I have a massive headache as I write this, which seems to be a recurring pattern with these blog entries, but then again, if I always have a headache, there's not much room for anything else.

We have now entered 2025 and my only resolution is to finish Cycle 1 before the year ends. The gap between two parts of I1, I believe, took sixteen months, so unfortunately the idea of not updating for more than a whole year is not new to me. I suppose the issue is that I really don't feel like drawing. It's difficult to draw without 'feeling' like it, nothing comes out right. I was never all that good at drawing anyway: not to devalue my own work too much, but I can somewhat render my work to a decent quality. But drafting/sketching my work is the problem: in the majority of my illustrations, the sketches are incomprehensible and I 'sculpt' them into decency with the colours.

This makes it so that starting a drawing is always exceptionally hard, not merely in terms of executive function, but in, like, actually having the sketches look like what they're supposed to look like. I suppose this is evident with how simple the drawings are in BreadAVOTA, populated by repetitive headshots and standing 3/4 poses without any real dynamic action or perspective. I admit it, we're style over substance. BreadAVOTA uses the ocassional painted page and cute background to hide the fact that I cannot draw characters worth shite.

Anyway, I'll try thinking over how to better use the multimedia format to make what I want to portray more effective. I'm limited by my (lack of) coding ability when it comes to more 'flashy' effects or presentation, and that aside I like the relatively simple layout of the website. I've seen a lot of beautiful and interesting static websites, but I'm not sure if they fit the aesthetic I want. And despite BreadAVOTA being intended for PC use, I do make an effort to make it mobile-compatible, which poses quite a few difficulties. An initial plan I had for the Annotation was to use a different web layout for it, in mimicry of a desktop, with different windows and all, but the problem was I couldn't make it work on mobile (drag and drop doesn't work on mobile devices, apparently).

Well, besides 'get the bleeding story moving' another thing to do this year is to repurpose the old FC2 for a static version of the website where you don't have to interact or dig through the website to find everything. Of course, the digging around is 'the point', but there's nothing to lose in having the alternative option.

The feedback form will be taken down later, but I received around eight responses, which is honestly more than I was expecting. Thank you for the articulate feedback, all you three readers who are also eight people but still three people for the gag.

Well, anyway, here's some thoughts for the day.

I do not really like video games, because I do not like the vast majority of media. I've said this a lot of times so it's no news. It's the effect of my anhedonia. Everything is boring.

Despite this, I used to play video games, around a decade or so ago, on the NES and the PS2. I think using a controller to play games makes them more enjoyable, so maybe the real reason I stopped enjoying games is that I no longer own a console. I also used to play old as shit PC games. And by 'old as shit' I mean those hideous 8-bit DOS games from when 'gaming' was not established enough a landscape for any conventions to be widespread, so we were in this liminal phase where programmers, who without the Internet and the community feedback it provided, were throwing shite at the wall and seeing what sticks. Some game mechanics were revolutionary, others lost to time (sometimes because they sucked, sometimes because the game just faded into obscurity), but either way they all were interesting, at least, in giving you a glimpse into the creatives' minds.

I recently finished Ultima IV, a game I have been playing for a million years. This was the first time I ever finished the game, which I ran through with a walkthrough for the dungeons. Sorry but I am no longer the type of completionist who would walk through all those confusing and scary 3D rotating walls. I do quite well on aptitude tests, especially all those tests where you rotate shapes and symbols to figure out the next one in the pattern. I wonder if Ultima IV's peculiar dungeons helped me in that. Anyway, back when I was more of a Gamer with a capital G, I was the type to enjoy just running around and interacting with everything. Completing the game wasn't the point, and in those times it was more commonplace to play a game for the sake of playing it without the expectation of actually finishing it. I mean, you try completing the Ultima games without the walkthrough or the manuals that came with the original games. The thing with these older games is that because technology was so limited, it was not feasible to have the game itself tell you what was going on at all times, and there was also somewhat of a necessity to put bland, grind-y gameplay to pad the game out, because there wasn't much else you could program into it. It means that a lot of the puzzles in older games made no real sense either: the questions and answers weren't logically connected. You 'solved' the puzzles by interacting with everything and seeing if that did anything.

The initial idea for BreadAVOTA was a video game. Not a game I would ever actually make, because I cannot develop games (no amount of positive thinking can bully circumstance into submission: I am such a person who can never be a game developer, and I have accepted this). But the plot of BreadAVOTA was first conceptualised as a hypothetical game. You played as Bread who had slice-of-life-y moments in the overworld, and then you progress the story by going through the Annotations like the different levels of a game. And then when you moved on to Bien's side of the plot, the idea was that you used Bien's side to pseudo-code the puzzles or whatever the hell it is Bread is going to do, and then you used Bread's side of the narrative at first to just 'solve' the puzzles but as the story went on it was not about solving the puzzles but finding the logical flaws and shitty code that Bien wrote as a way of finding Bien himself and putting an end to his manipulation of Reality. And Bien had his own story where you as the player had the choice to either make Bien grow closer to Ava or to Sar, with your choice affecting the type/style of 'game' he would make for Bread to play. Yadda yadda. We would also have reverse-Undertale where the game would appeal to your guilt by having killing Objects in Annotations progressively more unpleasant, because instead of fighting back they would all just beg for their lives or whatever.

