History, Interactive, People, Real Life, Writing

State of the Spud 2026: This One Was Really Bad, Y’all

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A screencap from Griftlands' Cinematic Early Access trailer, depicting the kra'deshi Smith sitting down at a bar table, beaten and bruised and cut up, dropping off some loot with a shrug and a bottle of booze in his other hand.
Yeah, that’s about how I feel too, Smith.

Then again, this year’s been bad for a lot of people, and in some respects I’ve been lucky that I’ve still been able to advance some of my ambitions without any severe emergencies cutting me off at the knees.

But boy howdy, even taking the most generous stance possible, this one has been really, genuinely, actually rough for me personally.

[CONTENT WARNING: Towards the end there’s going to be some discussion about contemplation of self-harm. I’ll mark it when that anecdote begins.]

Let’s start with the good stuff, though, just to balance things out.

I’m 34 years old today and I’m still alive, so that’s one thing.

Right now I’ve got two major projects: Three For All, my second major Griftlands mod to end them all; and The Interference, the self-insert Kingdom Hearts fanfic I started as a teenager and has been crying out for some continuation and closure for nearly two decades. I spent the last part of 2025 working on a few chapters of the fanfic, then I pivoted to the mod to get it up to “bare minimum playable,” and as I write this I’m back to the fanfic again.

Three For All is in a really good position in that it has a solid foundation to build upon. Many of the major underlying systems and structures are in place, so what remains is to add and refine all the Content(tm) – the side quests, the random events, and so on. The first seven months of this year I put in very reasonable hours, given my many hardships, and its current barely playable state is a milestone that I’m very proud of and shows that steady work. (Making a mega-anthology of short choose-your-own-adventure stories that also interact with a roguelite deckbuilder is actually pretty freaking hard, y’all!)

In the latest update before the mode switch, I tossed up the idea that I might try to assemble a team to help make the rest of the planned content, to help with writing and graphic design and art and whatnot. I haven’t gotten a whole lot of interest for that yet, but the offer still stands. After all, I’m just as hungry to get it into people’s hands to play it as anyone else is.

As for the fanfic stuff, I’ve put out like three new 5,000+ word chapters in like six weeks – my pace lately has been, frankly, amazing. If 2026 has been anything positive, it’s been a triumph for my work ethic. The machinery of my writing process has never been so excellently lubricated. Though I think it also helps that I’m working in a sort of “montage” style as I kind of rush towards a breakpoint I’ve been thinking about for… years now.

The goal right now is to… well, without spoiling… reach a sort of ending that isn’t really an ending. But at the very least a very clear marked endpoint for the Interference saga, opening up an opportunity for a continuation that can be as much fresh renewal as stopping point. And that will allow me to sort of package the saga in one big mega-compilation that I can finally migrate off FanFiction Dot Net, because my goodness has that been long needed. The point is, I’ve got plans, y’all. Every writer does, but right now I’m actively working towards them, and I’m getting closer each week.

It’s also been about two years since Friendship is Dragons ended, and we had a fun little cozy anniversary stream to celebrate. I enjoyed that – at the time, it was some much needed commiseration with some friends. (The social anxiety makes it hard to be, well, social, even in the Discord that I ostensibly run and lurk in. Sorry ’bout that. And I know posting on Bluesky doesn’t make up for it.)

I’ve pretty much mostly gotten off the livestreaming treadmill, though the weekly co-op game nights with my family have been very grounding and stabilizing, I feel, and I hope that someone out there has enjoyed them as a chill second-screen thing, if nothing else. Though we haven’t been able to play as much due to the unreasonable climate-affected heat around Nyx’s (my sister’s) place, but hopefully the autumn will bring those back shortly. (Also, given Twitch’s current absolute self-own with opt-out GenSlop training, I’m giving some serious consideration to moving platforms. It’s not like I’m getting a whole bunch of raids and subs and donations anyway – or hardly any at all.)

Oh man, don’t get me started on “AI.” (You’ll notice I try to avoid calling LLMs and LVMs “AI” whenever possible – these days I far prefer “GenSlop.”) Anything about the subject gets me downright steamed – partially because I had to own up to using it for a very early brainstorming stage of Three For All. But that was at least very early on in this craze, when it was still reasonable for everyone to check out this new tool everybody’s talking about and give it a serious chance to see if it had any useful applications. Y’know, before we fully realized what monstrous things had been done to labor, the arts, software engineering, and just about every facet of modern society, all in the name of <checks notes> making it easier to write BS work emails. Now there are no excuses; we’ve all had time to look at the machinery of this tainted beast.

Where was I? Oh yeah. (This is why you shouldn’t get me started.)

So that’s… probably the roundup of the good news. It’s mostly what I’d consider “work-related,” as much as this 8-12 hours a week writing fan content can be considered “self-employment.” The rest is probably just going to be me complaining about my life and begging for more help dealing with it, and it’s probably not going to stop before this post ends on a major downer, so if you want to just kinda stop here and browse somewhere else, here’s your chance and I don’t hold it against you. Honestly, just the fact that you cared enough to read this far is a small gesture that I cherish immensely. Okay? Okay.

Around March, I got kicked off both food stamps and health insurance, and that has majorly impacted just about everything. I tried for two months to get back on, only to be rejected again on some frankly BS but ultimately unanswerable grounds. In that same time frame, I got my second rejection on my application for disability, and the advocates handling my case dropped us as clients in a very infuriating drawn-out way, leaving us to fend for ourselves on the next appeal with barely enough time left on the clock.

To say that those were perhaps two of the worst months of my life would not be a gross overstatement, and since then everything’s just been really hard. Losing hundreds of dollars in food budget, turns out, has ripple effects on just about everything else you do – because you’re stressed about the whole food thing! And for someone like me with mental health and executive function issues, that stuff just compounds and compounds. I basically lost the rhythm of my exercise routine overnight and I haven’t been able to get it back. I’ve had to beg for extra donations a lot more – which I absolutely hate hate hate, but it’s easy to be shameless when you’re anxious and hungry – which has been a nightmare on my self-esteem and I worry has strained a lot of my relationships. (And ultimately, I absolutely blame The Current Administration as the root cause of all this strife, because I know I’m not the only one who’s had this kind of downturn experience this year, especially in the state I live in.)

And that’s all the new stuff, on top of the old grievances: The overall situation of living with 1) the one person who understands my condition and cares enough about me to take care of me despite how needy and dependent I’ve become, along with 2) the one person who triggers my traumatic anxieties the most and has decided he no longer cares about how he affects me so long as he gets to vent his petty anger at video games whenever and however he wants. You know, the situation that is completely intractable because the last time I tried to escape we got utterly screwed over by our own extended family members, and the only ways out of this situation now would require exorbitant amounts of money and assistance, so it’s just purgatory, if not hell.

But the roughest part was definitely… well…

[Remember when I said there’d be discussion of self-harm? That’s now. I don’t know how gentle or raw this is going to be, it’s just gonna flow from my fingers to the keyboard and whatever that first draft turns out to be is gonna be what it is.]

