Hello. As you know, I’ve given up being upbeat and optimistic in my updates on this project, since such an attitude is a waste of energy and also disingenuous. So if you aren’t interested in a long, bitter diatribe about how much I resent the amount of work this project is taking, turn back now.

I finished the "first pass" of chapter 3 a few weeks ago, completely crushing my delusional hopes that each chapter ought to take less time than the last, since, supposedly, the first few releases would involve a lot of general groundwork and later releases would only involve creating content specifically for one chapter. I started in on Chapter 3 at the beginning of December last year, and here we are 1.5 weeks into November, which means that Chapter 3 has so far taken the longest out of all of them.

For months now I've had a very bombastic essay prepared on how much I hate the amount of work this game is taking and how it's not worth it. I was planning on keeping quiet until I finally finished Chapter 3 and then posting the essay when the download link went up. But, fuck it. The gist of it is that I was absolutely ignorant of how much work this game was going to take when I started it, and a free RPG Maker Elder Scrolls fangame full of stolen media is not worth this huge a chunk of my life, but I'm not going to quit because of sunk-costs fallacy, and in the meantime I just have to hate God and keep grabbing a few hours to keep working whenever I can, as I watch my potential to create something that actually matters drain away month after month.

Something happened a few months ago that changed everything: I suddenly got a boyfriend. It should be good news. I should be happy. But suddenly, project time has been slashed in half. The amount of my life this project will consume has just doubled.

I'm full of emotional dissonance. I should be happy and want to hang out with him all the time, but this project is dragging behind me like a ball and chain. I'm constantly trying to make sure I can get away from him often enough to put a reasonable amount of project work in each week, even though I feel really guilty about it. Weekends used to be the best time to put in a good 8-10 hours of work, but ever since getting together with him I'm often away from home for the entire weekend. Again, I should be happy. This should be a great, exciting period of my life and I should feel be grateful to have met him. But, as I've said before, RPG Maker ruined my life. This is just yet another thing about it being ruined.

But I'm not cancelling this project, because then God wins. God mocked me by filling me with the desire to start projects, but then bombarding me with problems and misgivings until I cancel them, flushing into oblivion all the time and work I invested in them. This has happened time and time again. This new boyfriend is just God's latest attempt to try and make me flush away all that work. But He's not going to win this time.

Even if it's going to take an entire year or more to make each chapter from now on, I'm not cancelling Tallest-Reed. Even if this website closes down before it's done, scattering to the winds the few people who even know it exists. Even if this dumb RPG Maker fangame will get completely ignored and disappear with nary a blip underneath the surging bullshit tides of what the Internet decides to give attention to, proving ultimately what I already know to be true, the fact that this project is not worth 6+ years of my fucking life on this earth.

I think I hate this game.

Too bad I'm not going to stop working on it.

Maybe the next chapter will be up by the end of November?

How are you.