BreadAVOTA is obviously not an actual game, but if you can see what it was 'supposed' to be, I hope it makes people a little more understanding towards my poor meow meow flaws. It feels like I'm adapting a story in a format it was never really 'meant' for. I can make the website vaguely game-y, but it's really just not the same.

Well, all that aside, since I don't really play 'modern' games, I'm unsure what modern gaming 'looks' like. I played Undertale, which sort of gives me an idea? But I mean, Undertale is to me for games what Homestuck is to me for webcomics. As in, it's my only point of reference. Smarter writers will tell you you need to read a lot to learn how to write effectively, but my golly, I really REALLY do not want to read. Or watch-play-listen-etc.

BreadAVOTA's story is 'derivative' by nature, because first of all it's literally Homestuck if it was worse, and secondly because the plot sort of rests on the idea. Universes are just rip-offs of each other, Marginals are edgy DeviantArt OC's! Etcetera etcetera. This is such a silly problem that feels exclusive to me because of the type of person I am, but a major failure in BreadAVOTA is that it's a story that would benefit from making a lot of allusions and references to pre-existing work, but I don't like enough things to do this regularly. Music is the easiest to consume, so I end up shoving in a lot of songs into the story to sort of do this 'concept', kind of, but it doesn't really 'fly' that well. It just feels different to have random background music or transcriptions of lyrics as opposed to, say, quoting popular literature or making pop culture references, the latter actually reading as intentional allusions as opposed to, well, 'music for scenery!'. If BreadAVOTA was an actual game, where integrating sounds is far more effective, this would be less of a problem.

I sort of went on a tangent there. What I really wanted to say was that eventually there should be more game-y aspects of the story, if not necessarily with how the readers interact with it (the current level of interactivity is likely the limit we're going to stay at), at least in terms of the plot/narrative (awww shit this is literally Homestuck!!!!!). We kind of already saw it with BienAVOTA: there's a bunch of references to games there. The Wars are structured like games, Bien is more-or-less being told to make games (well, write stories, technically, but presented vaguely like a game), the Demons are associated with 'playing games' (in I1-5RD). But I don't play games, and the games I did play are a very limited pool. So whatever attempt I make at 'doing a game-y atmosphere, but not as an actual game, just as a comic' is probably not going to read... like... a... game... the way all the music in the story doesn't read like a Poetic Allusion. Or whatever.

I have failed to articulate my point clearly. Woe is me. I'm trying to allude to something about conventions here. Games look like how they look today because of adapting the mechanics that worked from older games. Sometimes when you play an older game you might find an idea that was quite interesting and effective but never caught on, and it's like... I don't know, looking at what could have been, like being in an alternate universe. It's interesting to see how creative works and the tropes and conventions that define them progress and relate to older works. You know how in novels, some will begin a chapter by putting in a random quote from a different book, not as an actual part of the story but sort of to set the 'tone' of the theme? This happens in enough books that we intuitively understand what the 'point' is in doing it. When a book makes references or parallels to literary classics like Dante's Inferno or Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet or the Catholic Church's The Bible, we just know what is meant by this (as in, not the specific references themselves but the act of making a reference to begin with), because we see it happen in creative works all the time.

Doing this with music, on the other hand, isn't one of those heavily established conventions, at least, not the way BreadAVOTA is doing it. There's a different 'atmosphere' somehow in having Bien transcribe the lyrics of a song, as opposed to if I had him read some famous piece of literature, even though arguably there isn't an 'actual' difference: I'm still making a reference to a pre-existing work. Maybe the different, often stricter copyright issues surrounding music limited the type of derivative works that use them and in turn the emergence of conventions on how these works would look like, but still, it's not precisely a 'thing' to do. The only thing I can think of that is comparable are those 'songfics' that used to be popular in the 2010s, and they were regarded as odd, stilted and 'cringe-y' in a way that, all things considered, was not precisely because of the act of putting song lyrics in a written work and writing a story alongside it, but because of the lack of convention in doing this. Nobody bats an eye if you start the prologue of your novel with You will die like a dog for no good reason. Ernest Hemingway. A rose by any other name is just as sweet. Knowledge is power. France is bacon.

Forgive my ineloquence. But it's the New Year so I wanted to write an entry. Today is actually a very difficult day for me. For reasons I won't explain. And my head hurts and all. But eh, whatever. Happy New Year! Let's hope Something Happens this year!

IN A GOOD WAY

Merry Christmas to those who celebrate.

I didn't do anything for this year. The holiday season is always tough on me, emotionally. And it's around this time where somebody I know just vanished off of the face of the earth. It happens, but you know how it is. I can only hope the people I once knew are doing well, wherever they are.

I had wanted to draw something for this year, but I didn't get to doing it.

