish I just had one clear thing I could focus on…

First, thanks to those of you who commented on the previous post showing a bit of gameplay of CBCR. Several comments mentioned the timer feature, so I just wanted to mention that I’m still experimenting with it; if it makes things more frustrating, I’ll remove it. The thought behind it was that it might make the multiple runs you’d have to do to unlock all the endings more interesting, but I wonder how many people would even be interested in playing through the game more than once anyway.

I haven’t made any progress on the game since posting that a couple of weeks ago, frustratingly.

I’ve been distracted by my mum’s health anxiety. Basically, she was meant to have a fairly routine procedure something like a year ago, but got turned away when her blood pressure was found to be too high. So she was put on medication etc, went again a few months later to have the procedure… and got turned away again. The third attempt was on Monday, and she’d been constantly stressing over being turned away again, as any temperamentally neurotic person would be.

Then, a week or so ago, some guy who lived in the house across from ours (seemingly with his parents despite being in his fifties or something?) died of a sudden heart attack while at work.

Which all got me sort of mentally preparing for the stress and the medical stuff to culminate in the same happening to my mum, at which point I’d be cast out of my cocoon into flailing chaos.

Thankfully, the procedure was a success on the third attempt, so the worst possible scenario my mind cooked up didn’t come to pass. A huge relief, but it’s frustrating and embarrassing getting gripped by such fantasies in the first place.

Something notable is that I had a ton of physical symptoms - my throat was constantly tight, for example - but once the procedure was a success and she came home fine, those symptoms all pretty much disappeared. Things like this make me wonder of how much of we call mental illness is a direct response to external factors, which would dissipate if circumstances changed.

Now that’s over, I’ve been wanting to get back to… something… but what, exactly?

What even am I? What do I do?

I’ve been lost for a long time now, as I’ve rambled about at length in many past posts. And it’s frustrating, because at the start of every day I need to decide what to actually do with my time.

If I had an ordinary job, like, say, goat semen taster, every morning I’d know that I needed to go into work at maybe 9am, taste whatever goat semen my higher-ups assigned me for 8 hours (though from what I’ve read, many work days are largely made up of procrastinating and/or meetings?), then come home and put goat semen out of my mind completely so I could switch to another mental mode and relax and indulge in entertainment. All very straightforward and compartmentalised.

As it is, I have no clear path, and have to spend time and mental energy every morning whether it’s worth it to work on a game like CBCR, or whether I should be looking into how to radically reinvent my life, or whatever else…

Often I end up talking with ChatGPT for hours trying to decide on something only to go around in circles getting nowhere.

What I’d like to be doing is something like I used to do in the past: wake up, open up my current game project, do several hours of work on it (with some breaks included; I’m not completely insane), relax for the evening, sleep, repeat the cycle.

I’d like to be doing that with CBCR, but the chances of it earning any money are slim to none, so I just don’t feel that I can afford to. If I had had that focus with it, it would have been done by now.

I saw a post on Reddit a few days ago about an indie dev whose newly-released game, Tangy TD, earned $250,000 USD in the first week after four years of work, or something, and he was crying on stream with joy about it.

While his supportive wife cheered and embraced him. I bet that helped him finish it. I know I’d get a lot more done if I were already settled instead of worrying constantly about whether I ever will be.

(I think he was also a relatively popular streamer with an existing community or something? But I don’t know all the details.)

The comments in the Game Dev communities were talking about how extremely rare these kinds of earnings are for indie games - something I’m already acutely aware of - while others were describing even this huge success as ‘poverty wages for a dev’ (presumably the people saying this were in big city American tech jobs)…

Last week, wanting to do something, I uploaded a couple of music compositions to a YouTube channel I set up for that purposes a while back (three years ago, apparently?!):

This one, Ramble 38 - the first piece I composed in MuseScore after switching over to that, I think? - got something like 50 views in the 24 hours or so after posting (it’s got 97 as I write this). The other videos on that channel got similar view counts at first, and I felt so discouraged to the point of thinking “what’s the point” and giving up on the whole idea of posting there regularly, despite having plenty of music I could potentially post.

This time, though, probably due to some recent psychological shifts, I felt grateful and happy that the video even got that many views; the number no longer physically stung. It also used to be that I couldn’t even check the stats on that channel since I assumed they’d just hurt, but I seem to have magically got over that aversion somehow and can now look at them without issue. Strange, how these things work.

So I uploaded the next one after a couple of days:

But that only got 10 views in the same amount of time? It’s only at 21 now. So again I just felt discouraged, doubtful about whether there was even any point.

ChatGPT said it’s due to YouTube’s algorithm more than anything else, which is probably true, but still… I suppose that just draws attention to the fact that all online creators are at the mercy of cold, unfeeling algorithms these days.

I composed Rambles 38, 39, and 40 over the course of like two or three days or something, and thought I’d posted them to my Patreon account at the time… but apparently I hadn’t added number 40 there? I can’t remember why, so I assume it was mental-health-related as always.

So I posted it there, which was my first post there in months. One person commented to say they were surprised I was still alive, which was surprising to me; I suppose I just assumed that everyone supporting me on there also read this blog. But maybe not?

It made me wonder how people follow creators; on which platforms, etc. I know I should probably be making more effort to make sure people who are interested in the stuff I make will even see it. So I’m curious to hear your experiences with this if you’re reading this.

I also thought I should probably be posting more on my Patreon account, but I’m never sure what to post there because it seems like the posts often get little to no engagement. And I’ve read that’s common for Patreon; that many people just support silently and don’t even check what the creators post there, which I find strange.

I realised I should probably update my Patreon’s description section thing, since I haven’t in ages… but the thought of it brought to mind the questions in the title of this post:

What do I even do? Who am I? How should I present myself?

Am I an ‘Indie Games Developer’ who makes games and that’s it? Not really. Or maybe I am? I mean, I do a bunch of creative things, but most are at least related to my games, right…? But the Ramble compositions aren’t.

Years ago, my cancer doctor asked me ‘what do you do?’, meaning what was my profession, and I didn’t know how to reply. I think I said something like “I make various things online”.

I’ve seen YouTubers say they have difficulty describing their work to people with more conventional careers.

I often wish I just did one thing, like for example putting out one video about a particular niche topic once a week (the hot new goat semen flavours, for example). Then I could devote all my energy to researching that topic, improving my knowledge and skills related to it, and making the singular piece of ‘content’ that people were expecting from me. I could orient all my ‘branding’ - eg the Patreon description - around this clear direction.

Instead, I flitter back and forth between music composition, programming, web dev, games dev, character design, drawing, etc…

Last weekend, as I was in a state of constant stress/tension due to concerns about my mum’s health, I made this thing to help me cope:

It’s a kind of music composition, but not really. When meditating with the aim of relaxing, it helps to use controlled breathing where the out breath is significantly longer than the in breath, as that’s supposed to shift you into parasympathetic activation or something. There are plenty of guided meditations out there, but in my experience they mostly just mention the breathing once then leave you to it.

I always wanted something where I could breathe along with a counter or something, which is what this is: there are four beats playing rising tones where you breathe in, four where the note is held and the breath should be too, then eight falling tones where the breath is to be slowly released. The same pattern repeats 19 times (adding up to roughly 5 minutes).

I made a similar thing years ago - 2019 or something - but it was 15 minutes long, so I rarely use it; I thought a 5 minute one might be easier to use more regularly (lower ‘response effort’) so I could get back into a more regular meditation practice.

Other people would probably try to make a whole career-of-sorts out of just that one kind of thing alone. To me it’s just something I made in an hour or two to address a specific issue I was having.

I also spent some time making changes and tweaks to a mood/task tracking local web app I made for myself ages ago in the hope that might help me focus my attention, though the changes are still fresh so time will tell whether it was worth the effort.

Do you remember this thing?? It’s one of many iterations of an idea I’ve had for years and posted about many times; in the past I’ve referred to it as a ‘talky thing’. (Did I mention it in my last post? Can’t remember, or be bothered to check.)

Basically, I have a Unity project set up where I can manipulate models’ rigs at runtime and store keyframes of any changed parts on sequential dialogue lines, allowing me to create simple minimally animated scenes very quickly.

I’d compare it more to webcomics than anything else I’ve seen.

I keep coming back to it, because in theory I could use it to make and release maybe multiple episodes a week rather than having to spend years on a game. Maybe people would become attached to whichever characters it focused on, due to familarity.

I’d been working towards using the Dreamons characters for it, but, like with the Dreamons game, I could never decide on a narrative, so all the times I tried went nowhere. What would they even be talking about?, basically.

I think my most recent attempt was when I decided I could combine it with the Dreamons game? So there’d be these cutscene things interspersed with turn-based battles. Can’t remember why I gave up on that (even though it wasn’t even all that long ago).

…Actually, I just looked it up, and I posted this video here almost exactly a year ago showing the gameplay loop as I was imagining it at the time, with alternating cutscene-like therapy session things followed by battles with the mechanics I’ve had in place for ages:

I’m really proud of what I already have in place for that game, and really want to finish it in some way. It’s really just the narrative aspects that have been so elusive.

I watched a couple of gameplay recordings I have of Dreamons (of sections I can’t easily access in the current game build) and scrolled through some of the 1000+ screenshots I’ve made of the project, with equal parts pride and sadness. I liked these ridiculous arguments abouts silly things that made no sense and didn’t matter…

But then I suppose I tried to go in a more serious direction with an actual story, disliked it, and… I don’t know, maybe burnout was the main factor why I put it aside. Or assuming nobody would even like it except me so it was hard to justify the time spent on it. I don’t know. I don’t want to consider it completely abandoned, though. Same with Atonal Dreams, though it’s been even longer since I last touched that.

I wish I had more time, more external stability and security.

While feeling lost and I suppose desperate at the tail end of this week, I spent a few hours setting up a new, fresh project - without all the clutter of the Dreamons one - and copied over some of the core ‘talky thing’ mechanics, and used the model I already have of this character, Angela, to test it along the way.

I was thinking I could post about that on Patreon… if I actually make more progress with it. It’s currently missing some core functionality.

I did have an idea for something like a narrative for it a few days ago - which is what inspired me to get back to it - but I need to do some more brainstorming before I could actually talk about it.

I’m full of doubts about whether anything even could come of it again, of course, but that’s true of every path I can imagine potentially taking. Which is why I so often end up feeling paralysed and wasting time.

I wonder what it’s like having a clear idea of what you want to do with your life and the guarantee that once you get there, you’ll be well rewarded…

Also, another thing I keep thinking about is how I don’t engage anywhere online these days (other than here, I suppose), but would pretty much have to in order to have any hope my creative stuff will find a large enough audience to support me full-time.

I never know when I can squeeze in the time though, or where to start. Discord communities, probably, but the format is deeply unappealing to me…

Posting on Reddit feels like screaming into the void and/or walking into a meeting of homophobes wearing a Pride flag and shouting “I sure love cock!”... Then there are other things like Xwitter, which seems even worse…

I don’t know.

The Remakester section starts at 3:30.

Both show the same sections: Clarence’s Bedroom, then a bit of the Bathroom, ending with Clarence finding his Toothbrush.

Watching a video of someone else playing a game is never the same as actually playing it yourself, but I’m curious to hear your impressions.

I also made some progress on the game dev side of things.

I added the car - or ‘Clarencemobile’ - which works basically the same as in the original.

Here are the old vs new sprites. The car’s 3x2 tiles now instead of 4x2, and has the same 3/4 angle as the characters rather than being side-on.

I also remade a couple of the enemy types, Clowns and ‘Old Biddies’:

They only had two frames before; now they have more. All enemies also have a death frame, shown at the end there, which flips horizontally back and forth as they fall off the screen.

The Clowns used to throw pies, but now they juggle balls that mean you can’t jump on them without being hurt. The car can still mow them down.

I’ve been getting quite discouraged though. I’m subscribed to a bunch of indie dev subreddits, and every day I see several indie games that look way better than this. So many people pouring years of effort into pet projects that nobody ever plays.

