Truth be told, as a bit of a jack-of-all-trades when it comes to making VNs, writing is the sub-craft that I feel least confident in. (While I have talked about this here before, when I skeeted about this on bluesky it was a surprise to my followers, evidently.) I suppose that, compared to my background in both visual arts and programming, where I largely learned through reverse-engineering and self-directed learning, writing is the craft that I do have formal, fundamental training in– But this technical background doesn’t offset how it feels to publish original writing online, where, unlike my experience with visual works, it’s very difficult to get engagement with a piece, much less any kind of feedback.

And yet, here I am, penning this meandering blog post tying together loose VN recommendations, postmortem-adjacent thoughts on my most recent games, and my thoughts on writing genre fiction.

So, genuinely, thank you to anyone who takes the time to leave comments and recommend indie works. The least I can do is try to pay this forwards.

Pervert Jam Highlights

Pervert Jam is a call to make a game in a week with a target audience of one: yourself. As it turns out, it is kind of hard to make a complete entry in one week.

Although I made an earnest attempt to play every game submitted, there were quite a few that I could not get to run or otherwise suffered from game-breaking errors. Many of the gameplay-centric games kind of left me with the feeling of watching someone else play with toys– like the supremely libidinal FLESH OUT or the body horror-ridden (VR-only) Forsaken Flesh Body Art Gallery, both of which I had to ‘experience’ through the screenshots on their respective store pages.

So, my highlights from this jam are going to be visual novel entries. I find that a one-week timeline can help the development of a short story more than it hurts it– work smarter by focusing on your thesis, not harder by inflating scope.

tracing morality through soap bubbles by bruisedmarble

The soap-bubbles are popping,

and I was wrong.

A story about what it means to have sexual power.

Deals with narratives around victimhood. Reader discretion is advised.

This game feels a bit more in-line with what I’d expect from the Toxic Yuri VN Jam or some of its subsequent gamejams than most things that come to mind when describing ‘pervert jam’, but it very much fits the theme as something “unmarketable”. A grounded and uncomfortable read that touches on the struggles of local community, navigating victimhood, and what it means to consent.

Free by tippler

Don’t try this at home! Warning for dead animal pictures!

Like many of Tippler’s other works, Free manages to be witty and humorous in its small runtime. I’d say that this semi-autobiographical (?) game is a really fun (?) example of perversion in the non-sexual sense– being obsessed with something outside of the norm.

Trans girl to moth plushie file converter free online by gnat

Feeling alienated? Isolated? Rejected for your obsession over the inexplicable?

Come to the Faewoods!

Throw it all away, and embrace the transformative power of becoming your true self.

(no refunds)

This is absolutely a game where the fetishes on display are not my personal cup of tea, but I can still admire the thought about the underlying desires that went into this– an exploration of the relief from finally letting go of all your pesky human obligations and cognitive functions in exchange for being soft and unconditionally loved.

The niche of Pervert Jam

Works that explore the author’s personal realms of perversion have always been interesting to me– even if it’s not in the constellation of kinks that I enjoy. In a time where so much media sexlessly worships the conventionally attractive figure², the honest pervert eskews both of these axes, indulging in their non-conventional interests without a hint of reservation, allowing their messy devotion to flow onto the page. In comparison, descriptions like “He was tall, dark, and handsome” or “She breasted boobily” only convey a signifier of something that is meant be seen as attractive.

And, honestly, this has always been my personal experience. I never see what gets my own jollies going in mainstream media. While it can be easy to ridicule the pop-culture milieu of sexless and shallow media, even niche erotic works lauded by my peers for how sensual and tender they are just leave me bored, despite the obvious craft skill that went into them. For the most part, I don’t see reflections of my taste outside of scenes meant to be horrific.

The process of figuring out my own sexual desires has been an arduous journey of pinning thoughts and feelings down to the canvas before carefully dissecting them, picking apart what bits and pieces do and don’t work for me.

Works devoted to pervert interests are a delight for this reason. You, like me, have spent time discovering and learning about your own interests– they were not something rolled out on a platter and understood by greater society. Show me the results of your research! Show me what parts of this you enjoy! I’m here to sit down and listen.

Further reading: How Does Touch Lead to Pain or Pleasure, Janna Levin and Steven Strogatz

Worldbuilding WITH TEETH

The core concept behind WITH TEETH was inspired by how Monoco learns spells in Expedition 33 by collecting their dismembered feet³. Feet are very much not my scene, but I appreciate just how brazenly this plays into the kink angle… But what if this did cater to me?

That could be enough to set out and write a story, but when I sit down and write something I like there to be some kind of deeper meaning or themeing to it. If there isn’t something deeper to chew on, I just get bored and don’t care to finish executing the idea (yes, even in the context of self-indulgent smut). So, what deeper meaning could there be here?

Subliminal Horrors

While dental horror is not a primal fear, it is still something deeply embedded in modern society– teeth may serve a functional purpose for mastication, yes, but teeth are also a social organ. They are front-and-center when engaging in face to face communication, and, even during moments of smiling and joy, are held to strict beauty standards. It is no coincidence that teeth falling out are a common motif in nightmares.

Absent teeth in particular carry strong connotations. At different stages of life, it is normal to go without teeth– the infant whose teeth haven’t grown in yet, the youth in the transitory period before becoming an adult, and eventually, the elder, whose lost teeth are an indicator of their senility and declining health. There is a common thread between all these stages of life, namely, that they are periods of life where an (otherwise able-bodied and of sound mind) individual is stripped of agency. To be toothless is to be seen as an incomplete human by greater society.⁴

This is where this all starts to tie back to WITH TEETH, a magical setting where the associations of senility and disability with toothlessness are directly tied to stripping magical potency. The rules of the world itself substantiate the subliminal social fear.

Some analyses would go one step further and state that the act of pulling teeth is one of emasculation. I’m not a fan of tying agency to masculinity like this, but I cannot deny that the act of removing a tooth carves a new hole in the victim.

Isn’t all sex just probing cavities, anyways?

It was for this reason that I decided to keep both figures in this story wholly ungendered. I did my best to altogether avoid pronoun use as well, instead referring to both characters as a collective of body parts that appear to act and react under their own agency. It took some tinkering to get this to parse cleanly, but I think it made for far more lurid descriptions than I would have written otherwise.

When it comes to erotic violence, the genders of the participants does not matter to me⁵, but the action in WITH TEETH is, arguably, gendered. In the absence of any social indicators outside their role in violence, what gender does the reader see?

The Pelican and Timeliness

If this wasn’t a purely text-based novel, I definitely would have included some closeups of this device.
Source: Smithsonian

There’s one last tidbit I’d like to get into while discussing this game, and that is the exact exact means of tooth extraction. I did a bit of historical research on tooth removal protocols, and it turns out that a lot of the tools used for this have not changed for centuries– I ultimately settled on using the humble dental pelican, a tool that was ultimately phased out for the older tooth key because, by sheering out the tooth sideways, it was disproportionately likely to cause damage to the surrounding jaw and gums.

But like the torturer in WITH TEETH, I fundamentally wanted this to hurt.

