Time to drag myself kicking and screaming back into my drawing habit. As much as I want to keep coding, I also want to do my Christmas Special in a timely manner instead of crunching for two month straight

As always, scroll past any topics you're not interested in. I put those headers there for convenience since I know not everyone is a nerd like me

~~Linux Stuff~~

Good news! I got dwm up and running on my main machine!

Bad news is that it's practically the same as the last time I showed it off. Very basic, and with a bunch of missing features.

Thought that implementing the network and volume indicators would be easy, but even looking at other people's code I still couldn't figure it out on time.

But hey, it works, and does everything I need to do with it. And that's all that matters. The rest can be added when I get bored of drawing.

Might show an updated pic once it starts looking good

~~Steam Deck Stuff~~

Part of me regrets buying the Steam Deck. No, not because it's a bad machine. It's amazing! The problem is I'm addicted to customizing the crap out of it, and finally playing games that have been in my bucket list for ages.

It's too good! I don't get any work done with it because I just wanna see if it can play all my games...and 9 times out of 10 it does! Heck, I even set this thing up so I can draw portably with it. You might even see something from it this month too!

Better that Switch 2 in every way (minus accessibility if you're doing non-steam games)

~~Life Stuff~~

Not really much went down last month, but the end of that month was jammed packed. I went to my parent's cottage where I helped find what was wrong with the fridge my mom brought over, I then improved the cellphone booster a little by shoving tin foil in the connector (the better antenna had a smaller connector, and the adapters I bought didn't fit).

Lastly, I decided to make a home-made NAS (Network Attached Storage) for a cousin of mine using a PC he found in the dump. Setting it up was pretty easy, but putting the thousands of games on there took forever, and it didn't help that a few of them got corrupted.

I had to scramble and find a way to redownload them, but the new versions came in a different format, so I had to figure-out how to convert them to work on the Wii I hacked for my cousin at around the same time.

Whole thing was wild and nearly took a week, but it's done now.

Though, now I have to double-check my Wii game collection now since I thought all those games were fine.

~~Photography Stuff~~

So while I was waiting for a few things to transfer over to my cousin's little NAS box I decided to go outside a little and take a few pictures for fun. Beats having to wait a solid 4 hours in a house with no fresh air coming in.

Unfortunately, some of them came-out ever so slightly blurry. It's hard taking night time shots without a tripod since you have to stay perfectly still for at minimum 1 second. By the end of my shoot my arms were too tired to keep a steady shot. It would take me 10 snaps just to get a single decent one while before it would take me like 3 snaps.

Might try doing more of these photo shoots if I ever end-up feeling too demotivated from drawing.

~~Conclusion~~

If I had to describe my time in May in a single word it would be: exhausting.

I don't know how this always happens, but things almost always go wrong when I tinker around with tech.

The good thing is this month I won't need to touch anything tech related, so it should be smooth sailing...maybe...probably...hopefully...dear god, let this be a calm month, I don't think I can take much more of this.

Regardless, see you all next post!

To-Do before I go back to drawing (FINAL TALLY):

>Finish the bare minimum for the Vectorizer

[INCOMPLETE!!]

[Although, I did enough of an improvement to use my unfinished code over my janky bash script]

[Still needs to be rewritten completely next time though]

>Add more features to the Vectorizer

[INCOMPLETE!!]

>Remake my entire Linux setup

[30% complete]

[It functions...that's all I can say about it]

>Transfer the new setup to my main rigs

[50% complete]

[Need to clean-up all my Firefox tabs and set-up a few things like SFTP, and streaming my laptop's audio to my main rig]

>Create my Neocities website

[INCOMPLETE!!]

[Not even close to starting this. Think it might take a whole year's work just to get it done]

>Attempt to fix a broken TV

[INCOMPLETE!!]

[Whelp...time for that TV to stay in that corner for another year]

>Hack my PS3

[INCOMPLETE!!]

[Found a guide to hack it at the very least...PS3 still hasn't been touched since I got it]

Well shoot. I knew some of these wouldn't get complete...but I wasn't expecting all of them to not get complete.

That's some rotten luck there.

Not sure if this one will be interesting to anyone, as I mostly spent my time tinkering with Linux for a month.

