妖怪世捨て人

I'm not good at planning out these confession articles. At most I start with some kind of semi-witty or insightful introductory idea from which to painstakingly draw a somewhat cogent line through my thoughts until they inevitably dwindle out into nothingness and the article concludes. But for this one, I didn't even have an idea for a beginning, nor a central thesis I wanted to talk about. I tried writing this introductory paragraph a bunch of times, and it all just felt like something I'd already said a hundred times over. But then, I suppose, ironically, that's also the feeling I just felt the need to express somehow: that this is all I know to do.

In 2015 in London I attended my first European Lisp Symposium. I was 21 at the time, and while this wasn't my first time abroad on my own, it was still a pretty stressful affair. I remember it still pretty clearly to that day: meeting Robert Strandh, Zach Beane, Didier Verna, Daniel Kochmański and many other people I'd previously admired from afar through many discussions on IRC. It was an important event for me, and was the first time I'd felt like I was in a group of people I could talk with about my interests and ambitions.

I write this lying in bed, typing away on a clicky keyboard. I'm not listening to any music, the door to my room is closed, and even my birds are (temporarily) quiet. All I can hear is the breath from my stuffy nose, and the clicking of the keys as I spill my brain into another text file. I am here, right now, because I feel miserable.

I'm no stranger to keeping journals of many kinds. I have a daily five-year journal that I keep for myself for a year and a half now, I used to keep a daily journal in high school, for a long time I did weekly and monthly progress summaries of Kandria's development, and for the past two years I've kept monthly status updates for my Patreon. So really, I should be used to understanding the passage of time and have a pretty good idea of how much I keep doing or have done. But I do not. It is, in fact, astounding how bad I am at recalling events within a given timespan.

I've been thinking about the role of comfort and convenience in our lives for quite a while. Certainly there are many facets that could be explored here: the decisions we make in our lives, the way we choose to interact with each other, but also the way we assign judgement to these concepts. It's good if something is convenient. Being comfortable is nice and to be striven for, but at the same time we should break out of our comfort zones, and expend effort in the face of convenience.

I fully realise how gauche it is to begin an article or any kind of prose with a famous quote, but I hope you'll indulge me in this instance. I do genuinely believe that it gives a nice entry point for a series of thoughts that have been swirling around in my head for a good while now.

In addition to my recent journey with SRS I've now also undergone "Facial Feminisation Surgery" (FFS). As before, I thought it might be of interest to others to hear about how everything leading up to it, the procedure, and the recovery went for me. Same as before, too, this is extremely specific to my particular locality and unique pile of bones. FFS in general is sort of a grab-bag of terms, and the extent of what's being done for it varies a lot from person to person. I've been told my corrections were very minor in comparison to others.

It doesn't take any kind of genius to figure out that every one of us is dependent on hundreds, thousands, millions of other people. As a civilisation we've only come this far because we've managed to connect with each other and continue to exchange everything that we produce, from energy to materials to ideas, concepts, and procedures. We all depend on the expertise of doctors and care personnel, on the food and produce of farmers, on drivers and delivery people to get it to where it's needed, on those around us to keep us company. There's hardly any step in our lives that we make that isn't influenced by and dependent on others.

For the past two years Charles Zhang and I have been working on getting my game engine, Trial, running on the Nintendo Switch. The primary challenge in doing this is porting the underlying Common Lisp runtime to work on this platform. We knew going into this that it was going to be hard, but it has proven to be quite a bit more tricky than expected. I'd like to outline some of the challenges of the platform here for posterity, though please also understand that due to Nintendo's NDA I can't go into too much detail.

I've recently had the privilege and the displeasure of going through SRS. Well, I'm still currently going through it as you'll see. Whatever the case, I thought it would be interesting to some other folks out there what the procedure has been like and what all has been involved. Naturally, all of this is quite specific to my particular locality, and also my particular, ~unique~ pile of trash that is my body.

Note: This story takes place between Getting Through to You and What is it With Me. You'll probably want to at least read Getting Through to You before this.

It happens frequently enough that a conversation in some online chatroom veers over to the question of privacy in the modern world, and especially to the willingness people have to share oodles of their often very personal information with complete strangers online. I certainly appreciate and understand the fears of oversharing, after all there are a lot of very dangerous people out there that, if they decide to do so, can absolutely hugely impact if not ruin your life entirely. Despite this, I somehow can't help myself.

I've been writing libraries for Common Lisp for over a decade now (lord almighty), and for most of that time I've tried to ensure that the libraries would, in the very least, work on all three major operating systems: Windows, Linux, and MacOS.

I've been debating opening up "a Patreon"(https://patreon.com/shinmera) for many years and I've always been hesitant about accepting donations from people, but I think it's finally time to change my mind on that!

If you've read any of my preceding entries I would expect it to come as no surprise to you to see me write "accepting who you are is really difficult." Though today I want to write about a few different facets of that than just the one you may be thinking about right now.

I don't like sleeping. I like the idea of sleep, but the practise of it seems all too often fraught with issues for me. I do consider myself fortunate that I don't suffer from any major sleeping disabilities like insomnia, but my quality of sleep is nevertheless far from ideal, despite adhering to a rather strict and regular sleeping schedule.

Hello everyone. It's been a while since the last update. I apologise for the silence, things have slipped out of habit a little bit, and besides there's just been a lot of work on things that aren't easy to talk about. I'm still stuck in the R&D phase for the next game, and probably will continue to be there for a few more months before I can properly enter pre-production.

Kandriaの日本語アップデートはリリースです！

Another month gone by. There's no major updates this month, since we just had the "level editor release"(https://reader.tymoon.eu/article/425) last month. However, there is a somewhat major update coming out next week!

The first major update for Kandria is now live on all platforms! It includes the level editor, a modding system, some new sample levels, and bugfixes!

Let's get the important news out of the way: the next major update for Kandria will launch on Wednesday, March 8th, at 15:00 CET. The update will include a number of improvements, new features, more content, and a community event!

It's already been a month since Kandria released! Woah, time sure flies these days, huh?

Kandria is now finally available for purchase and play!

​Kandria launches tomorrow, on Wednesday the 11th, at 15:00 CET / 9:00 EST!

In case you missed the "yearly update"(https://reader.tymoon.eu/article/419) last week: Kandria will release in one week from today, on January 11th, 15:00 CET / 09:00 EST. I hope you're as excited to play it as we are to finally get it into your hands!