Discard Pile

Home

My name is Kyle and welcome to my website.

Consider this my basic little "hub world" for the stuff I've worked on.

This site is still under construction. For now, use the navbar at the top to look around. This site might be slightly busted on mobile.

About

About Me

31 // he/him // United States

My name is Kyle Labriola. I'm an artist, writer, and indie game developer.

I like to blog and make games. I occasionally draw things and make comics. I've been posting work online since 2005, though obviously most of that won't be shared here.

About This Website

This site is intended to be a casual landing page and personal website for me to play around with.

I don't think I have ambitions of making it look "professional" or anything like that. I think it's important to have a personal site disconnected from any corporate-owned platform, even if it means having to get my hands dirty with a tiny bit of HTML.

Visually, expect this site to look as basic as possible. I don't know what I'm doing.

This site was made with the public domain template shared at https://jackis.online/freewebsite/

Everybody say "Thanks, Jack."

Now

What is a "Now" Page?

The idea of a "Now" page is to sum up what you've been up to lately. It's not necessarily meant to stay on the internet forever. It's ephemeral and casual, like catching up with a friend who hasn't seen you in a while.

You can read about the origin of Now and a collection of Now pages across the web right here.

The next time I update this page, the previous entry will be lost forever.

What am I up to Now?

(Updated September 5th 2026)

Doing: Did some important stuff for 7BG recently, nervously excited to see how it all pans out. On the personal project side, I've actually made a ton of progress lately. I think that MAGwest rejection / faux-deadline helped light a fire under my ass for a month in a productive way. I also have rough "milestone deadlines" of what progress I want to make in September and October. If all goes well, the game will be out in December. I can't promise it'll be GOOD, since I'm trying to not worry about that anymore, but it'll be OUT.

I sound crazy for saying this but I've also started brainstorming, and writing, for another personal project for after the RPG is done. In some ways this is a bad habit, splitting my focus across multiple projects, but it's sadly just how my brain seems to want to operate. I'm proud to say that the stuff I'm chipping at for that mysterious game is going well. It's all just jotting stuff down in Google Sheets on my phone while watching my partner play games on the couch, but it's more "writing" rather than "being an Ideas Guy" so it's like real work I promise. This will be more obvious when I announce the game someday. God I hate saying shit like that, now I just jinxed it.

Last night my partner and I went out to karaoke with our friends, for a friend's birthday. That's three karaoke outings in the span of roughly 4 months, and it's been a blast every time. Each time we go, new people who are invited are surprised to see how theatrical and over-the-top I am lol. What can I say, I've always been a wanna-be theater kid who never tried out for any of the school musicals. When we do karaoke, I like to leave it all out on the field (sweet bro and hella jeff voice: "sports refrance") even if it means losing my voice by the end of the night. There was one particularly magical moment where my friend and I were singing a duet, and then completely unprompted and unplanned we started doing the exact same dance at the exact same time, in perfect sync, without even looking at each other. Our friends were like, "Uhh….did you rehearse this beforehand?" I guess life just has those serendipitous moments. If you're curious, this was during "What Is This Feeling" from Wicked.

Reading: I finished the Keza MacDonald book about Nintendo! It was pretty good, but sadly written for someone who's more of a layman than a fanboy like me. It's not necessarily an issue that I "knew most of the information already" but I guess certain chapters feel deflated when I have more information that I would've added if I had been writing the book. It's weird to read history about something you lived through, because there's this voice in your mind like "you forgot to mention XYZ thing that was a huge factor or result of this." But otherwise the book is good enough. I like stuff about gamedev and game history.

Now I'm continuing Meditations for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman. This is my second full Burkeman (and I dabbled in a few chapters of one of his early ones) and I continue to be a sucker for this kind of stuff. They're all vaguely self-help books about motivation, time management, happiness, etc. but mostly predicated on the notion of self-help being bullshit. I know that's a cynical way to sell your own self-help book, but instead of being edgy and gimmicky, Burkeman seems pretty sincere and even-keeled about weighing different approaches, pieces of advice, and different philosophies across different cultures about how we think about our lives. I don't know if I will directly try to use any of the actionable advice, but his work in general brings me comfort and I feel like they help me with my anxiety and feeling of being overwhelmed or lost. He seems like a chill guy and good writer.

Also been reading the Magic the Gathering stories for their upcoming Reality Fracture set and they've been really good, even though I don't have the full context of some of these mainstay MTG characters like Jace and Vraska.

