Progress Report + a Frank Health Talk + Art Update

Howdy hey folks!

The art editing is nearly done. All that's left is cleaning up a handful of Zoey's expressions (I'm a bit over 75% done with that), more minor edits to the background to polish it, final checks for things like color flats escaping outlines, and the admittedly daunting process of fixing how Keisuke looks and the laborious process of exporting everything into flattened PNGs, but after that I can finally fucking write again.

Unfortunately, my right arm is currently out of commission. I ignored the warning signs of my body and pushed past them to edit the art (with a mouse because I am insane) for over 8 hours a day, only for my right shoulder and the right side of my neck to explode into so much pain that it felt like getting hit by a battering ram and burned alive at the same time. A day and a half later (when I intended this post to come out, but my internet was out for the entire day because Xfinity is a dogshit service provider), my right shoulder still hurt like crazy, there was a lot of tingling numbness in my right pinky and ring finger, and I couldn't even feel my right forearm at all. Three and a half days later, those fingers still feel sore and there's a stronger than recent average tremor from my wrist down so I am refusing to take chances on anything that requires heavy mouse usage. If the last year taught me anything, it's that not taking my health seriously and being impatient with recovery leads to spectacular backfires that set me further back than I would be if I'd just waited until I could work without trading my health.

The last three days were mandatory rest days of parking myself in front of my computer and using my right hand as little as possible (and today is looking to be much the same), but I've thankfully gotten respectably decent at typing with my left hand and using navigation keystrokes and macros in lieu of a mouse. I really should just swallow my pride and get an ambidextrous mouse or even a dedicated left-hand mouse for days like this (like a Razer Naga because I am insane and I will take all the physical buttons a mouse can offer), but I just replaced my dying Razer Basilisk V3 of four years I bought for like 50% off with a wireless version of the same mouse with a similar discount so my cats don't keep biting the cable and I'm hesitant to dive into another rabbit hole of PC peripherals when I've trapped myself in the ivory tower of needing a very, very specific (and uncommon!) southpaw layout on a keyboard to use it for work, to say nothing of my pickiness about switches (currently Kailh Box Pink V1s with a mix of dry R0-59 KT and wet Krytox 205g0 lubricants + aftermarket 50 g SPIRiT BOX springs coated with GPL 105, but I now hate anything that isn't a clickbar switch), stabilizers (I can't use anything but TX AP's with plate foam to dampen downstrokes), plate material (polycarbonate or polyoxymethylene for flex), foam (ideally the full package of plate, case, PCB, and spacebar foam), keycaps (I'm actually way more lax on this one and am fine with Cherry, SA, or DSS form factors, but if a set has a numpad with any legends, a dedicated solo = key (yes I know NUMPAD = isn't a scan code any modern OS uses), or is missing a satisfactory way to fill out a 20 1U numpad, I hate it), and mounting style (O-ring, PCB gasket, plate gasket, and grommet are the only options I accept but I've made exceptions for great top mounting).

I think that when I need a keyboard to look like this to even consider using it for work, it's a sign I've lost the plot.

I keep my ear to the ground about any Full Size/1800/75%+Numpad keyboards, and to my confident knowledge these are the only 8 keyboards that I could ever see myself using as of 2025:

• HEX.6C (the one I currently use).

• EXT65 (which I've had for years and got on clearance for like $100).

• Kangaroo Full Size (which I have as my possible endgame keyboard if I need to add even more focus on my left hand).

• Southpaw Full Size (which I've had for a few years).

• Wyvern (which I've had for years).

• SPV1 (which actually would have been perfect were there not stupid blockers on the windows key so I didn't get it).

• Fossil Full Size (which is still in manufacturing).

• Pangea Full Size (which doesn't actually have a 20 1U key layout option but I've manually rewired a keyboard (Keychron Q12) before and it doesn't even look that bad and I don't doubt that I can do it again).

These 4 keyboards (and a number of cheap 3D printed projects) don't make the cut:

• Southpaw Extended 65% (which is just a straight-up worse prototype of the Wyvern).