I do want to finish this for my own personal satisfaction, though. I just wish everything didn’t take so long.

Though I’ve spent most of my time in recent months stressing about my life situation rather than doing game dev. Can’t say I made any progress regarding that this week, though. Disppointing, I know. For me more than anyone.

I’m also subscribed to various ‘fix your life’ or career guidance subreddits, which are also consistently discouraging and bleak because of the current state of the world. Even the well-adjusted are struggling to find social connections, employment, hope.

Anyway. I hope someone gets something out of this video of this silly game!!

I spent much of the past week working on CBCR. I edited some maps, added some simple new obstacles - toasters (Clarence can fail to meet his date due to being killed by a piece of toast), and oven flames that toggle on and off every second or so - and did some general tweaking.

I also composed several pieces of music for the Outside area. The original level 2 music, ‘Suburbia’, always felt like it had a sort of ‘big city’ feeling to me - or at least I think that’s what I had in mind when I composed it - so I composed a different, ‘gentle stroll’ variation of it for the Suburbs, and sort of ‘remastered’ the original Suburbia into a new piece called ‘The Big City’, which actually took way longer than composing a piece from scratch. Plus I composed a separate piece for the Park (in a fraction of the time), and - on a whim - a short piece that’ll play when you’re in the car. Even though I’ve yet to add the car, park, or any of the outside areas yet! That’s what I’ll do next.

The music’s probably my favourite part of how this project’s been turning out, and I’m eager for other ears to hear it… but I feel it’d be best heard in its correct context first rather than showing it here or on my Patreon.

Speaking of music, I wrote last time (was it last time??) about how the dentist removed what turned out to be a baby tooth that’d been lingering in my jaw for three decades. Such relief!

Something else that’s been lingering in my mind for maybe even longer - and which resurfaced a few days ago - is this melody:

Do you recognise that?? Because I wish I could find where it’s from!

Here’s the story as I remember it, though it’s been so many years that I wonder how corrupted the memory has become over time; most of the notes I remember are definitely inaccurate approximations (this has bothered me for so long that maybe I’ve written about it before, maybe even several times, but if I have I can’t remember):

Some of my early experiences of the nascent internet during my late childhood/early teens were of listening to midi versions of the soundtracks of Final Fantasy games on fansites. Final Fantasy IX was the latest at the time, so I was particularly interested in hearing music from that. Most of the midis I found sounded pretty much like the music in the game… with one glaring exception.

FFIX had a main character called Amarant, though his original Japanese name was Salamander. For whatever reason, the fansites often used butchered half-translated names rather than the canon English ones (eg Beatrix’s Theme was often “Loss of Me” rather than “Rose of May”). One site had a midi for “Salamander’s Theme” rather than “Amarant’s Theme”… and it sounded like that fragment I just included there (maybe; I only heard it a few times almost 30 years ago). Amarant/Salamander’s actual theme is slow and dangerous; Zach’s theme in MARDEK was inspired by it, I think? (Or was that Shadow’s Theme from FFVI? Probably many inspirations mixed together, as with everything.)

I don’t know why that “Salamander’s Theme” sounded so different. Over the years, I’ve wondered whether it was a piece from another game that’d been included in the wrong list, or maybe even some amateur composer’s personal composition or something.

ChatGPT’s been able to help me identify some other hazy memories. For example, I told it about my vague recollection of a browser-based game I’d play with my friends during lunchtimes in the computer room in my teens, where you had some kind of chibi Bruce-Lee-like character who’d fight other players’ characters or something; it was able to deduce that I was talking about MyBrute, which was made in Flash and rather shockingly still has a website which looks exactly like it did back then! THAT hit me like a nostalgia tsunami!

Unfortunately, it’s been unable to help me with this. It tends to pick up these annoying turns of phrase that people on Reddit end up complaining about - like it ending every response with a clickbaity question to keep you engaged - and one I’ve noticed recently is that it keeps saying everything is common or widespread. So all it told me is that “midis were commonly misfiled on old fansites”, which is rubbish; this was the only case where I ever found a midi that sounded completely different to what it should, and I used to use those sites a lot.

Oh, but! Actually, I suppose it DID help, when I asked about this same thing a few months ago. I learned from it that there was a game called Salamander (in Japan; it was called Life Force in the West, or something), so I looked up the soundtrack to that. And the music is very similar, structurally! So it could have been that there was a midi from the game Salamander that ended up on a FFIX midi soundtrack list. I listened to several variations of the soundtracks of two Salamander games, though, and none were a perfect match. Way closer than Amarant’s actual theme, though!

I’ve also tried things like WayBack Machine snapshots of some of the Final Fantasy fansites I vaguely remember the names of (eg “FFShrine”), but didn’t find anything.

Maybe I’ll never find the original source of this strangely obscure memory, though, and such will never get closure. I’ve been chipping away at Ramble 41 for the past few weeks, so maybe I’ll incorporate the probably-distorted memory of the melody into that, claim it as my own. It’s been in the back of my mind for so long that it might as well be.

Makes me wonder if there’s anyone out there who heard midis of my music as a child, forgot who I was, and one day they’ll stumble upon them again and get the huge surge of nostalgia and relief that’s so elusive to me.

(I also once found some bedroom composer’s quirky midi compositions on his personal site, but the chances of me finding those again are pretty much zero because I can’t remember any related words or melodies or anything, just the feeling of enjoying what I heard.)

I can’t say that I’ve made any life progress over the past week. So much for building momentum…

I’d planned to get driving lessons, but got cold feet because of the cost. Lessons and a car won’t be cheap, and it’s not as if I’m earning much money at the moment. Plus I’m paying £45 a week for counselling sessions - the cheapest I could find - which adds up.

Mostly I earn money from Patreon, which I really appreciate since I have more patrons than most creators I come across and I’m glad anyone believes in and wants to support me, plus sales of mostly MARDEK on Steam, and some little occasional things like Google AdSense revenue on some Four Temperaments website I made years ago.

They don’t add up to much. I’m currently earning $340 USD (£256.86) per month on Patreon (hmm, I see I haven’t posted anything on there in a while; I never know what people would want to see). I got an income statement from Steam the other day which told me that my games sales added up to $1200 for the whole of last year. For the last 30 days, the AdSense revenue was an average of £2.02 per day, £60.47 total.

So that’s, what, about $500 USD last month? It’s a weird amount in that it does help me keep going and not spiralling into despair, but it also falls short of what I’d need to move out and live independently.

I probably spend at least half of my time talking with ChatGPT about what I could do to earn more without giving up my creative pursuits, what I could tolerate, what I’d even be qualified for, but it’s yet to give me some magic solution; it typically suggests things I’ve already tried (eg “make a small website for sensitive people!”) or which would never work (“sell mood-tracking web-based tools!”); basically “just keep doing what you’re doing, champ, and it’ll all work out!”.

I also regularly read posts in subreddits like r/findapath or r/careeradvice or related to indie dev. There are a lot of bleak stories in all of them.

When I was in this same sort of position maybe 13 years ago - knowing I need to get out into the world - I decided that it’d be wisest to go and do a course as a stepping stone towards relevant employment rather than jumping into an unskilled job directly. So maybe I should be thinking in that direction instead?

But I tried that twice, and neither time worked out. I excelled at the work each time, but the first time I couldn’t connect with anyone socially, and the second time I found out I had brain cancer and couldn’t continue on to a Master’s. Then when I started recovering, the COVID lockdown happened. Now there’s AI, which seems to be ruining how higher education works. If I went to do a Master’s now, at almost 40, I’d be some creepy old man to most of the other students. I’ve said all that before.

I suppose I tried again with a local counselling course a year or two ago, thinking I could do that… But got socially rejected by everyone - because they were all demographically similar (middle-aged women with partners and children and jobs in nursing or teaching) whereas I was an awkward lonely man - and dropped out before I finished.

My mind keeps going to something I’ve been experimenting with in various forms for years: 2-3 minute long videos, like this thing:

Maybe about the Dreamons characters (remember those?!?), if I can even decide what to do with them.

I’ve written blog posts about the concept/format before (were any on Substack? Can’t remember), but never seem to commit to any narrative direction long enough to get the ball rolling. Then other distractions come up and I end up forgetting about it for months.

But I do keep coming back to it, so… maybe I’ll experiment with something alongside CBCR or something. We’ll see. I do like the idea of making things I can release more regularly.

I’ve been playing this Pokerossingcraft thing recently, since I like Pokemon, liked the only Animal Crossing game I’ve ever played (New Horizons), and I’ve never played Minecraft so I was curious about how I’d feel playing a game with similar mechanics.

I love the visuals, music, and general concept!

But I’ve been really struggling to get into it, finding it a chore. It feels to me like there’s both an overwhelming amount of stuff to do and nothing to do simultaneously.

Maybe I’ve just been approaching it with the wrong mindset, though, and not really giving myself the opportunity to really sink into the whole cosy aspect because I always feel like I should be doing other things with my limited time.

I rarely play games generally these days though because I always feel I should be doing something that might one day lead to increased income or independence… which seems to be a common thing among people who don’t have a clear division between Work and Play.

Hopefully other people are enjoying it more; I don’t check communities or reviews or anything!

Before that, I’ll talk a bit about CBCR progress, as seems to have become the usual format. I only spent a few hours on it over a couple of days, but made some significant steps forward.

I wrote in a recent post - I’m not sure which one - that I’d been wondering whether to add some kind of timing element to the game: the date would be at a certain time, you had to arrive at work on time, things like that.

It seemed perfect for what the game is about; I wonder why I didn’t think to add it in the original.

Part of that wondering involved how the time would be tracked: a simple timer in the corner of the UI seemed a bit bland.

An idea came to me one day, and bounced around in my head for over a week. A couple of days ago, I decided to experiment with implementing it, and ended up with this:

Essentially, you can press and hold a button that makes Clarence extend his arm to view his wristwatch through your eyes. Completely ridiculous!

It makes me laugh, and - from playing around with it - feels more like my own experiences of obsessively checking the time on my phone before appointments than some always-present UI element might.

I also wondered - though haven’t implemented this yet - whether the arm(s) could have some surreal interaction with the environment. Like maybe certain blocks could be smashed by the giant fist, or maybe you could even jump or walk - or drive your car - along the giant arm. Might trivialise other platforming aspects though. Allowing you to kill enemies with the fist would trivialise a lot!

Currently you can only check your watch while standing still, and can’t move while it’s out. You can still get hurt and die though.

As for the time itself, I’m imagining each real-world hour equals three or four in-game hours. Clarence awakens at maybe 9am, you have to be in work by 12, and the date’s at something like 8pm (I’ll tweak the exact values as I experiment with what works best). If you arrive too late to work, you get fired, being late to the date severely affects your performance, and skipping it entirely leads to a bad ending.

Oh, and time runs twice as fast while in Cyberspace, and most work tasks would take place in there.

I’m thinking/hoping this could make multiple playthroughs more interesting, but TIME WILL TELL, I suppose!

Another thing I talked about in a recent post was revising the overall structure of the game. The original had four discrete levels, though you could sort of go between them via some special dimension or something.

I’m planning to revise this so that there are five interconnected areas:

• Clarence’s House

• Outside

• Inside

• Cyberspace

• Work Office

The Outside is a sort of combination of the original levels 2 and 4, with the Inside being a sort of sibling map made up of building interiors; you weave between the two, similar to level 2 from the original.

Instead of having separate Cyberspaces for each level, things like Way of the Blade and any work-based computer stuff would take place on the same single map.

I’m imagining each map as roughly equivalent in size - about the size of Clarence’s House, shown in the in-game menu map screenshot above - and each would take about an hour to complete 100%.

So a full 100% playthrough might take 3-4 hours, but you could also run out of your front door in your underpants, to the restaurant, then sleep on a bench or something to progress time until the date, and finish in maybe five minutes.

I started building an Outside map using the original level 2 and 4 maps, arranged using a custom map editor I’ve been using for Clarence’s House.