Though, honestly I felt a little depressed this month which made it hard to work on things. I had this big plan all laid-out to make and market a program that could help artists get into vector art while also remaking my entire Linux setup to be better than ever. All before the end of June.

Now here I am, just one month before the deadline and I've completed exactly zero things from my list. I'm just left wondering what the hell I've been doing for almost half of 2025. I can't push it any further either because I want to give myself enough time to complete the holiday specials, and next year is gonna be packed!

So with that, the Vectorizer project is on hold indefinitely (though, I'll still use what I have of the Rust version in the mean time) until I find a long enough stretch of time to work on it, and all focus is on getting my setup up and running again. I can't be working on big projects with everything in shambles and half working. It's bad enough that it's been broken since the start of the year.

[I blame it entirely on Arch screwing itself over]

On the bright side, at least spending Easter with my mom and brother at the cottage was able to cheer me up somewhat.

~~Art Stuff~~

Been working on this little animation on my 3DS every once in a while when I'd get bored of coding.

This is just the rough animation. I need to adjust the pauses between the movements to make it look better. I just didn't get to that point, and I was too lazy to copy/paste a bunch of frames.

In general, I've been getting a lot of mileage on my 3DS this year. Practically every drawing I've done so far was done entirely on my 3DS. The only exception was the "12 Hare-y Months" comic.

I still prefer using my PC, but you know...it ain't half bad in a pinch.

~~Linux stuff~~

So much work has been done with this setup since the last update...the only problem is that most of it is under the hood stuff, so most people won't be able to see the difference.

[One of the many downsides of being a coder]

Most of the changes are on the status bar up top. Had to do a lot of code rewrites just to get it looking the way it is. Not a whole lot of things actually work on the status bar. The clock and the CPU temps are the only ones I added that work properly. The rest like the CapsLock, volume, and network indicator are mostly for show, and to get an idea where to place them. They at least function as working buttons that can launch apps.

It's an ugly mess at the moment, but I'm hoping that at least the bare minimum will get done before the end of this month. That being finishing-up the status bar, testing a few more important apps, and getting my tablet up and running (hopefully without the need of the official drivers because those kinda suck).

I don't care if it doesn't look pretty at this point, that can be done on my free time, I just want something that works for what I'll have to do pretty soon.

~~Life stuff~~

Got myself a Steam Deck!

[Of course I had to pimp out the desktop mode on the same day I got it]

Was on the fence with buying one for the longest time, but after seeing the shitshow that was the Switch 2, and whatever Trump was doing. I decided to think of the potential uses for this thing, and I finally bit the bullet and bought one.

So far I've been loving it! It's finally giving me an excuse to play some games I never would, because I'm always too lazy to setup Steam on any of my Linux boxes. The Steam Deck already has it installed and ready to go, so I no longer have any excuses.

I'm planning to not only use the Steam Deck for on-the-go gaming, but also as my on-the-go drawing tablet. Just like my 3DS XL except I can use the same drawing apps I use in my normal setup. Making it so I can continue working on bigger projects without needing to haul my laptop and drawing tablet everywhere.

Still haven't set-up the drawing programs just yet, but once I get some free time I might give it a go.

~~Conclusion~~

Time is ticking pretty quickly, and I didn't expect half a year would go by so fast, so I gotta haul ass this month.

Nearly everything is removed from my to-do list because there's not enough time in the world to complete them all this month.

One of these days I'm gonna have to go on an actual hiatus, and even cancel my usual events (or downscale them a ton) until everything that needs to be done outside of my art circle is done for good.

That's it for this month, not sure what will be in store next month. I just expect that I'll be running around like a chicken with its head cut off trying to finish my Linux setup.

Also, happy late Pico day!

To-Do before I go back to drawing:

>Finish the bare minimum for the Vectorizer

[INCOMPLETABLE!!]

>Add more features to the Vectorizer

[INCOMPLETABLE!!]

>Remake my entire Linux setup

[25% complete]

[Might need to cut corners to get it done faster]

>Transfer the new setup to my main rigs

[0% complete]

>Create my Neocities website

[INCOMPLETABLE!!]

>Attempt to fix a broken TV

[INCOMPLETABLE!!]

>Hack my PS3

[INCOMPLETABLE!!]

God damn man, where did all my mojo go? I was doing so well last month!