I don't have much to say, it's not easy to think. The past few days I have been sleeping too much; I'm sleepy for no reason. I also have this vague sense of (???), like nothing really matters, and I have these thoughts of, 'I don't want to do [anything] because it's pointless.' I try to tell myself it's temporary, and I only feel that way because of the season, and that eventually my motivation will come back. I 'want' to keep writing my story, despite feeling like I don't have the motivation or energy or incentive to do so. Or I can want to want it, there's no functional difference.

I go to bed early these days, around 7 PM or earlier, and right now it's such a time, and I think I'd rather go to sleep than think too much.

I have been feeling unwell lately, but that's par for the course for December. I've been preoccupied with some matters, which I won't bother getting into.

I'll share some minor updates here: I recently added a new illustration to An Archetype of a Person from Universes Before that was requested through a Ko-fi donation (thank you!). It also seems like the comment box is broken, which is an issue with the comment box host (HTML Comment Box). I sent an e-mail and hopefully it's a temporary issue, but if not I'll have to look for a different comment box widget again. Ach ):

Anyway, I recently received a question about Jacques and his relationship to his family. This is important enough to his character that I think I will write something about it in the story eventually, but the question reminded me of Albert Camus's The Stranger, a book in which the main character's relationship to his mother is similar to Jacques's relationship to his own, or at least, my interpretation of the book.

Recently, since it's been suggested (and for my own purposes), I've also been trying to archive my old blogs, or at least, the last two I had (I didn't export any back-ups of the first ones). I'll deal with that another time, but in the meanwhile I found my old postes talking about my interpretation of The Stranger from earlier this year. It's written somewhat haphazardly, but I figure I might as well share it here as well (and it might give insight to how I write Jacques):

[ There was meant to be a first part to this, but I didn't archive it, so the beginning is a bit abrupt ]

Half-formed thoughts that I'm too sick to think about too deeply but re: 'The reason Meursault shot that man was because he actually did care for his mother' in disconnected paragraphs:

It's notable that he refers to her as 'Maman': the English version (that I am familiar with at least) translates this as 'Mother', which is technically indeed what it means, but any English speaker can attest to refer to your mother as 'Mother' sounds clinical and detached. 'Maman' does not quite have the child-like quality English speakers associate with, say, 'Mommy' but it's definitely a warmer title than 'Mother' that already paints a particular image about the relationship they have. This may be the most important point, but besides that…

Meursault does have emotions and he expresses as such in the story, it's just that the subtext/follow-up to his expressions is that it makes no difference either way. An 'obvious' thing that may be silly to point, probably, but I'm surprised at the number of times I have seen it simply be said that the 'crux' of his character is he feels nothing.

Since I like to think of him as a quintessential schizoid (who doesn't), my interpretation of him is that he experiences the same dilemma many schizoids do: he is superficially apathetic but is in reality incredibly sensitive, even if he himself may not be 'aware' of it. It's a case of using the maximum of your energy to suppress the maximum of your ego: nothing feels meaningful or important because the overwhelming nature of emotion is eschewed from the selfhood.

Despite this, Meursault would be a person who is sensitive to change. He gets irritated when others push him to do things, even if he responds with passivity (avoidance, 'I'll just go along with it and be done with it') to hide it. This in part can be interpreted as perhaps apathy, perhaps the whole 'don't like people intruding upon me' feeling, but I also feel it's something like… 'I don't see the point of doing that because it makes no difference even if I did.'

The story textually demonstrates his apathy (for example, when he's asked about moving for a job and he doesn't really care because life's the same everywhere) but I think his apathy is deeper than just… well, apathy. When he says none of it makes a difference, it's not that he doesn't actually believe anything will change in a literal sense but that he doesn't feel like any of it will be meaningful to him. His default response is to try to be immovable whether he does it through action or inaction: that is, he'll resist minor irritation but also go along with what would be considered major decisions (marriage, moving for the job).

And that seems contradictory at first (wouldn't that be a big change?) but Meursault's avoidance and sensitivity has come to a point where he evaluates reality not through its material state but through personal abstract connections. If he goes through a big change like marriage or moving or even going to prison, to deal with the disruption in his material reality he tries to tell himself that it is not different in an abstract sense: how he is within. It's like a classic schizoid schism where things that happen to the external self/the 'body' are considered irrelevant to the internal self/the 'mind'.

It's notable that when he's in prison that one thing he thinks about is something he learned from his mother: the idea that there is nothing in the world that one cannot learn to stand. It may just be a generic shibboleth but I always found this noteworthy because it's the principle from which I myself deal with my own issues: of course material reality has a tangible effect on you, and it can change in major, unpredictable ways. And you can't control it! And to deal with that lack of control instead of thinking about things externally (what can be done with the circumstances?) you think you can learn to live through it by controlling it internally, that is, making 'life' be nothing more than a test of endurance, a series of learning how to make yourself tolerate.