In the original, each level had a singular music track, but the revised version has several biome-like rooms, each with its own music track.

I thought I should probably split the Outside into similar biomes based on the original’s layout, each of which I’ll compose music for:

• Suburbs

• Park

• Inner City / Business District

• Sewer

And I suppose the Inside map would count as a separate biome.

The original level 2 map was very horizontally wide, but to fit everything neatly into the menu map without scrolling or scaling, I’ve decided to stack the biomes vertically, with the suburbs at the top (‘uptown’), the park as a divider, the inner city (‘downtown’) lower, and the sewer obviously at the bottom. You’d probably take a meandering path to get to the office though.

To make Outside maps, I need a tileset, so I started on creating a new one based on the old one. Here’s how the first level 2 room looked in the original (or rather, this is the original map and tileset loaded into the Remakester editor; the doors are misaligned and use new sprites):

And here’s what I had after a couple of hours of work yesterday:

The tiles in the original included a lot of black - and therefore harsh contrast - which was hard on the eyes; the new version’s much softer. It looks emptier, though, as I intend to use a parallax background - using mechanics already integrated into the cyberspaces - rather than tiles for bushes, background houses, etc as in the original, but haven’t drawn it yet.

I also started redrawing some new enemy sprites: Joe Bloggs and ‘Music Man’, though both are heavily redesigned; it’s a Music Woman now, since I don’t think the original had ANY female enemies other than Mothers and Whores? Oh, and old ladies, it seems. Which probably says a lot about my own perceptions of reality back then.

I may add several other enemies, like hyperactive little children, or young women with prams that spawn babies endlessly. Silly.

Now. Life stuff!

Before this week, I can’t remember the last time I went to the dentist. When I was in my early twenties, maybe? Over a decade, at least.

My teeth mostly caused me no issues… with one glaring exception: I had what I believed was an additional tooth - hyperdontia - in my lower jaw behind one of my canines. The area under it was pretty much impossible to get at with a toothbrush.

I only learned a week or two ago that plaque accumulates on the teeth and can be brushed off, but if left there, it hardens into rock-like tartar (calculus) which is impossible to remove with a toothbrush (I’d heard the terms ‘plaque’ and ‘tartar’ before, but never knew the difference).

Under this ‘extra tooth’, there was an enormous buildup of this tartar calculus, forming this huge chunk maybe 3cm across.

I made this image (or rather, edited one I found in Google Images) a couple of weeks ago to show ChatGPT: the position of the ‘extra tooth’ is marked in green, and the tartar deposit in orange.

Though it looked ghastly, it didn’t usually cause me any issues; I used to lick at it habitually with my tongue, treating it like some kind of internal stress ball or fidget toy.

Last week, my parents were away, and for whatever reason my mind latched onto the state of my mouth and caused me a huge amount of discomfort. Not pain exactly, but more like awareness of the tartar, my mouth generally. It got so bad that I couldn’t sleep because my tongue felt like it was being constantly electrocuted. One night, I leapt out of bed at like 2am and started desperately trying to shave down the tartar deposit using a nail file because I couldn’t stand it poking into my tongue anymore.

I strongly suspect that much of that was psychosomatic; the degree to which the mind can create unpleasant sensations from (often subconscious) thought alone is really quite alarming.

I’ve written before about how I struggle to make forward progress in a lot of areas despite knowing I should - and even wanting to - because I lack the extrinsic motivation.

This distress served as such motivation.

I’d been meaning to see a dentist for years anyway, but it seems difficult to get appointments here in the UK. I had brain surgery twice - and have yearly scans and check-ups - for free, but for some reason the NHS (National Health Service) doesn’t cover dental care. You can put your name on some NHS patient waiting list - this is what I did, years ago - but it can take years to actually get an appointment. AND in the unlikely event you ever do get seen, you only get a discount rather than free treatment.

Some recent change to the system meant that anyone on a waiting list had to sign up to another waiting list, or something, also…

I was in such distress that I just wanted to bypass all that and get private treatment, despite the cost.

I was fully expecting to go to the same dentist I went to years ago, and to have to make a phone call to arrange that - since that was the only option presented on their website - and kept putting it off due to social anxiety about phone calls…

But I searched for ‘dentists near me’, and found one more conveniently located for me (it’s along the path I take to get to counselling sessions every week; the other would have been a longer trip in the opposite direction) which also allowed me to book an appointment on the website!

When I mentioned that to my counsellor, she seemed annoyed that I’d not ‘challenged myself’ and made the phone call. But I saw it as something like an access ramp: we could all understand how someone in a wheelchair might require an access ramp to get into somewhere with steps, but what about someone who can technically walk but - due to a leg injury, say - feels distress from doing so? They might end up avoiding places with many stairs even though they could force themselves to endure them, just as I could make a phone call - and have done so in the past - if I absolutely had to, but it’s unpleasant for me so I’d rather take other routes if I can. I really appreciate that this dentist had that option.

Anyway, because the location was familiar to me, I got the bus and found my way to the dentist without much trouble. After an initial awkward first impression (he greeted me with something like “how are you doing?”, and I said “well, uhh, I mean I’m at the dentist, so…” and he seemed to interpret it as me meaning ‘dentists = bad’ when I meant ‘I’m having teeth-related issues’), the 30-minute session I’d paid almost £100 for went smoothly enough.

He removed the huge tartar buildup that’d caused me years of distress in like two minutes.

I expected to have to book a follow-up appointment to remove the ‘extra tooth’, but he realised when treating the tartar that what it actually was was a baby tooth that’d clung to my gum for like three decades, because the adult tooth under it hadn’t properly pushed it out. He said it was hanging on by a thread, asked if I wanted it removed there and then, I said “of course!!”, then in like five seconds it was gone.

30 years, that thing had been irritating my mouth. Then it was just gone in a flash. Surreal.

What relief!! I felt ecstatic. Since the brain surgery in 2018, I’ve struggled going in supermarkets by myself due to shame-based social anxiety (I assume I’ll behave weirdly - I’ll fumble around because I don’t know what to say or how to pay - and be judged for it), but I felt so uplifted after this that I went in a local supermarket during the journey back and bought a couple of things with basically no worry at all. That really surprised me!

The dentist told me my teeth were full of tartar - something I didn’t even realise - and advised me to book two hygienist appointments, one for the next day. I thought I didn’t need two - plus they were just as expensive so it was a lot to be dumped on me without warning - so I just booked one.

I had that the day after, and the hygienist removed a lot of stuff from my teeth that I thought was just part of them. I didn’t even realise that teeth were meant to have gaps between them!! Things like dental floss didn’t make sense to me before. Now mine do have gaps between them, and they’re not covered in stains either. I don’t even recognise my own mouth; it looks WAY better. Feels better, too.

(Thankfully - and surprisingly - my teeth had been perfectly fine underneath the tartar and I didn’t need any extractions or fillings or anything.)

After that, I realised I probably do need the second appointment, so I booked that… though it won’t be until like June or something.

The whole thing’s been rather surreal, really; I’ve felt less like some traumatised recluse than usual, just from getting out multiple days in a single week and having some basic human interactions (counselling on Tuesday then dentist visits on Wednesday and Thursday, with supermarket stops after two of those). I felt like I’d travelled further down the route to healing than I have in ages.

Importantly, I didn’t just decide to do it; there was a clear and obvious motivating external push that got the ball rolling (the distress).

It also makes me realise - for far from the first time - how crucial those small, safe interactions are for proper mental functioning. A lot of things that seemed impossible through my clouded lenses before now seem less so. I have hope, maybe, and shifts in brain chemistry combined with successes I can remember are to thank for that.

Unfortunately it was dampend a bit by some health concerns my mum’s been stressing over; I’ve felt very anxious about the thought that she might succumb to them and I’ll be thrust into independence I’m not yet ready for.

I mean, these ‘successes’ are so minor - the sorts of things other people do without a thought - and I’ve so much of the mountain left to climb…

But I suppose compared to the stagnating I’ve been doing for months, it is good progress.

I just need to keep the momentum going. I didn’t book driving lessons last week because my mouth was bothering me so much I couldn’t think about anything else. So maybe that should be the next step.

I also really am very starved of human interaction, so maybe I should finally give volunteering a try, since there’s less need to prove myself or commit than would be the case if I sought a job.

Speaking of which, thanks to those of you who wrote long comments on my previous punishingly long mental breakdown of a post! It took me a while to even read them because my traumatised nervous system assured me they’d be hostile, but thankfully they weren’t. I felt moved by what some people shared about their experiences, and grateful to have that quality of commentary on this blog.

I had every intention of replying to several of them, but… didn’t, couldn’t, for the same old reasons. Executive dysfunction, essentially.

I’ve not done much of anything recently due to the same mental blockage; I’ve been in a sort of haze, probably because of the psychological energy spent stressing over my life situation for weeks.

Or rather, I’ve done a ton of ‘comfort creating’ to recharge, but not anything that’d lead to money. I’ve half finished Ramble 41, for example. Wow.

I wanted to do some work on CBCR, but made no progress on the asset/code side of things.

I did however decide to scrap the discrete levels structure from the original in favour of a group of connected areas you can explore at will: a large ‘Outside’ combining the original levels 2 and 4, and buildings such as Clarence’s House, the office, shops, and the restaurant, which you can go back and forth between at any time.

Instead of having one of each of the cyberspaces per level, they’d just be sections of a single interconnected ‘internet’ map. You could use laptops to warp, sort of, by entering one Way of the Blade portal and leaving from another, for example (once barriers had been unlocked).

Maybe there’d be a timer too - 10 minutes per ‘real world’ hour, something like that - since it’d fit with what the game’s about; the sky and palette in the ‘Outside’ area would be based on the time of day. You’d have to not be too late for work, and show up to the date on time. Could encourage replays? Could also be very annoying, though. I’ll need to experiment.

My parents have been on yet another holiday, and - as with every time this happens - I’ve felt a huge weight lifting from my mind.

Though I’ve also been having some tooth/mouth-related issues that I should see a dentist about, which is annoying.

So all those things considered, my plan is to use the rest of this week to just follow my whims creativity-wise.

Then next Monday I’ll book driving lessons.

I’ll also look into seeing a dentist… though the hard part there is even getting an appointment; seems it’s generally difficult here in the UK? Plus I’ve basically got agoraphobia so it’s tough to do anything out in the world.

Many - maybe even most - people hate the dentist, but the procedures will pale in comparison to the brain surgery so I don’t havy any anxiety about that part. Instead I get anxious about getting there; once I’m in the chair, I’ll be relatively fine. The opposite of how it’d be for most people, I imagine.

I’ve been seeing some frighteningly impressive AI videos on Reddit recently, for example this one in the style of the Super Mario Bros movie, or this clip of Neo and Agent Smith from The Matrix fighting.

They are of course imperfect and derivative. But compared to the Will Smith Eating Spaghetti thing just, what, two or three years ago, you’d have to have your head in the sand to not acknowledge the disruption that future versions of this technology will have to creative and technical industries. Which is one of the many reasons I’m unsure what to do with my life going forward.

The YouTube algorithm also recommended some Cartoon Network cartoons from around my childhood, for whatever reason, and I watched a few that I either know I saw or which I missed out on. I’ve been aware of Courage The Cowardly Dog for years, for example, but because the children’s TV thing I used to watch when I was little never aired it, it wasn’t a part of my childhood. So I watched this with curiosity:

And it… doesn’t really make much sense? I suppose as a child you’re not really caring about that, but many adults were involved in the process and were presumably happy with the results. I find that strange, and relevant to people complaining about AI being nonsense; it’s not as if human art is uniformly wonderful.

Here are a couple of other animated shorts I saw over the past few days and found intriguing and amusing respectively in ways AI can’t yet replicate:

Anyway, hopefully I’ll get back onto some kind of track soon. I’d like to at least finish CBCR even if it won’t make any money.