Unfortunately, nothing much to report on this month. Most of it was me being a lazy piece of crap, and procrastinating a bunch

~~The Tech Stuff~~

Not much work was done on the Vectorizer this month. Mostly just small optimizations to the code so that I can easily slot in the different supported filetypes without needing to copy/paste the same code twice. I'm also struggling with trying to figure-out how unzip a freaking file in Rust. I need to learn that because some filetypes are just zip files that go under a different name (like "ora" and Krita files)

"ORA" files would have been next on my list of things to do, but I've grown tired of Rust's shenanigans recently. Both in the code, and in the Rust community. I thought Rust would have been a good beginner-ish programming language with the ability to reach C level speed.

However, what I got was an annoying programming language that's not as flexible, nor compatible as C with a community obsessed with rewriting everything in this baby language despite it being incompatible and unstable.

I didn't want it to come down to this because I worked so hard on it already, but I'm gonna rewrite the whole thing in C.

It's harder, but all the pros of C outweigh the cons of sticking with Rust...I just wished I had started with it sooner. I'm just hoping the syntax isn't too different that I need to rewrite whole functions.

Guess we'll just have to wait and see

~~Linux Stuff~~

Took a little detour because restarting an entire project like that is demotivating as all hell.

So I took to gutting OpenMandriva in the meantime, and trying to customize the DWM desktop.

Here is where I found my first complaint against OpenMandriva: its app repository is really lacking in variety. Most of its apps are made for the default KDE desktop they have. Straying away from that means you need to build the apps yourself. Thankfully, most of the apps I use are minimal and only need a handful of dependencies; so it's not that bad for my case. Just a little annoying to deal with.

Although, looking through their rolling release branch shows that they're trying to fix that problem. Only reason why I'm on their stable release is because rolling releases aren't good in commercial-like settings. Constant change is bad, and can cause problems when working on a bigger project.

Here's how my setup looks so far:

Looks nice enough in this stage, but it's still missing a lot of things that make it usable. Like it only just got a screenshot utility, and it's only so I could get this glamour shot. I still need to give it a lock screen, and set-up a bunch of hotkeys for everything.

Funnily enough, the easiest part was gutting all the pre-installed packages (which I figured-out shortly after taking the screenshot). All I needed to do was tell it to remove the "Knotification" packages (KDE's notification tool), and that for some reason uninstalled the entirety of the KDE desktop, and all the KDE apps it came with...I get the feeling that was an oversight by the OpenMandriva team...but hey, it made my life 100 times easier, so I'm not complaining

There's a lot of work that goes into these "DIY" desktops, but the hard work almost always pays off. I just love how feather-light it can get, and I can truly call this MY computer.

~~Life Stuff~~

Not a whole lot going on personally. I've amassed a collection of USB keys throughout the month. All in varying sizes and styles!

Got some 4GB USBs for installing different versions of Linux or just to experiment with different stuff that usually fall under the 2GB limit.

Some 32GB USBs because I've got half a dozen 16GB ones, and it annoys me how limiting those 16GB ones get sometimes.

And finally a couple 64GB USB keys (one USB 3, and the other USB 2 just in case there's compatibility issues) for those rare occasions where I need to transfer a file just over 32GB (and I'm too lazy to set up a temporary ftp server)

Now I have a wide range of USB keys that meet all my potential needs!

[Isn't this fun guys?]

Another thing that happened is I coded an expense tracker for my mom using the same Google Forms and spreadsheet apps. Originally, I wanted to make it super ambitious where it could sort by income and/or expense, select a date range, and search transactions by name.

Although, when I asked my mom about it, she said she only wanted something that tracked her expense which could be separated by category, and she'd manually clear the list every month. Nothing else. So I copy/pasted the code from the time tracker spreadsheet I made for her last month, tweaked it a little, added a graph, and I finished the whole thing in like 30min. She loves it!

Lastly, my mom and brother came over and helped patch the outside of my apartment to stop the pigeons from bugging me every day.

Normally, I'd ask my landlord about this, but I don't think he'd bother fixing it. The dude already hates me after I won that court case, and he had to shut-down two of his stores since. Don't think he'd be interested in patching-up a wall even for cheap.