This characterization for the torturer interplays a bit with the piece’s time period ambiguity. If the magic in a tooth can ‘die’ and it must be extracted in whole to be ‘stolen’, then for a dental pelican to be considered best practice the story would have to take place somewhere around the 16th-18th centuries; This is directly at odds with the language used– orthodontics in a recognizably modern form did not exist until the industrial revolution, and the word ‘orthodontics’ itself dates to the early 20th century. We do not know when “our age of magic” really is, just that our torturer’s actions are anachronistic.

At the start of the story, the victim assumes that the torturer is doing this for their own gain (something conveyed succinctly with the uncreative moniker “magic thief”), but as the curtain is pulled back and more about both the world and the characters are revealed, it becomes clear that this is not the case. The game climaxes at the realization that this is purely an act of sadistic hedonism, and closes on the note that the torturer has both done this before and proudly wears the marks of doing this.

Further reading: Dental Imaginaries in 19th Century Literature and Culture, Eleanor Chantelle Faulkner

WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT

It is probably unsurprising for me to say that WHAT HATH GOD WROUGHT is also a game that started with a core conceit for how the world would work.

In my opinion, “worldbuilding” is a concept with very different connotations to different people. To many, it conjures notions of bullet point lists about topics like holiday traditions and jargon– things that can make for interesting decoration in a narrative, certainly, but are not the conceptual framework needed to deliver the intended themes and plot of a story. Personally, I agree with what Ada Palmer has to say: that the worldbuilder’s craft is the same as the historian’s, an art of drawing throughlines between disparate events in order to make statements about the sociopolitical and economic forces that steer the world.

And many of the throughlines from the world of WHGW to our modern day should be obvious. I am far from the first person to draw parallels between the current state of generative AI and prior tech bubbles⁶, and I doubt that I will be the last. By writing a game about generative AI that only minimally includes computers (and their output), we are free to focus on the other effects of the technology: decreasing the signal-to-noise ratio of an increasingly corporatized internet, the environmental impact of new datacenters on the surrounding (often lower-income) communities, the erosion of skilled labor and how this causes growing class disparity, the way an outside agent that mirrors one’s beliefs can further entrench them, etc. etc.

That said, there is one component of the setting that I feel is more about stylizing and underscoring the way it feels to live through such a time than is about a historical argument about the impacts of the technology: if we stop feeding our demons data, the world will not end tomorrow. But given how the average person is helpless to do anything about this industry-backed juggernaut that feels as though it is consuming the world around them, we can relate to the people in the world of WHGW have no choice but to watch as the economy warps around this existential threat.

I’ll spare this essay some of the specific decisions that were made when putting together the setting for this game. Just know that both Fisher and Laplace Atelier were involved in the early back-and-forth that pinned a lot of the specifics down, after I provided the initial pitch. This world would be very different without their contributions.

Reject Nostalgia, Turn to the Future

Setting WHGW shortly after the peak of the dot-com bubble in an alt-history where that bubble never popped both worked to cement some of our thematic parallels and gave us a delicious set of aesthetics and cultural influence to draw from.

Y2K throwbacks are in vogue, for everything from fashion to the growing popularity of oldweb-inspired services like Neocities and webrings⁷. But, even when looking back at these times with fondness, I think it is important to avoid the sweet poison of nostalgia, the fascist impulse to revisit an older time as though it was a physical space.

The experimental digital artist Nathalie Lawhead wrote an optimistic piece about the nostalgia in indie/weird-games for Web 1.0, often found in those who never lived through the time themselves. The crux of her argument is:

If I was to point at any one instance in internet history to say “this is where it all changed for the worst”, I would point to when business started to “take the internet seriously”.

I argue that such a time never existed.

The moment the internet shifted from an internal research project by the department of defense to something available to the public, companies have been trying to extract value from it. The internet is not, in the economic sense of the term, free. It takes human effort to extract copper and rare earth metals from the ground to make wire and other hardware, to bury cables and keep up with maintaining them, to generate the electricity to run servers and replace failing hardware; The people who perform this labor deserve to be fairly compensated. While there are arguments to be made about who should be responsible for footing the bill, under our present economic system one cannot deny that companies providing access to this grand series of tubes have incentive to seek increasing payment for it.

By the time of the examples cited in the article, the movie Hackers (1995) and the essays “A Declaration for the Independence of Cyberspace” and “Cyberselfish” (1996), the hooks had already been set for many of the modern conflicts that we face on the internet today.

Services like Prodigy that simplified the process of getting online had to be supported by advertiser funding in order to stay in the black. By 1991, Prodigy had already pioneered the banner ad and began to censor anyone who spoke ill of advertisers on their forums or messaging services. Companies revoking user content because they are beholden to the advertisers that maintain their bottom line– stop me if this sounds familiar.

1995 saw the birth of advertising behemoth DoubleClick, who would lay the groundwork for advertising agencies providing software-as-a-service as well as leveraging unique user fingerprints and a real-time bidding system in order to optimize the number of ad click-throughs. If this kind of combined rent-seeking-behavior combined with selling users as a product sounds familiar, that’s probably because it’s the same basic revenue model as Google Ad Services, who would eventually acquire the company. There would later be a class-action lawsuit brought against the company for violating user privacy by compiling information on their online habits without their knowledge or consent– stop me if this sounds familiar.

As much as we regard Geocities as a bastion for easily-accessible individual expression during the Web 1.0 era, we shouldn’t forget that in 1997, after the invention of javascript, the service invented what would later become known as the “pop up ad” (and this was before the controversial acquisition by Yodel Yahoo that would drive the platform to become even more profit-oriented). Browser developers would work on tools to stop the obtrusive ads, creating a game of cat-and-mouse between those who profited from user eyeballs and users who wanted a better web-surfing experience– stop me if this sounds familiar.

The power of looking to the past in order to feel hope for the future should not come from nostalgia for an era that never existed, where the original sin that would cast us from the Garden of Eden had not yet been committed; It is that knowing that people in the past had to contend with many of the same issues that we do today, and that they fought back and survived.

The Belief is Out There

One thing I wish we could have done a more concrete job solidifying was the importance of belief and how it interplays with all of the economic and supernatural forces that drive the game. A tech bubble cannot exist without a critical mass of investors to believe in it; Organized religion cannot exist without a critical mass of patrons to believe in it; AI psychosis cannot exist without a critical mass of amplified thoughts repeated back to the person who believes in them.

Belief is the glue that fills in the cracks when other explanations for the way the world works fail. While we kind of touch on this with the timing (and implied cause) of The Great Crash as well as the nature of how demons appear to people, there was a lot that we left on the table.

The direct conflict between religious and scientific ontologies for the world has always been fascinating to me.

Rachel’s status as a practicing Roman Catholic scientist was something that I decided on relatively early on, and is a topic somewhat close to my heart– I am a scientist who was raised in the Catholic church, although I stopped genuinely believing in religion in my teens when I parsed that many stories in the bible were meant to be taken as metaphors to guide social behaviors.⁸

I was also not very old when I learned to code switch when questioned in my beliefs. The answers that I gave at Sunday School were different to the answers that I gave to my mother (a catholic scientist)⁹ were different to the answers that I riddled out for myself inside my own head. While I don’t think that the scientist’s view of empirically understanding the world through study is something that has to be innately incompatible with belief in a higher power, but as I understand things now, I do think that you have to take a few liberties from the Catholic Church’s teachings in order to reconcile these belief systems.

I really wish that we could have gone into greater depth about how Rachel holds these (superficially conflicting) belief systems in balance, but by the time that I realized we were wholly overlooking this the script was already growing past our ability to easily sustain it in the limited time of the jam. Maybe on the next one.