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Before I get into that, a couple of things:

I did a tiny bit of work on CBCR at the end of last week: I finished a ridiculous boss I’d half-added a while back (and laughed a whole lot during it), and started on another: Bigfoot, which Clarence encounters at the end of the Living Room and has to defeat to get his Shoes. I couldn’t concentrate though and didn’t do much with it.

More interesting than that was an emotionally mixed big surprise: I’d kept in touch with a friend I made at uni over the years since we graduated, and we’d have hours-long video calls multiple times a week (I’ve written about those here before)… until she moved in with her boyfriend around the middle of last year so she no longer had the opportunity (or probably the interest) to talk with me. I hadn’t heard from her in months, and had been basically grieving the loss of the only real world friendship I had left.

I got a text from her last Monday, and we had a video call the next day. So THAT was a severe psychic shock to my system!! The first conversation I’ve had with anyone other than my mother or counsellor in months.

I noticed how just getting the initial texts from her - knowing she was still alive and cared that I existed - caused a palpable inner chemical cascade; I felt lighter, stronger, more hopeful about the future. Like someone had cast a buff spell on me.

The call itself was 99% me listening to her vent about her stuff before we were cut off abruptly when her boyfriend got back home (we were only talking because he’d briefly gone out), so… mixed feelings.

That inner physiological change from just the knowledge of connection is so important, though.

Now, the life situation stuff.

I read all the comments on the previous post as they accumulated over the course of the week, and I really appreciate that people took the time to share their experiences and thoughts, I really do!

While reading them, though, I couldn’t help but think… Well, you might have seen memes like this before:

That is, someone promoting ‘hustle culture’ as the path to get to the success they have, with the “inherited $22m from my parents” casually thrown in there.

(That’s hardly the best example since part of the joke is that his efforts have led him to have less than what he started with, but it’s the first I found; I’ve seen a bunch of things like this over the years from passively scrolling Reddit, but had no idea what to search for to find them again!

Wait, actually, I just scrolled Reddit for a bit and found another example, though as a short video.)

I imagine anyone would see something like that and realise “your advice wouldn’t work for me because I’ve never had the huge advantage you had handed to you”.

That’s a hyperbolic example, but I feel similarly when I see people mention things like parents helping out, being accepted socially by others, not having any major medical setbacks, or having a loving partner back home. I don’t have that scaffolding, and as such what would be possible for someone who does have it isn’t necessarily possible for me.

I remember being bothered by all this when I went through a similar process of trying to fix/start my life a decade ago in my late twenties, and would read and listen to self-help books about overcoming anxiety and depression, or how to be happy, which were always written by established people with happy childhoods, PhDs, stable lives, partners. “Of course you can be happy”, I’d think; “you already have all the external successes to base it on”.

When I finally found the book of someone whose life situation was miserable but who had a profound spiritual awakening despite it, I had one too. It’s a shame that didn’t last…

…I’m rereading/editing this on Thursday, and want to mention a thread I saw this morning in r/AskReddit about signs someone grew up in a privileged environment, because almost all the responses I skimmed through were interpreting ‘privileged’ to mean ‘wealthy’. That’s not what I mean here; I didn’t get the impression from the comments on my previous post that anyone was talking from a point of wealth privilege. It didn’t even occur to me that that’d be people’s first thought until I saw that thread!

Rather, I was thinking in terms of social support, healthy childhood socialisation, having allies to coregulate and share psychological burdens with. I personally envy someone with an emotionally supportive partner far more than someone who can casually buy $400 meals, because I wish I had the former but don’t care about the latter. I’d personally rather live in poverty with someone I share a mutual loving romantic bond with than in a mansion alone.

I’m not without privilege, obviously; my parents have given me the opportunity to create art rather than forcing me to do back-breaking, soul-crushing work just to survive, as many people have to. I’m immensely lucky for this in the short-term, though painfully aware that in the long-term, it’s left me soft and dependent.

The ideal would be to have allies to tackle life together with as a team, or to have built up resources and/or resilience to survive alone, rather than guardians who just do everything for me so I never have to face it at all until it’s too late and I’m completely unprepared, which is what I’m heading towards and panicking about daily.

I spent most of last week having a chat about all this with ChatGPT so long it started lagging my browser; I just went back to it to ask for a summary of the chat, and it briefly crashed my display driver (my monitors all went black for a couple of seconds)!

Some of the many things I talked about with it were:

• Terminal ambivalence and context-dependent selves, which I talked about in a previous post

• Spoon theory - Some of us can’t spend energy with wild abandon

• Harlow’s Monkeys, and the importance of a comforting ‘safe base’ that provides more than just food and shelter

• How normal, safe childhoods ‘should’ be, and how many important psychological and practical scaffolds I missed out on

• Many metaphors I could use to try and communicate how the position I’m in crucially differs from people trying to help, eg being dumped into a game (working in the real world) at level 1 and having to defeat level 40 enemies with no equipment or tutorial

• Temp agencies as a possible place to start, but whether I could even mentally cope with the demands

• Driving, and the shame and difficulty of learning at my age

I also had a session with my counsellor this Tuesday where I tried to work through my thoughts about all this. I described a metaphor I may have mentioned in the previous post or a comment reply or something:

I feel like I’ve spent my life climbing a tall mountain, helped along with steps carved out by others, or with helpful leg ups or paths pointed out, but now I find myself at the summit, where there’s an empty cave, devoid of treasure. I’m looking out over the horizon at the setting sun and a bunch of other mountains - many close to me in the process of being eaten by robots - and realising I need to pick another to scale without the staircase and shortcuts that helped me climb this one, or the guarantee that it will have treasure, with an exhausted body and mind, and with lower light and less time in the day (that is, my lifetime).

My counsellor said “since we’re doing a metaphor, why don’t you just fly to one of the other summits?”

Why don’t I just fly to one of the other summits.

How??

What’s that even meant to mean, metaphorically? It feels like what’s expected of me, though; that I’m supposed to pull myself up by my boostraps, a phrase that Wikitionary defines as:

(idiomatic) To begin an enterprise or recover from a setback without any outside help; to succeed only by one's own efforts or abilities.

I asked the nascent digital deity to generate an image of a man pulling himself up by his bootstraps:

It’s literally an impossible task.

My counsellor also told me briefly and anonymously about another client of hers who struggled with similar ‘stuckness’ to me, but got out of it thanks to a daily meditation practice. “Did he have a partner?”, I asked her. “Uhh, yeah”, she said dismissively, as if that answer alone didn’t tell a whole story about capacity for social integration and achieved developmental milestones.

To elaborate on that, I want to talk about how I became a games developer:

One day, while living alone in a cave in the wilderness, I decided for no reason that I should get money, thought a while about how to do that, and settled arbitrarily on Games Developer. The next day, I conjured MARDEK into existence using pure willpower and earned lots of money and lived happily ever after.

…Is obviously not how it went at all.

1 - Grown in Poisoned Soil

I know I’ve written about most or all of this before - for example in some long old blog posts and the strange About page on my personal site - but I want to do so again to work through my thoughts in the hopes it’ll help, rather than to create entertaining content to use as a distraction from thinking while on the toilet. I know it’s long and indulgent. Since I’ve basically written a short book here (which wasn’t the initial plan, but that’s how it ended up), I’ve divided it into pretentiously-titled chapters.

I’ll start at the beginning: I spent my childhood in poverty, squalor, and severe neglect with my never-employed alcoholic father, who spent most of his dole money on alcohol so me and my two brothers couldn’t even eat most days; when we could, we had to navigate a kitchen full of full bin bags to heat up chicken nuggets on a never-washed grill, which we’d eat off paper plates, all while my father slept the day away. My five-years-older brother physically and mentally tormented me. I fainted a lot. I skipped school so often that an Education Welfare Officer would check up on us, despite being gifted, because my father would be too drunk to wake me and my brother up in the morning… Oh, except one time during some drug trip when he woke us up in the middle of the night, got us dressed despite our confused protesting, and walked us all the way to the school gates which he had to shake on to get the point that what we were doing was wrong. Another time, he was pantslessly shouting at invisible crocodiles and we had to spend two days hiding in our bedroom. And so on.

I’d always just tried to shrug all that off - the past is the past, I’ve escaped now - but I’ve been learning more and more through counselling recently how those early experiences have shaped everything going forward, in the same way that a combat veteran isn’t all that comforted by the fact they’re no longer on the battlefield. Mentally, neurologically, they may as well be, because their nervous system had to adapt to survive it and the process isn’t easily reversible.

My counsellor often uses the term ‘inner child’, and I’ve seen it cropping up often in the C-PTSD subreddit. ChatGPT summarised it like this:

It refers to the parts of your nervous system, emotional responses, and core beliefs that were shaped before you had adult agency, power, or choice, and that never got properly updated because the environment didn’t allow it.

On some deep, physiological, neurological level, my brain is still in the survival mode it developed in to endure that harsh environment. This fact can’t just be brushed aside as the no-longer-relevant past; I realise that now.

It’s not that I’m ‘socially anxious’ or ‘afraid people will judge me’, like it’s just some surface-level worry I could easy shrug off with a bit of a pep talk. It’s far deeper-rooted than that. The primal, animal parts of my brain see interacting with people - or at least most types of people, in most contexts - the same way they see sticking my hand in a fire.

What would it take to convince you to stick your hand in a fire?

ChatGPT told me that well-adjusted people have both parents around during their formative years, who provide reliable material comforts like food and clean bedding, as well as emotional reassurances when their children are upset, and practical skills training (eg learning how to ride a bike, or get their first simple job). Those parents are typically employed, functioning members of society, too, and the children are able to see that daily and model their expectations of their futures and the world around it.

Wealth isn’t the core factor here; a financially poor but attentive parent would produce better psychological outcomes than a rich but neglectful one.

To me, having a job at all was something I only saw in fiction; it seemed as real and achievable for me as spellcasting and starfaring.

I was luckier than some in that I was able to escape that hellish environment every couple of weeks to stay with my relatively well-adjusted mother and step-dad for a weekend, so I did at least have a taste of comfort and safety every so often that I could use to wash, eat, mentally regenerate. I’m privileged and grateful for that. Things would have been much worse if I hadn’t. Maybe I wouldn’t have survived.

I can’t remember how I was first introduced to video games, but I think it was seeing Mega Man on a NES some friends of my brother had? Then later, my older brother got a MegaDrive (I can’t remember how), and I’d escape into the Sonic trilogy in order to endure my bleak reality. And I think his friend had a SNES and I got to experience Super Mario World that way, but only briefly?

Because we couldn’t afford a bunch of games, though, I’d draw my own Super-Mario-World-like platformer levels on paper, using creativity to fill in the holes left by circumstance.

My father, to his credit, did at least get me a SNES (I think it was on sale?) and a GameBoy Color, though I don’t remember having games for the SNES other than the Super Mario All-Stars that it came with? And I do remember having no games for the GameBoy Color and just staring at it, turning the power on and off and watching the Nintendo text, until my mother got me Pokemon Red later.

I think back on that with sadness; my father clearly didn’t have the money to buy those things for me and my brother, but did anyway. As a child, I just noticed the lack of games, but as an adult now, I wonder what was going through his head. As much as I hate that he couldn’t afford things - including food - because he spent all his money on alcohol for himself, and didn’t look after us generally, I understand enough about Psychology to realise that it’s not as if he chose to end up in that position. A whole cascade of factors added up to lead him there, probably to a position he felt there was no coming back from.

It’s not as if homeless people decided one day that that would be the best path forward for them, nor do they remain in that position because they lack discipline or something.

So little - if any - of where we end up comes down to decisions made in a vacuum. It’s all about circumstances, accumulations of tiny - or not-so-tiny - external pushes and slip-ups and ideas put in our heads by others.

My mother later got my brother and I a Playstation, which was huge; most of the games I remember from my childhood were for this. I think my older brother got a demo disc with Final Fantasy VII on, which was my first experience of an RPG, then later my mother took me to a game shop for my birthday, I saw a single copy of FFVII, remembered enjoying the demo, and chose that.

