It's been a bit, yes. I don't have much of an excuse other than general lack of time, energy, or brain-power to deal with developing the site. The PHP-ification process has stalled because of the above, especially the lack of time part. I'll get back to it at some point, but I can't say it's high on the priority list at this very moment with how life is going.
THP stuff has been relatively unremarkable and slow-going. I tried posting a couple of things just for activity and got little traction. One of them even has had some slightly assholish replies, and I don't especially feel like engaging at this time. There's not really anything running that I care to read, as usual. I wish Teru would bring back Pantomime of Youth, even with all the trouble that comes with it; I won't ask miracles and beg for Heart of the Fool back, because almost nobody actually appreciates it.
There was an exhibition this past period, technically to celebrate the site's birthday, though almost no one knew or cared about that part. I helped come up with one half of the themes this time, funnily enough. I won't say which one publicly, but I think it should be kind of obvious with some thought. That said, the majority of entries seemed to hew towards one or the other of the themes, and I feel like a lot of them leaned more strongly towards the 'comfort' side. I did my utmost to include both in my own entry, and I'd say I was successful to some extent, making them fairly pivotal to the core of the story. If I had to say there was a weak point conceptually, it's that Sannyo's own sense of weakness was a bit secondary to the rest. I don't really know how I would have improved on that, though, considering how little space I was working in. The result was, in any case, a pretty dense story for its length, which ended up being pretty considerable by necessity.
Length did end up being a bit of a pain point in this exhibition, incidentally. There were several other entries that totalled similarly in character count to mine, and they were worse off for it. I'd say the common denominator lay between a lack of focus and a lack of much on a conceptual level to justify the length. There was at least one that had more the opposite issue, but I also don't feel the ideas the author expressed separately were that interesting, so perhaps it was a blessing in disguise. As usual, Teru's entry was leagues ahead of the rest in general, even if I sort of liked a couple despite their flaws. There was also one that I didn't think was bad initially, but the response from its author to my impressions was so contemptuous and condescending that I revised that opinion. The impressions I got for my piece were often puzzling or just irrelevant, save a couple. It largely felt like people didn't get it, which didn't totally surprise me, but it does annoy me a little that most responses were based on very surface-level aspects. I felt like once again dusting off that old chestnut of reading motherfucking books when responding to some people but held off in the end; I ended up just not dignifying most with a response.
Beyond the exhibition, I've been trying behind the scenes to get some kind of momentum going for reviving Lion-Dog. I don't want to go too deep into things, but there is a whole mountain to get over when it comes to arranging things. There was essentially never a full story to hold everything up, so it has to be constructed out of (almost) nothing. I've figured out some fairly basic things, but the next steps have to be figured out almost at the same time as carrying them out. Even with Teru helping me, things don't proceed at any steady pace, and every step feels exceptionally clumsy. I guess it just goes to show that lacking experience in storytelling at any scale — at least, doing a story of my own instead of acting as a collaborator — makes dealing with anything larger than a short story difficult. At least, despite understanding that, I feel it more palpably every time I make even the least effort with this. There are also other smaller projects that have sat idle for a bit for the same reasons as everything else, but I can't spare much effort on them for the moment. It sucks, because I really would like to do more ToY tribute stuff, but I just don't have the bandwidth.
Anyway, yeah, I'm alive. Maybe I'll continue being alive somewhere down the line. Right now, I'm too fucking tired.