Second week of July. My little brother, who is an adult now by the way, is so worked up that afternoon that he’s just exploding at his computer screen every hour, if not every half-hour. Every tantrum causes a three-hour silent panic attack for me, three hours of the flight-or-fight-or-freeze adrenaline response, stacking a little bit more every time. (I don’t engage with him or loudly demand that he stop, because that never works and only makes him angrier out of indignation, so my only play is to just ride it out.) After about four hours of this, I’m out of my mind. I’m crying and screaming in my room, but unlike I who have such sensitive hearing that the world’s best noise-canceling headphones can’t stop me from feeling vibrations through walls and floors and my very skin, my brother does not notice or acknowledge and continues to yell and bitch.

He does not notice when I walk out to the backyard to get a moment of fresh air. There’s a dust storm raging, so it doesn’t help.

Then I walk to the sidewalk of a busy street. And I just stand there, staring at the oncoming lanes. Contemplating.

Contemplating what it would take for the pain on the outside to match the pain on the inside so that certain people would finally notice and take it seriously.

Thankfully, it turns out when you stand ominously on the sidewalk of a busy street during a dust storm, people notice. Someone who knew my family pulled over, and the check-in was enough to break the spell so I could go back inside. That was the end of the incident, no harm done.

Looking back, I didn’t believe that I was really going to “attempt” anything… but looking back with more distance, I realize that it doesn’t really matter what I thought I was going to do, because in that moment I wasn’t in my right mind at all. In that moment, I was truly insane, driven mad by an overload of emotional pain.

This is going to sound weird, especially given the subject matter. But understanding this is almost kind of a relief? It’s a matter of public knowledge that severe depression often leads to… self-harm, but there’s, understandably, not a lot of explicit explanation of how and why that happens, what’s going on in that moment. To someone like me who’s been getting up out of bed every day facing this crap because deep inside me is a fighter’s spirit, I couldn’t really understand why, even with depression, someone could make that choice. And I don’t say that to demean others who faced it, it was just truly a failing on my part that I couldn’t connect the dots.

But now I understand that there is a level of pain that drives away rationality, where the body is crying out for some kind of equity and overrides the mind. “Mind over matter” is complete BS – our mental faculties are on loan from our meat, and if we’ve abused that permission too far, it will absolutely use its veto. Even consideration, even contemplation, in that moment, only made sense in a dangerous moment of genuine madness, brought on by overwhelming pain. And now I know where that threshold is and what it looks like, feels like. In a weird way, at least I now know the face of the enemy, even if I let that enemy get dangerously close for a moment.

Silver lining aside, nothing has really changed since then. Despite the incident having been explained to him, I’m not sure if he’s really internalized any of it. He still blows up at his usual intervals, his usual monthly sine wave of calm and frustration. And if anything, my own pain tolerance has gone down, because my body and mind now has markers for when we’re “stoic-ing through it” too far and getting close to the danger zone. He’s not making enough money to move out, I’m not making enough money to move out, kicking either of us to the curb would be disastrous if not lethal… I’m still stuck.

And that’s on top of all the other extra crap I’ve been dealing with this year.

I’m still very lucky to have the support that I do. I’m still very fortunate to scrape by living with at least one family member willing to take care of me as best they can under the circumstances, allowing me to just work on my little passion projects for my own sanity and contribute to a couple of utilities with my miniscule income when I can.

But boy howdy I would like at least some of this weight lifted off my shoulders, just for a bit. I’m tired and I’m upset, and part of me feels guilty for being tired and upset, because who am I, the quiet fanfic boy, to complain about anything when everyone’s having an enshittified time in the year of our lord 2026?

Interactive, Writing

The Most Tepid, Bitter AI Disclosure Ever

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A cropped screenshot of an OpenOffice Calc spreadsheet, showing basic summaries of several sidequests for the Three For All Griftlands mod, with one-sentence descriptions of Setup and their respective Twist.
Every good game design project starts with a lot of spreadsheets, it’s known.

I’ll try to be quick, but you know me.

In late 2024, I used ChatGPT as a brainstorming aid to help come up with numerous basic concepts for side-quests, opportunities, and random events for my upcoming Griftlands mod, Three For All.

The intent and result of using the software was purely as a tool to help me brainstorm a large amount of random, broad, surface-level ideas and concepts that would eventually create a spark of inspiration that would lead me to writing an idea I actually liked down in my planning spreadsheet. I found the software helpful in this one specific instance because, while writing a single deep narrative is very fun and engaging for me, brainstorming a huge number of smaller ideas is something I find extremely challenging. No text was directly copied to the concept planning spreadsheet. No line of code nor dialogue was created using generative software.

Since I performed this task, my opinion on generative AI software has strictly nosedived, and I am currently vehemently against using GenAI at all in its current form. They are an ethical disaster, an education disaster, an environmental disaster, a labor disaster, a security disaster, an incoming financial disaster, deeply inaccurate, built on a temple of lies and empty promises, and a blight on all creative and professional fields. If they weren’t un-auditable black boxes that everyone just despairingly accepts are filled with plagiarized material, if they were scaled down and ethically sourced, they would still be abused as a lazy shortcut that undermines the creative disciplines.

This has led to me becoming conflicted about this brainstorming spreadsheet I now have.

On the one hand, I want to believe that, in my relative ignorance a couple years ago (I was still skeptical at the time, but part of me was looking for some way that the software could be genuinely useful), I used this generative software as ethically as I possibly could under the circumstances. I only used it as a rapid inspiration tool to stimulate my own mind and thinking. I would prompt it to generate 10 quest ideas at a time, often in different genres that weren’t the space western I was working in, and if one or two of those listed concepts sparked an idea in my own head, I would write down the adapted Griftlands version of that idea onto the spreadsheet. I tried to use it as an augmentation of the creative process, to cover a genuine limitation I have with breadth-first brainstorming dozens upon dozens of ideas on my own. The alternative would have been slower and similar, raiding all of my favorite media, scouring the internet for various prebuilt TTRPG quest generators and the like, harvesting sidequest ideas to synthesize and remix into my own project. The generative software, in its role as lossy compression of large volumes of text, was helpful in speeding up that process. Or, less charitably, I used the random text generator as a random text generator just to simulate my brain and get ideas flowing, which is I hope the least presumptive way to go about using it at all.

On the other hand, even with all that filtering from slop-output to work product, all that effort to keep it to brainstorming only, it’s still the product of running a tainted source through multiple layers of sieves. The purity of the content will never be 100%. Not that any list of 100 sidequests I painstakingly thought up in a vacuum over the course of six months would be entirely original either, but I still ran some amount of my process through the dreaded un-auditable black box. How do I know for sure that one of the ideas I wrote down isn’t essentially ripped off from a plagiarized text scraped from what was supposed to be a private corner of the internet, a time-bomb waiting for when the five people who recognize that synthesized idea stumble across the finished work? Maybe a tad on the paranoid side, but this is the kind of existential dilemma that running your process through an un-auditable black box gets you.

Understanding all of those factors in play, I had a decision to make: Err on the side of caution and toss away the spreadsheet in order to start from scratch all over again, or err on the side of reckless expedience and keep the spreadsheet so I can get straight to work on filling out content for the mod.