My mum and step-dad lived in Estonia briefly around this time, and used to bring home pirated Playstation games they’d got from dodgy market stalls. Or when we visited on weekends, they’d take my younger brother and I to Blockbuster to rent a game. I experienced a lot of Playstation games one of those two ways.

While my external environment was very bleak, I was able to endure it thanks to those portals to other worlds where I was in control and could succeed and be rewarded for my efforts.

2 - Disorientation and Development

Later, when I escaped the poverty and neglect but travelled disorientingly to the other side of the planet in the process (from England to Australia), I remember playing this pair of Playstation ports of SNES JRPGs I’d missed out on - Final Fantasy IV and Chrono Trigger - in order to cope with the chaos of the transition.

I’d forgotten about this until trying to work out this timeline this week; I thought I discovered those through emulators. The psychological anchoring those games provided during this crucial transitional time might have been more of a factor in why I tried to make similar-looking games later than just “I thought the graphics looked like something I could do” (as the long About page on my personal site has said for years).

During the first few months in Australia, my younger brother and I would play the original Baldur’s Gate on a family PC, which was my first Western RPG. Lots of fond memories of that.

Later, my parents got me my first PC, and also gave me the space and peace to play around with it in private. I used strange things like PowerPoint to make my own ‘games’ because those were the only tools available to me.

When I went to school in the strange new country, traumatised by my childhood and unmoored from all I knew, I struggled at first, and was assigned a ‘buddy’ to be my friend to help me integrate. That didn’t really happen, though; I think I could barely talk.

Eventually some other nerdy guys adopted me into their group for some reason. I’ve spoken poorly about them in the past - because of faults of my own rather than anything to do with them - but in hindsight I’m grateful to have been accepted by anyone at all. They provided many opportunities I wouldn’t have otherwise had.

At some point, I got the game Neverwinter Nights, which may have been recommended to me by one of those friends because he knew I liked Baldur’s Gate? I spent ages making my own ‘modules’ in that, often starring bland male protagonists with female ‘childhood friend’ allies with names like Emela Jard, to - again - make up for what I lacked in reality (the friends who’d adopted me were all male). It used a C-like programming language for scripting events, and I think I learned the basics of programming from internet tutorials for this?

Those friends used to go to the computer room at lunchtimes to watch often gruesome animations on Newgrounds, so I went with them. There was a teacher who also hung around in there - a friendly, extroverted immigrant man with a thick accent who smelled strongly of coffee - who sort of took us under his wing to some degree. He once told us about a game-making contest involving this program called ‘Flash’, and gave us copies of it; apparently it was what those Newgrounds animations were made in.

I spent a long time dabbling with Flash, making RPGs similar to Final Fantasy IV; if I knew about RPG Maker back then, I probably would have used that, but I didn’t. Fig Hunter was the first, I think - based on a Neverwinter Nights module I’d made - but several iterations on the same general idea (Deliverance etc) later led to MARDEK.

I also learned how to make websites around that time, maybe using skills and software I’d learned about at school? Can’t remember. I made one called the Catechisms of YALORT, based on a silly made-up religion, ostensibly with my friends… but I did all the work while at least one of them wanted to be the highest-ranking member despite doing nothing. I suppose that was important, formatively, in that it soured the idea of working with others in my mind; any school group projects had been the same: I’d do all the work while the others messed around. If I’d had other similarly-minded and similarly-competent co-creators back then, I imagine I would have been eager to continue working with others instead of thinking I had to do everything myself. That in turn would have provided coregulation and more opportunities… had it happened, but it didn’t.

I also used to post and talk with people somewhat freely on deviantART, enough that I was able to find a handful of kindred spirits, one of whom became my first and only girlfriend. Oceans separated us, though, and to say that strained the relationship would be an understatement. I remember the first time she told me she loved me - one of the few times we met in person - and I had no idea how to reply because I don’t think anyone had told me that before? My mother was kind, and provided materially for me, but she’s never expressed affection either verbally or physically. No hugs or ‘I love you’s. How could I not feel fundamentally unwanted considering that?

I used to vent constantly at my girlfriend about the Fig Hunter stuff. It helped me - I might not have got through it if not for her being there for me - but vomiting poison all over someone constantly is no way to keep a connection going, especially separated by seas. There are so many things I’d do differently if I could do it all again.

3 - A Demon Awakens

In my final year of school, I ended up in a tiny, exclusive, expert-level maths class: it was me, two of my nerdy friends, and just two or three others. I had no idea what was going on and rarely did the homework. When it came time to do the exam, I looked at the paper, thought “I can’t do any of this”, and fainted. The invigilator escorted me to the toilets where I threw up, and he said my lips were completely blue. I saw a doctor afterwards who described and dismissed it as benign vasovagal syncope (which was just a cold description of the mechanistic what rather than the psychological why).

I asked ChatGPT what it made of that event now, and it suggested dorsal vagal shutdown… though from googling that it that sounds more like the chronic state I’m often in these days rather than the dramatic, acute event where I fainted. I also found mostly therapy sites rather than anything academic; it seems to be a part of the ‘polyvagal theory’ my counsellor often brings up but which doesn’t seem to be ‘real science’.

I was always temperamentally timid and ‘scared of my own shadow’, but I think that fainting episode might have been where the physiological anxiety I’ve dealt with ever since began. That is, sensations of bodily collapse rooted far deeper than conscious thoughts.

I felt it as a low-level background hum constantly back then, for months or maybe years after the fainting, but it went into overdrive anywhere I felt ‘trapped’; for example, I used to go to the cinema with my friends fairly regularly before this, but afterwards, I found that intolerable, because my body was internally screaming that I’d pass out again. I didn’t understand any of it at the time, nor did I have access to resources that’d help me understand it. I just had to grit my teeth and push through it.

I remember sitting at my computer in Australia working on MARDEK Chapter 2 with my head swimming and my body shaking, not understanding why any of it was happening and thinking “but I’m fine, I like doing this, why is this happening to me?”

Though I suppose this is also during the time I was running Fig Hunter, and pushing myself to work on games constantly without any breaks, so those were also constantly contributing stress I didn’t take as seriously back then as I should have done. Plus I probably had the tumour in my brain back then but didn’t know it (or rather, my constant complaints about headaches were dismissed as hypochondria).

I didn’t go to uni immediately after school ended, because we were supposed to be moving country again… but then we didn’t end up moving after all, and I had to start half way through the year; my mother talked with the uni staff to arrange that. There was a university directly adjacent to the school I’d gone to, and it offered a Game Development course, so I did that for obvious reasons, but felt the content was more basic than what I’d already taught myself. I stayed living at home, and the only person I talked to on the course was a friend from school who was also doing it, so I didn’t exactly have the formative ‘uni experience’. Especially since the anxiety meant I couldn’t tolerate the ‘trapped’ feeling of the lectures so I skipped most of them. Didn’t help that the one friend I had never showed up either.

Before one of the exams, I felt unprepared - because I was - and fainted shortly after waking up in the morning. When I awoke, I couldn’t see, or rather my vision contained ‘holes of understanding’ where there were visuals but I couldn’t make sense of any of them. Thankfully it passed in like half an hour, then I went to do the exam a couple of hours later. I don’t think I did very well, but I don’t remember paying any attention to grades back then since I didn’t understand them to be relevant for anything. I don’t know if that was related to the anxiety or the brain cancer I probably unknowingly had back then; maybe a bit of both.

I had no idea how uni worked, the first time I went. No idea what a degree was, nor did I have some career in mind or the steps I’d need to take to get there. Did you, O reader? If so, how did you know? Did someone teach you? I only went for the same reason I went to school: the river I was in - external forces - pushed me there, without much in the way of thought or decisions on my part. I remember going to an open day thing with my mum and a friend before starting the course, and feeling profoundly dissociated, like I had no idea what was going on around me and was just being dragged around. When I did show up, my grades were mediocre, because I was more interested in making my own games alone at home; I had intrinsic motivation for that, and my parents didn’t care about my grades either way.

I asked ChatGPT how other people even learn what degrees and jobs even are. It said:

For many kids, the idea of “a degree”, “a career”, or “a path” isn’t introduced as a formal lesson. It’s learned through constant low-level exposure. Parents talk about work at the dinner table. They complain about colleagues, promotions, deadlines. They say things like “when you’re at uni” or “after your degree” as if those are obvious waypoints. The child doesn’t need to understand the system — they just learn that this is how life proceeds.

Then there’s modelling. Seeing adults get up, go to work, come home, get paid, change jobs, retrain, talk about opportunities. Even if the adults hate their jobs, the structure itself is visible. Work exists. It’s normal. It’s survivable. It leads somewhere.

So different from my life experience…

I started learning to drive back then, maybe a year or two later than my peers. But then we did end up moving country, just as I was getting used to it and before I got my licence. I dropped out of uni since I couldn’t see myself surviving if left alone in Australia in the mental state I was in. The anxiety was so bad that resuming driving in this strange unfamiliar setting with no friends seemed impossible. Same with regards to going back to uni, especially as I’d have to live away from home for it. I was in no state to be doing that.

A lot of people get their first jobs in their mid teens, but that was never even presented as an option to me. It didn’t occur to me at all. I don’t recall any of my friends having jobs either? Though that could be because the idea of jobs was so alien that I didn’t ‘notice’ them happening around me, my friends getting them, etc.

I uploaded my games to Flash portals around this time, and - with zero marketing - MARDEK attracted more attention to the website I’d built using my hard-earned self-taught skills, Fig Hunter, than than I’d ever had before. But my neglectful childhood just hadn’t equipped me with the skills to properly deal with it all. It’s that - more than ‘people were trolls!’ - that broke me.

I hadn’t been properly socialised or prepared to survive, so when faced with the challenge, it destroyed me.

It ruined my already low capacity to trust other people, and my relationship (though considering how poorly socialised I was, I doubt that would have lasted anyway), and I avoided all online stuff - where I might have met people like me - for years because I saw it all as a threat.

4 - Finally Starting, and Failing

Sometime in 2011 or 2012 - when I was 24 or so - my situation had become too intolerable: I’d effectively burned down Fig Hunter and replaced it with the Alora Fane site, which became Fig Hunter 2.0 anyway, then I made a bunch of other websites in the hopes of finding kindred spirits, none of which turned out that way since I was too mentally unwell to be building any kind of communities. So I thought about what else I could do with my life instead.

I had my first course of free counselling around this time… again, found for me by my mother; I just went along with it. No searching or decisions on my part. It took me a long time to open up, I think? I can’t remember the first session(s) at all; the memories aren’t even blurry, just… gone. Like the vast majority of my past. Maybe that helped me decide what to do next?

Whatever the causal factors were, I decided to get serious about art. I think it was because I’d met my ex on deviantART, and I thought that if I got good enough at art, then maybe I’d attract the attention of someone else who might love me like I felt - on some deep, deep level - my parents never did. I practised hard every day with that singular hope motivating me.

Or maybe I was also thinking I could do it professionally, but needed to achieve a certain skill level first, like the ‘good artists’ I saw on deviantART?

Oh, or maybe the reasoning was something like “I should use my existing skills to make a living” but also “I really, really don’t want to be stuck in a position like Fig Hunter again” (surrounded by ‘logic good, feelings bad’ guys who’d turn everything into a damn debate and respond to expressions of struggle and vulnerability with “grow some balls”). That’s ringing some memory bells.

Yes, so I tried to find some courses focused on the art side of video games; “maybe those will actually have girls on them!”, I naively, lonelily thought, because the only girl I’d ever even known was my infinitely kind ex, and what culture had told me about ‘the fairer sex’ generally sounded less hostile than my experiences with the overwhelmingly male Fig Hunter.

Things like future earning potential were irrelevant to me, I just wanted something I could survive, and which might actually fill the hole in my soul left by childhood neglect.

I found only a handful of such courses, with the most appropriate-looking one being at the other side of the country. I applied, somehow; again, I can’t remember any specifics, which is frustrating since I’m basically in this situation again now!

I moved away from home to the other side of the country to live independently as I attended this Video Games Arts course.

