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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.

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, Interactive, Writing

J’accuse Dreemurr Reborn

Yeah, just gonna update the blog outta nowhere like it ain’t no thing.

Go on this journey with me, will you? UNDERTALE. UNDERTALE spoilers (beware). UNDERTALE fan-comics and fanfiction. Tumblr character-driven ask-blogs. UNDERTALE Tumblr fan-ask-comic-blogs exploring a version of events after the ending. Congratulations, we have arrived at the headspace necessary to comprehend Dreemurr Reborn.

Dreemurr Reborn is a consistently high quality and high effort production, save for one thing that’s been nagging at me for a while now: There’s this weird undercurrent of author exceptionalism throughout the whole thing.

Again, UNDERTALE spoilers abound. Maybe at this point there’s been so much internet exposure it doesn’t matter anymore, but this random, aggressive blog post really ain’t worth reading if it’s gonna spoil you on the crucial details of an impactful RPG you might play someday. Continue reading J’accuse Dreemurr Reborn →

Interactive, Ponies

Pony Tales: Aspirations of Harmony

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Friendship is Dragons comfortably fills a niche for bronies who love tabletop RPGs. Yet there are those who can’t seem to get enough of their pony RPG fix, and they remedy this by making their own homebrew pony-themed roleplaying game system. And thanks to the comic, it’s easier than ever for said systems to get exposure and attract potential players.

This now makes the second time this has happened, and this time it comes from a good friend of mine. He goes by the handle Stairc, and he made his own system called Pony Tales: Aspirations of Harmony. (Not to be confused with another Pony Tales, an Open D6 pony system. From this point on, when I say “Pony Tales,” I mean Stairc’s game. I haven’t played the other one.)

Stairc organized a game with a few of my regular readers, who’ve been great about sharing recaps of their adventures with the rest of the… Friendship is Dragons community- boy that’s weird to say. Earlier this week, I got invited to create a character and play a game with the established group to try out the system. And now I hope to be a regular player each week.

Suffice to say, I really like Pony Tales, but I feel I should really elaborate on how I feel about the game, if only to satisfy the game designer in my brain.

Continue reading Pony Tales: Aspirations of Harmony →

Interactive

Skyrim – Dem Dragons

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I actually haven’t let Skyrim eat a whole lot of my time. I’m the kind of person who eats the side dishes before the main course, so I’ve been tearing through a bunch of smaller games and leaving Skyrim for “every once in a while.”

That, and I’ve been letting the mods pile up in eager anticipation of the Creation Kit coming out around this Tuesday.

But while I don’t have a whole lot to say about Skyrim, I have noticed one crucial thing about its design that I think is worth sharing.

Continue reading Skyrim – Dem Dragons →

Interactive

My Unknown Ponies: Failure is Awesome

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Over the weekend I…

Wait.

Dear Princess Celestia…

This past Sunday I played a roleplaying game run by Erin Palette, whose ideas I used as inspiration for my webcomic, Friendship is Dragons. She made a pony modification for the Unknown Armies system which she calls Unknown Ponies: Failure is Awesome, and invited myself and several of her other friends to test it over Skype.

Is that enough links? Nope, gotta mention Erin’s own after-action report, too. There we go. Now where was I?

Continue reading My Unknown Ponies: Failure is Awesome →

Interactive

First Post – MDA

I’ve been dragging my feet on this first blog post because, well, first blog posts tend to be kinda terrible. They’re always about “Oh boy, it’s a new blog and a new opportunity; here’s looking forward to all the cool stuff we’re going to do; hope all you imaginary readers like it.”

None of that. This site – spudlink.net – is primarily for my use and my reference. I’ll be looking back at this first post very often. So it needs to be something that I’ll actually find useful.

So let’s talk game design. Continue reading First Post – MDA →