The mere existence of this blog post has already spoiled the ending: I’ve kept the spreadsheet and I’m continuing to work on the mod using those brainstormed ideas, hoping that my efforts to keep it as ethical and slop-free as possible pay off in the long run.

However, I don’t want anyone to take this as an endorsement of ChatGPT in its current form or any future form anytime soon. Doing my brainstorming this way was a mistake, one I was ill-equipped to evaluate at the time and one whose baggage I’ve reluctantly decided to carry forward.

If faced with the same situation again, I would avoid using any generative software entirely, unless things have magically progressed to a point where we have reasonably sized language models whose training data can be adequately audited for ethical use. But boy howdy do I not expect that to be the case anytime soon. I would rather get some friends together to help me brainstorm or, as stated before, scour all my favorite media and other people’s handmade generators so I can do the flawed all-but-plagiarism myself rather than offloading it to a black-box program to launder ideas for me.

I debated somewhat about doing this “AI Disclosure” at all, because it’s such a borderline case and I really did put in the effort to separate the slop from the content, so that not a single line of code or dialogue ever even got close to the finished product. But seeing a bunch of high-profile game developers wheeling out excuses about how the way they used generative AI was for “concept art only,” I realized I had no excuse myself.

And I hope there’s something to be learned here from my mistake. Even if a random word generator might be helpful for that grueling brainstorming process, the current random word generators we have right now are so deeply unethical they taint everything they touch. Steer clear for the foreseeable future.

Real Life

State of the Spud 2025: Repeatedly Telling the Impostor (of Syndrome fame) to Shut Up

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WIP screenshot of modded Griftlands, showing a debug-mode battle between the three heroes of the game - Smith, Rook, and Sal - against two freshly modded antagonists.
Somehow not as immediately gratifying as a comic page.

It’s been just over a year now since I finished Friendship is Dragons.

Sometimes I catch myself thinking “It’s Monday / Wednesday / Friday, I should check to make sure the next comic’s up.” Every so often I wake up from a concerningly compelling stress dream where I’m unfathomably behind schedule, continuing the comic endlessly via meaningless AI slop because someone is blackmailing me to never stop.

So yeah, my relationship with stress is still about as good as it’s ever been.

Look, I’m not going to try to mansplain to you, the reader, how 2025 has been nightmarish for everybody, nor how it doesn’t look like the broader situation is bound to improve anytime soon. It’s my birthday, and I’m taking the opportunity to make this about me and me alone.

And the situation there isn’t complicated: I wish I was doing more, but I have to keep reminding myself that what I’m doing has to be enough. But man is it ever frustrating.

I don’t have a thrice-weekly comic to publish anymore, which gives the impression that I’m spending most of my weeks doing nothing. Fanfic-wise, I completed a very basic editing pass of the entire Interference saga and published… three new chapters. Which, after nearly 20 years, is significant, but less so when it’s over a period of 9 months. Modding-wise, I’ve got the engine groundwork, two-thirds of the first day’s storyline written, and ten bosses done. Which, just for getting the first-day demo out the door, probably puts me at around… 10% completion after months of on-off work.

If this was my full-time job, I’d be an unjustifiably terrible employee who would have been fired years ago, is what I’m saying. But I’ve had to remind myself that the main thing I’ve been trying to focus on this year is: Myself. And not with a great deal of success.

My disability application got rejected, so we’re on the appeal process, which has been stalled for literal months in no way I can control or speed up.

My stressful home situation hasn’t changed much, except that my younger brother has now graduated high school and gotten his first part-time job, so the handful of hours each evening of rare quiet I get is balanced out by a new source of frustration that can lead to his explosive temper tantrums which lead to my night-long panic attacks. Same crap as ever, different context.

The one thing that has been going mostly right is that I made a New Year’s resolution to exercise regularly and I’ve been mostly sticking to it.

An utterly silly experience, which turned out to be a key point in its favor for me.

I’ve been playing Ring Fit Adventure for about 30 minutes several evenings each week. It doesn’t take much to wear me out since I’m a hefty guy, but I’ve definitely seen improvement and become more limber. At the start of the year I aimed for three nights a week, though as the desert summer has worn on it has whittled down to more like 1.5 nights on average. Still, I’ve kept up the habit for just over 50 sessions without completely falling off the wagon, so I’m relatively proud of myself.

What makes RFA work over, like, running on a treadmill or lifting dumbbells is that it’s deeply, deeply silly. No really, that’s been a huge sticking point for me. Standing in my room, unhealthily overweight, dedicating time out of my day to working out, already feels absurd to my deeply depressed brain. So interacting with a program that is relentlessly positive, never judgmental, always surprising, and has its tongue firmly in its cheek as it says “Do squats to defeat these RPG monsters!” is exactly the kind of over-the-top absurdity I need to make the fact that I’m working out alone in my room at over-30 and over-300 to feel like the less silly thing happening at that moment.

So that’s one personal victory I can mark, at any rate.

The Twitch streaming has basically shrunken down to just the family co-op time with Nyx and GreyDuck, playing Satisfactory or Warframe or maybe other things coming up. Which, honestly, I’m pretty happy with. Years spent on the streamer treadmill only proved that I’m not cut out as an entertaining personality, and I’m enjoying myself way more just streaming as a family unit for posterity.

Actually, the fanfic and mod progress is all victorious, too, it’s just that the results of those have been harder to see and feel than the sweat.

It mostly just frustrates me because I’ve had to beg and scrape for enough money to survive all year. The Patreon helps with one major bill, essentially, and food stamps get me through about half a month, and then the rest I’ve gotta rely on the generosity of others. And I hate that. So much. With a fiery passion. Not because I hate people or resent when they can’t help, but purely because I hate having to be a bother, to be non-self-sufficient, to have to advertise myself like I’m trying to trick people into giving me their money so I can consistently eat.

But if there’s been a running theme of the last few years of my life, it’s been the importance of getting over my pride and asking for help. Sigh.

That said, I’m allowed to be frustrated, especially when major costs are looming on the horizon. My six-year-old Windows 10 computer – that was itself the result of generous, unexpected, extremely well-timed fundraising – is about to lose official support, and can’t upgrade to Windows 11 according to the official tools. I’ve already had to replace my old phone that bricked earlier this year, and I wasn’t sure if that was going to be feasible. I certainly can’t afford to buy a new PC that can handle both the gaming and technical things I want to do on it, and I don’t know anyone personally that I can lean on to handle that cost. So Microsoft is basically holding a gun to my computer and there’s not much I can do about it.

And it’s stuff like that – needing money to replace essential things but scraping by and letting things slide into desperation instead while I barely manage to make progress on my personal projects – that has broadly defined this past year for me.

On top of all the societal and psychic damage being inflicted on all of us by The Goings-On.

Whoops, this retrospective got all vent-y and depressing again.

Screenshot of Guild Wars 2's login screen with an asuran engineer in front of a Janthir landscape.
Um! Um! I’ve also been getting into Guild Wars 2 lately? Meet my asuran engineer, Shuuti! That’s a positive, right? Getting a second MMO addiction to complement my Warframe one is totally a positive!