One last quick thing I did was fix a small issue with my toilet where it would "phantom flush" every couple of minutes. Had this problem for almost 5 years. None of the plumbers the landlord hired was able to fix it. Then one day I experimented and found that the problem was caused by the toilet being too dirty where the flapper was.

I think I'm more qualified to be a plumber then whoever the landlord keeps hiring.

~~Conclusion~~

Pretty "eh..." kind of month. Feels like after I completed that first milestone with the Vectorizer things just went downhill motivation wise. A lot of things still happened later, but in general the whole month felt unfocused.

This month I'm taking a detour to work on a good long lasting Linux setup, and then I'll come back to the Vectorizer next month with a fresh mind.

To-Do before I go back to drawing:

>Finish the bare minimum for the Vectorizer

[65% complete!]

[Might go back to 0% when I switch programming languages]

>Add more features to the Vectorizer

[0% complete]

[Keeping this separate because this is more of a long term goal]

>Remake my entire Linux setup

[15% complete]

[Going well so far. The biggest hurdle is learning C, and X11's limitations]

>Transfer the new setup to my main rigs

[0% complete]

>Create my Neocities website

[0% complete]

[Gotta put my portfolio somewhere. Even if Newgrounds is perfectly fine]

>Attempt to fix a broken TV

[0% complete]

[It only has a broken backlight]

>Hack my PS3

[0% complete]

[Mostly just a bonus thing to do]

What more is there to say. It's not like anyone reads any of my stuff here.

I've made it very clear in my previous posts why I hate Newgrounds so much, and I don't feel like typing it again, so go look for it yourself if you want to know

Been quite all over the place this month. For a good moment I thought it was gonna be a month where I did everything but work on the Vectorizer, but no surprisingly I had enough time to do practically everything I wanted. Including helping out my parents, finishing a huge milestone in my Vectorizer project, dipping my toes into another Linux Distro, and even doodling a little.

Let's get to the news shall we?

~~Fanart Mention~~

Got some new fanart from @Twoeliz last month, and it's a super cute drawing of Harriet! (formally Rathrie)

Thank you for the kind gift Twoeliz, you're too kind! If my setup wasn't still in shambles I'd immediately draw fanart back.

I promise you I'll do fanart of you as soon as I'm back from my hiatus. Mark my words!

If anyone would like to see more fanart of my characters I've made a whole playlist collecting them

Feel free to notify me of any fanart you've done, so I can show them off here. Maybe we can create a tag so I can easily search for them?

~~The Family Stuff~~

Don't want to go too in detail with this stuff, but to cut a long story short-ish:

My mom invited me over for a weekend, but I ended-up staying for a whole week instead. Every time I thought I was done, my mom would just drag me back in with something new she just remembered.

Then after everything was done I was finally able to go back home and rest a little before going back to working on the Vectorizer. A week later I had to repeat the whole song and dance again, but thankfully not as long.

Overall, it was still a fun time, and it gave me an excuse to practice my Excel script-foo to create an interest rate calculator, and organize a time tracker I made using Google Forms.

Just fun ghetto coding

~~The Tech Stuff~~

I already said it a few times, but I finished a major milestone for my Vectorizer project this month!

Now the Bash script has been fully ported to Rust, and it's so much cleaner by comparison.

Though, I'm still not done with this project just yet. I want to at the very least implement the ability to convert ".ora" files to vector because no one (including me) would ever use the old folder method. The only reason why I even bothered coding the old folder method is because it's useful in a pinch

[It was also a good coding warm-up]

Ideally I'd have the ability to convert ".kra", ".psd", and ".csp" files, but I need to decrypt those and that may take a while to do. Just gotta take baby steps with this.

~~The Linux Stuff~~

Haven't had the time last month to set up a new Linux rig. I've just been tinkering with yet another distro in the last few weeks of the month, and forming a plan for what my next rig will be like.

For one, I've been trying-out OpenMandriva Linux for the hell of it. Someone recommended it, and since I was going to restart from scratch I thought why not go all the way.

And I've gotta say...it's surprisingly good. To give an example: my old Core2Duo machine I use to test these new distros has an unusual issue with the graphics card.

