Hello again? I would open with comments on how I routinely forget these articles exist on my site if the default state of their position in my memory wasn't an altogether absence. It's easier to permit the gap in my memory when I reflexively believe their contents to be an outdated reflection of myself that would do me no good to revisit when I might try to purge them entirely. If I've had to retire & revise perzines written far more recently, it's a near given that I would find older writings much less accurate. A comfortable compromise is another article after another year; a year so achingly long.

 I write this reflection on the cusp of burn out. A logical burn out if one tallies the sheer number of things I've done this year & the fact that my art is at a level of technical skill & aesthetic coherence that I long dreamed of. I'm not able to always produce forms/images with the right anatomy or proportion, but I can manage much more competently without reference than ever before. Beyond forms, I've honed my sense of color, rendering, lighting, perspective, & other fundamentals to a (comparatively) shocking degree. This skill extends to more than the aliased/pixel-y style I've used for my comic & into a sketch-painterly style I adopted in December 2025 & evolved from there. My comic, Mythoslain, celebrated its 1st anniversary on 8/20 with the end of Act 1 at 421 pages & 162,827 words. A total of 226 of those pages were posted within the span of this personal "reality (review) year" between 10/6/25 & 10/6/26. The first ever Rat Lore Con was hosted the same day of the formal launch of the Rat Lore website with a number of new Rat zines & a game hack I'd stumbled my way into for my birthday festivities. There have been a number of other zines, events, & smaller projects including a successful completion of a one month daily zine challenge for April 2026. One of my most unbelievable achievements has been with animation (despite all the hardships) that ended with me producing an animated trailer for Mythoslain over the summer & a long end of Act 1 animation featuring a great deal more than I would have thought possible for me to do.

 Beyond projects & productivity, I've managed a number of other personal successes continuing work with my writing club, streaming again, redesigning my logo/site revamps, relearning math concepts, revisiting a great deal of literary theory/criticism, & rekindling my love of/ability to play games (something SORELY needed for the sake of my sanity). Reading & gaming have been invaluable habits to reduce the reign of terror that I operate myself under, yet they too are limited by my year's greatest nemesis that has afflicted not only everything I do, but also my very being.

 Pain.

 Big shocker, sure. I've always been vocal about my physical pain if only because saying something about it helps manage it in some small, confusing way (headaches especially). Yet this year, two forms of pain have dominated me to a whole new degree: heat-induced ailments & wrist/arm pain. The summer was brutal & the heat absolutely destroyed me on top of what I later realized, in the throes of a meds-lapse induced cleaning effort, was a source of black mold poisoning me. Wrist pain was a further agony on top of that all that persisted regularly past it. I was doing too much writing & drawing on a daily basis that it was taking a tremendous toll on me to the point of threatening my ability to do anything else for a time. I wasn't always making the wisest choices in regards to taking proper breaks when my body signaled it or selecting activities that wouldn't overly strain me (ex. certain games & cutting cardboard). I so often felt terrible &/or prone to easily fumbling into the terrible that I constantly fantasized that I would have some medical test or examination reveal a discrete cause of my afflictions that could be remedied entirely by a vitamin or other specific, certain change. Instead, I despaired over optimal bloodwork results guiding me no closer to a solution. I long grappled with how part of my issues was limping into the cycle of trying to concentrate too much creative work into a span of functional time before the body would randomly give out, a plan that only opened me up to falling harder.

 Ailments & sickliness isn't anything new for me. It bothers me sometimes when others are so quick to authoritatively joke about me constantly being this way, but I have always felt a baseline level of unwell. Be it a consequence of years of past malnutrition or food sensitivities, in the absence of other compounding factors I would be able to perform habits that would help keep me in balance. Chief among these, walking/light exercise, has been an impossible thing to keep up during the harsh temperature conditions. Especially not when spending a time outside, even taking care to rest in the shade & cool off, has taken me out for a week after. Speaking the pain into words helps vent a compounding awfulness, however sometimes I do feel caught up in the resentment that I am seen this way. I can never rest easy that it is spoken in caring recognition or a kindred venting of frustration.