I want to leave off on one important positive note: The baby steps are continuing. The anxiety and depression combo haven’t gained ground on my psyche – they’ve lost ground. I’m more aware of them and how they work, and how they affect how I work. I’m still failing and faltering in so, so many ways, ways that make me a terrible Content Creator ™, not worth the webpage his Patreon squats on, but as a person I’m still putting all the (limited) energy I’ve got into clawing back every ounce of hope and spite and motivation I can to keep this going as long as possible, including making sure my body has a better chance.

And if it seems like I’m quiet and putting out nothing for weeks on end, it’s because I’m battling ALL OF THAT every. single. goddamn. day. And on quite a few days, I lose.

Which makes me, as ever, so incredibly grateful to everyone who’s kept on supporting me, or even just hanging around with mild interest. I don’t take a single one of y’all for granted. You’re all much more kind, patient, and generous people than I truly deserve.

Welp, back at it. Gotta survive to 2026.

Comic, History, People, Ponies, Real Life, Writing

State of the Spud 2024: Reboot Complete

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Why yes, graphic design IS my passion, how did you know?

It’s been a few years since I’ve done my yearly State of the Spud, and the short answer for that mystery is because, well, there hasn’t felt like a whole lot of change. Broadly, my mission is still just to survive, and real recovery isn’t exactly possible until certain aspects of my living situation improves drastically. (If you’ve seen me [vent] on the Discord server, or happen to be related to me, you might know exactly to what I’m obliquely referring.)

This year, though? Yeah, there’ve been some changes.

Friendship is Dragons has finally come to an end after nearly 13 years. (Didn’t quite get to the anniversary, but I managed to land on Page 2011, the year it started, so it just goes to show that you can find a meaningful number just about anywhere.) To be honest, at time of writing, I’m still very much in a post-partum period. I miss it, plain and simple. I miss the structure it lent to my weeks. I miss the constant feedback and appreciation of comments on new pages. I kinda miss being one of the last long-running bronies standing, playing around in that world. I miss the constant writing practice that really noticeably sharpened my skills over more than a decade.

I don’t miss it enough to go back and start it up again, because dear god, the arcs I described in the epilogue would be nightmarish to actually do, but you get the idea.

In the couple of months since it ended (Oh god, it was the beginning of June and now it’s mid-August??), I’ve been admittedly struggling to change gears. I’ve made very defined plans as to what The Next Projects are, but I haven’t made as much progress as I’d like, even counting one month off as pure vacation.

Then again, a big part of my recovery process has been accepting that I’m going to work at my pace and no one else’s. If there’s been a theme of the last four years, a narrative to fill in the missing yearly States, it’s been, “Accepting Your Weaknesses.”

Friendship is Dragons was doable three times a week because it took me on average 90 minutes to make a page, which was always something I could do even on my worst days. That’s how it became my crutch. Writing a novel or creating a game mod, on the other hand, is something that takes more long-term discipline. And I consider myself to have made big improvements on my work ethic, but…

You know what, even as I write this, I’m falling into my old workaholic traps, so heck with it. No, I’ve gotten quite a bit done beyond just ending the comic. I’ve done an editing pass on The Interference, the self-insert fanfic I wrote when I was 14-going-on-15, that it was waiting for for nearly 18 years. I finally redid the Let’s Play of Dark Sector that I attempted 9 years ago. My dad, sister, and I completed a massive streamed playthrough of Satisfactory in Early Access. On the grand scale of things, I’m actually enjoying a grand rush of creativity and closing a lot of old wounds with that energy. It’s pretty great.

It’s just not as glamorous and actively updating as a thrice-weekly webcomic. And you know how it is – if no one sees the work, it’s not real to them.

I also have another perfectly good set of excuses to shut down my workaholism. Outside the internet, “IRL” as it were, I’ve been taking on one of my greatest fears – bureaucracy – to apply for disability, insurance, and food stamps. Processes that terrify me so much that I need to lean on family and friends for moral support. I fret about paperwork, I agonize over phone calls, I panic through interviews. Crippling social anxiety is a real bastard.

And that’s been the other big shift over the past four years:

Accepting that I’m disabled.

I have a mental disability that prevents me from being gainfully employed. I haven’t received a formal diagnosis, and I’m wary of self-diagnosis, but the main driver is probably in the realm of complex PTSD manifesting as debilitating social anxiety. I can barely leave the house for more than 90 minutes at a time. Even doing livestreams saps all of my energy for the rest of the day. I live with someone who can trigger me at any time with his temper tantrums and cause panic attacks that last hours. And situations where I have to go to places where mistakes can be devastating and judgment can be swift and sudden – like, say, applying for government help, or going to the doctor? Oh boy, those are the worst.

But I’ve been slowly pushing through. I’ve finished my disability application and now I’m on a months-long waiting list for inspection. I’ve just renewed my state health insurance and food stamps. All thanks to the moral support of my friends, and a lot of help from my mom, frankly. I’ve been slowly learning to ask for help, and to accept my new “normal.”

I mean, in retrospect, some of you older folk reading this are just gonna be like, “Yep, that’s called being in your 30s.” I turn 32 tomorrow, in fact. (I usually do the State of the Spud on my birthday, but it’s been a rough month already and I’d prefer the actual day off.) And I don’t refute that. But I also still very much feel like a scared teenager frozen in arrested development who’s just now starting to thaw a little bit.

Yet strangely, overall, I think the trend is positive this year for ol’ Spud. Sure, there’s a lot I’m still struggling with, and overall I’m still just trying to survive, but… I’m more sure of myself in who I am and what I want to do than I was a few years ago. I am Newbiespud. I very much like to create compelling fanfiction across various mediums. I have a mental disability that’s not going away anytime soon. But, like… at least I know that.

I haven’t made as much progress as my old workaholic self would have liked, but I’ve still made significant progress. Baby steps work, y’all. Asking for help sometimes even works. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

And as always, I wouldn’t be here still truckin’ without all of your support – you, the ones who’d bother to read a blog post from a D-list content creator. Thank you.

Comic, History, Ponies, Real Life, Writing

Friendship is Dragons Is Ending, Here’s Why

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I still remember when FireEsper improved my incredibly crappy initial logo. Thanks, FireEsper.

The short version:

  • Friendship is Dragons will be ending sometime mid-2024, or in roughly 6-7 months. That’s a rough estimate since the rest of the comic isn’t written yet at this time, and the ending could arrive sooner or later than that.
  • I know that I could have chosen to continue the story into Epic tier and the source material would have made that more or less feasible, but I’ve chosen not to.
  • Mental health, waning interest in both webcomics and tabletop gaming, and desires to explore new projects are the main reasons why I’ve chosen to plan the ending.
  • When FiD ends, I will probably temporarily suspend the Patreon for a month or two, either restructuring and coming back after or finding a crowdsourcing alternative that suits me better.