[The PC in question]

For some reason it just locks-up Linux after 5 seconds of use in anything but the bare-bones tty mode (it's one of the very few driver issues in Linux). However, OpenMandriva is the first distro I used where I didn't need to patch Linux with the correct drivers. It just worked!

[Arch, Debian, and NixOS all needed to get the proper drivers patched in]

The distro comes with KDE Plasma installed by default, which isn't my favourite desktop look, but I'm surprised at how snappy it ran on my old tinker PC. Last time I installed it my Core2Duo PC would beg me to end it all, but this is perfectly usable. Call me impressed...Still gonna gut the entire distro to do my own thing, but I legit wouldn't mind recommending this distro as an alternative to the usual Linux Mint.

So, now my next plan for my rig is to use OpenMandriva with DWM as my desktop look. DWM is a very unique desktop as you need to physically code everything you want in the source code of DWM which is written in C.

I mean I'm gonna rewrite my entire Vectorizer code in C when I'm done with the bare minimum...why not get a head start learning C with this desktop look?

I love being masochistic

~~Conclusion~~

Overall, pretty busy month last month. Wonder if this month will be the same. I am expecting to finish the bare minimum for the Vectorizer this month which will open the flood gates for a bunch of other side-projects I have on my list below, and a few that were too small to include.

That's all for now. Hope my ramblings weren't too long this month [I put those fancy tilde titles there for easy skipping], and as always:

See you next post!

To-Do before I go back to drawing:

>Finish the bare minimum for the Vectorizer

[65% complete!]

>Add more features to the Vectorizer

[0% complete]

[Keeping this separate because this is more of a long term goal]

>Remake my entire Linux setup

[5% complete]

[Long way to go with this one, but it shouldn't take me nearly as long]

>Transfer the new setup to my main rigs

[0% complete]

>Create my Neocities website

[0% complete]

[Gotta put my portfolio somewhere. Even if Newgrounds is perfectly fine]

>Attempt to fix a broken TV

[0% complete]

[It only has a broken backlight]

>Hack my PS3

[0% complete]

[Mostly just a bonus thing to do]

Hello everyone, just doing my regularly scheduled monthly updates.

~Art Stuff~

If you haven't noticed, I put out a few drawings in January.

One of them was this comic:

And the other was this "quick" doodle I did on my 3DS:

I'm still putting-off drawing to focus on programming like I said. I'm just taking it much slower, much less seriously, and mostly using it to practice stuff I'm not quite good at. Oh, and it'll only be on my 3DS from now on...because my main PC is borked, and I'm too busy coding on my tinker laptop to fix it.

~The Retcon~

In other art related news: I decided to retcon my bunny OC's names.

Originally they were named Holrad (the male rabbit), and Rathrie (the female rabbit), but after talking about it with others in a Discord server I decided to rename them to Harold and Harriet respectively. Which is their unscrambled names. All my OCs have anagram names if you didn't know.

How it's gonna work now is whenever they go into Nothany's dimension they'll scramble their name to fit-in with the gang, but as soon as they leave they go back to their unscrambled name. It's a really easy retcon to do because they haven't said their names a single time in any of my comics I drew so far. They just keep saying "Brother" and "sis" to one-another.

~Brain Age~

Recently started playing Brain Age: Concentration Training on my 3DS. At first I wanted to know if that sort of training could really help me focus on my work, but then I found that the game has really good math exercises. I'm ironically a programmer that really struggles with math, and this helps quite a bit to speed-up my calculations and learn my multiplication tables better than any math teacher I've had.

The concentration training part is really tough. I can sometimes feel my brain melting under the pressure sometimes, and even in tamer challenges I constantly feel stupid for not remembering things I just looked at. Never got this frustrated over my own brain in a good while. I do feel a little more concentrated some days, but it's honestly kinda hard to tell for sure if it's actually working or if it's a placebo.

~~The Tech Stuff~~

I'm hard at work learning Rust for the first time, as I'm trying to convert my Vectorizer from a flimsy Bash script to a polished program in Rust. Would have gone with my old fav C++, but Rust interested me with it's security. I didn't want to take the chance with C++ and cause a bunch of accidental memory leaks with this first real program I'm coding, so Rust it is.