 Not feeling Well & its entanglement with Time has dominated the shape of my work & being this year. I've had to stretch out my goals/plans for Mythoslain & other projects several times to account for illness-induced delays & impaired ability. It's become harder for me to be present socially or commit focus to many things when the feeling strikes. Still, I've made a focused effort to improve my conditions & rituals so I have better support to fall back on. Adding extra tasks/goals can intensify the time terrors, but it can also provide necessary variation in the flow of activity to preserve my sanity. I am in the privileged position where I do not have to adhere to deadlines for the sake of my survival or comforts. The sole deadline influences are those that are self-imposed & used by me to torment myself. I've gotten a lot better at not harming myself to meet them & accepting that I will need to back down or not take on more work when I reach a limit, but some are tragically inflexible due to my attachment to specific dates in my work (i.e. Mythoslain "arc numbers" (8/20, 3/15, 10/20) & Rat Lore Con (5/30)). It helps/harms that I so desperately want to make this art, to tell these stories. I'm terrified of not finishing. I'm terrified of having to trim out too much. I'm terrified of letting the rest of me fall by the wayside. I'm terrified of my social connections rotting due to misplaced attention. I'm terrified of missing out on fantastic things & people.

 I'm (clearly) quite full of Terror. September was a month dominated by a default emotion of Fear & Stress (thematically appropriate for Pathologic month) that I was able to funnel into deep engagement with Pathologic as I began the task of writing something about the entire series & trying to finish Pathologic 3 (NOT a good game for my psychological state regarding Time Terror in particular). Yet, this type of thing isn't unique to September. I've had a VERY strange year full of guarded confusion as my understanding of self/events are wildly challenged & I am subject to entirely unexpected events. My day-to-day is far better than it was years ago with a much higher emotional baseline, but it becomes deeply apparent that when I am unable to do the things that I want to do that covertly define me, I am liable to shatter myself with unkindness.

 Before getting more into this discussion, I'll extract words from an unfinished article draft from three months ago entitled "Unreality Stories & Other Myths of Me:"

 This excerpt was written at a different strain of "Tough Time" flavored with grief & even worse bodily pain, having recently done the first wave of reorganizing my living space & fixed the mold situation. I was destroying myself with multiple deadlines converging at once & the looming first Mythoslain anniversary 8/20 day. I was starting the project of examining my works as it pertains to descriptions of myself & perzines, focusing mostly on labels. I'd just retired my lesbian zines, then firm on no longer identifying as such, though I had struggled for a while to articulate my experience with that label & others. Having the right terms to understand myself & communicate who I was felt vital. I'd spent my teen years utterly lost in myself & without energy to express myself through coherent action/investment. I was terrified by the amorphous quality of myself, clinging to the idea that it was just classic teenage angst & exploratory development that would settle later on. In early college, I would push harder down on whatever terms found their way into my web, ignoring the uneasy questions & pesky ripples of how weight proper terms patterned out Me in the minds of others. Luckily, I could ignore that feeling as part of how I feel about everything I think, say, do, or feel. I always feel artificial & itching to run. Why would it be any different?

 Getting back into reading theory this year & doing theme work for Rat Lore unlocked the idea that language & imprecision of definition remains a strong issue. I first heavily chewed on these thoughts when I started wondering if I was some flavor of aromantic/on an aro spectrum. I realized quickly I would not likely feel comfortable labeling myself as aromantic (even if I made the distinction of not being asexual (lack of physical pleasure =/= asexual)). Aromantic, qualified whatever which way in terms of positivity/neutrality of romance+, would paint an improper picture. I doubted I would feel confident in any list of qualifiers as I also would regularly run into a mismatch in communication similar to that of when I was presenting more openly & consistently masculine wherein I noticed friends applying these strict notions of masculinity in a nominally supportive way. I would an undertone of "relief"(?) in simple categorization & be surprised when my polite countering of assumptions were met with upset. I was never sure of these implications (I doom myself knowing how I've historically done a poor job at catching hints or reading people), but they stuck with me. The distinction of term utility internally for understanding the self & socially for interfacing with people/communities grew. Lesbian had come into use for me as writings on lesbianism in regards to the absence of a desire hegemonically baked into gendered constructs & how it had functioned for me at a practical level resonated. Aromanticism struck a far more resounding personal chord as I explored written accounts of others' personal experiences, even if the aversion/disinterest in real or fictional romance didn't.

