Hello! Happy new year, I guess. I’m going to go over what I’ve made this year, what I’ve read, watched, played, and listened to, and other general updates. These lists aren’t exhaustive. Rather, they’re just the things that I remembered. What I have to say is all in different lengths, which doesn’t necessarily reflect the importance of any of them.

2022 Projects

Released Turnstyle, our turn-based RPG about hating your roommates
My capstone project at UCSC. I learned a whole lot about a whole lot of things, including programming, UI design, production, and teamwork. This is the biggest project I’ve worked on before. I’m eager to do more game design, as opposed to whatever kind of design Judge my Vow  is.

Turnstyle, all in all, is a beautiful, real game. It combines genre norms and urban fantasy with real trans and mentally ill experience. It aims to be a lot more than what we were able to get done in ten weeks, and there's some world where I would love to spend more time on it and really iron out all the wrinkles and add more juicy bits to the UI and UX of the game, but that's just not gonna happen.

Released chapters one, two, and three of Judge my Vow, my interactive fiction webzine
My current magnum opus. Who knows if I’ll finish it, but I am proud of everything I’ve done. I do plan on releasing more this year! Chapter 4 needs editing, and then I will have to create the stat blocks for it. I love Judge my Vow, but I really haven’t been spending much time on it as I would like lately. Chapter four in particular reflects a lot of the things I’ve been thinking about lately, which I’ll talk about later on.

It's a little unreal that this exists. It's taken an incredible amount of work from all angles to bring together. I've sort of bitten off more than I can chew in terms of the amount of writing and illustration that comes with the project, but I'm proud of everything I've done so far and excited to continue working on it.

I really want to see more stuff like this. It's a neat medium that I'm working in, which is only shared by, to my knowledge, Until You Continue To Behave and 17776.

Made the map for Judge my Vow
This is currently unreleased. I plan on releasing it very soon! 

Finished "🤪✌️", my digital zine collection
It took me almost a year to get back to this. I might write a post-mortem on this later on. Originally I lost focus on the project when I was going to assemble/write the third part, “pikmin,” and coming back to it, I understand exactly why. “pikmin” is certainly the weakest part of the zine. It’s still very important for a holistic perspective on my zine career. 

I am so glad to finish it! I’m also proud of the graphic design in the complete collection pdf, which I put together pretty quickly. It only took me two to three days. A part of that comes from the fact that I wasn’t designing it necessarily for print.

2022 Games

Dwarf Fortress Steam release
This is a big one. Dwarf Fortress has quickly become one of my favorite games of all time. It’s totally unique and hugely important and sometimes feels all-consuming. I’m obsessed. Tarn and Zach Adams are so cool. Tarn in particular has given a lot of talks that you can see on YouTube. Hearing what he has to say on the game really cements how brilliant the two are. I recommend the to anyone who is willing to invest enough time to learn it.

Across the Obelisk
I played this a lot in a very short period of time. It’s a really smart deck building cooperative roguelike that borrows mechanics from Darkest Dungeon. The fantasy is frankly boring. Me from a few months ago would 100% recommend it, but honestly I stopped finding it interesting after a while. I don’t have much else to say, honestly.

Adastra
I saw a Patricia Taxxon video called “Art, Furries, God,” that included an analysis of it. Anyway I’m like 80% a furry now. I want to design a fursona, but I’m having trouble deciding on an animal. I’ve been told by several people that I seem like a raccoon or a tanuki, but I don’t really resonate with the connotations of raccoons. I’m also drawn to hyenas (on account of my laugh) and lions. A part of my would be upset if I didn’t pick a cat. 

Anyway, Adastra is a beautiful and strange gay sci-fi fantasy ancient roman furry alien abduction political intrigue slow-burn erotica visual novel. Patricia’s video sells it (and the furry fandom) extremely well. Also, Amicus, the love interest, is so easy to fall in love with. He’s extremely well written. 

The story grapples with weird MLM erotica norms, (like the lack of women in stories, all the characters being naked or nearly naked, kidnapping, and weird dubiously consensual situations) but falls into them at the same time. In the end, it’s really for gay men who want to see and read about sexy furries fucking. I may or may not fall into some of these categories. I haven’t finished it yet but I am excited to! I’m also excited to read more by the developer, Echo Project.