So far I've got it almost to the point where my old Bash script was. Though, I plan to take it further beyond with more features, and make it more compatible with different file types. Starting with this weird file type I found by accident with an "ora" extension called the Open Raster format

It's not a common or revolutionary file format, but for what I'm doing with the Vectorizer it's perfect for honing my skills. It's basically a zip file with a bunch of pngs inside. Real simple, real effective. Plus I found that Krita, Gimp, and Photoshop supports it too.

At the very least if I'm not able to crack the code for the Krita, Photoshop, and ClipStudio Paint files, I at least have a compromise in the mean time.

~~Conclusion~~

All and all, still busy, but in a chill way (not too chill though, still need these done at a reasonable time). Feels somewhat relieving to finally take my time with something instead of constantly pressuring myself with these deadlines.

Though, I gotta try and keep up with my Newgrounds feed. Haven't checked it fully since October.

Also exercising, need to get back into that routine too.

See you next post!

To-Do before I go back to drawing:

>Finish the bare minimum for the Vectorizer

[50% complete!]

>Add more features to the Vectorizer

[0% complete]

[Keeping this separate because this is more of a long term goal]

>Remake my entire Linux setup

[0% complete]

[Gonna take this opportunity to go very experimental with this next attempt]

>Transfer the new setup to my main rigs

[0% complete]

>Create my Neocities website

[0% complete]

[Gotta put my portfolio somewhere. Even if Newgrounds is perfectly fine]

>Attempt to fix a broken TV

[0% complete]

[It only has a broken backlight]

>Hack my PS3

[0% complete]

[Mostly just a bonus thing to do]

This is gonna be a long news post!

Don't click "Read more" unless you're prepared to scroll a lot!

Happy late New Year everybody!!!

How did everyone's holiday go? I had a pretty good time! (drunken brother aside) Me and my mom went sledding with a few of her friends, watched a bunch of Christmas classics, and spent the new year hanging-out with our uncles. I wouldn't call it a grand holiday event, but it was a nice humble one that just about captured the spirit of the holidays.

Also, if you haven't seen it before, I gifted a few Supporter Badges right before Christmas. Even did this whole little comic and everything, took me months of hard work to get it all done in time. Go check it out if you haven't!

I also updated my WIP thread, so you can see what projects I left on the back-burner, or the ones I had to scrap for various reasons. I tend to update it once every year while cleaning-up my art.

One last thing I'd like to mention before switching off the holiday news is that I will be compiling all the monthly comics I made throughout 2024 and I'll post it to the art portal soon.

The only reason why I'm not doing it right now is because I wanted to add a few little touches to these comic strips. Just to make it look better as a standalone comic.

Art Recap & New Year's Tally

Alright, now that this is out of the way it's time for the yearly art recap and art tally! Everything in the tally shouldn't be taken seriously, I just like having fun calculating thing.

[Can you tell I'm a massive nerd?]

[Surprisingly, even though I was MIA for like half a year I was still active enough to have at least one drawing a month]

January

February

March

April

May

June

July

July Doodle Comic from one of my news posts

August

September

October

November

November Doodle Comic from on of my news posts

December

Total Art Posts: 15

All Art & Alts Posted: 42

(53 if you count the monthly comics I haven't posted yet)

[A lot more than what I expected]

Animations Posted: 2

(Both of them were simple Flipnotes doodles)

Comics Posted: 15 *NEW RECORD*

(Almost all of them were only posted in my news feed)

[Don't think I'll ever break that record again anytime soon]

Events Participated: 2

(Hyun's Dojo Banner Collab, and the OCs by Night Collab)

[The Hyun's Dojo Banner Collab still hasn't been released yet]

Front-paged: 0 *OUCH*

(Collabs don't count unless I host them)

Missed Deadlines: 0

Near Misses: 6

(I may not have missed a deadline, but I had to go to crunch land a lot just to make it happen. Never again)

Abandoned Projects: 1

New Back-Burner Projects: 1 *NEW LOWEST*

Total Back-Burner Projects: 9

[I miscalculated last year's back burner projects by 1]

RANK: C

Would have been a D rank if I didn't have a good half-dozen posts thrown in there at the start and end of the year. Couldn't do much to get a higher ranking anyways, because I was just so busy with everything BUT drawing to really participate in anything.

