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."

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 18th 2026)

Doing: Stuff, I suppose. On the previous Now I mentioned "self-imposed deadlines for September and October" for one of my personal projects, and I can say that I successfully met the September one! That felt good. Now the work continues for October.

I've been getting into tinned fish lately and it gave me a new bucket list life goal: I want to try anchovies on pizza someday. Then I realized that's a really easy life goal to accomplish, so…I had my first anchovy pizza the other day. The old lady at the pizza place kept chuckling at me when I ordered it, like I was about to get pranked. The verdict: I loved it! Mission accomplished I guess!

I went to a friend's birthday celebration last week and it was really nice. I have not been to a lot of "birthday parties" in my life, especially not since like elementary school…so it's always an honor and a novelty and a thrill for me. I got to chat with lots of different people, including people I haven't had much chance to speak to, and it was a really nice time. I feel like for most people it was just a mundane evening but for me it's like "this is a memory I'm going to cherish forever" lol.

Reading: Still reading Meditations for Mortals. Also been considering getting back into the habit of reading webcomics…? Maybe…?

Playing: For brain-off number-go-up time, I've been playing The Loopler. Other than that, the big game of the week is Fire Emblem: Fortune's Weave. I've been having a good time so far. I started as Leda, and may do Cai's route as well. The game is probably a little more maximalist/convoluted than need be (I had similar feelings about Three Houses) but it's really fun. The art and animation is pretty great, and the gameplay is still solid Fire Emblem fun. I have to get used to the fact that there's no weapon triangle.

Oh, now that I think about it…my favorite game lately is actually probably Krillion, a daily trivia game. I've been comparing scores with my brother and it's been a great time.

Watching: Saw Coyote vs. Acme in theaters. Thought it was alright. Other than that, haven't been watching much lately besides Dropout clips. Oh, I guess I also watched season 9 of Rick and Morty, which is a show I hadn't seen in a few seasons. I wrote about my thoughts on the show on my blog.

Listening: Still listening to my usual Bandcamp rotation, which you can find on the Stuff page. For some reason I've been really hooked lately on this one particular Deltarune cover, the chopped vocals make for a unique style.

I haven't mentioned podcasts in any of these Now pages really. I guess I can say I just recently listened to the Playstation 1 Console Retrospective episode of Into the Aether, which is more than 6 hours long. It's a great listen and honestly I did not realize how cool the PS1 library was. Have also been listening to Shelved By Genre talk about The Silmarillion, even though I know very little about Tolkien stuff.

Thinking: To be blunt, this past month has not been great.

Every week has brought varying layers of stress and hopelessness back and forth to the forefront. Overall I'm doing fine, so don't feel worried. I'll spare you the details, but to list a few examples of stuff going on: My partner had the misfortune of having sharp back pain for 2 weeks and then after it subsided she got sick for a week anyway. I have been so worried about the health and stress of my parents. My grandmother has been having declining health and memory loss. Several of my friends have been going through tumultuous months. Everywhere I look, all I see is conversation about genAI.

It has really, really had me feeling down. It's to an extent that I won't share here, because I don't like being too personal on the internet and I feel a responsibility to not be overly bleak. There are times where things feel hopeless, like they're always destined to get worse. Some of the things I mentioned, like my grandmother's health and genAI, don't seem like they're going to be getting better any time soon. It's frustrating at best and immensely disheartening at worst. I haven't really been able to come up with a framework or consistent technique for dealing with all these stresses. The best I've been able to do is tell myself to "not think about that" temporarily, try to enjoy life, and then get depressed about it on another day. And in some ways that method has…worked? At least temporarily?

To be clear, there have been bright moments too. There have been moments of joy and relaxation and pride scattered throughout the past month or two. There's been fun with friends, and interesting conversations with people, and all sorts of moments of human connection. There's been birthday parties and karaoke nights. There's been work that's gotten done with at least some semblance of productivity. There are days where I feel, even briefly, like I know what I'm doing and where I'm going. But even still there is this on-and-off again gnawing feeling like everything is going wrong and I'm not ready to deal with it. I'm sure you've felt similar things before.

Sorry for the bummer note. I'll try to keep the next Now page shorter and lighter. Let's rejoice that I now have anchovy pizza in my life. We'll see what tomorrow holds.

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
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