Hello everyone, dropping a line cuz I figure I’m overdue for another update. And once again it’s a new month so rent’s breathing down my neck again ><; It is a bit of an emergency, as I think we get an eviction warning on the 8th if we can’t pay by then. Asking for help if anyone has anything to spare, as much as I’d like to say financial stability is getting closer I’m overwhelmed at the moment and could really use the help, or spread this journal around if you’re comfortable doing so.
( https://ko-fi.com/riendonut/goal?g=0 < KO-FI DONATION PAGE)
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-$1.7k (rent)
-$180 (student loans)
-$300 (personal loan repayment)

The last couple week of July were difficult; my wife had some recurring vomiting & pain related to gallstones. Thankfully no extended hospital stays were needed, and symptoms could more or less be managed at home, but it was pretty brutal for a while. I do wish the gallstones could’ve been dealt with on the first ER visit, instead of being another thing to worry about in the back of the mind ><

Been trying to manage my anxiety as best I can but I feel a bit like a frog being boiled; nothing I’ve been doing seems to be working well enough. I can still work but seemingly not fast enough to catch up. I’ve been able to keep afloat with help from people and loans and the like, but not enough where stability feels within reach. I’m not organizing and communicating effectively enough, and it’s weighing on me as bills continue to stack up.

It’s also not lost on me that we’re in the middle of a really censurious push on the internet. With all the ID laws & product removals seeming to happen all at once, it’s clear Project 2025 has its sights set on all of us over here, and its counterparts all over the world (if you want to keep abreast of everything going on with internet censorship, Ana Valens has been doing great work on Bluesky https://bsky.app/profile/acvalens.net ). Truth be told, I've never been less certain about my future as an artist, NSFW or otherwise. I’m not sure what the future holds, all that can be done is keep fighting for now I guess. The future is unwritten.

In a desperate attempt to avoid being all gloom and doom at all times though, I wanna talk about video gamesss

Stuff I been playing:
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Deltarune: after chapters 3 and 4 it’s safe to say I’ve got the Deltarot. The OST’s pretty much been on loop while I work, along with hour-long YouTube theory videos, practicing Black Knife on guitar, the whole nine yards. I think it started last year sometime after watching Jacksepticeye’s playthroughs of UT/DR; his enthusiasm for the games was pretty infectious and made me give Deltarune another look before the new chapters (I feel like games like UT/DR & Night in the Woods REALLY benefit from their online presence despite the downsides, it’s super fun watching people voice & connect with the characters). I think on release I was pretty unfairly dismissive of DR; Undertale was obviously really concise and thought-provoking, and after the first two chapters of Deltarune I wasn’t sure whether it was stacking up. I’m not sure if I first played Chapter 2 on a bad day and the humor just wasn’t landing or something, maybe the wait between chapters had me doubting the release schedule, but I didn’t end up finishing it for quite awhile. Chapters 3 & 4 really drove home that I had only been engaging on a surface level, and after a more thorough playthrough & attention paid to the plot I realized Deltarune’s shaping up to be the most beautifully intricate spider-web of an RPG I’ve possibly ever played. I think the last RPG that was on my mind this much might’ve been Final Fantasy IX, which was literally like the first RPG I ever played. Of course, at the heart of both those two games is an ABSURDLY likable cast, everything else is gravy. So, yeah! Excited to see where the story goes next and doubly excited that the wait won’t be nearly as long this time.
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Songs of Conquest: I’d been craving a Heroes of Might & Magic kinda game for a couple years when I found this game was getting a Switch release. Obviously PC’s the ideal platform for this kinda thing, and if I really wanted HoMM I could just play through one of those again, but fuck man I really can’t PC game these days. I spend my whole work day in front of the computer and my butt’s REALLY sick of this chair by the time I might wanna play a game for a bit. But I digress, this shit definitely gave me what I wanted, and importantly it’s visually YUMMY like Heroes, too! Fun-ass campaign, expanding and building towns and amassing your armies of monsters is always compelling to me haha. I did notice I was letting the auto-battle rock for a decent amount of it though; partially due to the pretty brutal load times on Switch between map and battle scenes, and partially because watching the AI battles didn’t really give me confidence that I could do them any better xD With some work I’m sure I could get a better grasp of essences and positioning and all that, but for the time being I’m pretty sure my tactics haven’t evolved too far beyond my childhood approach (get the biggest number of units and then you win :v) The game’s a bit too concerned with balance to let you get away with the EXACT shenanigans you could in Heroes (i.e. raising enough skeletons from enemy corpses that no force in heaven or hell could stop you) but it’s still a really good time!
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Ocarina of Time: Master Quest: YOU CAN’T JUST HIDE A SWITCH INSIDE A PAINTING TEXTURE YOU MONSTERS.