So I’ve done all that before. I excelled at the work, but struggled socially because the course was tiny (20 or fewer people?) and most of them were indeed male (shocker), so my traumatised mind unfairly piled a bunch of assumptions on them that caused me to perceive them as dangers to be avoided.

Though it’s not as if I didn’t try. Early on in the course, we had to do a group project where we had to collectively plan a game or world or something; the details elude me, but I know we decided on something involving badgers and mushrooms based on Weebl’s animation - I remember being surprised they’d also heard of it when someone suggested it and everyone expressed recognition - and I drew/designed this…? I don’t remember what the elf is.

We had to give a presentation about it, but the others were reluctant to speak in front of everyone, so I - despite my anxiety - volunteered; I remember thinking “this will be good for me, to prove to myself I can do it”.

I stumbled through my words or something, or maybe said something strange? I don’t even know, I just have an image burned into my mind of looking out into the room and seeing expressions on people’s faces - especially the tutors - that that meme image strongly reminds me of; even now it makes me viscerally cringe, want to curl up and disappear. Afterwards, my group seemed really awkward and uncomfortable, and nobody tried to talk to me after that.

People often speak as if shyness or anxiety are just thin sheets that can be pulled away to reveal sturdy scaffolding underneath. But what if the sheet is torn away to reveal dung fashioned crudely into a strange, unsettling sculpture?

I’ve wondered a lot in hindsight about whether there was an aspect of intimidation from them or something, though. I seem to remember this piece of music - from Alora Fane Creation, which I must have been working on at the time - playing during that presentation, and someone - maybe one of the instructors - asking me what it was, and I said I composed it, and my mind interpreted his reaction as irritated (though that’s probably saying more about my mental-illness-warped perceptions than the reality of the situation).

Or I painted this photo study in class one time, because I’d done a lot of private study of things like value and blocking out the whole before refining any details, and people seemed - again, this is filtered through my warped perceptions - both awed and irritated by it; I looked around the room and noticed one or more people focusing on a tiny section and trying to add detail while the rest of their canvas was blank.

We were hardly on fair footing though. Most of them were straight out of school, still trying to find out who they even were; maybe they chose that course because they liked games and drawing and thought it’d be fun. I got the impression that many of them were locals who went to the same school together beforehand.

I was also maybe 7 years older than most of them - hmm, felt like ‘a couple of years’ in hindsight for years; writing it out like that clarifies the gulf - and chose it for more desperate, existential reasons, and did a year or more of hard training - uninterrupted by a social life or adult responsibilities - building up to it because I - again, through warped beliefs - expected everyone else would be way better than me and I didn’t want to be too far behind.

I overprepared, though.

The instructors used to hang up students’ art on the rooms of the single computer room we were always in, and I remember looking around, noticing it was mostly mine, and feeling embarrassed.

Once, the two instructors took me into their office and asked if I wanted to be given any more complex stuff to do; one of them asked “why are you even here?”, in a tone one might ask a 20-year-old why they’re in Year 10 (where the other students are about ~15; I had to look that up). I don’t know what I said at the time, but “because the ebbs and flows of the river I’ve been caught in led me here” is the best answer I can think of for that now. I certainly had no grand plan for the future. I just felt I had to do that course in order to bridge the gap from where I was to whatever might be next, because I knew no better.

Those factors - combined with the fact I had no friends - convinced me to just drop out after the first year and try something completely different.

By contrast, my ex went to a similar course around the same time, also struggled, but was accepted socially, found a new boyfriend on her course (I think? She did tell me, but it’s been ages), and that launched a whole career trajectory and web of connections for her. Similar initial decisions, entirely different outcomes due to circumstantial nuances (though her personality was probably also far less repulsive to others than my own).

5 - Getting Back Up, and Knocked Down Again

After that, lost again, I went home to my parents - another privilege not everyone would have - and spent a year getting more free counselling through a local mental health charity that I think my mother found for me; she had (and still has) a job with the local council, through which she becomes aware of a lot of local goings-on.

I’d also been listening to audiobooks I’d been finding myself, but usually got annoyed due to the external circumstances of the authors (as mentioned long, long ago near the start of this arduous trek). I think my mum mentioned one that someone at work told her about or something, which was by a guy who had nothing and had a spiritual awakening anyway; that’s what led to me having one too, just hearing it was even possible without all the externals. I went out for long daily walks listening to recordings of talks by the same guy given at meditation retreats. Thought I’d seen the light at the end of the tunnel and found peace.

I tried going to many ‘groups and clubs’ - again, found by my mother via her job - in the hopes of making connections, but everyone was decades older than me, married and settled with children.

I felt I was too old for uni and the last time went poorly so I didn’t want to try again, but my mum told me about a Psychology night class, and I begrudgingly went since I thought I should try something; maybe it’d help me tame my demons (plus I had a strong interest in personality psychology because I hoped that knowledge might tame my demons). There, I met a young woman who looked - to me, back then - eerily like the sorts of characters I liked to draw, and who I became vaguely friends with… though I cringe looking back at how socially oblivious I was about everything. That was reason enough to stick with it, and to motivate me to go on from that to an actual uni Psychology course, because I had evidence that I could find what I was looking for there: someone of a similar age to me who was female and actually wanted to talk to me about things I cared about (mental health stuff).

So I did that. Independent Living, Take #2.

I chose to stay in the shared ‘halls of residence’, hoping chance would put me together with someone I might click with… though that didn’t happen; I ended up with three ‘normal’ young girls who quickly formed a clique and excluded me.

My course ran some ‘meet your classmates’ events, which I attended eagerly - desperately, I suppose - and on two of those I met and initiated contact with two women who I later grew very close to, and who became my first actual female friends.

Importantly, we only got to know one another in the first place due to the randomness of proximity. With one, we were seated in circles and told to chat to the person next to us; she just happened to sit next to me; had I sat next to someone else, or turned to my other side, my uni experience - and whole life - would have gone differently. With the other, we were to told in an email to meet outside at some landmark, and she was waiting when I got there; had someone else shown up and talked to her before me, again, that would have changed everything going forward. Both were also eager to make connections, as everyone was in the first week. Circumstances like that are very rare.

I tried to make other friends throughout my time at uni, but the only thing that actually worked was in third year when I reached out to a woman who’d chosen to be part of the same dissertation group as me; she’s the one I mentioned at the start of this post.

It’s circumstance, not ‘confidence’ or social anxiety or whatever, which is the biggest barrier for connections for me.

The friend I grew closest to was a studious academic type who aimed for high grades, which encouraged - or allowed - me to be the same and to get top grades too. Things like what a degree even is started to finally make sense to me, too, just through osmosis from being in an environment where that understanding was relevant.

I started adjusting to it all, went out every day, mostly to the supermarket, which was in walking distance; I miss having to do that even when the weather was awful because I’d starve if I didn’t. (These days, my mum does the shopping because the supermarket is a 15-minute drive away so it’s impractical for me to go even though I’d prefer to.)

I applied for my provisional driver’s licence to try to learn to drive again now that I felt I had a safe base and sufficient motivation.

Then I found out I had brain cancer. Literally on the way to pick up a photo for the driver’s licence, I think?

I had ‘minor’ brain surgery almost immediately afterwards, but postponed the major surgery for two years because I was so desperate to hold onto the relationships it’d taken me so long to find. I also requested the neurosurgeon take a different path through my brain than what he intended because I was so worried about any damage to my creativity. Both were more important to me than anything else, than my own health, my own life.

I graduated, in the top handful of my class of hundreds, grades-wise. My closest friend ghosted me for my social mistakes. I at least had my parents to return home to again to recuperate; that’s a privilege, and I have no idea what I would have done if I didn’t have them to fall back on. I got back into making games because it was all I could do considering my circumstances, and I’m grateful they allowed me to do that; another privilege.

Just as I was getting better, the COVID lockdown happened. Going back to uni seemed like a bad idea.

I tried making games again, and finished and released Memody: Sindrel Song in about 6 months, so I thought I could make others just as quickly.

But despite doing 6-8 hours of focused work on them every day, week after week, they just dragged on and on because I was trying to do the work of a team by myself. And the more I read about how well indie games fared, the more I doubted the chances of anything coming of my efforts. Intrinsic motivation can only take you so far.

I’ve tried going to some meet-up things. Everyone was older, settled. Again.

I saw a GP about all this, who directed me to an Occupational Therapist I saw once a week for 6 or 8 weeks; she told me to eat more vegetables, and not much else.

She also referred me to a ‘Community Navigator’ who’d tell me about local opportunities I could get involved in. We met up, had one phone call, then… silence.

I tried to do a beginner-level counselling course, but everyone was older, settled, and they socially rejected me; when forced to pair up with me to practise counselling techniques, they literally turned their back on me when the activity was over to talk to the other pair on their other side. I tried my best to engage, to talk. It didn’t work. I dropped out.

I kept working on games because I felt like I was at least doing something. It kept me sane.

Now…

Why did you get a job, O reader? Why do you do anything?

Looking back at all that, I never got into making games because I thought it was fun, cool, interesting, or profitable. Making things was my way of coping emotionally with the poor hand I’d been dealt, my way of lighting a candle in the darkness so I could see any way to keep on moving forward. I suppose it was the only way I felt remotely in control of anything when I was clueless about so much else, having never been taught how to be human.

I realised while writing this how much of my life I’ve spent in a sort of bleary-minded survival mode, using creativity to cope and going to things I barely understood that were found for me by my mother. I don’t know what it’s like to have a plan about the externals of life. I just want to make things so then I don’t collapse completely.

But the dark reality is that I need to make money somehow to pay for the right to do that, and what I’m doing now isn’t earning enough to cover the basics of independence. My parents support me - I’m very privileged for that - but that only helps maintain the status quo rather than leading towards the self-sufficiency I’ll need once they’re inevitably gone.

I wonder if ‘getting a job’ for other people is similar to how ‘playing a new game’ might be for me: I’m familiar enough with genres to have some idea which one to pick, I know the procedure to acquire it, the extent of the commitment, and I can use my experiences with previous games to not feel overwhelmed even if the exact mechanics are new to me.

My mother, on the other hand, wouldn’t have a clue where to even start if I said “you should get a game on Steam and just try it out for a bit”; she doesn’t even know what Steam is.

That’s how ‘jobs’ feel to me. Alien. I never went through the assisted or forced formative familiarity-building stages when I should have done. But more than that, I’m profoundly aware of the nervous system scars left by my childhood, and that because of them, I perceive almost all people as threats, and my ‘spoons’ are limited. I don’t believe that I could work a ‘normal’ job and keep making games, or art generally. But art’s the only thing that’s kept me going as long as I have. It’s not just some toy I can drop.

I don’t see it in terms of finding a dream job straight away; I know there are steps. My experiences have conditioned me to believe that any jobs - or any social situations - will include brutal exclusion or bullying and I won’t survive them. I’ll be rejected, attacked, because that’s what’s happened before. I can’t just decide to not believe that in the same way you can’t just decide to (dis)believe in God.

I just wish I had a way to survive.

Both my brothers have jobs, despite being grown in the same poisoned soil.

My older brother stayed behind when my younger brother and I moved with my mum and step-dad to Australia. Apparently - I just learned from my mum - it was because he’d just started university at that point, and didn’t want to give that up. She also said he didn’t have a job, as far as she knew, before that. I suppose uni led to connections which led to crappy jobs he had to work out of necessity. He’s been working since then, I think, and has had a string of partners since I was a child; I don’t think he ever struggled with that (which is great to know considering he tormented me when I was too small to defend myself). He’s achieved all the adult milestones.

My younger brother had just finished school when we moved from Australia, and went to uni soon after we arrived in Wales. At some point during or after that, I think my gregarious step-dad told him about some job washing dishes at a local pub that he’d found out about by talking to the owner, and my brother didn’t want to do it, but did anyway. At that job, he met a girl his age who was going to the same uni. The dishwashing job led directly to greater responsibilities in the pub which led to a job as a chef. He’s currently in a relationship with that girl and lives with her in a house they bought together. He’s also achieved all the adult milestones and is basically ‘normal’.