• SP-111 (which I would never get because I don't trust myself to like a split layout).

• Class0413 (which I declined because it lacks arrow keys).

• VIENDI 8L (which I likely will never get because I am skeptical of its arrow key layout).

By the way, that black gaffer tape a shelf I made so my cats can crawl behind my keyboard and mouse and lay down there without getting in the way (and excuse the dust and cat hair because I have domestic medium hairs who leave litter dust and thin hairs on everything I own).

Anyways, I didn't bring up all this keyboard stuff without good reason, as it's here to demonstrate a point while being a springboard (keyboard) to a topic I do in fact need to address.

If you'll allow me to indulge in a mix of a frank discussion about my health and humble-ish boasting about my own ingenuity to work with the bad cards I've been dealt with my health, I am simultaneously someone who thinks a lot about how to adjust my routine as a right-handed person to give more tasks to my left hand and someone who stubbornly refuses to compromise with reality (and I don't just mean the state of being genderfluid).

By far the most prominent example of this is my keyboard(s). I've done hours upon hours of research on any given keyboard to determine if it's both good and actually going to make work easier. That left-handed numpad has a bunch of macro layers to speed up work and reduce keystrokes (seriously, I would've completely given up on C.H.E.A.T.S. and modular expressions years ago if I didn't have tap codes to type the code into the script for me with only 5 keystrokes). I decided that QWERTY's stupid layout (this video is a good 8-minute summary of its insanity; this article is also pretty good but Wikipedia's entry is perhaps more digestible) is actually perfect for my use case because it favors the use of the left hand over the right). I experimented with plate material, foam density, and mounting styles to find just the right combination of flex to reduce fatigue and to control that flex with sets of foam blockers. I thoroughly tested a lot of switches until I found ones that were quite light (to reduce strain), have decent travel length (so that when the travel "bottoms out" it isn't that forceful because my fingers have distance to slow down), and give me a lot of feedback on keystrokes so I can tell if I mishit a key... and then I modified them to feel even better.

For as many problems as my highly specific demands of a keyboard create, this has been the primary success story of me facing the problems of my own health, recognizing and accepting them, and then thinking things through and doing my best to make the best of it.

But in most other areas, that process has been a mixed bag.

I got into shaving with a double-edge safety razor and need to put all my information, suggestions, and advice into something like a Google doc because I am very willing to proselytize for its dramatic savings over shaving compared to cartridge razors (even if the investment cost in equipment means it takes like 3 months to start saving over cartridge razors), its closer shave with less irritation, its better skincare, and how its not nearly as daunting nor difficult as it looks, but every time I shave with my right hand I have to have a light grip and vigilance to drop the razor as soon as I feel my arm start to jerk.

I'm a fairly novice chef who is getting surprisingly good at cooking given my dramatic and abysmal start, and yet for as much I've tried to do it right with subscriptions to Epicurious and NYT Cooking for recipes, suggestions, and advice from actual chefs so I can cook things that are both tasty and healthy, and as much as I've tried to make cooking safer and easier with commercial-grade choppers/dicers (something like this was a lifesaver in my former life as a pizza delivery driver/back-of-house prepper and it's so much better than those cheap plastic clamshells on a hinge) and non-mechanical can openers, and as much research I've done on assistive kitchen devices such as senior/one-handed cutting boards, mounted jar openers, and finger guards for a knife, I've insisted on not just more manual knife use than I need but finally learning how to properly sharpen those knives (something I've always been awful at).

And not only that, but...

Look, if I haven't already lost you by now, the point that I am trying to get to is that I will adapt to my declining health when it comes to work because it's been an ongoing process elsewhere. In addition to the above, I now drive only with my left hand and I've started to use a cheap Bluetooth home theater remote I hold in my left hand when I'm in bed with my phone right next to my face when reading books or whatnot. Like that cat shelf, I am capable of kludging together a solution, but like that keyboard, I can also use the process of adapting to my declining health as an opportunity to put thought and effort (and a lot of tinkering!) into a system that not only acknowledges the reality of my own limitations or does the best with a bad situation but turns a weakness into a strength. My health (and myself) have become intertwined problems to solve, and as much of an eccentric writer and gender maverick I am, I never lost that part of me that's an engineer who existentially loves the process of thinking, tinkering, and finding good solutions with confidence.

