You may have noticed that I’ve pretty much disappeared from the internet. I used to write all the time, both here and on social media. Quite a few people used to read my blog, and I did my best to engage with the political and philosophical issues that I thought I had something useful to say about. But gradually I just vanished.
It’s not just down to one thing, but to a combination of factors.
The internet changed drastically over the last decade. It became totally colonized by large corporations, erupted into idiotic culture wars, and then collapsed into a hellscape of sociopathy and slop. Spending any time on the internet now is intensely depressing to me. There’s too much to say about this transformation to fit here, but it’s certainly made me want to retreat, if only because interacting with it at all drains me and leaves me despondent.
Speaking of depression – I’ve grown extremely suspicious of the internet’s tendency to incentivize sharing one’s trauma, so I won’t go into detail, but I can say that the last ten years have been very rough for me personally. There have been great moments and accomplishments I’m proud of, like all my work on the Talos games, or working for ACE Team, or making Gospels of the Flood, but the lows have been very low. A lot of it is things outside my control: bad things happening to people I love, the random disasters of everyday life – and it’s certainly not been helped by living in a collapsing culture and a terminally broken political system.
I have not yet found a way of truly putting into words how it feels to work so hard, to try and do everything right, to be everything to everyone, and to find out that in the blink of an eye, you went from twenty-something to forty-something. I caused physical and mental damage to myself trying to bring a level of quality to projects that… well, they just weren’t worth it. The sheers hours I worked, let alone the amount of mental energy that went into some of this stuff! But I wanted the games to be good, I wanted someone who sees my name on a project to know I didn’t phone it in.
As a consequence of all this I also got more and more stressed about not completing the game I crowdsourced all those years ago, The Council of Crows. I poured tons and tons of work into it, but it kept getting bigger and harder to manage, and the gaps in my ability to work due to other commitments or (increasingly) due to illness made it harder to keep track of what still needed to be done. But things kept getting in the way, and some of them were the kind of things you can’t really negotiate with.
I cannot stress enough how unhappy this has made me. Normally I deliver everything on time, and here is my own project and I’m more than a decade late with it. And every time I think I’m almost done, something else goes wrong. (For those keeping track, I’ve recently released an update that includes all the previous Lands of Dream games, with various improvements, which should be the final step to releasing The Council of Crows.)
In 2025, apart from struggling with the death of a beloved cat that hit me harder than almost anything ever has, I developed major issues with my shoulders, likely due to too many years of nonstop writing. That’s on top of ongoing severe problems with my left knee. And I also got the world’s most miserable flu which wiped out almost a month of work. So I’m still not quite where I wanted to be.
But with the update I mentioned above, I’m close to finally getting this burden off my back, and you cannot imagine how much good that will do me. It won’t make me feel less guilty for taking so long, but at least it will finally be done, and I will feel ready to move on to other things. Because honestly, I want to come back. I want to write again, to share ideas. I have a new audio drama coming out soon, and new projects that will be announced, and I just want to be participating in the world again, even if it is this hellscape. If I can contribute some small element to the creation of a counterculture that’s opposed to this horrible misanthropic garbage we’re all drowning in, that would be worth the frustrations of dealing with the modern internet.
I have so many ideas. So many stories still in need of telling. I somehow spent my entire thirties without telling almost any of them, and that’s a failure I deeply regret. I have enough sympathy for my past self to understand why those choices seemed correct, even unavoidable, but I think in the long term they were wrong, and I’m going to try to make different choices now.
So please keep an eye out for me. I do still want to finish The Council of Crows before I do anything like creating a Patreon, because it feels wrong to ask for money (even if it will go solely towards making things, not to paying bills) without having delivered on that front. But I’m slowly getting out of this miserable state that I’ve been in, and I think in 2026 I’ll have a lot of new stories for you. If you like what I do, please just hold on a little longer. I’m coming back.
Jonas Kyratzes 