No Front-pages this year. Well, technically one if you count the "OCs by Night Collab", but I don't count collabs I join as "true front pages" since I was just a small part of this group effort. Was hoping I'd at least get one on my art posts with how ambitious some of them were this year. Oh well, better luck next time I guess.

One MASSIVE take-away I learned from last year is I gotta give myself a few months head start next time I do these big projects. This entire year was practically filled with deadlines that I'd always just barely make. The March drawing and the supporter gift special especially.

I hate it every time! The rewarding feeling at the end can be nice, but at a certain point I just felt hollow and dead from it all. The entire supporter gift special was my breaking point. Giving myself around 2 months to work on all of that (one month for the gifts, and the other month for the comic), and working on it for 4 hours almost every day was a massive mistake. Especially with that promo comic! I made it with around 3 days to spare, and the whole time I could barely handle the stress and anxiety. Though, don't feel bad for me about it, I'm the guy responsible for putting myself in these horrible situations. It's my responsibility to do better.

Next year I'll be giving myself at least 4 months in advance (maybe more) just to draw these gifts and promo comic at a comfortable pace. In general, I'm gonna give myself at least 2 months to work on these bigger projects instead of my usual 1 month deadline. I don't want to be stressed while drawing anymore, especially during the holidays.

The Serious Biz

Alright, now it's time to talk about the more serious stuff

In short: I'm gonna go back on hiatus as soon as I post my compilation of monthly comics.

Why? Well, to put it briefly: I want to make myself useful for once and sell a tool to graphic designers (AKA: the Vectorizer). Just because I can't handle the world of freelancing. Tried it a few times in private, and it was always a disaster

[Probably because I got some of the worst clients from the get-go]

Also I'm desperately trying to rebuild my Linux setup for the third time. Even more so now that Arch Linux on my main PC decided to off itself out of nowhere. Can't even begin to explain what happened there since it makes no sense. I just looked at it wrong and Arch Linux didn't want to open Krita anymore, and updating Arch only made it worse. Now Krita works, but sound, internet, bluetooth, and even flash drive don't work on it anymore because most of the kernel drivers got corrupted during the update. It's a massive mess that Arch could have easily avoided but didn't, and instead preferred to destroy itself just to complete an update.

Thankfully nothing is lost. I can still get all my info out of there, and I it's fixable, but I'm not gonna fix it until I have a working Debian setup since that one is still holding-up strong. Despite all the issues I've had with it.

[It's also real easy to convert from one Linux distro to another because most of them share the exact same files]

Only reason why it's taking so long is because I keep finding big problems with it when I'm 90% done with the setup. The first pitfall was Arch Linux soft-locking itself out of an update (which is common on Arch if you don't update it in months), and the second pitfall was Wayland (the newer Linux GUI) being more trouble to work with than Xorg (the old Linux GUI). That's what I get for being experimental with Linux. Thankfully, all the biggest pitfalls are done and over with, so things are gonna get done a lot faster...hopefully. No guarantees.

I don't know how long the Vectorizer and the Linux setup will take me. It might be as little as a few months, or as much as the entire year (maybe more). All I know is 2025 is gonna be a very "unknown" year for me, which may turn into a "nothing" year depending on how things go. Expect a lot of 3DS doodles.

That's about it for my ultra long January update. Hope everyone here started on the right foot this year, and I'll probably (maybe not, but who knows) see you next month for another one of these updates.

Alright, the bunnies are all dressed and ready to go spread some holiday cheers!

It's time for the 2024 Newgrounds Christmas Supporter Gifts!!!

[Title subject to change]

If you're new to this, every year I pick 3 (used to be 4) lovely Newgrounds users that are:

>Under 500 fans with under-rated stuff (Art, Music, Animations, or Games), and have been active enough to not be considered "dead"

[Note: Users that have frequent front pages with low fan counts will have a lower priority, as a way to promote artists that are under the radar]

>Left a strong impact on me (either in-person or online)

>And/or inspired my art in some way shape or form

[I don't try to use this one often, as I want to keep it to mostly small users]

These lucky winners will each receive:

>A free 1 year Supporter Status Badge

>A hand-typed letter

>And a personal drawing from yours truly

Lastly, just to give everyone a fair chance you CANNOT win a second time!

