guh

I used to update my blog infrequently because I felt I didn't have enough going on to justify posting about. Now I am too busy offline and in my personal life to keep up with regular blog posts. It's a good problem to have, I guess.

Currently, I am having a very strange and difficult time. My dad died of cancer this week. We ended a few years of no-contact estrangement with a phonecall while he was on hospice care, after he had lost the ability to speak. I am struggling with a lot of things I did not and now will not get closure on. I don't think I would have if he had lived longer, either, but it's still hard to know that that door is now shut for good.

A month of knowing but having the 'when' hanging over me was strange, disorienting. It feels weird that it's the third week of June now; May is a vague smear. I have one last diary entry of the day I got the first phonecall, and then no logging of time or my thoughts beyond that.

He passed this Monday, and I have been able to sleep without nightmares again for the first time in a month. It's a miserable thing to go through even when it's someone who was a negative presence in your life.

I am trying to keep going in a normal way, keep going to work because I can't take any more days off. I have a new, non-evil job now, different than the sketchy one I mentioned in my previous entry. It's a part-time role helping people with computers, and for someone who feels largely incompatible with holding down a regular 9 to 5, I feel very fortunate that this role is working out for me.

My commute is pretty long, the only real downside to my job. There's a silver lining here, in that it has been giving me about 2.5 hours a day of idle time on the train that I have mostly been using to read. I've read more fiction in the past few months than I think I have been able to in the past 2 years combined, currently at a pace of about 2 books a week. I'm maintaining a medialog on this site, if you'd like to read that.

I'm not doing very much drawing at the moment. Aside from the obvious reasons, illustration and I are taking a break for reasons I'll write a blog post about some other time.

I'm still creating at a steady pace, though. A friend and I are participating in this year's Toxic Yuri VN Jam... 2!!! It's been a good place for me to expel my current bad humors, so to speak. Two long-standing desires of mine are being fulfilled at the moment, collaborating with someone and actually making more than one scene of a game, and I'm very excited for you to see what we're working on. I hope that we are able to hurt you in a fun and sexy way.

I gave another crack at learning 3d as well, and actually have a somewhat finished model to show for it this time. I'm very happy with how it turned out in terms of translating my flat and graphic artstyle to a 3-dimensional object. Blender isn't so scary after all... Dedicated blog post about this project to come sometime soon, too.

As for the site, it remains in its crawling but constant state of being worked on. Nothing too big and exciting going on, really... Now that I've streamlined my workflow by switching to 11ty, making new stuff is a lot easier when I have the time for it. Current goals are to make things more mobile accessible, a visual redesign of my art pages, a section for my games now that I am actually making them, and basic things I can't believe I'm still missing like a sitemap.

I will be alright, but if I could be greedy and make one My Shit Sucks Rn request, it would be nice to see some doodles in my Oekaki board. Doesn't have to be anything specifically for me, just whatever you feel like drawing in there, in fact I would prefer it not be geared towards me versus you simply having fun. Those always cheer me up.

Take care.
Luc