Melatonin
A beautiful, chill, dreamy rhythm game in the style of Rhythm Heaven. It learns a lot from RH while developing its own user experience and style. I would love to see more indie developers take on this genre. What do you call it anyway? Rhythm mini game collection? Heaven-like? It was the first game that inspired me to write a review on Steam.

Bits & Bops demo
A demo of another Heaven-like game that’s currently on Kickstarter. It also takes lessons from Rhythm Heaven. It’s extremely well done so far. It’s campy and juicy and perfectly dramatic. I’m so so so excited to see what they end up doing with it, especially what kind of style they end up developing and how it will differ from RH.

Sorry We’re Open demo
A surrealist horror turn-based RPG. You play as the manager of what is essentially the scariest Wal-Mart in the world, managing money, time, resources, and the lives of your employees to get through the work day. It has a lot going on, but it’s all very cohesive. I need to play/read/watch more surrealist and truly strange stories in the future. Can’t wait for the release.

2022 Movies

Everything Everywhere All At Once
I don’t need to say anything about this because you already know it. A must-watch for any gay person. It’s a fantastic, funny, campy, faggy, 100% zany, 100% real, totally fucking bonkers movie spanning three generations of an immagrant family. It’s explosive and colorful and serious all at the same time. All the actors are perfect for their roles. It’s the kind of thing that hones in on certain demographics, (specifically gay, poc, children of immigrants with mommy issues) but that doesn’t make it inaccessible for other people. OH and Patricia Taxxon analyzed it in that video I mentioned earlier.

Bodies Bodies Bodies
The fun, sharp, hilarious lesbian slasher that I didn’t know I needed. It’s brilliant and tense and takes itself seriously without being serious, which is exactly what you want in a slasher. I was laughing the whole time. It’s instantly my favorite horror movie. I started hyperventilating when “100 Boyfriends” by Alice Longyu Gao came on, even though it was only for 30 seconds.

Barber Westchester
I saw this movie right when it released. I think someone just retweeted it to my timeline. I have since seen several of Jonni Philip's other animation, which I love. She's become my favorite animator. She inspired some of the portraits in Judge my Vow with her oddly-shaped and appealing character designs.

Barber Westchester follows the titular character, a weird kid who loves space. Their dad is a cult leader who believes a malevolent deity named Dacia is out to destroy their city. It's strange, subtle, and biting. The whole thing is weird and oddly melodramatic, like when Barber is given a job at NASA so that the mayor of their city doesn't have to deal with them getting in the way of her nefarious plans, or like when Barber inexplicably loses an arm while in the bathroom of a blimp. In Jonni's words, the movie is about Barber disengaging from the plot. In this sense, its more about them trying to create their own future rather than getting caught up with the other characters' problems.

Barber Westchester is also a sequel to a series of animated shorts called Secrets and Lies in a Town of Sinners, which develops the city and other side characters who don't appear in the movie.

Wasteland
Another Jonni Philips animation, in a similar vein to Barber Westchester. Wasteland is a series of shorts that build an atmosphere and introduce characters followed by a 40 minute finale. The final animation is called The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia. It's another cult story, but completely different from Barber's cult.

Wasteland is light, heavy, surreal, and downright weird. The paper cut out animation style is wonderful. The final part in particular is amazing.

2022 Books

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow
An amazing, hard-hitting, deeply emotional, complicated story about three game designers that spans 30 years. It has the most high-stakes bat mitzvah community service plot. The game design is unrealistic and maybe sensationalized, but I don’t think it would be as good if it was more accurate or if the main characters were anything short of brilliant beyond their years. Everything is complicated memories, beautifully illustrated situations, and shifts in the lives of the main characters. It’s personal and intense.

Worm
I have a lot to say about Worm. That’s probably because I spent hours and hours reading it. It’s 1.7 million words long and just impossible to put down.

I have no idea what possessed me to read this. I think I was looking for web fiction, sort of as research for Judge my Vow and I had vaguely heard that trans women in particular tended to like it. Obviously any time you hear that trans women or bisexual people or whatever like something, it’s bullshit, but I was still enticed. 