So obviously it’s not just my childhood that’s led to me being this way, if they came out well enough. I’d say it’s a combination of several factors:

• The childhood stuff; as the middle child, I bore the brunt of my older brother’s abuse, and got the least positive attention

• Moving country twice at the worst times

• Fainting in an exam, which led to a prolonged period of extreme anxiety

• Having success with my games online and thinking I could do that instead of getting a normal job

• My mum and step-dad enabling that decision rather than urging me towards normal employment, or dropping an opportunity in my lap

• Getting more attention online than I was equipped to deal with

• Trying to get out there, but finding I’d set off in an inappropriate direction

• Then, just as I was starting to build momentum after trying to start a second time, I found out I had brain cancer

• My parents have enabled my avoidance since then

If you’ve had a relatively smooth, linear path through life, I envy you.

I need to do something now though; I’ve been stuck in this vortex for too long. Years now.

“Getting therapy” yet again for the past few months has been allowing me to see what’s at the root of it all, which feels helpful, but doesn’t provide any practical steps forward and I have to just figure out and do those myself somehow.

Several people in the replies on the previous post suggested driving as the easiest among the five failed milestones I presented… though about as many people seemed to say don’t do that, because their situation afforded privileges mine doesn’t; I live in the back of beyond - I’ve never lived in a city - and would need a car even to go to the supermarket. I don’t have a partner to drive me places. I have no idea how to just ‘move to a city’.

I’ve at least found the website of a local female driving instructor who advertises herself as good with nervous drivers, and meant to contact her on Monday… But it’s absolutely not something I can do trivially due to all the accumulated psychological baggage. I know I need to ‘just do it’, but if I could ‘just do it’ generally, I wouldn’t be in this position in the first place.

Human minds don’t work like that; we can’t just take a standing leap for no reason (metaphorically speaking). There needs to be sufficient motivation, incentive, and I’m lacking that currently.

I can do creative stuff because there’s intrinsic motivation; it helps me cope. But I don’t have to pay bills here because my parents ‘support’ me (or enable me, depending on how you want to look at it).

That won’t last, but it’s difficult to act when the deadline is so fuzzy and abstract; back in uni, if we were given an assignment due in a month, most of the class would start it the night before the due date. I started a couple of weeks before.

I’ve spent days wondering whether to even post this because of worries that hostile people will use it as an opportunity to kick me in my bared belly, as has happened in the past.

I often see stories by people online about how they hate working 25 hours in the toilet mines every day, but they do it because they don’t have a choice; the alternative is homelessness.

So maybe I’ll get some “we all have to work jobs we hate, so suck it up, buttercup” type responses or something.

I wonder though how people like that got to that position in the first place; which scaffolds or motivators pushed them to get their first job that made the subsequent ones a whole lot less daunting. Whether they have a partner and/or friends to help endure it all. How they found them.

I just saw some Reddit posts about a couple of games made by Flash creators who started around the same time I did: Matt’s Hidden Cats by Matt Roszak (Epic Battle Fantasy), and Mewgenics by Edmund McMillen and Tyler Glaiel (Super Meat Boy, Binding of Isaac).

Those devs all did way better than I did, presumably due to having greater supports, fewer disruptions, and - importantly - sticking with something that worked instead of scrabbling desperately to find safety. They seemed to be well-equipped, psychologically, to cope in a healthy way with the attention they got.

ChatGPT told me the Binding of Isaac was based around the dev’s trauma, though I suppose in a form more palatable to people than my attempts to cope with my own.

I’m glad things worked out well for them! I just wish they had for me, too.

There. IT’S OVER NOW, thank god. The post, I mean; MY SUFFERING!!! very much isn’t. You can rest your weary mind-legs, or whatever.

Some questions for you, if you read this far:

If you look at where you are in life, which external factors - eg parental support, meeting the right person at the right time - allowed you to get there?

And have you followed a mostly smooth, forward, upwards path, or have you dealt with major setbacks? If you did face setbacks, how did you overcome them? What support structures did you already have in place to help cushion the fall and bounce back?

Can you think of any times where you ‘pulled yourself up by your boostraps’ and did something you didn’t want to do with no external forces pushing you towards it or helping out?

Last year, I decided that I should probably renovate my personal website (alorafane.com). I improved my very rusty web development skills and learned something called Laravel in a week or two with ChatGPT as my tutor.

(My uni friend who I used to talk with did a Master’s-level course last year to learn essentially the same skills over several months, and for a substantial financial cost).

I intended to turn the site into a sort of archive of all my creative work that could also serve as a portfolio.

(I switched my blog from my personal site to Substack a year or two so then I didn’t have worry as much about backend stuff, and in the hope that maybe I could even connect with people, or at least draw new eyes to it. Now I no longer feel like I’m sitting in my living room talking to the wall, because I feel like I’m on a crowded train muttering to myself in the corner instead! PROGRESS.)

I got most of the structure working, but got to the point where I had to populate it with content and put it online (replacing the current version of my site).

I also wanted to modernise my approach to the hosting side of things, talked with ChatGPT about how to do that, and it told me, but it involved making some decisions, so I thought I’d worry about all that once I had the content sorted out.

But I wasn’t sure how much to share on there, or how exactly it should all be laid out.

I can’t even remember why I stopped working on it months ago. I suppose I just got distracted with other stuff? I know I kept going back to it, but kept feeling stuck; the last time, I think, was when I made a Games page, included a few of the mostly-unfinished games I’d worked on, implemented a Flash emulator (Ruffle) to play them in the browser, but felt just plonking CBC on there like that felt like a waste and got distracted making CBCR instead.

Then months passed.

I decided to get back to it last week since I thought I should do that first before seeking any kind of employment, but just got stuck, yet again, because I had to decide how to present myself, but couldn’t.

I’ve always presented myself quite ‘nakedly’, rambling honestly and at length about my numerous personal problems in my blog, and in some strange long autobiography thing in the ‘About’ section of my current site, which I’d copied over to the new version.

I’ve always felt that being authentic like that is ‘the right way to be’, but I get the distinct feeling I’m an exception for that. Most people wear a set of protective masks to fit into the environments - the tribes - they’re trying to integrate into, and the world seems to be set up such that that’s pretty much necessary to be accepted for things like employment.

(Which seems so strange to me; if I were to employ someone, I’d want to know what they’re really like, not whether they can craft an acceptable persona they’ll drop once they’ve passed the barrier. Some people even approach dating this way. What do they intend to do once they’re in the relationship? Keep up the ruse forever??)

I suppose the main reason I’ve never bothered crafting masks like that is because I’ve avoided those environments my whole life, so I’ve never been forced to (though a lack of childhood socialisation is relevant too).

So there’s this tug between the knowledge that I need to make a carefully cultivated professional ‘mask’ portfolio that impatient recruiters can skim to assess whether or not I’m a clean cog that’d slot smoothly into their machine, and the desire to make some indulgently authentic museum to all I’ve managed to achieve while living on my own terms away from all that.

ChatGPT suggested effectively splitting the site in two, with the professional portfolio being the main site and the personal archive tucked in some back room somewhere. While I could understand that, it just feels so profoundly wrong to me that I couldn’t get started.

Last week was hardly the ideal time to do much of anything, though, as my parents were renovating a couple of rooms of the house, painting walls and replacing carpets, moving furniture…

They hired a contractor to fit the new carpets, who was apparently retirement age (or close to it?) and had terminal cancer, but was still going to strangers’ houses to fit carpets. I passed him while on the way to the kitchen, on his hands and knees, wheezing.

Meanwhile, because I couldn’t focus for the first three days of last week, I decided to give myself the remaining two off, to deliberately use them to recharge. I usually have a main projects that I treat like work (CBCR currently), but also work in a whim-driven way on a variety of personal creative projects in my ‘free time’. For a month or two before, during, and after the Christmas period, I felt so mentally messed-up that I wasn’t able to engage with them at all. The desire to do so came flooding back last week, and I indulged it for those last two days of the work week plus the weekend.

So I’m aware of my relative luck in some ways; I know not everyone has the opportunity to do things like that. Some people are forced to push their broken bodies to endure gruelling work because the alternative is far worse.

But I also know it won’t last. I woke up in the middle of last night, and just lay there for like two hours terrified about how unprepared I am for the future.

I’ve been stuck in the same position for ages now, but I can’t remember whether I’ve laid it out cleanly here repeatedly or just to ChatGPT.

Essentially, I’ve failed to achieve pretty much all the adult milestones:

• I’ve never been employed

• I’ve been single for 15 years

• I’ve never lived in my own home or long-term rental place

• I have no support network other than my aging parents

• I can’t even drive

And I feel like I have to tackle them all at once, and it ends up being like several people all trying to fit through a doorway at the same time: everyone just gets stuck and nobody gets through.

I feel that they’re all interdependent, too; I need a support system to endure the stresses of work or living alone, but need to get a job etc before anyone would want to be associated with me. I need to move out before I feel comfortable enough getting driving lessons or a job (so then I’m acting from a position other than ‘stunted manchild’), but need money before I can move out. I need to build an adult life before the idea of finding a partner is anything other than laughable, but feel I can’t do that without a supportive ally to come home to.

When I saw my counsellor last week and went around in circles about all this for the umpteenth time, she mentioned a specific term: terminal ambivalence.

I talked with ChatGPT about it, and asked for a summary of it:

Terminal ambivalence is a clinical shorthand some therapists use to describe a state where ambivalence stops being a temporary phase and becomes a stable end-point. Instead of conflict leading to decision and action, every possible choice triggers an equal and opposing internal veto, so non-action becomes the default. The term ‘terminal’ is used in the sense of an end-state or self-locking condition: the system reaches equilibrium and no longer moves on its own. It’s often associated with trauma, chronic threat, or life experiences where action has felt dangerous, futile, or unnecessary for survival, causing the mind to treat staying stuck as the safest option.

Essentially, I see no path forward which has a desirable outcome greater than the cost required to walk it, and my circumstances don’t force me to take those paths for survival. So I end up paralysed, frozen, inactive, stuck.

There’s another concept that came up in the many long talks about all this that I’ve had with ChatGPT over the past few weeks: context-dependent selves (aka ‘situational selves’ or ‘state-dependent selves’). It gave an even snappier summary of this:

People don’t carry a single, consistent self everywhere; different environments activate different self-states, so capability, motivation, and identity can change dramatically with context.

In my late twenties, I had a ‘spiritual awakening’, after which I used to go for hour-long daily walks listening to recordings of meditation retreats hosted by some respected guru who gave inspiring talks to the attendees how to find peace etc. I remember an anecdote he shared during one of these about how he went home for Christmas one year - during his ‘spiritual guru’ phase - and reverted to the same behavioural and mental patterns he had as a moody teenager.

And I know that every time I actually go out into the world, talk with my counsellor, and walk home, I feel far more capable of doing things that’d normally feel beyond me while sitting alone in my bedroom of my parents’ house. I’ve written about it before - saying I ‘feel like a different person’ after getting out - and it does seem to be a universal physiological phenomenon rather than just something unique to me.

I asked how this compared to the phenomenon of masking that I know I don’t do (and which is getting in the way of making a pretty professionally presentable portfolio), and it said that masking is deliberate performance (you feel like you’re ‘on’ while doing it), while context-dependent selves are changes in the ‘base layer’ of the mind, so to speak; in some literal, neurological sense, you become a different person depending on your environment:

When masking, the inside stays the same and the outside is adjusted.
When a self-state shifts, the inside changes too.

I was thinking a lot over the past week while working on miscellaneous personal creative projects how many of the things I make involve characters the age of university students (eg Dreamons), since those were my peers the last time I got out into the world (plus it’s common in the games I play). I felt like a creep because I’m almost twice that old now, asked ChatGPT what other creators my age explore, and it told me things like fading romance in a long-term marriage, office politics, or watching children grow older, none of which I have any experience with at all.