Further reading: God is a Fiery Accelerant, Erik Davis

Robert Silverberg’s Science Fiction 101

Around the start of the year, I picked up this book on a whim when visiting an out-of-town used bookstore. Short stories I hadn’t read by Philip K. Dick and Alfred Bester? Yes, please!

I greatly enjoy the form of the SFF short story, and this book is a delightful collection of them. Aside from being an anthology, there is commentary between each work by the curator of the collection, Robert Silverberg, often going into the cultural context of the work’s original publication and analyzing the work itself, highlighting themes and dissecting effective narrative devices– It’s like having a mini-bookclub baked-in to the book itself. That said, there are definitely points where I disagree with what Silverberg has to say about a story.

The stories in the book run the gamut from the crunchy and detail-oriented to the lyrical and emotional, but the overwhelming feeling across the selected works is a sense of wonder. The last story in the collection, Day Million by Fredrerik Pohl, is a story that paints mundane life in the distant future as something wondrously different to our own, which works well as a capstone to a collection. (It’s a particularly short short story, you could probably go read it now without losing the cadence of this post too much.)

This is the gist of what Silverberg has to say about it:

Long before the term “future shock” became a cliché, Pohl realized that the world is in a state of rapid metamorphosis in which change has been coming at an almost unimaginable rate: and in which that rate will continue to accelerate. Reality makes science fiction look timid; what most writers imagine as the world of 2583 will be old stuff before the year 2050, and if we could see the true world of 2583 it would be virtually unrecognizable to us. […] “Day Million” is framed in the form of a challenge to our complacency.

But… is this unimaginable shift really all that the story is saying? I want to highlight this particular snippet, emphasis added.

About this business of her being a boy. It didn’t matter to her audiences that genetically she was male. It wouldn’t matter to you, if you were among them, because you wouldn’t know it—not unless you took a biopsy cutting of her flesh and put it under an electron-microscope to find the XY chromosome—and it didn’t matter to them because they didn’t care. Through techniques which are not only complex but haven’t yet been discovered, these people were able to determine a great deal about the aptitudes and easements of babies quite a long time before they were born—at about the second horizon of cell-division, to be exact, when the segmenting egg is becoming a free blastocyst—and then they naturally helped those aptitudes along. Wouldn’t we? If we find a child with an aptitude for music we give him a scholarship to Juilliard. If they found a child whose aptitudes were for being a woman, they made him one. As sex had long been dissociated from reproduction this was relatively easy to do and caused no trouble and no, or at least very little, comment.

How much is “very little”? Oh, about as much as would be caused by our own tampering with Divine Will by filling a tooth. Less than would be caused by wearing a hearing aid. Does it still sound awful? Then look closely at the next busty babe you meet and reflect that she may be a Dora, for adults who are genetically male but somatically female are far from unknown even in our own time. […] The difference is that […] the people of Day Million did it often, on purpose, because they wanted to.

Well, that’s enough to tell you about Dora. It would only confuse you to add that she was seven feet tall and smelled of peanut butter. Let us begin our story.

While I would agree that this excerpt is meant as a challenge to the reader’s complacency, it is not spinning a yarn set in a distant future that is wholly detached from the author’s own time¹⁰– part of the challenge to the reader’s complacency comes from pointing out that some of elements of this story exist in our current time, and in ways that many people may not notice. I don’t think Robert Silverberg did.

To borrow the (perhaps cliché) words of another SF author,

The future is already here– it’s just not evenly distributed

– William Gibson

And this, to me, gets at the heart of what Science Fiction is about. We tell stories about hypothetical what-ifs and the future in order to talk about today; Abstracted metaphors that highlight the underlying emotional truth of a situation, built with the knowledge that the future is built from historical throughlines that started in our past.

To quote the prescient Ocavia Butler in her short essay, A Few Rules For Predicting The Future, written in 2000,

“SO DO YOU REALLY believe that in the future we’re going to have the kind of trouble you write about in your books?” a student asked me as I was signing books after a talk. The young man was referring to the troubles I’d described in Parable of the Sower and Parable of the Talents, novels that take place in a near future of increasing drug addiction and illiteracy, marked by the popularity of prisons and the unpopularity of public schools, the vast and growing gap between the rich and everyone else, and the whole nasty family of problems brought on by global warming.

“I didn’t make up the problems,” I pointed out. ‘All I did was look around at the problems we’re neglecting now and give them about 30 years to grow into full-fledged disasters.’

If reality makes science fiction look timid, it’s only because it is being taken too literally. Writing science fiction is the art of using what-ifs to deeply explore our present reality.

Further reading: The Importance of Reading (and Teaching) Cyberpunk in the Age of AI, Joanna Nelius-Free

In closing

Woof, this has been my longest blog post to date. When I first set out to write this meandering post I didn’t really think that it was going to be this long, but I suppose that it should not be a surprise to myself that I have a lot of words to say on topics that I feel passionate about. Thanks for sticking through with this ‘till the end.

Site updates

Been a minute since I had one of these headings, eh? I’ve been on a kick of tinkering bits and pieces of this site, partially brought upon by seeing more pages by fellow TYVNJ participants.

• Added toybox
• Added shrine page
• Added improved last.fm now playing widget on landing page
• Minor restyling
  • Middle column of layout is now centered when all 3 columns are visible
  • Tweaked welcomments section
• External links now have icon to indicate opening in a new tab (you probably noticed this already)
• Implemented littlefoot.js footnotes (another thing obvious in the contents of this page)¹¹

I admit that I kind of want to rip out and replace parts of the backend now that I have a stronger grasp of jekyll, as well as rework large chunks of html/css now that I know about standards that were written after 2006… but we keep moving forwards. 🏃‍♀️‍➡️

Footnotes

Now, I got a lotta small things done and continue to have a lotta increasingly big things to do, so let’s keep this post brisk.

• I have a new game out! The Voyeur: A BDSiM Side Story, a short kinetic novel from the perspective of The Manager, made for Videotome Jam 3.
  • The game is also hosted directly on this website, because Videotome is an awesome engine for in-browser games.
• There is now a page on this site for Postmortal Figures, which links to all the major works in the setting. It’s only gonna get more sprawling from here, so this is going to be useful to keep tabs on everything, moving forward.
• I also added an RSS feed exclusively for my visual art, and a small feature of my most recent art on the homepage to this site.

I must confess, Tomodachi Life has also been taking up an unexpectedly large amount of my time as of late.

I must confess, Tomodachi Life has also been taking up an unexpectedly large amount of my time as of late.

What else, what else… I’m also doing visual dev for a Daydrinking Jam game, which is going to be an excuse to play around with some renpy toys I haven’t gotten to play with yet, so that’s going to be fun. Even if it’s going to be the vast majority of my free time for the next week and a half, ahaha.

Videotome Jam 3 Recs

There’s a lot of variety cram-packed into a lot of small games, so I do recommend clicking around a bit if you’re interested in the medium of VNs. Here’s some personal highlights from what I’ve played so far:

• Me / 我 / Saya / நான் is about dissociation, diaspora, daily life, and forgetting your mother tongue.
• Scrimmage Ball 5050 is about a possible future of (american) football.
• Running at Night is about balancing work and hobbies, and the act of choosing to run when you can.
• This Desolate Night is a beautiful adaptation of an urdu poem about a chukar partridge who yearns for the moon.