The long version:

Friendship is Dragons has been going on for over 12 years now, and it’s been a wonderful experience. I couldn’t ask for a better project to keep my writing instincts sharp and prove to myself that I have a semi-decent work ethic. It’s been balanced right on that perfect edge between simple and challenging, taking a small amount of time three days a week each week while still pushing me to handle some narrative curveballs. It’s been a crutch of stability during some of the worst parts of my life so far, giving me something to do and focus on while other parts of my life collapse around my ears.

If you’ve followed Friendship is Dragons for a very long time – or just me, Newbiespud, in particular – you’ve probably been around for a good chunk of my mental health journey. But just to recap: I’ve got crippling social anxiety and self-care issues stemming from lifelong repressed PTSD, and my current living situation is more keeping me in stasis than actually giving me space and time to heal.

As part of what little I’ve been able to do during my healing process, I’ve tried to commit to the path of a recovering workaholic. And that’s meant cutting down on the overload of projects I’ve subjected myself to – podcasting, streaming, video editing, writing for webcomics, writing for novels, building a social media brand, game design and development, all that jazz. For a huge chunk of my life, work has been a form of martyrdom, sacrificing myself for the sake of trying to build works that will eclipse me and stand worthy on their own, separate from me. Part of my healing process has turned out to be cutting down the amount of work I do and reestablishing boundaries with myself, trying to put the human being here first.

If I WASN’T honest with myself, I could keep the comic going. I could come up with a half-baked idea for an arc to take the characters into Epic tier and arrive at a major climax at Level 30. I had a few such ideas kicking around. This would allow me to keep using Friendship is Dragons as my creative, professional, and financial crutch for many more years.

But if I AM honest with myself, the spark’s not just there anymore. I haven’t played tabletop roleplaying games like D&D since I put Spudventures on hiatus nearly two years ago. I don’t have a lot more to say authentically about TTRPGs, whether as jokes or as dramatic themes. I’m still not in a safe place emotionally where I can responsibly and reliably share the spotlight with my fellow players and DMs, so I haven’t gained any new tabletop experiences lately. And just on a practical level, the thought of spending another 8-10 years clipping screencaps three times a week fills me with the kind of dread that makes you feel like your body is turning into dust.

And thanks to modding projects like Arint’s Last Day and Grift the Spire, I’ve rediscovered my love for other kinds of projects and have learned how to establish the kind of work-life balance that allows larger solo projects to get done. My capabilities have changed, and I want to keep exploring and adapting further. Heck, there’s a self-insert Kingdom Hearts fanfiction series that could use some real love after all this time…

All of that together means that, for me, the time has come. Friendship is Dragons has been a great project, but it’s time to end it on its own terms and reclaim my three days a week.

My current estimates put the ending sometime mid-2024, but the truth is that, as ever, “it’ll be done when it’s done.” The ending will arrive at the pace I write it at, and it’s not written yet, so I can’t know with total confidence. It could arrive sooner… though given the languid pace of the comic so far, it seems far more likely the ending is actually further away than I realize.

When Friendship is Dragons finally does officially end, I’ll also probably be suspending my Patreon for a month or two, since FiD is the main source of content-per-month that really justifies it. I want to give everyone an off-ramp if that’s the main reason they’ve been supporting me. I will be continuing to work on other narrative projects (gaming and storytelling are my lifeblood, y’all), and I’d love it if people still want to support me through those processes, but considering that I tend to keep to myself when I’m working and I find it socially difficult to share things that aren’t finished, I’m not sure what kind of crowdfunding will really work for me going forward.

I know it kind of feels a bit sudden. It was a bit of a sudden realization for me, too, to realize that I’d rather reach an ending than keep going forever. Heck, when it comes to webcomics, you either fizzle out in three months or keep going until the end of time, and very few webcomics seem to reach an ending on their own terms.

Well, I’ve come this far but I don’t want to keep doing it forever, so I guess Actual Ending it is. I feel like I’ve more than completed my bucket-list desire to make a webcomic like my dad did back in the day.

Thank you all for supporting Friendship is Dragons and me, Newbiespud, for so many years, and I hope you’ll continue to stick around for these last few months.

Fallout is Dragons, History, Podcast, Ponies, Real Life

Taking Responsibility for the Fallout is Dragons Breakup

What a crew, huh?

Fallout is Dragons was an actual-play RPG podcast / livestream show I ran from January 2014 to June 2016. It used my friend’s homebrew Pony Tales RPG system and was set in the Fallout: Equestria fanfiction setting. Looking back over my body of RPG work, it’s still probably the best campaign I’ve ever run overall.

Towards the end, though, there was a schism in the group, one person was forced out, and the show continued.

I’m not going to make this about naming names or pointing fingers or creating a thorough account of what happened. I don’t have the Skype chat logs (and have little desire to hunt them down even if they did still exist). I can hardly recall anything that was said; all I can vaguely recall is that some unforgivable things were said as things blew up.

Only now, after my emotional and mental breakdown back in 2019 and months of struggle and therapy, do I begin to have a grasp of my own role in what happened, how I let it happen through neglect. Because I wasn’t even conscious of what I was doing at the time.

Some background, though.

I was emotionally traumatized by my (very stressed-out due to other factors) parents at a young age. I was yelled at a lot as a baby and as a prepubescent child – the worst times being totally at random, going from 0 to 100% in-trouble with no ability to comprehend anything other than that I dun fucked up somehow. I developed hypervigilant personality traits and avoided conflict at all costs, and whenever conflict broke out around me, I always assumed it was my fault somehow, fled to my room to hide, and spent the next few hours blaming myself and trying to figure out what I did wrong.

That probably spells out most of the story right there, but I have a little more to add.

Between 2014 and 2016, I was on my prolonged, steady decline at my dream college. The hypervigilance I’d developed both as a child – and as a teenager having to take care of my newborn baby half-brother – made homework and teamwork impossible for me to complete with any rigor. Furthermore, I was struggling with undiagnosed sleep apnea, stealing away all my deep REM sleep and slowly driving me insane.

And yet, pretty much between the middle of my teenage years and 2019, I was in the mindset of pretending nothing was wrong with me. At all times. Putting everyone else ahead of myself and my needs. Except that my needs and traumas and fears still controlled me, unconsciously. I just pretended that I wasn’t feeling it so that the delusion of success could continue.

Knowing all that now, what happened during the complete breakdown of the Dragon Mawlers’ group cohesion – and specifically, what I did to enable it, let it fester, and let it blow up out of control – becomes so painfully, obviously clear to me. Every time people yelled during a call, I froze up like a deer in the headlights. When the yelling turned into prolonged arguments, I avoided them and stayed out of it as much as I could, maybe throwing in a judgment call or two here and there because I was the leader and I was expected to do something. When it finally blew up, I took the path of least resistance that made the conflict stop so that we could all pretend that things were fine and move on again.

It was neglect born out of fear. Deep, traumatic, unresolved fear. The fear of a 3-year-old, 6-year-old, 11-year-old, 14-year-old, all simultaneously flashing back and wanting nothing else than for Mom and Dad to stop yelling.