 Related to plotting out my self-improvement & recovery, romance was always Heavy Baggage. Unsurprising for someone who has far more exes who openly identified themselves as "evil" or "insane" than not & stories of those who didn't even label themself accordingly regularly induce baffled surprise. Stability of self inoculated me better against continuing to expose myself to this type of behavior as I no longer required another person to exist via echo. I also had enough other things to agonize over through the fog of dulled sensations. No longer would I have to apologize for poor performances or dangle promises of a legitimate, fully capable me to debut for someone. When I can exist sanely & escape a person if needed, I don't need to fabricate a truer version of me underneath the lack. The performance itself wasn't an issue, it was the purpose & contract of it. I hadn't understood the difference in my experience.

 Amatonormativity, the ideological assumption that everyone desires & pursues romantic love (especially monogamous partnership), routinely ended up a root factor in my struggles. I witnessed countless people around me make ruins of themselves & their relationships by operating under unspoken rules & elevating relationships deemed romantic to a near mystical maladaptive degree. I won't vilify love or other people's relationships, of course, only the mental prisons many so easily construct. This isn't just a monogamy critical type of thought, though my alignment with polyamorous sentiments comes to play in this. It's far too easy, especially in a harsh financial & social climate, to latch aggressively onto a person for survival & neglect friendships that are (consciously or not) placed at a lesser vantage. Misaligned notions of what a relationship pattern comprises between people that are never addressed, even on more particular positive details over (sometimes confusingly also not discussed) boundaries that mark cheating, fracture bonds & rupture memories.

 Ironically solidifying my idea of year 4 representing comfort in ambiguity, I realize that I see no substantial or fundamental difference between "platonic" & "romantic" love. I've long considered sexual & other physical intimacies an inherently neutral act, fiercely rejecting the idea of them being so fundamentally corrupting or altering of a dynamic/person. They are simply different ways of knowing or engaging with a person. I can't say I've truly felt even the less exaggerated descriptions of different kinds of attraction & the exercise of defining them was too urgent to combat the ongoing struggles with intrusive thoughts & spells of unwilling obsessive spirals. Maybe this reads as me being "technically aromantic/asexual/demi/...," but I would love to be able to voice these experiences without having to find precise language. These aren't "immediate concerns" either outside how I present my creative work as I've been single this whole time, but they linger in my thoughts & narrative writing. It's one of the loudest narratives that have introduced undue complication/stress in my life, artificially confining me to a coherent "character" when life & people don't have an "essence," let alone narrative causality. It has me consider the future (scary). I wonder what I would make of this subset of my desire & love, whether I would identify them differently or change my expression, if I lived in a world not subject to amatonormativity. Or, at the very least, in a world where amatonormativity wasn't as socioeconomically enforced where you might terribly wonder if you truly still care for someone or you have chosen them just enough times that it would make your life infinitely less practically manageable if you parted. Or even if you still just need someone to "choose you first" & help you when you're down. I can't help but be reminded of The Next World mural from Disco Elysium

 Full acceptance of the idea of it being "too late" as written at first reeks of moralist sentiments depicted in Disco Elysium which subsists off control of self & the world under the guise of incremental change to further the notion that this is the only world & the best world that could be. The idea of there being a "NEXT WORLD" with "NEW PEOPLE," of course contradicts that line of thinking by asserting a cause for a revolution to secure this next world. It's not a romantic statement. It's a statement I've seen "aspirationally apolitical" (& other) players of the game laugh nervously at or mock defensively. It's not a pleasant thought for many to think they will be denied "true love," something that many were raised inundated by mythic tales of humanity defined by love which renders countless lapses in logic as perfectly coherent (if only for those who may project their own ideas of love onto). I am not immune to extolling the virtues of love, though I never mean a narrow definition of romantic love, even in terms that might suggest a countering human essential. There is too much love in too many things for me to cherish. I bake these ideas into all of my works, even if they also contain a deluge of different forms of romantic affection & love, it's delicately qualified & written intentionally away from the narrative pitfalls I find in other stories of love. Still, those who take more stock in fanciful notions of "true (romantic) love" than I do (or the personally repellant notion of romantic soulmates) might best consider the questions of autonomy that slither into one's perception of free will & preference living under capitalist ideology. Deeply dreary stuff if you extrapolate too much on & find misery in the impossibility of x or y thing under this system, especially when all of those who are not so snared by doom that they dream of a next world (or changes to THIS world) like you do are so crushed by it all. It sometimes becomes necessary to sometimes divorce one's self from cognitive recognition of facts to adopt a utility stance to simply keep on going & fighting. Pursue the Next for New People, but arrive at a good enough during the downtime on the way.

