I wish I had some massive splash of updates to soak you with, dear reader, but I'm afraid all I can manage is a little trickle. The fact of the matter is that my private life has had a lot going on, much of which has hindered me in different ways. I've had entire days stolen away from me by sudden obligations, as well as obligations that we agreed upon months out, and I've had a bunch of the latter all coincide in the past month. Whilst I can say that some of it has contributed to me doing more 'touching grass', as the kids say, it's not volitional, nor does it necessarily help with anything. I've been left without much in the way of a headspace to productively address things, so I've only made extremely incremental progress, if indeed progress has been made at all. Even where I've had the opportunity to do things, I've largely lacked for the willpower and have spent what little energy I have on self-mending.
Probably the biggest thing that's suffered has been this site. I have made so little progress on the PHP development that it ought to be considered stalled at this point. Some of that has to do with attempts at stopgaps that didn't work out and took a lot out of me in the attempt. Otherwise, I've simply not been in the right state of mind to try my hand and do the extremely tedious work of trying to actually get the scripts barely functional and test them, make incremental changes, and pull what remains of my hair out trying to get them in some working state. I intend to try at some point, but I won't lie and say it'll be soon. This site is, in many ways, on the back-burner at the moment.
Just so I don't leave off without some kind of general news: Among other things, I've been continuing exploratory work on Lion-Dog. It's not exceptionally fast or productive, but it's more than I've done in a long while. Unfortunately, I don't know what else I can do other than just write out bits based on whatever scenarios I can concoct at the moment and see if the output is interesting or not. I've spent some time trying to think about the intent of the story as a whole, and I have come up with some thread of a thought. The challenge remains to develop on that line and put it into stronger, more concrete words. That process has been helped a bit by my re-adoption of local journalling CLI tool, jrnl. On days where I can manage the brain, I jot stuff down. On days where I can't manage, I often idly run back through what I've jotted down. It's no magical method, but it's what I have, and it's what I'll continue to use for the future.