Retro Heart

When you find yourself amidst everything falling apart, the only way is forward.

This one's a little selfish. I'll be honest, it was tempting to write some big, long screed on the past year or so of my life, particularly in the wake of Cohost entering read-only and shutting down and, honestly? I started to do that, but stopped myself. I've done that plenty already. Reflecting on the recent past doesn't change or resolve anything. It's time to move on to what's next.

Today's Tune: Re-Undulate by Kankitsu

Where to find me:
| Website | Blog | Patreon | Ko-Fi | Streams | Everything Else |

I'm not quite done here, there's still one last, not-specific-to-Cohost post I want to make before it goes read-only if I can swing it as my actual, absolute last post, but this is the weekend of everyone saying their goodbyes, and I suppose it's time to say mine, too, in a sense.

I've been trying to sum up the words, but I think I can shorten my thoughts down to Cohost giving me a place to belong. I got to meet people I'd never meet otherwise, cross paths with people and artists who, seeing them elsewhere, felt like giants. Cohost made me recognize - forced me to recognize - that I'm not among giants. I'm just among other people.

It's been a strange year in an age where every year has some new catastrophic event tied to it destined to show up in history books. It's been a year where a lot of aspects of my personal life shattered, a year where I'm still trying to put the pieces back together. There's a laundry list of things I had planned that got pushed to the wayside. I wanted to reboot Terraform properly, start on Zero XP Hero, put together an art book, finish my website... the list is never-ending.

If I have any regrets, it's that I didn't work on the things I wanted to a bit more, show off characters and ideas that I think people here would really like, but we don't get to write our own scripts. It's all improv, and we do what we can with each passing day.

For a little while, Cohost gave me a place to put down my pack as a digital nomad and feel a sense of belonging. It got me to start reaching out again, to be a little less guarded. I'll always be thankful for that. Cohost shutting down has given me a strange sense of drive for what I want to do next, motivated by loss and hope. The ending to one story is the beginning of another, and I'm glad I got to play a small part in this story before it ended.

Thank you. From the bottom of my heart.

I'll see you next.

Website
https://retroheart.net
The central hub for pretty much everything I do, including galleries and character pages. It'll always be the central place for updates as long as I can keep the lights on.

Blog (Mechanical Heart)
http://blog.retroheart.net
A bespoke blog separate from my main site. I'll be retiring the blog on the main site at some point as I migrate blog posts over to this subdomain. It also has an RSS feed.

Links
http://links.retroheart.net
Currently redirects to retroheart.carrd.co. I'll migrate the list over to the main site at some point, but that link will always be a running list of where else to find me.

[Update: The rest is after the cut. It may may not be current when Cohost goes read-only, so Website and Links are always your safest bets.]