The way sinister undertones work their way into this game makes me giggle just as much as she would…

The way sinister undertones work their way into this game makes me giggle just as much as she would…

Anyways, that’s all for now, see y’all again soon. 🏃‍♀️‍➡️

Random act selection (left) achieves the "relaxed" ending >90% of the time, while a player who tries to maximize their strength and intelligence stats and prioritizes triggering events (right) always achieves one of the three confession endings.
Running a Monte Carlo Simulation of a simulation game… Baudrillard probably has something to say about this.

Random act selection (left) achieves the "relaxed" ending >90% of the time, while a player who tries to maximize their strength and intelligence stats and prioritizes triggering events (right) always achieves one of the three confession endings.
Running a Monte Carlo Simulation of a simulation game… Baudrillard probably has something to say about this.

There are already two parties interested in developing games using this engine (and the accompanying suite of simulation tools), and, while it may take the back burner to any game jams I’m involved in, I fully intend to provide support for this engine in the coming years. Don’t hesitate reach out if you want help using this code to make a game!

I confess that parts of this code are a bit scrappy because I didn’t want to take the time to rewrite significant chunks of the original engine– renpy treats all variables that aren’t scoped to a method or function as global, and it’s not considered bad form to look at these global variables in scoped code. So some of my rewrites to convert renpy code to python code make dodgy use of the global keyword. I may or may not come back and clean that up in the future.

At some point in the next few months I intend to write a PR for the base DSE engine that includes some of the more generic improvements that I implemented, so do look forward to that if you don’t need the full suite of simulation tools.

As for the rest of the changes from the base DSE engine, I’ll just transpose the contents of README.md here:

dse: Rougelike Fork

Dating Sim Engine for Ren’Py The Dating Sim Engine (DSE) is a framework for writing games based on events that are triggered by statistics. It comprises a number of independent modules that can be combined to create games.

Features of this fork

• Core renpy files updated to modern versions.
• Additional “Relationship status” screen that displays scores with love interests.
• Optional “Hardcore” mode, which disables saves and stores all user data in persistent variables.
• Random events for each day are rolled at the start of the day, instead of right before they occur.
• Because events for a day are pre-determined, “hintable” events will be highlighted on the scheduler.
• An event viewer menu, which allows the player to revisit any scene that they have already seen. Note: This uses the renpy replay function and may lead to undesired behavior if contents of events are conditioned on player stats. There may be a patch to address this in the future.
• And last, but certainly not least: an included gameplay simulator which can predict player stat values and endings under different play strategies.

Minor site updates

This site is now a member of the *nix and yuri EVN webrings! Go check out these awesome sites!

I have added a separate rss feed for the “now” series of posts. If you sub to both this and the blog rss feed you should be up to date on all the minor updates of this site.

While this site is hosted on neocities, the last updated field there isn’t reliable due to the way my comment system works– this site gets “updated” any time that a spam comment gets posted or deleted, which happens roughly on the daily.

See ya soon!

Expect another post in a day or two~

With this post I’m rolling out some tweaks to the overall structure of this website, with the goal of making it easier to navigate the increasingly large breadth of content. Changelist:

• Added favicon
• ToC tweaks
  • Moved reformatting of long entries to Ruby backend instead of javascript
  • Fixed minor issues with ToC links with special unicode characters (looking at you, Butterfly Æffect)
  • Subtle effect that makes onscreen headings appear bold
• /links page updates
  • Added more buttons
  • Added cliques and applied to new webrings
  • Added the entire Tools and Uma Musume sections
  • Added more entries to Lit. and Deus Ex sections
• Added tagging system to blog posts
  • Can see all posts with a given tag at /tag/(tag name).html
  • “Related Posts” section at the bottom of each blog post, populated by posts with the most similar tags.

The fullbody illustration for Epsilon. I was a big fan of the feet, but they never made it in-frame in the game.

I won’t get into anything that could be considered a spoiler, but there was absolutely a lot of plot that we came up with in these brainstorming sessions that wound up on the cutting room floor. Fisher axed around 2/3 of our planned plot in order to get everything wrapped up in time for the jam, which was definitely the right call to make. I do think that we were able to tie up what we had in a satisfying way– many of the plot elements that we planned to elaborate ended up as juicy tidbits to chew on in the epilogue.

There’s been some talk amongst the team about revisiting the setting for a sequel, which might happen one day. One day I may also write my own short story(ies?) expanding on the origins and development of the mechs. I’m fully aware of the pitfalls of over-explaining the horror in a horror story, but in this case I believe that the number of fucked up implications multiply with a slightly more zoomed-out view of the big picture…

Minor aside behind the scenes of Bug Grinder

Learning to work with a new team can be an exercise in learning the differences in your creation styles just as much as it is an exercise in creation. One point where this difference in styles became incredibly apparent was when deciding what to name the project– almost all of my proposed names were far more scientific or technical than the others.

My proposed names list:

• Stochastic Reality
• Basal Contamination
• Tactical Stochasticity
• Mechaphasia
• Subsumption: Mechaphasia
• Manifest Subsumption
• Mechyme
• Divertechulopepsia
• Ancillary Laparopilot
• Laparopilot Record
• Laparopilot Appendix
• Cricket, Human, Mecha

I’m still really fond of the word “laparopilot”, I may find an excuse to use that later.

New site features

The release of Bug Grinder segways nicely into two new site features: locally hosted itch-alike game pages and a 18+ content warning module (both of which can be seen on the page for Bug Grinder). While I don’t think that Bug Grinder counts as explicit sexual material, it’s still mature and fetish-y ways that make me want to throw that warning label on it. There will definitely be new things in the future that more unambiguously deserve this label, so please stay tuned.

I also created a full game page for Offsuit Pair while I was at it. In the future I may throw some of my 18+ work into my gallery, but that will require some elbow grease to get the template to work with the Adult-Only filter. I think I’ll also need to swap hosts before I implement this.

Changes to upcoming dev plans

The tl;dr of this section is that I will not be participating in Yuri Jam. (I will still be working on the project I was planning to submit to that.)

I know that I’m just some dev and that backing out of plans isn’t something that needs a long explanation, but participating in this jam was something that I have mentioned offhand a few times over and I don’t like to quietly drop projects and leave people wondering. Plus, some readers might find the process of making these decisions insightful, idk.

I initially wanted to use Yuri Jam as a way to get a demo for my ongoing solodev project¹ out the door and also potentially meet other people who make similarly interesting things/would be interested in my work. Plus, a semi-firm deadline would force me to lock in– I’ve been piddling with parts of this since January and, truthfully, have little to show for it. Being forced to work on this project as my #1 priority would absolutely make me make ground on it.

The thing to precipitate the idea of “do I really want to partake in this game jam now, with this project?” was listening to the Crying Rules Actually podcast coverage of the Toxic Yuri VN Jam. In these episodes, the hosts spend a lot of time talking about what actually constitutes toxic yuri and ultimately come to the conclusion that many entries to the jam don’t actually meet the stated theme (something in common with the judges of the event, evidently). While I maintain that Offsuit Pair does qualify as Toxic Yuri, I found myself asking whether my ongoing project even counts as yuri.

