September did, in many ways, feel like it wasn't going to end, much to the disappointment of Green Day. Even when there wasn't much actually going on, I found myself feeling the weeks stretching on. Some of that was due to personal business, so perhaps it's not entirely a fair assessment of the month. Still, it's a fact that the month has ended and passed to the next, not to mention the change of seasons that I barely noticed.
The initial bump of activity around Fossilized Wonders appears to have died down, as far as Touhou stuff goes. I still intend to do a write-up of what I've taken from it, as well as an attempt to contextualise the events of the past three mainline games, but I've yet to start on it. For the most part, discussion of the new game around THP ended up fairly muted and not very connected to the game itself. The characters that are more pertinent to the story don't seem to catch much interest, and there are the inevitable complaints about designs and the like. I'm personally a little iffy on the Moon being involved with the plot — such as it is — again. Still, it's what ZUN put out, so it's what we have now. I'd consider touching on the newer characters, but I really do feel I need to sort out some of the tangle of the recent games before even considering it.
Things started off noisy in THP's outer communities because of a certain self-absorbed individual, and I eventually had to ban them because they had a hostile, unproductive attitude that made them impossible to deal with; things became much quieter following that much needed bit of moderation. On the flip-side, activity was stable but muted on the site for a while but has upticked a little as of late. I was generally heedless of anything going on at the time because I was focused on picking Draft Records back up. Thanks to having a little space to think and numerous coincidences, I found myself with both the will to continue the story to its end and the means to chart a path to that end. Although I probably ought to do some sort of write-up/post mortem, I'll just say for now that I'm reasonably satisfied with just having got here, though I am slightly disappointed that the story itself seemingly got little notice or regard. Around the time I finished, there was what seemed like a sudden rise in activity. There have even been a couple of new stories started not too long ago as of writing this post.
For the most part, I didn't care that much about activity on the site during the period besides my own. I entertained doing various things on /gensokyo/ but opted to save my energy and concentration for Draft Records. What did get my attention was Teruyo ending my year and a half wait for a new Pantomime of Youth update. By that, I mean that I legitimately got excited about something for the first time in a while. It was a real joy to read something new for once, a feeling I had almost forgotten. Thus far, the response appears to be generally muted, so I'm keeping my hopes tempered. Still, I'm engaging as much as I can, and I do hope that something approaching momentum can sustain itself for Teruyo. I really enjoy the misadventures of thoughtfully reinterpreted 2hus in a world that pays loving tribute to bishoujo games and late Showa/early Heisei anime.
The conclusion of Draft Records has left with a bit of a quandry as to what I should do next. In some ways, I finished the story in order to have the space to take on something else, but I truthfully did it without much thought paid to what came after. I have a few partially-formed projects hanging around, but I'm not that sure about any of them. One that I spent a fair amount of the early month on was a novella-length story about kappa and humans, notably featuring no 'canon' characters. I had ostensibly put that one on the back-burner to finish Draft Records, yet I haven't found much will to get back into it. There was also a story involving Sannyo that has been in an iffy place for a while because I didn't feel I understood the emotions I wanted to convey and paused to read a couple of recommended books, something I've yet to finish doing. What's got the strongest hold on my motivation right this moment is figuring out how to move forward with Lion-Dog, something I'd hoped Draft Records would help me do yet never did in the end. I'm in the early stages of reassessing my goals and trying to figure out what it is that interests and motivates me about the story. It's always possible I could find the wherewithal to work on other things in between, but that rarely bears out in practise; I have to focus my energies in order to get anything done.
