Discard Pile

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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 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."

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 October 18th 2026)

Doing: Work is chugging along. We got hit with some deadlines so we've been slightly scrambling, but overall I think everything is gonna work out.

In terms of personal projects…I got some great work done on my game yesterday. It now has a functional final boss battle! You can essentially do a full run of it now. That'll be good for playtesting, as now I can play it all the way through and see what feels balanced and what needs more polish or more Stuff. My goal is to release the game on December 1st, no matter what state it's in. Right now things are on a decent trajectory, but there's still a lot of visual/audio stuff to deal with.

Reading: I finished Meditations for Mortals! Good book, though not very different from his previous book Four Thousand Weeks.

Sometimes I walk to the library, pick up something off the shelf, read it for a half-hour and then return it. Lately I've been doing that with Jane Austen's Bookshelf by Rebecca Romney. It's a brief history of writers just before Austen's time that inspired her. Ironically, I'm reading this despite having never read a Jane Austen book. I watched a film adaptation of Pride and Prejudice once on a plane, but that's it. I want to read one of her books at some point.

For manga, Parashoppers and Shiba Inu Rooms are still treating me well. Gal x Gal Yuri on the Viz app is also good. Yes, the manga is just called "Gal x Gal Yuri" lol.

Playing: Still playing Fortune's Weave. I'm in Part 3 now. I don't like it as much as Part 1 and 2, but I'll push through. Good game! My partner rolled credits on it the other day.

Been playing a little bit of MTG: Arena and Dicevaders.

Watching: I saw Street Fighter in theaters the other day. It was alright, but also a mess. I wrote about it on Letterboxd.

I watched a bit of a show called East of Eden, which was pretty good.

I also installed Pluto TV onto our smart TV just to have something to put on when I'm bored and don't wanna pick a show out. Pluto has "channels" in the same sense as linear TV, but they're really granular, like having a "Star Trek channel" and a "Naruto channel", etc. It's a feature that I wish every streaming service would implement. I don't want the choice paralysis of having to pick a show and an episode, nor do I want to be beholden to watching shows in broadcast order or having to pick them up from the beginning of the episode every time. It's all too formal and usually just results in me not watching anything. With Pluto I've just been throwing on the "Sailor Moon channel" and just watching the middle of whatever random episode it is. Fun!

Listening: Lately I've been obsessed with the song iPod Touch by Ninajirachi. It's a really fun dance track and I think the lyrics are really sweet. There's also a Madeon remix that is very good. I've been listening to these two on loop.

In terms of podcasts, the latest episode of Dialed Indie is great, interviewing Linker, the developer of Elephantasy. Each Dialed Indie episode I feel like has done a good job of getting devs to open up about perspectives in gamedev that you don't normally hear in interviews designed for promotion. Also been listening to Post Games, Into the Aether, and other stuff lately.

Thinking: I'm feeling pretty normal! At the start of the month I had a really bad weekend, basically what I'd call a really bad "mental health day" or "bad depressive spiral" or whatever you want to call it. But I talked to people about it and I'm feeling better.

For anyone keeping score from the previous Now page, my birthday has come and gone. I ended up celebrating via two smaller, more mundane get-togethers rather than trying to organize one big group. I think that was the right move. With one pair of friends, we went out to dinner. With another pair of friends, we played board games. My partner made a "Kyle Jeopardy" quiz filled with inside jokes and factoids which was very funny. It was all a good time!

Of course, let us not forget, just because I'm feeling well doesn't mean the world doesn't suck ass. US is still waging war, elections coming up, game industry is on fire and obsessed with union-busting. Generative AI stuff still seems to be creeping up into every facet of my life, including fun little browser games that bring me joy, so that's frustrating. And even zoomed into my own life, I've got stuff coming up that I'm anxious about.

But, for now, I'm managing. So let's just be happy with that.

Here's a collection of stuff I've stumbled onto on the web and enjoyed.

Scroll to the bottom for some music I've been into lately.

Type	Link	Description	Date Added
Interactive	I used to be a black artist	Great piece by nzumbi that takes about 1-2 minutes to complete. Will stick with me forever.	September 19, 2026
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