I think the fact that in prison, his thoughts surround his mother quite a bit is also evidence enough that, while he may not love her in a 'traditional' way, still had a relationship with her distinct from everyone else.

All that aside what actually stood out to me is when questioned for his motive for the murder, what he points out is his irritation with the sun. On a surface level, his apathy is brought up again: his irritation with the sun in his eyes and the heat of the day is tantamount to a man's life. He lacks the emotional capacity to internalise murder the way a 'normal' man would.

This stood out to me in particular because he brought up the sun before: during his mother's funeral.

It's a very loose association that only exists in abstraction and not in reality, but Meursault is exactly the kind of person who lives in abstraction and not reality: the sun is something he associates with his mother's funeral, ergo, it symbolises a period of major 'change' that he has yet to learn how to process and bury, even if he appears to be apathetic to it all.

When he confronts the man he shot, it is indeed not about the man at all, but a looser connection that only exists in his mind: that man, the sun, his mother's death.

I don't really think he 'loved' his mother the way one usually expects love to be, even if only because I'm projecting my schizoidism of being unable to 'love' from being unable to feel like one is actually 'in' material reality. But what mattered is that his relationship with his mother was distinct—he knew and remembered her in a way he did for nobody else. So when she died, perhaps her being lost as an individual may have been received with 'apathy' but it still had a more abstract meaning of marking an irreversible change.

When all other events, people and places are indistinct Meursault can convince himself that swapping them around will make no difference: material reality is a meaningless blur, so in his own abstractions objects are interchangeable with one another. Thus when things change, he can mentally operate as if the new is indistinguishable from the old. But Maman was someone he 'recognised' so with her loss there was no internal object to immediately replace it with: it presented a challenge of being a change he could recognise and thus could not deny nor ignore.

Shooting the man was something he himself could not explain in logical, material terms because it really did mean nothing in material reality, and he was aware of it. He knows he has no 'real' motive and that he didn't even know the guy. But in the abstract reality from which he operates from, the man's presence was associated with the sun and thus occupied the same metaphorical space of his mother's death. Shooting him was, in an irrational way, a way of seizing control against the feeling that there was a change in his life that he could neither move back from nor pretend made no real difference.

I missed it the first time around but besides the choice of him saying 'Maman' the very first sentence ('Aujourd'hui, maman est morte') using 'aujourd'hui' (on this day today) emphasises a particular trait of Meursault's, which is how much he lives in the present.

It's shown throughout the story how he lives moment to moment with no heed for either past or future, and this has always been a very schizoid experience. It gestures to both the dissociative nature of the condition that causes discrepancies in time perception and a difficult in evaluating or even experiencing temporality as one 'normally' should, and to the detachment of the condition, the feeling of life passing by without you as you exist 'outside' of material reality, like watching the world behind plexiglass.

The way he describes his mother's death with such an odd sentence, one that is difficult to translate the ambiguity of in English. 'Today, Maman died' is a literal translation but merely saying 'today' for 'aujourd'hui' for me doesn't fully carry over the idea of temporal disruption. When Meursault talks about today and follows it up with his mother's death, it's gesturing to a more existential notion of time as something disrupted by his mother's death, that there's a point between 'today' when he learns of the death and the time that existed before.

As I said in my last post, Meursault can convince himself that changes in material reality make 'no difference' in his personal abstract reality by considering objects (people, places, events) indistinct and thus interchangeable. His mother was different, in that she was distinct, so unlike with those other changes in his life, her death is a change that is a genuine disruption. There becomes a distinction between the Before and After of the death.

For Meursault who exists in the moment and doesn't properly conceptualise this understanding of time, as sequences of events that constitute the Past and Future, he operates as if everything is only the 'present'. He understands this death as marking an important before and after, a point where everything changes, but this isn't something he is accustomed to, so instead of thinking of the death as a fixed point in the past [ Maman died that day and I am now living in the part that comes after the death ], the death becomes a constant. When he says 'Today, Maman died' that today carries over. That particular today never actually becomes yesterday or the day before or any amount of days before that to him. It's always just today. Maman died today.

And again this is what makes it so important as well for him to point to the sun. The sun in the novel is presented as a constant: not merely as background dressing but a noticeable stimulus that bears down upon Meursault. The sun that shone upon him when he shot the man being 'the same sun when I buried my mother' is important not merely as a loose association of the sun and his mother's funeral, but it's symbolising his difficulty adapting to change and his coping mechanism of existing moment-to-moment.

The experience that there's this thing that splits reality in half, an irreversible event that marks a point that is no longer the same as before, but lacking the ability to properly comprehend and internalise it, like the sun that you can feel and see with your peripheral vision but cannot actually look at head-on without blinding yourself.

Do you ever hate an incident so much you cannot talk about it? I cannot talk about a lot of things to even my associates, but I used to complain about certain things in public, and in reality I have no idea what of the things about me my associates are aware of, because I never bring it up to them and they never bring it up to me (either they don't know or they feel it's not polite to discuss). I never intend to talk to them about it, but I do regret having ever talked about it in public at all, because the possibility that they know those things weighs down on me quite heavily. I do not regret much, but I sometimes do regret how much I've shared about my life: I endeavour to be honest about beliefs and feelings, but I would like to keep facts about my existence undercover. I'd appreciate it if everyone forgot about it, and never brought it up again.

