This is a letter I sent to one of my friends, congratulating him on a new subscriber milestone. Then again, this feels more like a giant note-to-myself, thus I'll leave it here, in case I ever feel down again. To those who come across this letter, I hope it is useful to you, like how it was useful to me.

Congratulations!

So, we meet again.

First off, congratulations. You achieved something that no one could ever imagine - keeping a solid 3-year long animation career while having to struggle with a day job (protective relay engineer), and perhaps a family, all the while.

I still remembered the last time I promised you that I would learn animation... and here I still am. For the three years, while you toiled hard, I did absolutely nothing, save for some abysmal attempts at whatever my dream pleaded me to. Soon, I realized that karma never misses, a fact that I learned the hard way.

For all those months, while you steadily churn out animations, and perhaps keeping everything else in working order, my abhorrently mismanaged life was slowly fracturing. Ultimately, when the façade fell apart, I had to switch schools, moved cities, wasting millions while still earning absolutely nothing. And worse, my old debts were ignored for too long - perhaps I should have reconsidered how I receive and work on art commissions...!

So. Here we meet again. You, among the stars. Me, among the piles of junk that used to be my dreams. But among those missed projects, missed commissions, those ideas that never came to fruition just because I was simply too scared to pick up a pen... there's still some hope. And that hope came from a very unlikely source...

Recently, there was this one big ugly incident with this very well known animation studio. All the idiots on this earth hopped on this bandwagon of machines, to recreate all that hard work with a press of a button. Seeing all that mess that followed gave me a weird emotion. An emotion that was sealed from within me for too long, suddenly freed from within the deep dark reaches of my heart.

That emotion... led me back to you, to "Mirano", to "Jomun", to all those people I have met before. It was an urge to put an end to all misery, an urge that I have tried to forget for too long. I lost control of that urge just recently, and that was when Mirano pushed me past that tipping point. He called me out for how pathetic I tried to make myself, with all that self-hate and pessimism.

That very moment was when I finally gave up. I was fed up with myself for how keen I was on trying to paint a bleaker picture of my life, instead of actually improving it. And to improve it, I needed to accept reality for what it is.

So, we meet again. You, perhaps a decade older than me, has a family and job. Me, unemployed, stuck in a polytechnic university. Both of us have computers, have a drawing tablet and stylus. Both of us all draw on Krita, and have a fondness for animation. Both of us love Touhou Project, for all its worth. That is reality, and that triumphs all the pointless self-hate that I just had to dump upon myself.

Perhaps, I will still have that instinct to compare myself to every single artist and animator out there, but that comparison shall not control my life anymore. I don't wish to be famous, I simply want to be free from those nightmares that had overstayed their welcome. And the first step to that is some nice little effort, every day and night.

My apologies for cluttering up the community notes with this "letter", but I just had to get some too many things off my chest. And perhaps, this is also a rallying call for myself, to rise up from the ashes and break this endless vicious cycle of misery. I shall not be remembered as some pathetic loser who couldn't stop begging for sympathy, but rather as a noble man who stood up for what he believed in, and paved a brand-new path for his world.

And at long last, congratulations on getting eighty thousand subscribers. Your success is my inspiration, and that inspiration is a debt that I shall repay in full.

Until we meet again,

Gentoku Koubu