This ongoing project is a continuation of my Postmortal Figures story, and while I did originally label the Volume 0 short stories as yuri, they also take a fundamentally different approach to carving out a narrative than this visual novel (Volume 1) will. In Volume 0, I jump around the narrative timeline to stitch together moments depicting the relationship between two women with a sci-fi thriller as the backdrop. In comparison, Volume 1 is going to be a telling of a heist involving all the established women from Volume 0. Drama first, relationships second. While there will be a ton of homoerotic tension, it’s far less a “romance” and far more a work that you walk away from and imagine that the characters get together.²

I think that, to me, this yearning can count as a kind of Yuri. But your average Yuri Jam participant, who will be walking in with a specific set of genre conventions, is unlikely to agree.³

At the end of the day, an event like Yuri Jam is only as useful as its ability to put you in contact with like-minded people, and between the aforementioned “my VN doesn’t really count as yuri” and the fact that a lot of the edgy or toxic yuri creators appear to have participated in TYVNJ in lieu of Yuri Jam this year, I just don’t think it would be beneficial for me to participate in.

The other half of this equation, of course, is where my creative energies are. As much as I’d love to get back on this project (I haven’t touched it since before TYVNJ started), I’m also tired right now. I haven’t had much of a break from firm development-related deadlines since TYVNJ started– I went from Offsuit Pair to website dev (pressured by the itch situation) to Friction & Integration for Yuri Shipping Olympics to more website dev (with a deadline of being done before Noise Jam) to Bug Grinder. I just need some time without a deadline above my head to recharge.

Some of my other hobbies are feeling sorely neglected. This is only a fraction of the cards that I need to sort into playables and bulk.

Plus, getting a public demo out is going to be a lot of front-loaded work. I feel like the ideal VN demo would let players pick up where they left off when the full version releases, but, like Offsuit Pair, this visual novel is going to have plot-centric gameplay. Building the engine and fine-tuning it to make early encounters to work right is going to take a lot of work from both a programming and art perspective. It’s not like writing where scaling back to 1/3 of the novel means you can leave about 2/3 of the work for later.

Yeah, there’s also the option of working on something else entirely for the jam, but… I already got the drive to do that out of my system with the aforementioned small projects.

I’m gonna keep working on Postmortal Figures Volume 1, just on my own time. I think that instead of making a demo, I’m gonna aim to get enough interesting scenes/cgs/gameplay together to make a compelling trailer before the end of the year.

On the upcoming Deus Ex remaster

So, some old lore about me: most of my oldest current friendships come from my days in the Deus Ex fandom ca. 2010-2012, in the lead up to the release of Deus Ex: Human Revolution and the time shortly thereafter. Honestly, it still blows my mind to think about how it’s been longer since Deus Ex: Human Revolution dropped than the time between Deus Ex 1 and Human Revolution.

Let’s just say that when the remaster news dropped, the old groupchat positively lit up.

To be clear: we were not overjoyed with this news. It was more of a “…but why, though?” This remaster isn’t bringing anything new to the table, unlike the recent System Shock 1 remaster, and the graphical decisions made are rather jarring, to say the least. The new models don’t feel accurate to the intent of the old ones⁴, and they still feel clunky and old to a modern audience.

In some cases remasters feel “justified” because they make an old game accessible again, but this remaster is objectively less accessible than the original. Just go buy the original right now! It should run on any modern sysetm! Play it! It’s the GOAT for a reason! image h/t

In some cases remasters feel “justified” because they make an old game accessible again, but this remaster is objectively less accessible than the original. Just go buy the original right now! It should run on any modern sysetm! Play it! It’s the GOAT for a reason! image h/t

Fast turnaround, little creative dev work, an established audience that enjoys the established IP… this is a game that makes that only makes sense on a profits spreadsheet. The fact that it exists speaks to the problems endemic to the modern gaming industry.

But still, this is a game that’s incredibly important to me. Hell, I have vague plans to build a shrine to it on this website! For now it’s just a set of links to some of the many, many things that people have written about it. I’m still finding new analyses of the game from time to time– the other day I found this fun blog entry on how the game handles password security, with some replies from the devs in the comments section!

Putting aside how DX is an absolute masterclass in game design, it is a game that is important to me because the story was exactly the thing I needed to hear when I played it in highschool. Deus Ex is a very political game, and it was eerily prescient of “The War on Terror” that Bush would start not even 2 years after the game’s release. Among many other things, the game points out that the label “terrorist” is a term of convenience for the current enemies to the established method of political rule.

Now, I’m certain that this idea isn’t radical to the readers of this blog, but at the time I found it to be a revolutionary thought. The war in Afghanistan was nothing more than background noise through my childhood, and I grew up in a conservative suburb in Texas where the overwhelming opinion was blind support for the president. I was vaguely aware that some other people opposed the war, but I didn’t put any thought into these things so removed from my daily life. I just accepted the definition of terrorists as “people who are choosing to do Evil” that was presented to me.

As I got older, military propaganda was everywhere in pop culture and further cemented this thought: the MCU was just starting to take off, where movies like Iron Man showed blatant disregard for the lives of those from middle eastern countries; You couldn’t go to a hangout where people were playing games without the latest Call of Duty on a screen somewhere, especially after the colossal success of Modern Warfare 2.

I’m not saying this to provide excuses, and I know that this is written from a position of extreme privilege. I’m also not going to claim that DX is some leftist masterpiece that disassembles everything wrong with modern society, either. But the questions that the game asks do a good job of making the player question their political beliefs, as well the nature of belief itself. This game was a critical step in unlearning the conservative-imperialist politics that I grew up in, eventually leading to the person that I am today.⁵

In the end, the old game hasn’t gone away. The remaster announcement got a lot of people talking about Deus Ex again, and I even got some of my friends to install it for the first time. Even though the remaster looks bad, the fact that it gets people talking about this ~25 year old game makes me happy.

Will I be playing the remaster on day one? Probably. I want front row seats to this disaster (I am fully aware that I may be a part of the problem here.) But I’d like to see a Deus Ex 5 one day, even if it is a shitshow…

In Conclusion

Hah, this blog post ended up being a lot longer than expected. I suppose as this website matures I’ll have a lot less to say about new feature rollouts and lot more musing on general goings-on. I’m definitely planning to write up some minor reviews to shoutout cool indie works (including continued TYVNJ coverage), so please look forward to that.

Footnotes

I can’t imagine a simpler way to go through over a hundred images and annotate it with all this information.

The code for this is relatively application-specific, but if there’s a desire for this kind of jekyll-specific layout I can make a writeup on it and release the backend code. The most universally applicable code, the python script for generating the yml file, is currently hosted on this website if you want to take a peek.

I was also inspired a bit by Rue’s website to make a little “Current status” widget. It’s automatically appended to the end of blog posts when there is an update on the same day as the post, and the latest update is listed on my homepage. There’s also an automatic status history page which includes every update I’ve ever posted. Neat!

Future Plans

I may be done with my initially outlined goals, but there’s still more site features that I want to add (the scope creep is eternal). Expect these in the near-to-mid term future.

• not-itch page layout for games, to have more in-depth descriptions than the current games page
• A modular 18+ content warning, which can blur out a part of a page unless the user clicks through and opts in to see it (with an optional checkbox to not show the warning in the future).
• Actually submit Offsuit Pair to the Yuri EVN Webring. Been meaning to do this one for a bit 😭
• More buttons!!
• Small post-mortem for Friction & Integration and Regret Matching (or maybe something more overarching on my experience directing all three of the Team OCs YSO anthologies?)
• More recs from my ongoing TYVNJ reading.