I am aware of my permanent delusions, but my goal is not to 'cure' them. I want to learn to live with them, I want people to play along. The conventional manner of treatment is to 'understand' that perpetuating delusions is bad, but if the badness is that everybody regards you as crazy it makes me bitter that the solution is to comply with reality against my will instead of having people concede to my thoughts. I would understand it if I was making demands of others, but nobody is meaningfully affected except for me in Playing Along. I am incapable of true honesty, because honesty would have to be acknowledging that certain things are mere fabrications, and every day I am weighed down by the feeling that I have to choose between the person that I feel I am and should be and being dishonest to the world. I can't complain about it correctly because by necessity I have to be vague about what 'it' is.

I watched The Good Place recently. It was alright. I'm not a fan of much fiction (despite writing my own), so it's not like I was 'obsessed' with it. But there is this one scene where they ask Michael to take off his human disguise so they can ascertain he is not an impostor, and he doesn't want to do it because he doesn't want to be seen as he truly is, and they don't force him. I really liked that scene, because it aligns with certain feelings I have regarding self-determination. I recognise the value of 'self-love and self-acceptance', as The Advocates will call it, but to be honest I was skeptical of the 'inherent worth' of 'needing' to 'accept' the things you cannot control.

What I mean is, I think one needs to learn to live with things that cannot be changed not out of some inspirational shibboleth of moral value but because it's practical: you have no choice. I would not associate it with pride or love. I think choosing things, even things you 'cannot' choose, is something to fight for. I suppose I am sensitive to the feeling of being helpless and controlled, to the point that what matters to me is not 'how things are' but the ability to choose it: how I would prefer a bad decision if the decision was called mine.

Well, I can't say much more about it, since I need to be vague. One of the things that tides me over is knowing that I am certainly not alone in this feeling, and although I cannot be part of the world in a meaningful enough sense to 'belong' with such people, just the presence alone is enough to be meaningful.

I may not run out of time any time soon, but I know how the story goes. There is nothing in the darkness that will not one day be forced into the light.

I have several memories of dying. Lefteris thinks it's funny, I suppose since a hypothetical mind construct given a name for the sake of amusement than any real belief in identity it doesn't matter much to him. I was cleaning files recently; I found how a few years ago I would draw simple diary doodles, except whoever 'I' was is irrecognisable. I think of how some of my associations weren't 'made' by 'me' but instead were made by 'others' in the past, and I wonder what that is like. I feel like I am stealing relationships even though logically they are mine. I suppose it is that I do not feel like a 'real' person in any meaningful sense, so I feel like I am robbing the life of somebody in the real world who is real, but for whom my presence has removed them of the reality.

The Marginals are a little bit of a lolrandomxD hodgepodge of different things. It works, thematically, since the initial idea was that Universes are stories and Marginals are all the random riffraff that get cut out or otherwise don't coherently belong. Either way, I still feel like I don't have the eloquence to express the proper feeling I want with them.

A Marginal is a Universe of Objects (the Objects are not really not real people). If you live in the Living World, perceiving 'a Marginal' seems to be perceiving a singular being. 'Media', some inky man obsessed with Jacques, seems like a 'person'. It is not intuitive to determine he is a Universe or he has Objects from perception alone. Media certainly has a 'backstory' but in the context of their current Reality it's not actually 'real', it's just vague Memories that 'inform' his existence, the way a fictional character has a backstory for themselves. But they certainly feel real to him. Who exactly is Media? I mean, in the broader context of his relation to the Universe: is he one of the Objects? A different kind of it? Is he the 'coagulation' of the Universe as a whole? Etcetera, etcetera. It bothers him, too. I am mostly just projecting feelings.

I try not to think too much about the future, because it makes me suicidal. I am worried about practical things, but most of all I am worried about the possibility that there will come a day in the future where I will have no choice but to abandon the 'reality' I live in, because it is not actually real, and I would rather die. It is not because I am afraid of the Real World, but simply because it is not a world that I feel Real in. It's complicated.

I never like this time of year, and in the past month or so I've been unwell every day. I get headaches and nausea and I have this constant feeling where I'm sleep deprived, even though I'm not. And I'm filled with a sense of dread. I want a distraction but have no idea what that could even be. I often wonder what's the point. I try to tell myself I have to keep existing for the future 'me' who won't feel the same way. I started to call myself only by the generic name, 'rolypolyphonic', because at some point I realised names wouldn't work for me anymore, and I like the anonymity I share of knowing it's also the online name my associate uses, even though frankly since they don't post online it's still technically me. Since I want to hide from the real world I want someone else to do real world stuff on my behalf. Oh well. My head hurts again, and when I am overwhelmed during the evenings I end up crying, but sometimes I feel it is just because it is the night. I'm not sure why, but evenings often make me cry. It's inconvenient because then my eyes hurt in the morning. It isn't that late at night, but I think I'll go to bed.