Playing: Still playing Zoominos. Dabbling in the Final Fantasy Resonance demo. Dabbling in Breath of Fire IV and Bomberman 64 now that I've got Retrodeck on my Steam Deck. Been playing Combolands (another score-chase synergy deckbuilder roguelike) which I enjoy but I like Zoominos more. Probably gonna try getting back into MTG Arena once the Bilbo Baggins set is gone and we move onto their original set Reality Fracture.

The wait for Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave continues.

Watching: Last week I rewatched La La Land. I hadn't seen it since I saw it in theaters the year it came out. I wrote a short review on Letterboxd. Yesterday I watched most of Rick and Morty season 9. I dropped off of Rick and Morty like 4 seasons ago, but heard good things about season 9, so my curiosity was enough to check it out. It was okay. I'm writing up a blog post about that show in general, because that show is a fascinating weird little mess.

Listening: I realize as I'm typing this that I forgot to buy anything for Bandcamp Friday yesterday. Whoops. I try to buy something every time it rolls around. I guess I'll have to just buy stuff on a normal day and give Bandcamp a slice of the revenue FOR ONCE. Oh well. I'm mostly still listening to stuff I've mentioned here and you can now listen to embedded in the Stuff page. Corrientes, Nintenhogs, ORANGE AIRMAIL, Mibu Balloons, Deltarune. Not counting the karaoke playlist I was studying up on for Friday.

Thinking: Maybe we can go one Now page without explicitly making this the emo corner. Karaoke was really fun last night and I truly do not take it for granted at all that I have a group of great friends who like doing fun stuff. I have gone through various phases of life of feeling like "I have friends" and feeling like "I have no friends" and I know how excruciatingly hard it can be to make new friends as an adult. I'm very lucky to know such nice people, and people who are so willing to introduce you to their other friends. It's really great. Also, I want to ride the positivity of me making progress on these personal projects, even though there's a pessimist within me that will be disappointed and depressed about them no matter what. I'm proud of what I've been able to do thus far, and will be prouder when I manage to release them, so I want to hold myself to that in a "you can do this buddy" kind of way instead of a "cracking the whip on my own lazy ass" kind of way. I try to take life as small victories and small things to look forward to. Like, hey, there's two Nintendo Directs next week, so there's another little thing to look forward to.

Stuff I've Enjoyed

Here's some stuff I've stumbled onto on the web and enjoyed. I wanted to keep a collection of things in a slightly more permanent place than "social media post" or a "blog."

Type	Link	Description	Date Added
Website	Floor 796	For better and worse this feels sooo 2000s-era internet. From the specific art style to the obsession with pop culture crossover. The part of me that loves trivia can't help but try to identify everyone.	August 26, 2026
Video	How Has Pokémon's Battle Animation Evolved?	New Frame Plus does incredible work highlighting great game animation and teaching about it. This video is a great look into how scope management is a big part of making Pokemon games.	August 19, 2026
Animation	The Forum Boy	Quotes that live in my head rent-free + an actual sincere drip of what the internet could be like.	August 19, 2026
Animation	Dog Walker	This animator makes really fantastic surreal loops. You should check the rest of them out.	August 19, 2026
Animation	Free Apple	Worthikids makes incredible cartoons, and I'm an absolute sucker for things meant to evoke crunchy old CD-ROM games.	August 19, 2026
Website	"has_not_been_viewed_much"	Someone made a website that lets you browse a random piece of artwork collected by the Art Institute of Chicago, out of the pieces with the least pageviews. Great stuff in here.	July 18, 2026
Animation	3D Mainichi Modern	Something about the style of animation, humor, and voice acting here is exactly up my alley.	June 13, 2026
Text	Raising a person in a culture full of types	A piece about being a parent and also the line between "who we are" and "what we do." Years of cliques, Hollywood tropes, and social media have tricked us into an obsession with self-categorization.	June 13, 2026
Video	AAA Kindergarten	Being in kindergarten, if it was a modern AAA game. Normally I wouldn't share an Instagram bit here, but it made me laugh pretty hard.	June 13, 2026
Animation	STRENGTH VS. SPEED: ROUND 2	Did you used to watch stick figure fight cartoons back in the day? There's still communities making them, here's one I really like.	June 13, 2026
Text	Post-Cringe: Forspoken and the Self-Sabotage of the Smirking Protagonist	A piece by Austin Walker about characters that crack jokes about the scenarios they're in. Some call this "Whedon-esque" or "MCU-style" writing.	June 13, 2026