I’ve also been thinking about joining creative online spaces for ages to find people who might be like me (“maybe I should post Melon Collie in a related subreddit!”), but lurked in some and just felt like most posters were probably teenagers; I was strongly reminded of my younger years on deviantART. I didn’t want to be some creepy old man, so I just didn’t post at all.

ANYWAY. I wonder whether moving out would provide a different psychological context that’d make the other things feel more possible (especially as the need for money would force action in a way it doesn’t while living with my parents).

But then the terminal ambivalence thing rears its ugly head and paralyses me, prevents action: “what if I go mad from social isolation”, “I’ll get rejected anyway because I don’t have formal employment”, “I’ll end up having to live in some bad part of town full of dangerous people”.

I’m curious to ask (though I’m getting deja vu so maybe I have before), though, where YOU think I should start, O reader.

• Should I seek employment?

  • (But who’d hire me? Could I even cope with it? I’d only end up ostracised, and I’d have to sacrifice the only things keeping me going…)

• Look for a partner?

  • (Where? Nobody would want someone in this position. What would I do, invite them over to my parents’ house?)

• Move out?

  • (Even if I’d be able to get somewhere despite my lack of employment history, I can’t afford it in the long term, and I probably wouldn’t survive living alone…)

• Try to find platonic connections?

  • (But where? I’ve already tried ‘groups and clubs’ and they’ve always been full of retirees. Online communities? It all feels so hollow, though, and I feel too impatient…)

• Learn to drive?

  • (What if I crash? I’ll probably be the oldest learner the tutor will have taught and I can’t bear the embarrassment of that…)

• Or something else entirely??

Where would you start if you were in my position?

(Though it’s so incredibly important that ‘my position’ is psychological as much as circumstantial; I’ve got a lifetime of bad experiences behind me that I know other people can’t simulate, but which mean things that for them would be trivial are impossible for me.)

You know, Melon Collie! Surely I don’t need to provide any more context and can end the post here.

Or I could spend several thousand words explaining the whole journey that led to that point. GUESS WHAT I AM INCLINED TO DO.

I decided a while ago that I wanted to include four power-up hats in the Clarence’s Big Chance Remakester based on internet tropes and communities of 2010 (the year I made the original, and when the Remakester will be explicitly set). I was rushing when I came up with the first few ideas, eager to get everything done as quickly as possible, and quickly settled on four: a fedora, a tinfoil hat, a fursuit head, and a silly Magical Girl wig. They seemed good enough to go forward with.

Those led to the creation of the four ‘cyberspaces’, one of which was the Spar Girl Fanclub, which some people said they found uncomfortable. But why?? I’m so confused; it seems so anodyne, fit for grandma.

For a while I put the cyberspaces aside due to that, but got back to them last week. I composed music for three of them: Way of the Blade, Order of the Oraccult, and Visagetome (sort of the fifth cyberspace).

Unsure whether to keep or revise the Spar Girl Fanclub, I decided to compose the music for the other cyberspace, Furriendly Pawrest, despite not having decided on the visuals. I wanted it to mimic the style of Animal Crossing’s music, but I couldn’t get it sounding right and ended up doubting my understanding of music theory.

At the start of this week, I thought about it a bit, and realised that cyberspace was too vague anyway. It was based the existence of furries, but that was it. Not very interesting!

I got wondering about what I could replace it with. Something from the internet of 2010… My internet experiences of that period were dominated by two things: deviantART, and my own website, Fig Hunter.

…WELL. I just took quite the trip down memory lane!! I wanted to include an image here of the Fig Hunter logo, and was going to add a caption about how despite it being such a big part of my life, I didn’t have any screenshots of the actual Fig Hunter website saved. I couldn’t find the logo image in any of the folders I checked, though, so I dug deeper than usual into my archives and found a folder full of old Fig Hunter stuff, including screenshots. Huge nostalgia punch right to the cringe nodules of my brain!!

It’s… interesting seeing how much has changed, how much I’ve changed, but also how much has stayed the same.

Most of the screenshots I have are of the chatroom, full of comments by my younger self and the members of the time, including some who still comment here, so I chose the only neutral front page screenshot I have there (from 2009, pre-MARDEK 3). Had to trim off the top bar full of browser tabs for places like Newgrounds, early YouTube, and creationism vs evolution debates, and a Windows Vista taskbar that included an MSN Messenger chat with my then-girlfriend…

Quite disorienting, being unexpectedly transported back to a lifetime ago like that. Especially since my memories of that time aren’t primarily pleasant.

ANYWAY, where was I…?

Oh! Right. CBRC… which is also about revisiting the past, sort of.

I had an idea for the cyberspaces: what if I were to replace the not-yet-implemented Furriendly Pawrest idea with one that was the niche community website of some indie dev? Basically a big reference to Fig Hunter; I imagine there’d be a big overlap between the (two or three) people who’d even play CBCR and people who know what Fig Hunter is. Plus the background music could be in my natural style, which of course would be easier for me to compose!

So I brainstormed some names that would be to Fig Hunter what Visagetome is to Facebook.

Avocado… something. Seeker? Pursuer? No. Hmm, there aren’t really many obvious synonyms for ‘hunter’. I checked this interesting website for related words, and one of the top matches was ‘wolf’.

I used to call myself Pseudolonewolf back then!

So how about… Plum Wolf? Avocado Wolf? Melon Wolf…?

During the Fig Hunter days, I discovered the Four Temperaments, and those became a big part of my worldview and the website’s culture.

I was Melancholic/Phlegmatic!

So maybe the cyberspace could be the eponymous website of an indie dev called MELON COLLIE who was making an emotionally autobiographical game starring their self-representation character!!

…Who’s completely unrelated to the character I already have called Collie:

So! Yes! All those ideas came together as something like this:

A cyberspace, meloncollie.cum, which is the niche personal website of an indie dev who goes by the username Melon Collie (or MelonCollie). The dev uses a furry character to represent themselves, who’s also called Melon Collie, and is making an emotional autobiographical game starring that character which is also called Melon Collie.

Clear as crystal, right?

The comments on the website (billboards in platformer space) would show… differing opinions about the dev’s emotional approach.

I thought that could be interesting, maybe a chance to explore or even work through - reframe, I suppose - TRAUMA I still have from Fig Hunter… though I wouldn’t want it to come across as something like ‘poor innocent dev is victimised by cruel evil idiot trolls’, like in a couple of past attempts to do that - much closer to the time - which I cringe about now.

…Maybe this idea will be even more controversial than Spar Girl, actually. Hmm.

Either way, I thought the ideas were amusing and interesting enough to at least explore, and I like designing characters, so I seized the opportunity to design this ‘Melon Collie’ character which the cyberspace would revolve around.

This was my first sketch (or variations of it). I wanted something that looked like a ‘deviantART furry OC’, specifically an anthro wolf, with a watermelon motif. I thought I could steal and tone down the boob-heart-cutout concept from Spar Girl’s design: her dark green hoodie’s open to reveal part of her pink chest underneath, looking like a cut in a watermelon.

I liked the gist, but wanted to refine some details, especially the face and colour palette. Considering teal’s the colour of my own website, and it’s the direct opposite of that rose pink colour, that seemed perfect! I liked the idea that her eyes could look like watermelon slices. Watermelon ears too, lower on the head so she looks less perky, more melancholy. Couldn’t get the face looking quite right though.

Those were from the end of Monday; I spent an hour on Tuesday morning drawing this refined concept. I remembered that emo was a huge thing back in 2010, and deviantART was full of emo anthros, so that seemed absolutely perfectly for Melon Collie. I looked up a bunch of emo hairstyles and fashions for inspiration.

The face looks really wonky though, and that eye floating over the hair, anime-style, bothered me.

I spent some time Google Image Searching things like ‘emo furry’ or ‘deviantart furry’, and studied the art styles that kept coming up. Then I drew this:

“YES!”, I thought; “I really like that!”

Design-wise, it’s kind of like an anthropomorphic symbol or icon: simplistic, every detail meaningful rather than just ‘looking cool’. More like a Western cartoon character - or even a stuffed toy - than anything realistic.

The ears and lack of a snout made it look more like a cat than a canine though. HMM.

Some more design-refining sketches from the next day (Wednesday). The middle one (a coloured version of the sketch on the left) bothered me, and made me doubt the direction I was going in, but the one on the right seemed alright. Maybe? It’s a symmetrical ‘schematic’ diagram-like drawing of the design that I could potentially use to guide the creation of a 3D model.

So I thought I’d actually try to make a low-poly model from that! As it’d allow me to more easily tweak shapes or details without having to redraw the whole character every time.

So I spent about four hours on Wednesday making and rigging this simple low-poly model. I really like it!!

I spent much of Thursday and Friday having some minor breakdown about life stuff, but kept coming back to it and tweaking little details. By the end, I had this:

Some design details:

• She’s a 2010-era-deviantART-reminiscent emo canine furry; a sensitive indie dev’s self-representation and protagonist of a game about emotions that they’re working on

• Her dark hoodie is open, revealing her heart - but also her melons - which the dev intended as something like heart-baring (especially a bleeding, wounded heart), but which many crasser fans just sexually objectify (it’s meant to be darker chest fur, not clothing; maybe that’s unclear)

• Her eyes look like watermelon slices with thick emo-like mascara

• Her ears also resemble watermelon slices, with piercings as seeds

• Her emo fashion striped sleeves have stripes like a watermelon

• The streak in her emo-style hair could also be seen as a watermelon stripe

• Her tail is a watermelon slice

• Her pale skin and snout make her head resemble a skull at some angles

Overall, I’m REALLY pleased with this design!!

…Though I obviously got carried away with it; I didn’t need to make a 3D model. Oh, I did quickly make a test sprite though, in a deliberately different style to the others in CBCR:

Sort of like a ‘stereotypical indie game style’… though I suppose that’s true for modern design trends rather than 2010, when ‘indie games’ weren’t even really a thing.

I’ll need to actually make the meloncollie.cum cyberspace next. Seemed wise to get feedback on this first, though, rather than making assets like I did with Spar Girl’s which might just end up scrapped.

(This was meant to replace the Furriendly Pawrest idea, but ended up stealing some ideas from Spar Girl, so I might rethink what to do with that, or whether to even include four cyberspaces at all; three might be enough.)

What kind of hat would go with this cyberspace though?!? I didn’t even think about that until writing this post!

I suppose I got carried away mostly due to panicking a lot about my life situation, even more than usual, because my mum had some health scares and I kept wondering how the hell I’d cope if thrust into independence I’m absolutely not prepared for.

I still can’t decide where to even start. Every time I feel I’m onto something, I get so excited about having found the path I should take, only to change my mind for some reason or another the next day.

I considered moving into an Airbnb for maybe 2 months as an ‘independence test run’, got excited about that… but found out it’d cost like £5000, which killed that idea.

I keep wondering whether to try volunteering to just get my body used to being out in the world, but working for free in the back of some charity shop with what are likely to be retirees just feels like such a waste of potential (unlike spending a week on this character design, of course).

I thought maybe I should try to learn to drive first… but presented the idea - after like two hours of talking with ChatGPT about it - to my mum, who basically just shot it down by saying “but it costs so much to buy a car”, even though she keeps telling me I need to learn how to drive…

I’ve spent probably most of my time this week talking with ChatGPT about all this; it’s not as if I have real people to talk to, and even if I did they wouldn’t be able to give me that much of their time. It helps, but clearly not enough since I still haven’t decided on anything.

Someone on the previous post mentioned getting a job later than most people do with the help of some kind of job centre, so maybe I could look into something like that to get a part-time job in a way that’d seem less daunting than ‘raw-dogging’ the normal job interview process with zero experience and no social support?? If such a thing is even available here.

I don’t know. I’ll talk through it all yet again with my counsellor/therapist person in a couple of days.

I do feel that my mentality is different than it used to be, at least; I used to just resist the very idea of going out to build a ‘normal’ adult life. Now I feel I’ve come to accept things I previously couldn’t; I just still need to work out the logistics.