It’s not an excuse. A group’s behavior trickles down from the top, and I was the leader, both as the DM and the showrunner. Not only did I neglect and avoid problems, that became hard unspoken policy for everyone else too, until it couldn’t be avoided anymore. And when the worst of it broke out into flames, I basically didn’t support anybody. I hid, I dodged, I muttered indecisively, I attacked whoever seemed to have the weakest position and the most to answer for when easy opportunities arrived. I was the worst kind of boss.

And knowing what I know now… if we turned back the clock, I would not be able to act any differently. Is it theoretically possible that the conflict could have been avoided, that some adult, mature compromise could have been reached if we had tackled the problems sooner? That’s a big maybe, but this isn’t a maybe: I wasn’t capable of doing any of that. I wasn’t able to be a mature adult about anything, because I was a teen in arrested development treading water to pretend otherwise, neglecting everything – including myself – that needed attention.

My players deserved better. Fallout is Dragons deserved better. I was a bad leader and a bad DM in the long run, and its shortcomings rest at my feet.

I’m still paying for that neglect. It all came to a head in the summer of 2019, where I couldn’t deny the pain I was ignoring anymore and everything broke down. I’m now in a purgatory where I can’t even go outside and be around strangers without having a panic attack within an hour, which means I can’t find gainful employment. Patreon and the patient kindness of the handful of friends and family members who believe that what I’m going through is real are the only things that have kept me alive and afloat the last few years. And even then, that arrangement still means I’m stuck with someone who regularly and uncontrollably triggers my post-traumatic stress buttons.

I don’t bring that up – any of this up – to gain pity points in the context of Fallout is Dragons. I’m mainly pointing it out 1) for the possibility of slight schadenfreude for those I’ve wronged with my neglect, and 2) to demonstrate that what I’d done was a pattern of behavior that I later paid (and am still paying) inevitable consequences for.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned from my counseling and therapy, it’s that we are all, as individuals, the sum of one unbroken and interconnected chain of events. Pretending that parts of that chain didn’t happen or don’t exist is just taking an emotional loan out from the future. Eventually you have to reckon with it somehow or go mad.

Just needed to get all of that off my chest at 3:30 AM, I guess.

Interactive, Podcast, Real Life

Spudventures Hiatus/Post-Mortem

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Logo by Space Jawa, who I have frustrated time and again by canceling at the last minute

Sucks that this blog has ended up the place where I announce and explain all the sad news, but heck, it might as well go somewhere.

Short version:

  • The Spudventures podcast is going on indefinite hiatus, though some of its games will go on privately.
  • I’m reevaluating my relationship with tabletop RPGs as a whole.
  • Friendship is Dragons is still continuing.

Long version:

I haven’t been playing much D&D or other tabletop RPG systems in the past year, let alone podcasting and streaming in general. A lot of that’s understandable – we’re all adults with less time on our hands, the pandemic’s hit everyone hard in so many ways, and health always comes first.

With me personally, though, there’s been this growing sense that my desire to play tabletop RPGs has gone down over the past year. And with the show having cancelled at the last minute for nearly two months straight – and, more importantly, me not feeling all too excited to eventually get back on the horse, as it were – I’ve had to kind of face facts this week.

Because it hasn’t been fair to my fellow players and GMs who do still want to play.

Over the past year, counseling has been helpful and I’ve made a lot of great strides in my understanding of my own emotions. But it’s also opened a lot of emotional baggage that I repressed for over 15 years, punctuated by many points of pain in my life that I couldn’t afford to process until I had even begun to start healing. I am still firmly in the “it gets worse before it gets better” phase of my journey, and overcoming or even learning to cope with my symptoms as my new “normal” is still very far off in the future.

What does that have to do with D&D and other TTRPGs? Basically, I’ve been grappling with the idea lately that my primary motivation for getting into RPGs in the first place was escapism. All the stress I was dealing with at home, I wanted an excuse to get out and away from it. Turning those games into a show was an extension of that, creating a regular obligation and harvesting positive feedback. And as I’ve started to confront the actual sources of my stress (and still live with some of them currently), I’ve found that my escapist distractions have become less effective. The desire to escape was the original spark of joy that drew me into the fantastical world of TTRPGs, and that flame has been withering to embers.

I don’t hate TTRPGs, to be clear, not one bit. They’re still a fantastic cooperative medium with endless complexity. But I have become slightly disillusioned with them. The space has limits, and those limits don’t satisfy my desperate emotional needs – and it’s not fair to demand that from the players and GMs I interact with while I’m going through this.

Over the past year, I’ve noticed my level of mental and emotional need go from “Hang out with me for a bit” to “Please take care of me and tell me I’m doing a great job”… That’s just not a good state to bring to a table.

So I think I need to take a break from tabletop RPGs, reevaluate my relationship with them. The current system of “I play these games to escape and feel better” isn’t working because I’m trying to escape less and playing them doesn’t make me feel much better.

The podcasting and streaming aspect of the show became sort of a trap like that. As I have become more and more acutely aware of my own social anxiety, the stress of pulling myself together and “putting on a show” has caused me to cancel on more than one occasion because I’m dry-heaving at the thought of it. Which makes me feel bad because I shouldn’t be feeling bad at all – this is supposed to be fun and games with my friends! I should be happy to make the time! But no, I’ve actually been somewhat relieved to be on an unofficial hiatus for months at a time. And that’s just not fair to my fellow players.

It’s not as though I’ve made it big as a podcaster and streamer anyway.

(Not that making it big should be a requirement for doing something. If you like doing it, you should do it. But if you find over time that you like doing it less and less…)

Spudventures in general has also kind of strayed from the initial goals I had for it, kind of in an inevitable way:

  1. I wanted it to be a podcasting show where the cast would rotate every week, so that people who’d been following me via Friendship is Dragons and Fallout is Dragons for years could get a chance to play, especially first-timers. In practice, over time it became the vehicle for a small tight-knit friend group of the same players over and over, self-selecting because they were the ones most able and comfortable to play in random games on a weekly or biweekly basis.
  2. I wanted it to be a vehicle for exploring a bunch of weird and strange systems and concepts in the TTRPG space, indie games and personal passion projects and the like. In practice, we’ve spent about half the runtime playing D&D 5th Edition, playing a funky remix/mashup of established modules. (Not a bad campaign, that, but not what I had loftily envisioned.)
  3. I wanted it to be essentially playaround filler between the last “big” campaign, Tales of New Dunhaven, and whatever the “next” “big” campaign would be, and I thought playing around with different systems would revitalize my drive just in time for the next big burst of inspiration to drive me to put another epic-length campaign together. That burst of inspiration never came in the three years or so this has been runnning.

I don’t regret Spudventures. I don’t regret the path it took, and I don’t regret the games we played, the things we tried, and the lessons we learned. And on its own, “not living up to the unrealistic and grandiose vision at the start” would not be reason enough to end a venture like this.

I’m just going through a really rough patch right now. The show isn’t really helping with that, and it’s actively hurting the games of the groups I’ve been playing with. So, as hard as it is to say, the best option for the indeterminate future is to put the show on hold. To free myself of a stressful obligation I legit can’t handle right now, and to free my friends from my own flakiness.