This started as a response to an ask, but it's long and significant enough for me to want to write a simple blog entry about.

Pan asked: Do you have a fave chapter? Least fave chapter? How do you feel about BreadAVOTA after writing it for so long and the way it changed over the years?

'If It Looks Like a Duck and Quacks Like a Duck, It May Be Made of Ink' is, I feel, the strongest example of my writing style, because it perfectly exemplifies my personal tastes: trivial situation, no action scenes or larger-than-life scenarios, extreme reliance on narration, minimal description of appearances and settings, introspection on the thoughts of a singular character, periodic breakdown of reality from being plunged into a mundane task, etc etc.

Of the major chapters, I'd say the entirety of Intermission 1, except maybe not for MV6, which I loathe with a passion.

Least favourite: Chapter 4. I could have split that up or something.

Honourable mentions for A1-4 and A1-5, which aren't precisely bad but are so nothing that there's nothing they evoke, but I'll give myself leniency for that one. I (rolypolyphonic) was dead when A1-4 was written, and I (rolypolyphonic, too) was working without an idea of what to do, on account of I (rolypolyphonic) being dead. And I wanted to get A1-5 out of the bloody fuckin' way because we've been stalling for so long.

I am content with how BreadAVOTA's story has gone so far even though I am aware that my own personal issues and circumstances have really killed a lot of the 'potential' that I had wanted for it.

Despite that, I feel that as the story has progressed it has started to 'take form' as the type of story I have always wanted to read, which is a feeling I didn't get in the beginning. I feel that people may disagree with this, but while I don't hate the first half of the narrative it feels very different from what I would have wanted it to be. It's structured like an isekai action-adventure where a quirky protagonist meets strange otherworldly beings and is going to be roped into monster-of-the-week type adventures a la the Annotations. This would not have been a bad type of story, and I would willingly argue it would have been a better type of story (clearer plot structure and progression), but it is ultimately not a story that I actually care about.

I'm not 'opposed' to the traditional hero's journey and other conventional storytelling formats (they're popular for a reason: they work!) but there's a reason I don't engage with the works other artists create and that's because while I find them technically proficient, they don't engage with my emotions. I've gotten used to this fact having been Big Fuck-Up Schizo my entire life, but I never realised how much I could appreciate a piece of fiction that 'speaks' to me until I decided to just make it myself.

I have always professed that BreadAVOTA is a worldbuilding/setting-based story, and I think that was sort of misleading because I hadn't realised when people talk about worldbuilding, they consider a sort of broad 'tapestry' of culture: names, flags, food, dances, arts, history, wars, political negotiations, religious practices, cosmic mythologies. From my oh-so-schizoid vantage, it's difficult for me to care about such aspects of the world when I've never been inclined to 'beauty'. There is no awe-inspiring feeling in me in seeing a wonderful painting or a large mountain or the colours of the sky changing, and throughout the years many people have noticed BreadAVOTA's odd lack of a 'world' outside vague philosophies.

BreadAVOTA, to me, is 'simulating' or 'reconstructing' a certain framework of 'reality', which is to say mine. I don't mean that I 'see' or 'believe' alien computer ghosts or that objects are sentient or that the abstractions of human beings are bodies of matter. Rather, it's trying to touch at the feeling of being a 'schizotypal' person, not as a list of symptoms but as a qualitative subjective experience. Whenever a person looks at my characters and asks, 'God, why the hell should anybody care?' what I'm 'trying' to do is getting people to ask the sort of question that I am forced to ask every single day, just by virtue of existing.

Since I've only ever lived as myself, it's been tremendously difficult to do this. I have no frame of reference but my own, and I don't know how to 'translate' that into the 'language' other people speak.

There is, of course, the other more immediate factor: BreadAVOTA has been going on for four years and it is very difficult to maintain the same style, tone and interests for four years. My new experiences and interests shifted my writing style.

Everything before and including I1-2/MV6 feels 'different' to me than I1-3 onwards, the latter being a story that 'touches' at my sensibilities more. In context, there was a gap of sixteen months between I1-2/MV6 and I1-3. Even MV6 took half a year to do because of my circumstances at the time, and I1-5-RD and BienAVOTA were the 'turning points' of me and are also where a noticeable 'shift' in tone and perhaps quality of the story happens.

If you've read BreadAVOTA since the beginning, the gap in time might 'soften' the changes that happened over the years, especially for my past followers/associates who were more prescient of my Gradual Descent Into Psychotic Madness, but if you're a new reader grinding through the story in an afternoon or two, I imagine the shift is much jarring. I1-5-RD and BienAVOTA don't even look like they belong in the same story anymore, but they are exactly what I want them to be, which is something I can't say for the earlier chapters. For me, that is more than enough.

BreadAVOTA need not be a good story; for my purposes, what matters is that it feels like something definitively 'mine', and it's difficult to let go of the feeling of sticking by the flaws of something if it's the only thing you have.

