well. as you can see. this website has not updated in ages. and you may be wondering. where the Fuck have kiki and ayano been. WELL i am trying to keep myself awake for something right now and i've been thinking about neocities all evening so i guess i'll bullshit out a journal entry about it. this may be a bit of a mess because i am stream of consciousness-ing this shit. you have been warned DSFSDKF

so first of all it's not like we've been totally inactive on neocities or anything, ayano is the webmaster of Blue Moon Falls which is also hosted here on neocities and that updates more frequently than here. but aside from that, yeah we've been really inactive. i can boil this down to a few main reasons:

1. creative burnout has been wrecking both of us in general. personally i've barely been making art, which has been my main thing since i was 10 years old. i have never gone this long without drawing consistently. i may talk about that more in depth at a later time but essentially i took way too many commissions and even though i got them done, i am just... so burned out. like the burnout is severe. i don't really know why i make art anymore, or how i want to make it, and i've slowly been trying to figure that out again but it makes me so unhappy, i haven't made that much headway. this leaks into the website stuff too - i like making my own assets and even just the prospect of designing the visual appearance of a page, even if i don't have to make assets for it, is overwhelming atm. making creative choices is just so hard for me right now.
2. real life has been kicking our ass. i had a dental emergency this past month and also since august we've just been... going through a lot. as is obvious we have DID and the DID experience includes uncovering repressed trauma memories more or less, and in august this year we got hit with a brick of "oh shit that sure is a horrific childhood trauma we completely forgot about until now due to repression" and considering that it's one of our most horrific traumas yet, it's... uh... really impacting our mental health. which therefore impacts our already fragile physical health. we are chronically ill/disabled. it sucks when our health is so poor we can't even do things we want to, like work on this website, but sometimes that's really just how it be
3. ayano's comment section thing... listen she appreciates the attention that it received SO much, genuinely and for real, but. i just don't think she was ready to face the prospect of making open source code like that. it was overwhelming to be directly receiving so many comments and have so many eyes staring directly at her source code, and i think she felt like an overwhelming fuck-up/failure when there was a massive bug in the code that she had to patch out after release. ever since she hasn't really wanted to touch our personal site because she's afraid of facing the comment widget page, even though she has had a QOL update planned for literal months at this point, just to make the base widget slightly better. ayano in particular suffers pretty severely from social anxiety and it's likely she won't be making any more open source code anytime soon until she can work up a little more confidence.
4. literally just being overwhelmed by the amount of projects we want to do. i have so many ideas for this website and actually a THIRD fucking website separate from this one or BMF, and it's so easy to get caught up in being overwhelmed by how much work all of it will take that we don't get anything done at all. trying to be better about this.

anyway yeah tldr life is hell, our health is poor, and making anything creatively right now is incredibly difficult. all that being said i have been thinking about neocities a lot and i'm finally feeling the urge to Make Things again, and i've still been struggling with art a lot, which draws me to this website more than ever before as an alternative outlet perhaps... i have lots of things i want to get done but until our next update this website will remain an unfilled out splash page and index page, which, at the very least, i do still like the look of. i never stopped liking how this site LOOKS. but a website should have actual content... we will get there.

we aren't dead!! i promise!! even if we're gone for this long at a time it's probably just a health thing. but expect more soon, maybe? no promises because my health is so unpredictable but i really want to work on virtual observer again. just gotta kick ayano's anxiety's ass and then we can move forward.