I plan to take this time as a break from playing RPGs in general, until I can come at them again from a healthier starting point than sheer, desperate escapism – that desire to write myself a story that I control and I can make supremely cathartic and gratifying for myself. I still plan on writing Friendship is Dragons; I haven’t lost my spark in that project yet, despite everything.

Thanks for reading, and hopefully thanks for your understanding.

Comic, History, Ponies, Writing

10 Years of Friendship is Dragons

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July 28, 2011—…

Looking back on the last 10 years has kind of depressed me, to be honest.

I started this silly little screencap webcomic where people play Dungeons & Dragons in the My Little Pony G4 setting in an alternate universe where no one’s heard of this setting when I was almost 19, on summer break between my first and second year of college.

I remember lamenting not being able to play with my D&D group from my hometown, the ones I’d first ever played D&D at all with. I wanted some way of maintaining and capturing that feeling of enjoying the fun of a D&D group while I went to college, because I knew I probably wouldn’t have the time to find a new group to play with there. (I was right.) Of course I am nothing if not a copycat of better ideas, and I had enjoyed both DM of the Rings and Darths and Droids. Plus my dad was working on a webcomic of his own that I found very amusing (because we share a dry, wry sense of humor), so making a webcomic had officially landed on my bucket list. Then, as I was beginning to realize what a surprisingly great show My Little Pony was, I came across a series of blog posts mapping the main ensemble cast each to a class from D&D. All the pieces fell into place.

I have never been much of an artist, but I had been writing fanfiction and editing/ripping video files for pretty much my entire adolescence. With the help of a program specifically designed to make the panel and word-bubble thing as simple as possible, I had just enough skill to make it happen.

Twice a week seemed reasonable at the start. I got a major boost from the fansite Equestria Daily on my second update, and I loved the rush of validation that came from updates and comments, so on the 10th page I made it double-length to celebrate and updated the schedule to thrice weekly.

And then I just kept going.

And going.

And going.

A lot of it, I don’t mind telling you now, has consistently been written, assembled, and uploaded the night before an update. Very rarely would I put in a buffer ahead of time; most of the time I’d procrastinate every page to the last minute. (I’ve gotten a little better now. A little.) But this has always been a relatively safe project to procrastinate on. Making one page can take an hour at most, and most of that comes down to writer’s block or scrolling through episodes looking for the right shot. It’s a very easy product to make, all things considered. At best, I can pat myself on the back for knowing my limits and having a streamlined production pipeline on the word go. At worst, I can’t really take much credit for the work because it’s a miniscule fraction compared to most other webcomic creators.

But hey, it’s been updating for 10 straight years now. I took a few hiatuses here and there, and I invited guests to submit pages to keep the update schedule consistent. Goodness knows I wouldn’t have survived this long without that. Gratitude isn’t really enough, but it’s all I have.

I wouldn’t have survived without the support via Patreon either. And every time generous people answered the call when I’ve had to beg for more help because it wasn’t really a living wage and I only had barebones support elsewhere.

…It’s been a rough 10 years.

I dropped out of college because I was going insane from undiagnosed sleep apnea, which also led to me walking out of my first job in a panic attack. I couldn’t afford rent, so I was eventually evicted and had to move back home with my mother, where I promptly sat in a self-pitying fugue state for about half a decade. Eventually I got another job at a thrift store, went on a grand jury, decided to take online classes to become a paralegal, crashed and burned out again, decided to start going to counseling, realized that I’d been ignoring years of old scars, and slowly processed that until it all came out in August 2019 and I had the biggest emotional breakdown of my life, whereupon I had to stop working entirely. I couldn’t cohabit with my little brother in that state, so we sought help from our extended family, who ultimately didn’t take our problems seriously and brokered secret deals to try and solve our issues ‘their’ way, which inevitably became a clusterfuck but by then we’d already moved so it was too late. Then I moved again, this time in a much quieter place, but there was a ticking clock of misunderstanding about how long I needed to recover. When I was pushed to return to work, even when I knew that I would just break down again, I couldn’t step up, and was promptly evicted. So I had to move back in with my mom again.

Only in the last year have things started looking back up. Counseling has been going really well. I’m on a medication that works well for me. My relationship with my immediate family has significantly improved. I’m working on a game modding project, when game dev is something I had wholly given up on because I dropped out of my dream college. I’m learning to value my work and my skills, little by little.

I still have a long way to go, too. I still have massive social anxiety. (In a darkly hilarious way, the pandemic has been a boon for me, removing the expectation of going outside for a nice long while.) I’m starting to think that a ‘normal’ path through life just isn’t going to happen for me. Whatever my new ‘normal’ is going to be, I’m going to have to stake it out for myself.

And through ALL of that…!

I’ve been updating Friendship is Dragons.

I said in the past that the comic’s been a point of stability for me, but that’s kind of understating it in retrospect. Friendship is Dragons has been the one consistently good thing going… despite it just being an easy screencap webcomic about ponies doing nerdy things. It’s been, at the very least, something to keep the days going by, two by two (three on the weekends).

It’s hard to look back on in the context of a decade. At the start of it, I had all my dreams and aspirations ahead of me. I’ve lost and given up so much along the way. And most of what I’ve gained is a better understanding, through the slow and painful autopsy of my life, of why I was doomed to crash and burn in the first place, and why that has to be okay.

I’m sorry if this is upsetting for a 10-year anniversary celebration post. This webcomic is so heavily entwined into my life that I haven’t really been able to separate it. And when I looked back over those 10 years, I couldn’t pretend I felt a lot of joy in the retrospective. So I decided to be honest instead.

The most positive thing I can say about Friendship is Dragons from my perspective is that it’s been undoubtedly a lifeline. And it’s hard to be ‘proud’ of a lifeline. It’s hard to be proud of the thing keeping you above water. Endlessly grateful, certainly, but proud?

At the very least – for the second most positive thing I can say about Friendship is Dragons – it’s helped me keep my writing skills sharp and in practice on a constant regular basis for 10 years, which is why I can say that writing is one of my best skills today.

So here’s to 10 years of the best project of my life, which both isn’t saying much and is saying a whole lot. I’m just continuously surprised and humbled that anyone is still reading it.

Real Life

Notes on the September 2020 Eviction for Posterity

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It just happened today and it’s still raw, so let’s just stick with the facts.