Worm is a gritty, graphic anti-superhero web serial. It follows Taylor, a bullied teenager who can control swarms of bugs with her mind. She is mistaken for a supervillain, on account of her uneasy power and the design of her costume, and joins a crew of teenage wrongdoers. 

Overall, Worm is incredibly intricate, very well thought out, especially the superpowers, very long, a little unpolished, totally unnecessarily fatphobic, and a little racist. The world is illustrated in insane levels of detail through interludes from the perspective of side characters. The worldbuilding is amazing, especially the way that the powers shape the person’s personality and stem from traumatic events in their lives. It makes everyone’s backstory (and everyone has to have a backstory) compelling.

I lost interest because everything takes so fucking long, especially the beginning and the fight scenes. I liked that the arc about Leviathan was basically one huge fight scene, but Noelle’s drawn out battle scene way later in the story made me lose interest. 

Shoutout Tattletale, who alone makes it worth reading. The combination of her power and personality is perfect. Here’s my favorite expert (no spoilers). 

“Wait, Circus is a guy?” Regent asked. “Depends on your definition of guy,” Tattletale said. “If you’re talking about biological or what Circus identifies as. Not that I have it pinned down; I can’t tell if you’re a guy posing as a girl when in costume or a girl who poses as a guy when in plainclothes.” Circus spat, directing a loogie to shoot a horsefly out of the air. “I’ll take that as a compliment, I guess.”

2022 Music
I don’t really know how to talk about music and I have a hard time understanding the meaning of songs, so I’ll just write some stuff about each of these albums. 

Ugly Death No Redemption Angel Curse I Love You
An amazing, heavy, loud-as-fuck album by Ada Rook. Watch the music video for XANAFALGUE, which is probably my favorite music video of all time (sorry hand crushed by a mallet remix). That will sell you on it. Honestly, I don’t really understand what it’s all about, but the tracks and lyrics are amazing. It’s incredible to hear her let loose like that. The samples from ICE are delightful and strange. It’s a must listen for any fans of Black Dresses who need something else to match the raw power of their work.

Forget Your Own Face
It’s Black Dresses’ best work. It’s fast, loud, soft, depressing, empowering. It’s everything you would want from them, in 20 minutes. The short length is a huge strength, as it lets you really get to love every single song, which is good because every song is the best song. My favorite is “nightwish.” I swear every year I become more and more of a stan.

Agnes and Hilda
Trans furry hyperpop shit. It only came out a few days ago, but I was instantly in love with it. Patricia Taxxon continues to make me a furry. It makes the furry fandom out to be beautiful and sexy. The overlap between trans themes and furry themes is awesome. She’s got a wife-murder song, an angry furry song, a neural network song, and a mean bocce song. My favorite is easily “With My Tail to the World.”

Everywhere at the End of Time
An ambitious album which aims to emulate the experience of dementia over six parts in six and a half hours. It samples ballroom music from the 30s that twists and fades and flickers and comes apart in an increasingly chaotic sea of noise. It’s like waking up from a fever dream to sleep paralysis. It’s a vague, obscure, nightmare that just gets worse and worse. 

Personally, I felt a little unphased by the noisier, more chaotic parts of the album. Despite that, it really delivers in intensity. The last song is particularly heartbreaking after the six and a half hour spiral.

I also listened to Everything at the End of Bikini Bottom, a “meme” version that remixes songs from Spongebob. It simply isn’t as brilliant or well-researched as the original, but is definitely worth listening to.

2022 Other Updates

Graduated college
I don’t know what to say about this. Everyone was congratulating me even though it felt exactly the same. I’m sad to leave school, especially because UCSC was such a good place for me. That’s a part of why I’m applying for the GPM masters program at UCSC. It’s hard to imagine what the future will be like, but easy to imagine the next step.