Other changes since last update post

• Long tables of contents now scroll, both on desktop and mobile.
• Blog entries now link to preceding and proceeding entries.
• RSS feed now includes only post excerpt instead of whole post, so that readers will have to click through to see content that wouldn’t be included in the post content (status update and comments).

Most important news first: I have released a new anthology game, Friction & Integration. My contribution to this game is what I was alluding to in the Offsuit Pair post-mortem when I said that I still had a few ideas I wanted to play around with in the same engine. Everyone worked very hard on this collection, so please check it out!

Secondly, I have uploaded an updated re-release of a collection of my original short stories, Postmortal Figures, which now includes some inline illustrations. My contribution to Friction & Integration is a direct followup on some of these stories, and my Yuri Jam project is a direct sequel to the events of the last two chapters.

On a site-maintenance note, you’ll notice that comment sections have been replaced. They’re entirely self-hosted now, through a service called welcomments! This is both a lot more flexible for you all and a lot more self-sufficient for me, win-win. I plan to manually transfer over my existing comments, so hopefully there won’t be much time between making this post and those being updated.

I have also drafted up a small reclist of most of the games I’ve played from the Toxic Yuri VN Jam so far; This was done as a part of the recommendations bonus round in the Yuri Shipping Olympics. These aren’t terribly substantial, but because they’re for 18+ games I was required to put them behind a role-locked discord channel. I decided I’d rather these be outside a walled garden where more people can access them, so I will cross-post them here as well.

Preface

I will not necessarily include a list of warnings for each recommendation on this list, so please refer to each individual game’s page. These games run the gamut from relatively benign to active discussion/depiction of suicidality and other heavy themes. To quote deaddeaddeath, “Eat only that which you can digest”.

This list is not sorted in any particular order, other than the semi-arbitrary order I read them in.

Terms of Assembly

by ruemilley, Noobert, and _Miisty

Author-provided summary

Need a hand? Some lip service? A second set of eyes? In a future where a new body is just a down payment away, THESECO has an installment plan for that.

Jeanne needs an arm.

Margaret likes to feel appreciated—one replacement, waived fees, no questions asked.

Now they’re both paying the price.

What I liked about it

This was the first game I played form the jam, and what can I say? I love depictions of how capitalism shapes bodily autonomy and how this might manifest as self-loathing. (And I’m a bit of a cyborg pervert, but that’s besides the point). The dynamic between the two leads is super fun and the in-universe advertisements are a very well put-together way to deliver narrative info.

Ten Metre Tide

by kazehai and ppilotco

Author-provided summary

“One day in mid-December, I returned to the shores of Fort Colwyn to the curious realization that the town had been wholly evacuated.”

A mixed media story about stories, storytelling, intertextuality, and canon building.

What I liked about it

If you’ve caught wind of games from this jam this is undoubtedly one of the ones you saw, and with good reason: it’s absolutely gorgeous. A masterfully interwoven story talking about the lives of three women and how their lives change in the last year of human habitation on their small island home. The realization (and dread) as the various nonlinear plot threads come together is utterly satisfying.

妄想発想 Paranoia Hyponoia

by 麒麟蝙蝠 (kirinkoumori)

Author-provided summary

“I’ve never felt this way about anyone else before… So, so…”

“Shut up!”

She grabs me by the throat, hands wrapped around the collar I wore that day. I can’t bear to look her in the eyes.

“I am so sick of you, Aiko!”

Her hands tighten around my neck and I black out.

… Except, I wake up in my room, drenched in sweat. My bedroom ceiling looks down on me.

“Haha… another one of these dreams…”

I close my eyes again.

Old-style 2000s era inspired kinetic novel. Yuri. 18+.

Greatly inspired by a certain French philosopher.

What I liked about it

If the description “absurdist denpa” means anything to you, you truly owe it to yourself to check out this game. Even if you haven’t read the recommended reading list featuring Sartre, Camus, and Dazai (copies of which are bundled with the game, a bold authorial choice that I commend earnestly), this intense story about delusion and philosophy is hard to put down– and hard to forget. The work as a whole is also delightfully nostalgic, with both visuals and cultural references that strongly evoke early ‘aughts VNs.

Incen(diary)

by rombuffer and VioletBooks

Author-provided summary

WELCOME TO ACEDIA

So, guess who got commissioned to search another archive by BORE? That’s right! Aren’t you lucky?

This one’s real simple, at least. Once you’re ready, I’ll connect you to an old academy ark, ‘Acedia’. Coordinates were so far out, it was pretty hard to get a stable connection- probably why it was abandoned, too. No life signs on board. Wanna take a bet on why…? Heh, well anyway, here’s the instructions:

Wake up the old system AI, !Rue, and have her unlock the archive logs. Find out what happened to our subjects of interest; girl named Kui and her companion, designation C-06.

View and download whatever files !Rue unlocks, then decompile it- I can do the rest.

Should be a quick mission, right? Don’t disappoint me now.

-CT-

What I liked about it

Incen(diary) is an amazing use of the medium; if I was not incredibly familiar with renpy as an engine at this point I would have been absolutely shocked to learn that this game was made with that engine. This game is a remarkable take on epistolary-adjacent writing, where the player must interact through a diegetic computer interface as they hack into the computer records of a former medical facility as they uncover what made the operation come crashing down. This develops in unexpected directions as computer logs report tampering and the system AI that has been helpful to a fault starts to behave in peculiar ways…

LET’S GO TO HEAVEN

by ruin

Author-provided summary

two scientists kill themselves to become a god (in space) a game about fear, and longing

What I liked about it

What if immortality was both a curse and a means to continually extract labor from working individuals? This far-future scifi offers fascinating glimpses into a world where this is all just background noise and protagonist Deimos seethes internally and just wants a break from it all. Every part of the presentation is amazingly put-together, with gorgeous art and well-timed audio cues that build up the cryptic atmosphere.

REGULAR MAINTENANCE IS REQUIRED

by Laddo_d

Author-provided summary

Unit 1277-B is the latest model from a fantastic line of home cleaning robots. She is programmed to love and obey her master no matter what. Her master is very busy, and can’t always complete the routine maintenance 1277-B needs to serve at maximum efficiency. How long will 1277-B last before her robot body falls apart?

Do your best, 1277-B! No matter what, you will always love master and master probably loves you! It’s definitely true! You know this is true because your programming tells you so.

What I liked about it

Very short and “sweet”, this visual novel has an amazing handle on what exactly it means to be a robot. Every bit of internal narration and decision making frame the player character, Skip, as a disposable tool meant to serve corporate profit-goals. None of this bothers her though– she loves her work! ^_^

Maybe next year…

by ptln

Author-provided summary

Two college students suffer through trauma, guilt, anxiety, and jealousy during the last day of finals before graduation.

Maybe Next Year… is a toxic yuri visual novel. The story follows two women, one drowning in delusions and self-destruction, the other in obligation and resentment, and both clinging desperately onto one another.

What I liked about it

While a lot of the entries in the TYVNJ are about fantastic situations driving women to spectacular disaster, Maybe next year… is very mundane. The struggles with self-worth and obligation feel very raw and earnest, the kind of thing that typically only happens with a passion project from a solo dev. This passion also shines through with all the small details in CGs and character expressions; a very well thought-out use of developer time and asset distribution.

