[Loelya]

hellooo again everyone <3 tomorrow is my birthday again! c: however I think there will be too much going on the day-of for me to carve out time for cs specifically so I am making another lil colored-in cake today and also gonna try to get some communication to y'all again. this time I wanted to try doing something outside my usual "aesthetics" hah; this is a multi-fruit shortcake with a caramel drizzle and lots of fun sprinkles ^o^ couple years ago I did a sea-themed cake and last year I did a sky cake.

I've been absent again despite my best wishes and I want more than anything to be able to say that's over now and I'm coming back and ready to start hosting my limbo-fied game again... sigh. I feel the urge to apologize again as well but there's also a part of me that wonders if I've apologized too much at this point without things changing for the better. :'] I have some concerns that the more times I say I'm sorry, the flatter it falls the next time I have to come around and do it again. but alas, there's not a great deal of other things I can do at this point. so: I am very sorry for any let-down feelings I might have left in my wake with the sudden halt in activity here.

I do have a couple explanations! I'm hoping that having more info will help ease any understandable frustration that might be there.

the first thing is actually kind of awful lol and I don't think I can get into this very much here because I think the topic might be too negative to be allowed on cs at-length. right after the new year, one of my bosses at work had a major series of incidents with me that just absolutely destroyed my mental state and I am unfortunately still feeling the effects of that. it's bad enough that upon relaying the series of incidents to three - completely unrelated, with no overlap in members - separate groups of people, one of which were personal peers, one of which were professional peers, and one of which was a personal, older mentor figure, the immediate advice I received from every single one of those people was to look into single-party consent laws in my state and get a recording device and start gathering evidence. so y'know. that's probably enough different perspectives that I've decided I'm going to try to do that.

my mental disposition is just,, in the gutter over this and I have been struggling to climb back out. I'm not even really excited for my birthday tomorrow, I just feel drained and lifeless most days recently. but I'm still going to try to do some nice things, I'm not just gonna roll over and mope or anything. ^u^ I have lunch plans at least!

the second thing is Much more logistical and not related to my personal life. I have a sort of oldschool 2012 large tablet that I use to do oekaki work, because it works well enough with the oekaki that I get to do fun things like use pen pressure lol. thing is, it's So Bulky, that I have to have it set up on a table of its own, and that's usually in my spare room. right now, I'm having to have the floor replaced in the spare room, so I had to pack up the tablet and move all furniture out of that space, and I won't really be able to put it back up in a different spot in the meantime because it's just So Big. diameter-wise it's like half the size of my body lmao

the floor-replacing work is also going much slower than expected because my area has been badly affected by snow and ice storms the past few weeks, and folks keep having to shelter-in-place (the area is not well-equipped with ice-management vehicles or strategies because it's very seldomly cold enough here to even get snow.) so there's not been a lot of actual progression and I think it will still be a bit of time before that picks up again.

I did briefly try to pull up game-related stuff on my ipad but as I've mentioned a couple times before (and something you may have seen other oekaki artists complain about) is that the oekaki doesn't recognize every pen stroke input from an ipad. it kinda skips to every 2, or 3 strokes and so a lot of "drawing" on ipad oekaki is just making the same pen motion several times, trying to get one of them to stick. it's very irritating and though I have toughed it out before to get some kind of time-limited drawing out, I'm just not up for it this go-round. xD sorry to report. I hope to have this resolved by the end of february and my big tablet set back up again soon, but I'm actually not 100% sure what the timeline will be.

given all of [gestures broadly] that, I'm considering what actually returning to the rest of the game activity will look like. I don't think it will be Imminent (as previously hoped), so I'm thinking about just kind of stepping back more fully for now and basically trying to complete all remaining non-oekaki work for it in the meantime.

something that might be fun is leaning into the recent trend of "summerween" I've been seeing floating around, and hosting the remainder of the game in summer. ^u^ perhaps June, after most spring semesters have closed for the year. I could make some "official" personal announcements about that schedule-wise when it starts to get close so that it's not a case of me saying "I'm coming back to this soon!" with no real calendar correspondence. I feel like launching back into it with little warning after the break has dragged on so long would end up leaving people out, since not everyone checks CS every 3 days.

I am open to suggestions though, if anyone has any. I never got around to replying to all the encouraging comments on my last communication about this, but do know that I appreciated all of them very much and I was so much less stressed closing out the year because of y'all's support. <3 thank you for being around and for being so understanding of me. I wish I was superhuman and never had to deal with anything keeping me away from sillyfunny games online, but I'm finding that's a rather rare luxury unfortunately. xD

[FateStoryteller]

I'm not part of your game, but I do know that the general consensus here on CS is that real life always comes first and you need to take care of yourself first. I would hope that would be the case in regards to your current players as well <3
Also, I'm so sorry to hear about everything going on in your life. Its completely understandable that you're feeling drained and that you're not excited for things that normally you'd be excited for. But you're doing the right things, taking the steps to free yourself from this terrible situation and I have high hopes that you will be excited for the things you're used to being excited for again. If you ever need someone to talk to, please feel free to pm. I can't offer more than an ear and encouragement, but I'm happy to be there for you if you need someone <3

[Loelya]

I'm not part of your game, but I do know that the general consensus here on CS is that real life always comes first and you need to take care of yourself first. I would hope that would be the case in regards to your current players as well <3
Also, I'm so sorry to hear about everything going on in your life. Its completely understandable that you're feeling drained and that you're not excited for things that normally you'd be excited for. But you're doing the right things, taking the steps to free yourself from this terrible situation and I have high hopes that you will be excited for the things you're used to being excited for again. If you ever need someone to talk to, please feel free to pm. I can't offer more than an ear and encouragement, but I'm happy to be there for you if you need someone <3

that's very kind of you, thank you. c': <3 I appreciate it so much.