  • At the beginning of March 2020, my family moves out of our hometown to seek support from my mother’s extended family down south. One of our goals is to separate myself from my mother and my little brother because we’re exacerbating each other’s mental issues, and I need peace and quiet in order to begin my slow recovery and tackle post-traumatic mental health issues getting in the way of work and now causing massive social anxiety.
  • The move is a massive fustercluck, involving secretly changing plans behind people’s backs, not supplying important information, and people generally assuming they know what’s best and others don’t. Standard family drama stuff, I’m told. The place I move to initially stresses me out immensely and causes another series of nervous breakdowns due to the presence of many loud children, which turns out to be one of my triggers even if it isn’t my little brother specifically.
  • Two weeks later, one of my Uncles offers to let me move in with him and his family. They are a quiet household and it should be perfect. I promptly move in. They set very generous terms for rent and utilities with the idea that it will help me move out sooner once things stabilize.
  • For about four months, things are nice and calm. I’m not terribly proactive about finding help or work, but I keep to myself, stay in my room, and make an effort not to be a bother or cause trouble at the very least.
  • Towards mid-summer, pressure mounts to start making steps towards recovery, work, independence, and moving out. There are some terse conversations, which gives me the kick in the pants required to finally bite the bullet and sign up for primary medical care.
  • From mid-August to early September, I focus on trying and balancing new medication, which ranges from being pretty effective to too effective.
  • Saturday, September 19th, there is a conversation with my Uncle about how, no really, I need to find a job, because the terms they set were very generous and unfair to them, and me being a hermit in my room most days bugs the snot out of my Uncle.
  • Monday, September 21st, I finally go see a psychiatric mental health nurse practitioner, who, on top of being very helpful for my one visit talking with her, gives me a line on some counseling I can afford. Things are looking up.
  • The morning of Wednesday, September 23rd, my Uncle suggests job opportunities at a couple of his old workplaces. He strongly suggests going over to one of them later in the day to pick up a paper application. I agree. A few hours later, however, I start to have a severe nervous breakdown about it. I’m too scared to talk with my Uncle about it, so I start texting my mother for guidance and emotional support.
  • The trip to this employer to pick up an application does not happen, though I am not told that plans have changed. I am simply left alone for the rest of the night. I do not know why. I assume I was heard crying, despite my efforts to be quiet.
  • No communication – NO communication – takes place between me and my Uncle between that morning and the following afternoon, despite passing by each other for dinner and breakfast.
  • Today, Thursday, September 24th, in the afternoon, I write a Facebook post about my mental breakdown the previous day and some of the thoughts it caused me to reflect on, like the physical nature of anxiety, and the ironic comfort that my nurse practitioner had given me on Monday regarding my possible personality disorder and that I was lucky I at least had the solid coping skills to never let it progress into rage-bender territory.
  • (About 3:50 PM, my mother is called by my Uncle, in which I am reportedly described as “playing everybody for chumps,” “making passive-aggressive comments,” and that I need to leave.)
  • Around 4PM, my mother comes into my room and tells me that I have been asked to leave. This is the first I’ve heard of this. No warning or discussion or any communication at all. We pack up promptly and without incident. When I finally ask why, my Uncle and his wife cite the Facebook post I made and the rage-bender comment, and concerns for danger for their teenager they’re raising when they’re not at home with him.
  • My only immediate option is to move back in with my mother and little brother once again, who thankfully have found their own house to rent. But considering the goal of moving down here was to try and separate us siblings in the first place, it’s not ideal. But hope springs eternal that maybe he’s mellowed out and quieted down. We look to see if I can move in with someone else in a similar situation in about 2-3 months, but for now I’ll be here.
  • And I’m pretty sure I lost my PS4 controller in the move. Not sure if I’m gonna get it back.

Real Life

State of the Spud 2020: Global Reset

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My troubles came into stark focus long before the COVID-19 pandemic, ironically enough. A little less than a year ago – shortly after the last State of the Spud post, even – I had a complete emotional breakdown, and since then I was already self-isolating because of severe social anxiety making it supremely difficult to go outside and be around people.

Thankfully, and in the spirit of starting out positive, a few important strides were made this year:

  • I am no longer living in the same home as the family member that was the biggest most toxic source of my anxiety and caretaker complex.
  • I got a lot of help with my Patreon-supported projects to help keep content churning during the worst of the breakdown (which I consider still ongoing), not the least of which being my friend GreatDinn producing a whole guest arc for Friendship is Dragons, and of course my Discord server community keeping the weekly Spudventures tabletop games a continuing event and generally being fun to play and hang out with.
  • Just this week at time of writing, I’ve started a new antidepressant that seems to be having a pretty strong positive effect, at least compared to the one I tried last year.
  • I’ve lost 50 pounds over the last year, started exercising a little bit regularly, and started eating more regularly rather than the starving and bingeing I usually ended up doing.

Still a long ways to go, and the question of “where to” is going to be the big one that will define the next year for me.

I’m staying with extended family at the moment, but there’s no uncertain terms between us that I’m going to need to move out into a place where I can support myself sooner rather than later. Which means finding a job that I can handle while I learn to control my anxiety, and finding an affordable living situation that will put me in range of how I want to develop myself without aggravating my hypersensitive introversion.

Not… exactly… easy.

It starts with making a goal, doesn’t it? What do I want to work towards? Both career-wise and short-term? What kind of rental opportunities are around, how much do they cost? What will put me on the path to getting there? What kind of jobs are available in the area that will eventually help support food, rent, and utilities, or at least help me build up a cushion of savings?

And my situation adds additional questions: If my social anxiety makes it hard to work a service job, and my physical weakness makes it hard to work a labor job, and my lack of a finished education makes it hard to work a technical job, and my unprofessional portfolio makes it hard to apply for a creative job…

Where is the way out of this dead-end? And quickly?

But that’s not unique. Everyone struggles with that stuff. On a deeper level, what I’ve discovered over the last few months of private introspection is that I’m suffering a severe crisis of confidence and identity.

I don’t know what I want. I don’t know what makes me happy. (And to the extent that I’m learning, I’m reminded at every turn that those things aren’t normal. Like wanting to be a hermit most of the time.)

I don’t trust my own judgment. I’ve been confident about these sorts of life decisions before, and I have a history of all of those initiatives ending in dumpster-fire fashion, so how can I trust myself?

I don’t know who I am.

I’ve spent most of my adult life escaping into different personas and personalities so I can work through my problems creatively and make/do something good, separate from me. And now I’m discovering that I don’t know what “me” really is. I’ve worked so hard to present myself the “right” way to so many people that it’s become a web of benign lies.

No, sometimes it’s felt more like programming, a robot that runs itself in my body. More than a couple times in the last year I’ve looked back on a conversation in real horror at myself, wondering why I agreed the ways I did and said all the “right” things. There are a few places where I should have put my foot down and said, “No. I’m sorry, but no.” I still struggle with that.

I’m struggling to find the “real” Alex and let him out, let him speak. I don’t think he’s very nice. He’s got reasons to resent a lot of people. Especially himself. But the part of me that was happy and content to be a yes-man robot broke down last year, and I don’t want to just get back inside it without addressing the underlying problems, or even acknowledging that those problems are really hurting me.

For that, I can’t just be a “strong young man” and plow through it. I tried plowing through it. The plow broke. I broke. I had to walk away. I’m building up the courage to ask (once again) for help building a new plow, a deeply humiliating thing to have to do. I have no patience for “well you should’ve just plowed through it the first time.”

I’m scared, I’m angry, all at myself. I’ve been teetering on the precipice for what feels like years now. The thing I’m most afraid of… I don’t want to take another bold step off a cliff and land in yet another dumpster-fire, after all this. I don’t know what kind of darkness that would put me in, or if I could take it.

So in a way, it’s been a medium-sized blessing for me personally that most of the world is staying home and distant while I grapple with all this. Because my real problems started well before the pandemic.

Sorry the post this year was even more sad than the last, but hey, it’s 2020. And I haven’t completely given up yet.