To me, those strings of concessions can feel like milestones in the road of a death by a thousand cuts. Hell, sometimes they even feel like they're costing me an arm and a leg.

But that would hardly stop me at this point. To quote the stupid yet genius Xavier, Renegade Angel (oh hey, all of it is on YouTube for free!), "I'll be fine, I'm a survivor. We're a dying breed."

By the way, one of my absolutely favorite parts of re:Dreamer is directly inspired by a dumb gag from Xavier: Renegade Angel.

And speaking of Zach being a fucking dork!

As I've been toiling away at TiltSHIFT's work for the last two weeks, TiltSHIFT has been toiling away on the Halloween CG set I explained in the previous progress report.

But real quick, I want to point out that due to a recent change to how Patreon posts work, images have a max height, so images in portrait orientation will appear smaller than they are. Right clicking those images to open them in a new tab should lead to an Imgur page, and from there opening that image in a new tab will give you the actual full image. I'm sorry this is so dumb, but Patreon is gonna be Patreon with reinventing something that wasn't broken (except by themselves) and Imgur has consistently been the best option for hosting any images in these posts.

Anyhoo, The sequence's sketches have been cleaned up more:

I've gotten the expression tests from the first of those scenes:

With minor corrections/adjustments on 10 and 13:

And the same for the second pose:

And a minor correction on 1:

So, beyond TiltSHIFT's skills clearly leveling up since the last time I worked with him a full year ago, I want to point something out before I wrap up this post and... well, "post it," I guess?

Zoey's expressions are... rather "tame" overall. Faces 24-33 were later additions from TiltSHIFT (with 34, 35, and 36 being edits or new expressions I made myself), and even then, they're not that eccentric.

For as much as I write Samantha as a maverick with a larger than life presence and intensity, her sprites (and "my" own haha god I'm still fucking embarrassed by how dense I was with designing Zach's mom) still have a lot of goofy faces. Hell, she even has more than her even dorkier daughter, and I am deliberately using that word here.

My consistent stance on the name and gender of re:Dreamer's protagonist has broadly been that Zach is the person (and that person is a guy), and Zoey is the body (right up until this person says otherwise about the name or their identity).

I genuinely try to treat Zach's identity with the care and respect I'd afford a real person, and if you've been paying attention to anything about me in the last two and a half years, you'll know that this unquestioning acceptance of someone when they tell you who they are with no strings attached or attempts to change that person's answer if you don't like it is something I very firmly believe is an inalienable human right. I've made mistakes I bitterly regret because I didn't properly understand that or its importance, and I have a responsibility as the head of a small queer community to create a space where nobody is pressured to be anyone else but themselves.

However, given the variability with this game and who this character becomes, I'll often Z and they/them as a catch-all name and epicene pronouns for the protagonist in cases of ambiguity, variance, or overlap in the center part of a Venn diagram of Zoey and Zach (similarly, I treat "epicene" as being different than "gender-neutral" as it encompasses characteristics of both, neither, and indeterminate for either sex or the two primary poles of gender).

Despite that variability in Z's identity, working through whatever their issues with gender might be is always going to be a necessary step for their personal growth because their situation means they are forced to confront themselves with no way to run or hide from the reflection.

My own experiences with gender have been one hell of a mixed bag, but that similarly mandatory exploration and self-reflection has still led to answers even if they weren't always ones I wanted. It's hard to explain or understand what change caused what change, let alone why, but I'm in a way that's even harder to explain, I'm more "myself" than I was two years ago despite being a very different person than who I thought I was. I'm more expressive, less scared to be myself, and over two years later this all still feels new and equal parts exciting and overwhelming.