Got hired at an escape room
This is my first “real job.” It’s a great place to work. I like the proximity to games, even though I’m not really designing anything. I’m learning a lot about the design of escape rooms through the act of game mastering them. Everything fits together differently than they do in video games. The bugs or exploits come up in completely different ways. I learned that players 

1. Don’t listen to instructions, or forget instructions.
   1. This isn’t anyone’s fault. The younger kids especially lose focus when I’m giving them the rules, though it is a lot to take in for some people. On the other end of the spectrum, the rules of escape rooms tend to overlap, so people with a lot of experience do pretty well.
2. Don’t always understand how games are meant to be played.
   1. A key example is the way that people force locks open or break stuff. I’m not sure if it’s because they don’t understand that what they’re doing isn’t working, if they are stubborn, if they’re not thinking critically about the puzzles, or if they just wanna break stuff. It’s a problem more because the physical objects are hard to replace, and less because the players are breaking the rules or breaking the sequence of the room.
   2. See lesson one, because we always tell them “no excessive force is necessary.”
3. Are very good at hiding things and very good at finding things.
   1. There’s a pattern that our players put clues back in impossible to find spots. We keep looking until we give up or run out of time. Then, miraculously, the next group finds it.
   2. It’s because players are looking at the room with no prior knowledge, so they have no idea where things are supposed to go. They search every location. I think they put things in hard to find locations out of carelessness or haste.
   3. See lesson one, because we ask them to put things back where they found them or in easy to find locations.

Of course, it is rare that players actually do something wrong, even if they are breaking the rules. Overall, we get lots of different kinds of players: families, work events, birthday parties, friends, gamers, casual players, veterans, old, young, friendly, curt. Every group is a new perspective with new surprises. 

Bought a calendar (nsfw)
In 2020 I decided I wanted to buy an erotic calendar. I don't remember what inspired me. It was maybe a third ironic, a third about wanting an ethos of owning indulgent, sexy objects, and a third about my constant pursuit of objectifying men. I did research and found two potential candidates: Colt and Lupine Enterprises. Colt has a wide seletion of men, including hairy men, hung men, and men with "beautiful butts." I picked the latter for a few reasons: while the men were all fully naked, none of them had erections, and because cowboys are silly and sexy at the same time.

I ended up falling in love with the cowboys. They all felt like close friends to me. I had them hanging in my bedroom (which I shared for part of the year) and ended up hanging them in the living room when we moved to a new place. They were all so sexy and had so much heart at the same time. I didn't buy a calendar for 2022, and hung up the 2021 one instead. It's not like people buy sexy calendars to keep track of time anyway.

I bought the 2022 version because it was on sale. Each month features two cowboys, including dick and ass. This is a good idea, but they are missing the heart of the 2021 version. That, or I'll fall in love with them over again over the course of the year.

My problem with the calendars is that all the men pretty much look the same. They're all muscular, gruff, masculine types. They're all cisgender and mostly white. Some of them have beards, some of them are hairy, and some of them are smooth. Not only does it exclude certain groups, but it also becomes a little boring to look at. I dream of a sexy cowboy calendar that includes fat men, skinny men, men of all races, trans men, and non binary people. Nonetheless, I will cherish this strange little piece of my room all year.

My cat died
Roby was always my favorite cat. On one hand, cats dying is just a part of pet ownership. Everyone’s cat dies eventually. They are often quickly replaced. On another hand, I feel like Roby’s situation was something special. His life and death is somehow more important than the ordinary cat. On the third hand, which I imagine is coming out just below my armpit, I bet everyone thinks that their situation is unique.

Roby was a survivor. He survived an encounter with a coyote, losing his tail. After my grandpa died, we inherited him. He survived kidney failure for several years. Then, he developed arthritis and began his true decline. Everyone cared for him in the end.

I wasn’t sad that he died. We were well aware that he was dying for so long, so I had been coping with his eventual death for a while. I was sad to see him suffering. Despite it all, he was full of will and love right up until the end. I was planning on writing a zine about him. Maybe I still will.

Resolutions
Read more. Play more games, but spend less time playing games. Don’t get 100 hours in Dwarf Fortress. Learn how to make friends outside of school. Go to more drag shows. Go to events alone. Spend more time with friends. Start more conversations. Write more, about more things. Finish Judge my Vow. Be gayer and transer. Wear cute clothes and talk to cute people. Take my health problems more seriously. Make better breakfasts in the morning. Eat more eggs and make better food for work.

2023 will be the year of creating destiny for myself.