Outside of THP business, life continued to be busy. I finally got my aircon serviced, though the bad news of it was that it needs replacing. There's enough freon to last five more months in it now, and then the laws governing what freon can be sold and used will be changing. This means that I have to have both indoor and outdoor units changed at a pretty great expense in the next year, news that didn't come very happily. Still, with how hot the days have been, not having aircon was not an option. Most of the days of September aside from dealing with life have been spent watching a lot of Youtube and reading manga, occasionally diverging to watch an episode of an anime or two. After randomly being reminded of its existence, I decided to watch the anime for a manga I unexpectedly liked, Yofukashi no Uta. Thanks to watching a couple of episodes, I ended up going back to re-read it since scans of the official translations were available. I had also earlier resumed reading Asper Girlfriend on account of finding official translations and ended up finishing it fairly quickly; the ending was abrupt, but I suppose it wasn't inappropriate for the story. I'll eventually re-read that one, but I'd need to be in a much better state of mind. My re-read of Yofukashi no Uta isn't finished yet, though I'm coming pretty close to the end now. Besides everything else, I've taken to catching an episode or two of City Hunter, having remembered how generally entertaining it can be in spite of its often dumb character.
I've gone through various short booms when it comes to watching Youtube. One I was in for a while was watching videos on drawing. There's a part of me that still wants to take it back up, but I can't really find the motivation to do the actual hard work right now; compared to writing the effort is pretty significant to get any sort of result, so the work of improving is thankless, difficult, and often unrewarding in the short-to-mid-term. Having moved on from that, I moved on to watching a lot of videos about PC-88, PC-98, and MSX games out of curiosity, never having really explored either platform much. Rather than an interest in the games themselves, I suppose it was more about the history and their influence on things that came afterwards, their positioning in the media landscape of Japan, and so on. Somewhere in there, I also watched a lot of video essays about adventure games and, in particular, eroge and visual novels. Most recently, I've gone back to watching a number of videos on retro computers, something that was an interest a few years back. I can't say that it's as intense an interest as before, but I'm casually following along with things that catch my eye, largely ignoring personalities and trends that featured in what I was following before.
Personal site stuff continues to not move very much. There was a short stretch where I was working on some initial CSS styling for the site and even came away with a very rough layout and colour scheme. However, the result is still fairly ugly and rough, and I haven't even looked into how to make it more responsive. I need to think over design a lot more, particularly as regards colour pallettes. My thought in terms of concept was something along the lines of hanafuda cards, with a black-red-white scheme being the majority, but colouring alone won't likely make that work based on my observations. I need to do more research into that, and I may end up abandoning it for a different idea. The main criteria I have for a design is making it very 'Touhou in feeling', which is a little difficult to pin down; figuring out a stronger, more concrete statement of that idea may be the real first step. If I can carve out the time, I will probably devote some amount of time to thinking over the design goals of the site, both in terms of visuals and content. I've had some rough lists of things to do as far as organisation and topics to write about for a bit, but some amount of clarification and further thinking on those things is probably warranted before doing any technical work.
At the end of all this, I have to say that September was a month I spent sleeping terribly. Maybe it was anxiety and stress affecting me, particularly the sometimes urgent feelings to 'get something done' I'm often seized by. Maybe it was the feeling that various things around me are dysfunctional causing me to be a bit neurotic. Maybe it was the heat and humidity making it difficult to get comfortable. Whatever it was, I had a terrible time sleeping, and thus spent many days too tired to do much. I've overall had a problem with willingness and ability lining up for me chronologically, and that was exacerbated by insomnia. There were also nights were I just couldn't sleep for whatever reason. My sleep schedule became awful, and I wouldn't say it's been totally corrected yet. I'm making efforts to be better, and I'd say I've at least slept a little better in more recent days. I just hope that continues for the future. Perhaps it's a matter of feeling satisfied with what I've got done in the time allotted. In which case, it's a matter of finding the wherewithal, a difficult ask all in all, but perhaps doable. Until then, it's going to be a continual battle with myself to not let myself fall into complete stasis.
Here's hoping a shift into autumn weather provides a more conducive environment to everything. In Japan, autumn is sometimes characterised as 'autumn of reading'. Maybe that can also be 'autumn of writing'?