The reason this CG set is important isn't that it's hot (it is), or that it's got even better art with a more experienced artist (it does), but because of one specific reason: it's the first time in the story so far where Zach, Zoey, or Z has felt truly comfortable being themself. They don't feel a need to deny any part of who they are, and the secret of the ephemeral and intangible idea of gender is that when you stop denying yourself from being anything other then all you are, what you are fades into the background and stops being so important when compared to who you are. Transgender, cisgender, non-binary, straight, gay, lesbian, queer, and all the rest are ultimately just labels you get the choice to use as a shorthand to say who you are in a way that can be shared with another person so that they understand you better, but you aren't any other label than you.

If you think that's profound, I regret to inform you that I am actually dumb as a rock and still confused by myself. The calm moments where it all makes sense aren't the moments where I understand myself so much as they are the moments where I don't care what I am. I can breathe and just be myself with no expectations, and when that genderfluid idiot that I am can stop standing on quicksand and solidify onto a bedrock that makes me feel steady, the internal compass loses relevance, because I am centered and I know I am exactly where I need to be.

Sure, the re:Dreamer app might be doing the majority of that work here for Z (there is a small layer of mental alterations, to say nothing of Z getting mildly tipsy), but that artificial or chemical support doesn't subtract from that comfort, that self-assurance that it's okay to be who they are.

Just take a look at some of the expression references for Zoey in this CG:

I'd usually try to source these to their artists to give credit where credit is very due, but that's very hard to do when they're already cropped and Patreon has been riding my ass about linking to sites they don't approve of; also, I fucking hate how the images are now centered in posts.

They are way less subdued and grounded than Zoey's expression normally are, because when you have comfort in just being yourself, it literally shows on your face.

Why that's further relevant is that this is a testing ground. Once the routes reach their moments of significant character growth (around the halfway point at December-ish; for reference, the first day in the story is October 7th, 2022), I'm commissioning new expressions for Zoey that show that whoever this person is now or whoever they are becoming, they are finally finding the confidence to be that person. They're a richer and more vibrant person, and that character growth can be seen in ways ranging from visibly shallow and profoundly deep, almost as if trying to grow as a person lifts some of that fog of depression and anxiety that they're plagued with as their range of emotions and how they express them widen substantially. I've been slowly building this stockpile of facial expression references for this exact reason for a few years now if you want to click that Dropbox folder link to see what I'm talking about, and I'm even way behind combing through and sorting everything in my downloads folder to add to the pile.

By the way, that idea was directly inspired by Kiyu Fuyuki's A Boy Who Loves Genderswap Got Genderswapped, so He Acts Out His Ideal Genderswap Girl (they also have a lot of other good short gender bender stories).

Despite being abandoned, it's an incredibly easy recommendation as it's a good, fun, and funny exploration of an incredibly self-aware protagonist in a gender bender scenario who very firmly understands the nuances of their genre and leans into parts for fun, to fuck with people, and to just enjoy their gender bender special interest with gusto.

As you can guess, it's been a very nice reference for Zach and the "middle paths" of variables and the "therapy" answer as a very self-aware character who doesn't let his complicated and mixed views on suddenly having a female body stop him from using it to have fun, fuck with people, and enjoy their kinky gender bender fetish (a mindset they try to hold onto even as it starts to surface that there might be more going on to that fetish than "I just like it").

It's also got what is either my very favorite or second favorite page in any gender bender manga ever, with its only real competition being BlazBlue - Remix Heart's (mild spoiler warning on the next link) "I'm me!/I am me!" page. If you're ever curious of the guiding stars of my ethos about gender bender, each of those are very strong examples that point straight to the heart of what makes me like the genre so goddamned much.

Wrapping this up, I firmly believe that the expressiveness of each character is one of the largest strengths of re:Dreamer, but that works best when I have content written alongside those facial expressions to fully fit with the writing rather than being a later addition and when those expressions have a massive range from how I can swap parts in it. Z, just like the visual novel, is a work in progress, and I want both to grow together to give a subject as serious and as pointless as gender my best efforts.

Until next time.