What's up everyone! Just as a heads up, this post is gonna be a bit vent-y and personal in places. nothin messed up just putting out some thoughts.
If you're the attentive sort you might've noticed i've been kinda quiet for a while now. What's up with that? working on a secret project? quit the internet? ran out of AOL free trial CD's? Started a new life where I exclusively comment on reviews of Zelda II to explain how it's actually a pretty good game in its own right?
The answer to all these questions and more is of course no. Hello Penguin 2 HD came and went and since then i've mostly not been doing much of anything at all, besides my job. You could call it taking a break, but maybe also hiding in a way. I've been just sorta feeling less and less comfortable with posting stuff online lately and never really figured out a way to deal with it.
I'm not 100% sure what leads to this.. but it's sort-of the reason for wanting to write this up in the first place. I think partly I don't really like the "format" of social media the way it exists now. Everything has to be short, catchy, there's too much focus on getting likes and algorithms and it's hard to manage who's interacting with you. hence uh.. wanting to make some use of my weblog. Maybe long-form posting will be good for me.
Another aspect of social media that puts me off is that like... it seems a lot of what goes on in twitter land is some kind of endless parade of the latest tragedies in the world and it feels really kind of messed up to drop my own blithe nonsense right beside a post about BLM or whomever's the latest person to be murdered by police or speculation about how many people are acting ignorant about a virus that's already killed 1000's of people. And don't get me wrong like, i understand that these are real issues and it's good that folks are aware and are trying to make a positive change but there's a certain amount of fatigue that sets in esp. when it feels like it's mostly just reaching the people who already know about it anyway.
Then the other thing is that I sort of have a problem about image. I like to have fun, make silly stuff, have a very outdated website, all that. But I also sometimes want to be serious or sincere or anything else really. The problem is that I get anxious about doing stuff that isnt in line with what i think people "expect" for... some reason or another. This is something for me to work on and this post is also part of it.
This is feeling kind of rambling now so my point right now is that I want to share more stuff. And the next thing i'm gonna start sharing is a game I plan to start working on soon. It's going to be kind of different from a lot of things i've made in the past like my mods or hello penguin in that it's a story-focused game emphasizing relationships rather than comedy or weirdness. There's also an aspect that is very personal to me that i don't really mention much, which is that the game is going to try to explore relationships from an asexual/aromantic perspective. It's something that I think really doesn't get a lot of representation and I really hope that I will be able to do it justice ^^;
The game will also feature a lot of cute creatures and soup, so it may be worth checking out for that as well. Seriously though, even if you're not in it for the ace experience I think there will be a lot to enjoy. Please look forward to more information on this in the upcoming months!
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p.s. i'm also planning to clean up my site a bit soon as well. I'm aware that there's some links to certain projects that have broken for some reason, I appreciate the folks in the guestbook for letting me know i'm just... gettin' around to it yknow. I have too many files and drives and I'm not sure where I put the originals :(