Pressure Cooker

by perpetuaReality

Author-provided summary

Two women trapped in an elevator.
It’s been who-knows-how-many hours.
Tensions are high.
They are sweaty and on edge.
Any spark will put them at each other’s throats.

What I liked about it

This game is framed as a video feed recording the incident between these two women, which adds a layer of delicious voyeurism to the raunchy events that unfold. Short with incredibly punchy and effective characterization, there is no time wasted in cutting directly to the conflict. If you enjoyed “Black and White: Tough Love At The Office”, you need to play this game.

Girl’s Symbiosis

by Lunaticker

Author-provided summary

A BEAST FATED TO DEVOUR OR DIE
A PREY ANIMAL THAT CAN’T HELP BUT RUSH ITS FATE
CAN TRUE LOVE BLOOM ACROSS THE FOOD CHAIN?

What I liked about it

Among the many people talking in the TYVNJ server while the jam was going on, this game was one of the ones that consistently caught my eye with stylish visuals. When I finally got to read through the novel, I was pleasantly surprised by the very visceral and intense writing style and the incredible chemistry between the two leads. I wouldn’t hesitate to call the relationship toxic, but their predator-and-prey dynamic sometimes struck me as oddly wholesome, which is part of why I think this one stuck with me– it can be tough to justify why a couple in a toxic story is staying together, and this game did a stellar job of explaining that.

The Lonely Dog Yearns For Love

by porksbun

Author-provided summary

Kinetic Visual Novel about becoming a goth girl’s dog for a day.

What I liked about it

This is another game that stuck with me because of the absolutely stylish visual presentation– the scratchy and animated character sprites do a lot to underscore the grunge of this game. Lonely Dog doesn’t pull any punches as the distant and sadistic Eden toys with Rachel, with little explanation given as to why. In the portmortem for this game, the author mentioned being inspired by Saw in the conceptualization phase for this game, and I absolutely do see that influence.

Present Perceptual Consciousness

by frenchie and witty

Author-provided summary

Present perceptual consciousness refers to the subjective experience of the current moment.

>A story of pygmalion and paper dolls.

>A story of a girl and her creator.

What I liked about it

Oh my godddd this is one of those things where I read it and it just felt so incredibly perfectly catered to me. Following the creation of a robot and how she interacts with the world through her incrementally-upgraded body, the relationship between her and her creator is incredibly strained. The conflicting desires for love from creator to created and for recognition to the creator over her creation sets the stage painfully realistic emotional neglect and denial of personhood. I will always love you, wire mother <3

Heavensent

by imcoffeecats

Author-provided description

The year is 1930. After a traumatic incident, Odette has been sent away to a Catholic boarding school for young ladies. However, there’s one secret she has to keep hidden: she’s a recently-turned vampyre. Determined to continue life as a normal human, Odette tries her best to navigate the changes within her body and appetite. Luckily, she doesn’t have to do it alone. Her roommate, Auriame, is by her side, but is withholding her own secrets. Together, will their friendship blossom into something beautiful, or become something all-consuming?

What I liked about it

This is on the cuter end of entries for this jam, primarily dealing with the mundane life of a schoolgirl who doesn’t fit in at her catholic school. But as the conflict from the supernatural plot elements– Odette’s budding vampyrism and Auriame’s self-proclaimed angelhood– start to mount, the stakes and dread of the scenario start to sink in. I also want to add that this game is incredibly impressive for a one-person dev team, between the length of writing, the quantity+quality of art, and the level of polish.

Part Of Me Loves You

by Fisher, Autumn, and Puapka

Author-provided description

Zuzka’s life is crumbling around them. They wake up with bruises they can’t explain, and they are barely able to keep it together anymore. Just what lies in wait for them?

What I liked about it

A very authentic depiction of plurality (and how this can lead to absolutely disastrous consequences if not everyone is in the same page). Both the (intra- and inter- personal) character writing and torture-basement writing are super compelling, I didn’t want to put this game down the whole time. This many original cgs and sprites is also wildly ambitious for the scope of a jam game, and added a level of detail for how Zuska presents themselves day-to-day that was very appreciated.

Milk Puzzle

by margogaming

Author-provided description

even though you have all the pieces, you don’t get the point

Contains

• neurotic protagonist
• constant failure of the bechdel test
• cunnilingus
• a complete lack of agency with the world around you
• but your life is like sooooo hard
• people just don’t get it…

What I liked about it

SCREAMING CRYING THROWING UP. If you have ever related to one of the tumblr posts to the effect of “Why is yuri not as indulgent and trashy as yaoi is. Where’s my mob boss x no-good debtor yuri”, you NEED to read this. Eleanor is an absolutely compelling protagonist who puts on a presentable face while constantly seething internally. When she ends up saving a dark and charming made woman, all she wants to do is get away and get back to her normal daily life. Unfortunately for her, the woman she saved is not someone to quickly let go of things, especially when a cute woman is involved… What a duo of weirdos. CLAIRE ILYSM.

The Romance of the Moth and the Flame

by doomgender and cryingrulesactually

Author-provided description

“I welcome you all, to the last and final show of the Rosenwood Center Saint Theater! The long-overdue farewell! The Romance of the Moth and the Flame!“
A story of three women whose lives intersect at sharpened angles.
A one-woman show in an empty theater.
A rebuke of the world of mortals.
A tale of love and parting.
Moth x Flame

What I liked about it

I feel like I’ve been repeating “the presentation is stunning” many times here but it’s true every time, and often in different ways. As the lead character in Moth and the Flame gives her one-woman theater show, the visuals in the novel itself follow stage cues and set directions in a way that shows mastery over how to implement 3D animation in renpy. Everything ties together beautifully at the emotional climax of the novel, where the titular (and inevitable) flame takes hold.

Cyberbulli

by oroboro

Author-provided description

It’s 2005, and Emily’s best friend Kayla is being harassed by an anonymous cyberbully on MySpace.
But Emily is there to defend and comfort her…
And be the only person in the world that Kayla could ever need.

What I liked about it

This is another entry that I can’t help but describe as “fun”– the ending basically had me going “LET’S FUCKING GOOOOOO” at my laptop. Em is such a disaster, albeit for a massive pileup of perfectly understandable reasons. A painfully accurate screenshot of the internet in the early 00’s and today.

Immortal’s Pet

by pickyerpoison

Author-provided description

The villagers of Anduja live an easy life thanks to the blessing of the goddess Kataja, who visits the village once every hundred years to bestow a gift of fertility upon the fields.

The price is simple: a single villager, given to her, to be taken with her for reasons unknown.

A hundred years have passed since the last blessing. You are the tribute to be offered to her this time. It’s your turn to see what the home of the goddess is like.

What I liked about it

This game makes really good use of branching paths– even after I’d earned all three endings, I played through a few more times just to see what else could happen and what other tidbits of lore I could glean. This game is astonishingly well thought out, and there are a number of key bits of characterization someone might miss if they don’t try to pry around the edges of the narrative. While it takes some digging to get to, Katja’s relationship with humanity is fascinating.

FAITHLESS//FLAGELLANT

by killjill

Author-provided description

Claire desires Didi. Claire hurts Nina. Claire wants Didi to hurt her.