[I even made a list to make sure repeats never happen]

You also can't receive this gift if you already have a Supporter badge (Though, I'm thinking of ways around this issue). If someone receives the gift at the same time they got their own Supporter Badge, then I'll try to give them a compromise.

Alrighty then, the holiday bunnies will be delivering their gifts soon. Come check back tomorrow to see who got gifted these wonderful gifts.

See you then!

[Been wanting to show off this trick for years now. Love pulling neat 4th wall breaks in comics]

Yes sir, it's that time of the year again where holiday cheers are high, and stress levels are even higher! Somehow, I just keep finding ways to make things worse for myself in new and unique ways every year. Gonna have to start sooner next year just so I don't burn myself out like I've been doing every year with this event.

[At least I was able to complete most of the work last month]

I'll be doing the Newgrounds Supporter Badge Gifts again this year, but this time the twist is that I integrated it with this little comic!

Afterwards, I'll be wrapping-up the story for that comic, and post the full thing to the art portal. I don't even know where to take it from there afterwards. Though, it definitely got me in the mood to do more. I might finally start drawing the comic I've scripted 3 years ago...that or 3D modelling (been wanting to remake that 3D model of Holrad for a while now).

However, don't hold your breath because it all depends on how crazy next year will be. There's a good chance I'll go on another hiatus again, and this time there won't be any doodle comics every month to save you from the boredom of my news feed.

[Did people even read these comics?]

Not really much to add to this, all I can say is that 2025 is gonna be a very "unknown" kinda year for me. It's looking like it'll be very code-heavy at the start with the whole "Vectorizer" thing, and finishing my new Linux rig (which I have to restart from scratch), but afterwards I've got no idea where 2025 will take me. I'll be sharing my full thoughts on it sometime after the new year.

Anyways, that's all for now! Stay tuned on the 23rd where I'll do a proper announcement of my Christmas Supporter Gifts!

[I really need to find a proper name for this one of these years]

See you next post!

Alright, time's up! No more fun computer time, it's back to the digital canvas for me.

Working as a "full-time" artist again has me both missing it, and loathing it a lot. It's a lot of hard work just to keep-up with a schedule, doesn't help that I keep 1up-ing myself every year, and working around other people's plans can be anxiety inducing (The increasing power-outages don't help either).

Still, despite the high stress, the reward more than makes up for it in the end. Don't worry though, I don't crunch unless I absolutely need to, and I take a well deserved break afterwards.

I may be bad at managing my time, but I'm not stupid with my health when it comes to crunching.

Anyways, here's this month's comic

Takeover Tuesday

In other news: Newgrounds introduced the Takeover Tuesday event a while ago. I honestly still don't know what to think about it. At best it shows-off a bunch of obscure stuff I never knew about, and at worst it's basically "P-bot 2.0", or a pop-up ad that advertises the popular stuff more than it needs to. In general, even if I enjoy the hidden gems, the whole event discourages me from posting my projects on Tuesday because nearly everyone's focus is on that Takeover Tuesday and not their feeds. It also annoys me when a group project gets mass voted on Takeover Tuesday by a bunch of members of that projects. It feels like a cheap and annoying advertisements that's "pay-to-win" because you need to pay the supporter badge just to participate, and the big "hot item" pop-up only makes it worse.

TLDR; I have a love-hate relationship with it

Playlist update

Playlists for supporter members are now double the size! I like this change already. No more frequent daisy-chaining playlists together just to extend the length of it. I'm planning on cleaning-up my super long playlist, so that it's not 4 playlists long anymore.

Conclusion

This update was kinda minimal, but I know next month will be the opposite of that. Pray that I won't freaking die from all the work I need to do in order to meet that Christmas deadline. At the very least I was smart enough to start all of it in October just like last year. The only difference is that I'm working on comics instead the Secret Santa.

I'm gonna tone it down a bunch next year I promise. Might even prioritize these holiday events way earlier too just so I don't get overly stressed-out during the holidays every year. Though, I'll probably go back into another hiatus next year too depending on how things turn out. A lot of non-art related things are calling for me, and the sad part is that they give me more money than my art, so those are a higher priority.

Just be happy that I still care enough to do art when I feel like it, and that I continue these monthly updates. I won't be going away for good anytime soon because I love this too much. It's just my output will be extremely minimal at points

That's all for me this month

See you next post!