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?