The entirety of the existing BreadAVOTA canon has been reuploaded. Rejoice! Looking for a Polish ''''Anselirian'''' translator for the 'Further Reading' snippet in I1-5-RD was a bit troublesome, but fortunately with the power of The Interwebs we have made it a Reality. This does mean, however, that I will eventually have to *shudder* make my own social media account to find my own translators, because I can only ask my associates to intercede for me so much.

I have to go back here and there to make bug fixes and proofreed (you're encouraged to send me a message if you encounter any mistakes), but for the most part I'll try focusing on Brand New Updates now.

With that said and done:

True rolypolyphonic aficianados which is like two people (I imagine the third breadposter is more casual about things) know I am so easily shame-ridden over the thought of taking people's money that the last time I used Ko-fi two years ago I ended up returning the donations and spending more on the fees it takes to return the donations than I got from the bloody donations themselves. Huzzah.

But a café isn't a café without any coffee so we now have a Ko-fi. Any money sent to the Ko-fi will be used for the website's upkeep, and since nobody reads this comicExcept for the three breadposters who I ♡ very much I expect I might get $1 every six months so I'm not going to be too fussed about using the money for anything else.

There are two membership tiers: a $1 monthly donation tier where you receive early access to whatever I'm doing, and a $3 monthly donation tier where you receive the same and also receive an art commission. You guys ought to be aware of my slow output by now so do expect that that montly update might range from Real Actual Content to something as trivial as three paragraphs of prose.

If you only seek to make a one-off donation instead of subscribing, you will also receive a one-time commission. Please note that in sending a donation to the Ko-fi, you must put an art request in the message: I will not 'accept' money for 'free' for moral reasons.

If you cannot support breadavota.cafe with cash money, remember that you can always continue to support us by engaging with the story, and maybe sharing it with a reasonable group of people (not a bajillion people on your TikTok influencer account or whatever, if I have to pay $20 in bandwidth I'm going to blow this whole website up).

This may be a miniscule amount of money to you, especially if you are a Westerner, but my monthly salary is a hundred dollars and my monthly medicine is seventy dollars so I'm already kind of killing myself slowly just by letting this bloody comic exist. Alas, it's part of the art. Never let it be said that I do not truly care for BreadAVOTA. My desire to complete the story is why I continue to fight against Ye Perpetual Suicidality! Ahahahah!

In other news, it's the anniversary of my last suicide attempt. I feel better now than I did back then, despite it all.

And then the evil children grow to become evil adults

breadavota.cafe now exists. Isn't that nice? I ought to use this Initiliasation Entry as a retrospective but I don't have a lot to say that I didn't say in the previous entry, and besides, who's reading? Besides all the BreadAVOTA readers, which is a sizable sum of three people.

When the site goes live, I'll upload up to the 'On Hiatus' update. Past BreadAVOTA readers, which I assume is all of you because I have zero desire to bother promoting that this story still-exists/that this website now-exists, are well-aware that that's around the half-way point of the previously finished updates, but the rest will follow… when they do. I am not one for efficient planning.

I'm considering uploading the backlog to completion once the next major update (A1-6) is finished, but in reality I've been saying that since June of this year. Since 2022 I've faced major art [block or burnout, whichever it is] and I have yet to recover. I've crunched the numbers [looked at my files]. I did three illustrations for 2022, one for 2023 and—don't be too shocked now—a whopping zero for 2024. In 2020-2021 I was drawing ten comic pages a day. Needless to say, but I'm one to say the needless, things are not profitez-en-bien, and they likely won't be for a long, long time.

I can write with marginally more success than I can draw, but I really, really do not want BreadAVOTA to become primarily a webnovel. For one, I'd have to edit every HTML page meta-tag to say 'webnovel' instead of 'webcomic', which is tedious and unbecoming. For another, BreadAVOTA's magic system hinging so much on convoluted, contrived linguistic middlingotology is already cumbersome enough to slog through the way it is without having it be the entirety of the story. Besides, if not to look at Jacques, the cutest and most important character not merely of BreadAVOTA but the entire Living Universe, what even is the point of BreadAVOTA? The world's first schizotypy allegory in a YA format? A demonstration of unique worldbuilding through an ipseity disturbance of a magic system? Don't make me laugh. BreadAVOTA is a furry fetish webcomic first and whatever the hell it is besides that second.

I spent a lot of money to get this domain. It's a lot of money because I'm broke. Maybe I should make a Patreon, which I probably will bar the fact that I probably won't. In lieu of monetary support, maybe you should e-mail me a very nice and/or very scathing review, as long as it's honest, and displays your rigorous integrity. All three of you.