What I liked about it

OOOUUGGGGHHH I have not seethed this much at a piece of fiction in quite some time. This is very much a tragedy in the classical sense– once these characters had met and the plot was set in motion, there was no happy way this was going to end, and all parties involved would have nothing to blame but their own character flaws. Claire is SUCH a shitty, self-victimizing, chaser sub and Didi is willing to look past one too many red flags. I also just really wanna see more messy women sadists like Didi.

A[n incomplete] to-be-read list

My reading may have slowed down a bit due to creative deadlines, but in no way am I done. These are some of the games that I’ve scoped out and fully intend to read, although this list keeps growing as I find more games that tickle my fancy.

In no particular order:

• No Mice in Heaven
• Killing me Necromantically
• With Reckless Abandon
• Copycat Recipie
• di/aphragm para/digHm
• Glass Heart
• In Your Flesh
• Anomalous
• Astral Battler Crux: Gilded Lily
• Contamination Protocol
• Mechacyte
• Of Piers and Bays
• Sunshine Backwards
• Black Lily Theater Company
• mutuAl understanding
• The Heart of our Lagoon
• Garbage Doll
• Beaconing (might wait for 1.0 patch)
• The Perfect Human
• Blood of the Future
• LONER_DOG://Snuff Puppy Carnage Society

I feel like I don’t have very much to say about the current itch.io situation that hasn’t already been said. What a time to start dipping my toes into gamedev and launch my first non-anthology vn.

While Offsuit Pair is in no danger of delisting from the current “NSFW” targets, it hurts to see all these new friends and acquaintances that I now know personally from the Toxic Yuri VN Jam be subjected to this (and, well, I was also planning to dip my toes into publishing explicit works soon™…).

We don’t just have to stand by and watch. Aside from contacting card services directly, events like these really emphasize the importance of community. When big corporations throw the marginalized to the curb, all we have is each other– events like the Toxic Yuri VN Jam bringing people together is a feature, not a bug.

In the past few days there’s been a big push for people in the VN-space to build their own personal websites, and given my 20+ years (😨) of off-and-on web dev experience and 2+ years of programming education experience, I wanted to do something to help out with this. There are already a thousand different "make your own personal website" guides, I figured that I didn’t really need to make guide number one thousand and one.

Instead, I set up a discord community to connect people who are working on their own personal websites, where people can share help, resources, and status updates.

Aside: Yeah yeah, I know, you don’t need to preach to me about discord itself being a walled garden at the whims of corporate overlords– this was just the common tool to get together people who were already in the TYVNJ discord server. If there’s a sustained interest in this I will consider moving to something akin to phpBB.

While this server is currently full of TYVNJ participants, it’s open to anyone who wants help with their personal website, especially those who are queer or otherwise targeted by recent social media content restrictions.

Anyways. On to less grim news: Offsuit Pair has been really well received and I’ve been overjoyed about it. There will be more on this in the upcoming postmortem, but I knew that the project was going to be a very big undertaking for the timeframe and I’m glad that the completed work managed to stick the landing and resonate with people. There are even small gaming sites talking about it!!

Near-future plans

• this week (?): finish Offsuit Pair Postmortem; this is currently at around 2,000 words and I’m expecting it to at least double before it is completed.
• before the end of August: finish this year’s YSO VN Anthology; I am planning for my contribution for this to recycle the engine from Offsuit Pair, so please look forward to it.
• before the end of September: Third (and final) major content rollout for this site, after which I will consider it complete (or at least: not under construction). This will primarily entail finally writing the gallery page and researching alternate hosting services. Once a satisfactory host is chosen I will host mirrors of all my games there, given the current itch situation.
• October through the end of November: Work on my current ongoing project for the Yuri VN Jam, aiming to get a vertical slice and/or demo completed.
• January through mid-February: make an entry for the Ryona Yuri VN Jam. I do know that Fisher plans to move this off of itch, the link here will be updated appropriately once this happens.

Site changelog since last update post

• new domainname! Now posted at http://hamaonoverdrive.online/
  • worry not, old links will redirect to the new url
• now hosting all assets locally (previously hotlinked stylesheets from google fonts and fontawesome)
• improved audio player: can now collapse and respects user pause when loading new page
• overhauled frontpage
  • now has buttons!
  • new splash graphic
  • truncated list of recent blogposts instead of just word-vomiting all of it at once
• added games page
  • this uses the same backend code as the writing index page, both of which read in from a yml file (will make future updates trivial)
• added Toxic Yuri VN Jam Webring
• added comments sections to select pages in lieu of standard guestbook
  • For the one person who left me a very lovely comment in the old guestbook, thank you. I have saved it so that I will still have it even after changing guestbook providers.
• dozens of smaller things that are too minor to bother listing here

I have crossposted my guide to the HnK series here from my tumblr. At the time when I first wrote the guide, the platform seemed like my best choice for hosting it, due to being so very multi-media and leveraging Tumblr’s photoset feature. Well, I should have known that would eventually bite me in the ass, because Tumblr is a half-functioning platform on a good day: I can no longer save edits to the post. I had a few errata that I’d needed to fix after sharing the page with the discord folks, but now with the new anime project on the horizon I really wanted to have up-to-date info on it. So I’ve added a new sub-section for the remake and made some minor updates to things that have changed since I wrote the post (ex status of Regenesis, number of Viz volume releases, etc.)

Anyways, cool new feature list:

• CSS for print layout.
• Automatic RSS feed of blog posts.
• Music player should automatically keep playing where you were as you navigate the site.
  • Aside: I have noticed some issues where it sometimes starts playing on a new page load, even if it was paused before unloading. As far as I can tell, the stored cookie should be telling the page NOT to play on load, so I’m not sure what the cause here is… (the fact that it’s not reproducible doesn’t help).
• Page for /writing/ that automatically collects stats and timestamps for relevant sub-pages.
• Tweaks and bugfixes to overall layout, particularly TOC display on mobile.

At this point I think this is about all the time I can justify spending on this site until I finish my Toxic Yuri Jam project. When that is finished I’m looking forward to linking it on my upcoming /games page– I’m definitely going to be talking about this one for a while.

The general state of social media (and the internet at large) being what it is, I probably should have gotten around to this sooner. In the end, the thing that finally pushed me to assemble this website was my participation in the Toxic Yuri VN Jam; Between seeing the personal websites of so many devs With Their Shit Together and being on a productive jag of recreational programming (which you will see the fruits of soon™) I just sat down one afternoon and banged this out.

This website has undergone a fairly large overhaul, although if you remember the old version of this page you probably won’t notice it– the biggest change is that I finally set up Jekyll and turned my HTML code into a template. You would have no way of knowing this, but I’m actually typing in a markdown file right now! Everything is set up to just fall into place when I run make build.

The other substantial change is that this layout is now mobile-compatible! I’m constantly surprised by how many people use their phones as their primary devices, but it is what it is, the times are a-changing. While mobile compatibility isn’t really a concern in neocities spheres, I plan to point to this site as a general place to keep up with my varied creative endeavors and I don’t want to categorically lock-out that many people.

Plans for the (near?) future:

• Implement a few more formatting bells and whistles
• Format existing longform writing and transfer it here
• Make mini-gallery layout:
  • and create a page with links to my games
  • and make a page for my visual art
• Tweak audio-player to “continue” playing across different pages