 Mayhaps it's too honest to talk in these terms when a quality espoused by narratives of romantic love is the tender barely-even-a-falsehood of sweet nothings spawned by this adoring shared fantasy (also a "highly cynical description"). I'm not suggesting that we express a direct "this is the most I can feel/give that will never be xyz" or some other oddity. These are my own musings, lines drawn on the map of myself & the breadcrumbs left behind. They are the side effects of a process of soothing the mental seas & coaxing what lurks there from the torrents of over-intellectualization & kneejerk impulse to pathologize. They are verbose laments of my wish to express more of my thoughts in the way I exactly mean them. They are also, obnoxiously, words grappling with my difficulty to understand why I so routinely operate in some of the ways I do, lacking awareness of things or options before they are brought to my attention.

 ALL of that to repeat once more: I'm still considering going through my zines/work & revising more of what I've made. Some zines listed on my physical zine page I never bring to events or really have available. Many more zines are far more outdated reflections of my personal thoughts & the quality of work I can produce now that it feels off to include them side by side. At the same time, I cannot reasonably put my works under too much scrutiny that would only harm me & smother out evidence of change as a person. Change at any age is deeply important to me. Even the outdated versions of my ideas of self/in general are vital morsels in support of my still reigning intentions & messages in what I create. What matters is that I keep on creating.

 Another year of creating has meant another year's worth of having people label themselves as fans of my work or telling me how it resonated with them/inspired them in one area or another. It becomes increasingly hard for even the most woeful state of my mind to reject the idea that I've had a positive impact on others the same way others have had on me. Physical condition still torments me, but I have so much proof that can dispel a great deal of the negative self-talk & hopelessness that sprouts when contemplating theory. All will only be truly lost if I give up & let it until the moment I drown out of life. That can't happen when I've got all this bullshit I've said about Rats, right?

 Rats (per Rat Lore) are about memory, absurdism, & love. Rats are permission to revel in absurd hilarity & reclaim symbolic threats for moments of silly nonsense that justify my absurd spending on theory books (the Rat Lore budget is in shambles). This exact day that I now publish my annual article on has an added significance through the Rats as it's also the arbitrarily assigned wriggling day of my Mythoslain troll, Xidobo Ktikov, who has those Rats. He used to be categorically the most tortured & suffering character in the entire thing, but now it's been reframed drastically into something much more absurd where he has to work to be seen/live that way in order for his life to have any legitimacy. The stuff of pure fiction & Rat nonsense. Vows to make Bad Art have carried me far in my creative quests, but the Rats awaken a new degree of lovely indulgence that charm my life so much. I don't want to cheat myself by producing less than I want to make for something or cutting too many corners, but I will certainly never fall on the sword of illusory perfection. It's not that I don't care, it's that caring is not killing myself over such a vain quest [insert some reference here to Eva in Pathologic 3 cheering up a suicidally driven Daniil - but not actually inserting because we can't deviate into Even More media reference talk].

 To wind down sloppy musings, I've got a lot of Thoughts on things [no one is surprised by that]. I have to actively hold myself back most of the time from talking myself into exhaustion. Making art/writing is like breathing for me. It sustains my life & evolves it. This is what we've got. It's a LOT of Rats.

 But okay, at the risk of repeating past mistakes of listing out goals for the next real year that will be forgotten/not met, what are some things I hope to do this time?

• ** Make more Mythoslain & its associated texts without dying (including the visual novel mainline segments, This Side Up, & BAD END)
• ** Make more issues of Rat Criticism, starting with #2 about semiotics
• ** Create/refine my concept for my Rat Hack Hack based on a variant rule in the booklet
• ** Have Rat Lore Con 2027 go crazy
• ** Progress/continue work on my planned Pathologic series book
• ** Work through my current zine/art offering & revise/retire more
• ** Watch again & make something about Mac and Me
• ** Draw like a billion pictures?
• ** Do more podcast

 Sure, sure, I have personal hopes for this fifth year. I want to craft a better living space off the bones I've planted thus far & foster healthier routines of rest. I need to figure out how to better take care of my body & probably go on T. I'd like to take more pictures, document memories/journals better, & stress less about time when possible. I've also got Many Video Games to play now (I've become a gamer again...) Maybe I might also write another full blog article for this site before the end of year five. Who knows! Catch you somewhere & sometime, okay?