Having abandoned my schizoid blogging days, because anybody on the Internet who makes mental health advocacy their main shindig is awful and annoying, I have since become better, and by better it means I have become full-blown schizophrenic. HAHAHAHA. Oh lo and beholden is the disorganisashen of speeeechhhhh. Every once in a while you (I) get people on reddit messaging me for surveys and interviews, because they write dissertations about schizophrenics. For one, as a hebephrenic (read: my speech and thinking erode into dust, but hallucinations/delusions are minimal), getting a lot of surveys about my experience with psychosis is taxing. If you're going to write a dissertation the fact you couldn't bother to do a rudimentary G**gle search of the differences between hebeprenia and psychosis reveals not only your lack of academic integrity but the sorry, sorry sad state of affairs of schizophrenia research as a whole. A message I got, which I ignored for my own pretentious sake, came from a person asking to interview me for a dissertation while having their profile full of 'narcissistic abuse' posts. Truly, the mark of a true dedicated psychologist is throwing people with personality disorders under the bus.

I try not to ask for things from people. You (I) cannot particularly decide when or where symptoms flare up. I won't go into detail, because I'm trying to gesture to a phenomenon more than individual people by saying this, but if you act and sound hebephrenic (or psychotic) around people, even if you aren't asking them for help and hoping they 'save' you from your insanity, they will often treat you as if you are taking resources for them. It's not necessarily malicious, but the whole 'I care about you and that's why it's best we never talk again because I can't help you and have my own mental illnesses to deal with and you being visibly mentally ill is clearly imposing an expectation-slash-obligation on me to do something about it, and not at all you just being visibly mentally ill, which I support by the way because I'm an activist' spiel that you hear not from asking for help, but merely existing as a schizo makes it quite evident that much of the sentiment behind Mental Health Advocacy online is an intellectual exercise-slash-self-soothing balm, a way to make yourself feel good without doing the uncomfortable work that it takes to put your money where your mouth is. In the name of self-care, we must remind the schizotypes of the Internet that mental illness is a conscious choice and a moral failure. Never let the gold-star Aspies try to convince you otherwise.

Also, these people never say thank you. They never say thanks! I don't need a thank you, precisely, as an individual. I think it's more that the fact that these people who pride themselves on their supposed 'awareness and education' for the mentally ill can't practice basic etiquette after asking people to write elaborate responses to their questions is ironic and dispiriting. If you can't show common courtesy, what makes you capable of actual 'advocacy'? Online Activists get a lot of value from forming networks, and without the cushioning of befriending other Online Activists to push you forward the niggling feeling that people talk to you like you're the schizoid ChatGPT becomes far more apparent, and even then the other Online Activists who try to 'befriend' you aren't immune to treating you the same. The value of any niche microcelebrity is first and foremost charisma and secondly eloquence, integrity be damned. I'm no better than anyone, except the Genshin Impact players, but I don't make my entire online presence being about how goody-goody I am. Or maybe I am better than a bunch of people. For one, I know how to thank people I have the gall to ask for favours from.

What is up and coming on breadavota.cafe? Not A1-6, that's for sure. I'd force my way through it but I can't even do that, and I know if I did I'd dig myself into a hole I can't crawl out of in terms of reconciling it with the rest of the story. Here's a list of other things I ought to handle at some point:

• Minor grammar/spelling corrections and standardisations. In particularly, the wiki (which was originally written by Breadposter Guillaume) needs to have the spelling standardised. Gui would spell that 'standardized'. The z's and s' are one such swap, but there are a few here and there that ought to be dealt with.
• The 'Home' tab on the homepage will eventually be replaced with simple browser game/s. At the moment, I'm thinking of replacing it with a dress-up game of the character of your chosen theme. I've considered making it a different game as well for each character, but frankly I don't know how to code anything except the dress-up game.
• An art/gallery page for illustrations and possibly photographs of my art dolls and plushies.
• Maybe some kind of Ko-fi/Patreon or whatever. I usually dislike receiving money from others, to the point that Rememberers of my days as a schizoid blogger may recall I spent twice as much on fees/conversions costs returning donations than I ever earned on the donations themselves, but I think having an extra fund for the domain name/hosting would be really helpful, and if I release some early previews or other ancillary works in return it's not really a 'donation' and I'll feel like I'll have earned it. Of course, there's like three people who read this, so the likelihood anybody would give me any amount of money is statistically improbable.
• I am also considering making some kind of SNS account again, if only to poste updates on, because who uses RSS anymore? I'm not sure which website to use thouugh, and I also have the whole 'social media drives me crazy and insane' problem to deal with. I feel a little better now than I did last year, but I figure the fact I stopped talking/stopped letting people talk to me is the main factor behind my relatively calmer state, and I think being anywhere online but my own website is going to compromise that. I already have to deal with strangers I don't recognise apparently archiving every single bloody metaphorical breath I take on the Interwebs.
• I plan on using this blog page not just for direct BreadAVOTA postes but for tangentially related stuff (real life meandering and postes about schizotypy, paraphilias, lovelessness and other themes directly tackled in the comic to explain the way I present them in the story), so I may have to update this blog page to something easier to link individual posts to.

Eh, we'll see how it goes.

Kind regards and well wishes to my fellow schizospectrals (and I guess the rest of you guys assuming you exist),
rolypolyphonic