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!

The "er" month curse is upon me, no matter if I'm drawing or coding the curse still ruins the last 4 months of the year.

It's already starting strong with my coding job proving to be way more difficult than I originally thought

Then I more or less wasted a bunch of time cleaning-up my apartment to fit this new furniture I got (it was worth it though)

And lastly, helping-out my mom deal with my brother's mess...again...hopefully for the last time.

[Gotta love that family drama]

I can feel these upcoming months are going to be really hectic. I just hope I'm able to keep-up with it.

Hopefully the bunnies are doing better

So now that it's the final 3 months of the year, my priorities have shifted drastically.

My new setup? Forget about it!

[gotta overhaul that stupid thing again anyways because Wayland sucks]

My Vectorizer? Delayed till January!

It's all about the holiday specials now!

Like it or not, I gotta go back to my old routine just to keep that holiday coated ball a-rollin'!

Hopefully, I can make it out alive this year.

See you next post!

Gee, months are just passing me by every week. I don't really have any sort of news apart from it being my birthday two week ago, and that I spent pretty much the entire month making an unnecessarily detailed drawing to go along with it.

[Why do I do this to myself?]

Thank-you again everyone for all the nice comments I got on that drawing. It really made my day on top of already having a really great birthday this year.

But yeah, after I barely completed that drawing the rest of the month was more of the usual. Just tinkering with my setup to get my tablet working, and slowly finishing my little animation on Flipnotes. Which, here's a quick update on that:

[Funnily enough, I'm almost done animating the entire thing as of writing this]

I'm most likely going to complete it this month depending on how busy I am, but I also want to do something more with this animation. Call it a proof of concept for another proof of concept if you will.

I've also managed to get my tablet up & running finally! It's not perfect, the stylus hotkeys don't work the way I want them to, and I could have used the jank-y official drivers instead...but now it's easier to manage this way. No need to constantly restart the drivers every time I put the computer in sleep mode, or dealing with the hotkey missing inputs...somehow. It's just a much smoother experience...yet, equally jank in different areas.

[Only took a ton of reading to figure-out how to remap the buttons natively in Linux]

Here's the first comic I made using this new setup:

Fun fact: Wild rabbits burrow underground during the summer when it gets too hot.

Wonder why Holrad didn't do this sooner?

Regardless, this month is pretty much the final month in the year where I have the freedom to make some major progress with either the Vectorizer or my setup. So I've got to go all hands on deck for this month, and at the very least make a proof of concept with the Vectorizer, as October-December is when I'm usually at my busiest with holiday themed drawings.

And for as much as wish to cancel my holiday specials to get extra time, I want to keep that ball rolling because I feel like I've got something special going on with it.

Who knows, depending on how well my time management is I might be able to complete my new setup, the Vectorizer, and all my holiday projects by the end of the year. I doubt it, but you never know. In one way or another 2025 is probably going to be a lot more productive if things go as planned.

But it's too soon to talk about 2025 right now. There's still like 4 months left in this year.

Anyways, as usual, see you next post!

Bit of a short update this month...mostly because I technically only had half a month to pull things from.

Still working hard on that PC. There isn't anything new to show (mostly because it looks identical to what I showed last time), but I think it's almost done at this point, all the necessary stuff is practically complete with the only big snag I have is my drawing tablet not working. Although, at a certain point I need to stop tinkering with it, and start using it for real. I'll give myself the end of this month to finish the bare minimum (basically getting my drawing tablet to work), so that way I can finally focus on my true passion project: the Vectorizer. If I can't make it, then it'll have to be put on hold until the Vectorizer is done.

Though, I'm hoping I'll be organized enough in these next few months. I kinda need to get back into a drawing routine for a few yearly traditions, and I'm not in the best of position. I have almost nothing planned in advance like last year, and my setup might be in shambles for a bit. I might as well give it my best shot regardless! After-all, I did draw every day for a year straight that one time...*PTSD flashbacks*

I think Holrad is hiding something...hmm

One last thing before I end this post. I was doing another little practice animation on the side as a distraction when tinkering on my PC got a little boring. I was hoping I'd have it done by the end of the month, but I only finished like a third of it (maybe more? Hard to tell when you don't animate often). Guess it'll have to be finished this month instead, had a pretty nice monthly streak going too. Anyways, even though it's unfinished I wanted to show a little sneak-peak of it here for now:

This isn't what I've animated so far, I'd say it was when I was a quarter done. These are Holrad's construction lines I used while planning my animation in Flipnotes. Not sure how common this is, but I like planning how my characters flow before I animate the real deal. Holrad & Rathrie's construction lines are super simple. It's basically just a stick figure with antennas and balls glued to their heads. Neat eh!

Well, that's all I have for this month. Time for me to chuck everyone back to their normal routine of doomscrolling on their social media of choice, while they complain how it just keeps getting worse every update, with harmful AI features ruining it, and being infested with AI bros and bot accounts...

...I-I mean nothing...

...see you next post!

Did ya miss me?

Don't worry, I'm not dead. It's just this month has been quite the busy one.

I practically spend half the month tinkering with my Linux setup, and the other half on vacation in Quebec (which I just got back from).

I didn't really doodle while I was away, but I did take a ton of photos!

So tough to pick a few pics out of all my 350 pictures I took throughout my vacation around Gaspé.

Had so much fun seeing the ocean for the first time, and learning about a part of Canada I never really knew about! So much so that I almost forgot I still need to continue building my new Linux setup when I got back home.

Which reminds me, here's how my setup looks like right now

[Showing-off a bunch of apps that may or may not look cool. So hard to show-off on such a tiny resolution]

[The app searcher. Basically my version of the start menu. I've been tinkering a bunch with File Managers, so those ended-up on the top]

[Logout screen. Need to make custom icons for these options]

Pretty much everything from the wallpaper, to the toolbar up-top, to the search menu, and the logout menu were customized by yours truly. The only things that aren't are basically the terminal applications, but those are all pretty barebones with customization anyways.

Is the flair really necessary? No, but I'm going to look at this for days on end, so I might as well make it as pretty as possible.

I still need to do more tweaking to get it in a usable state. Stuff like shortcut scripts for commonly used actions (mounting USBs, networking, and multi-monitor stuff), as well as making custom drawings and animations for the wallpapers and even a screensaver, but those can wait.

Some of you might have noticed I moved away from Arch Linux as well. That's because Arch broke one time too many, so I moved to Debian which doesn't break as easily but doesn't have as many "fun" packages.

Afterwards when all this testing is done, I'll be transferring everything to my main PCs, and then I can start the main event: The Vectorizer!

[That's right! My hiatus still isn't over! It only just the beginning!]

Now before this gets too buried, here the comic of the month

Oh these two...anyways, that's all for this month news update. Does anyone like my tech stuff? Feels like I'm making people's brains explode the moment I say "Linux"-oh, there goes another one.

Well without further ado, I bid you farewell and hope you'll come back to another technobabblery update next month if your brains can take it!

See you next post!

It's been one of these slow months...well more boring than slow. Just been chipping-away at the video editing my mom wants done. It's been a drag since I've practically ran-out of passion juice. At least I know now that I won't be editing some random YouTuber's videos for money anytime soon.

On the bright side, I've bought a used New 3DS XL [what a mouthful] to tinker around with. Hacking it was easy, but configuring everything to work how I wanted was kinda tough since some homebrew apps don't cooperate sometimes [ftpd], are kinda jank to work with [Notepad3DS, 3DShell], or are just plain slow [Anything DS related that isn't official].

Honestly, my biggest gripe of the 3DS in general is that it's slow as balls [worse boot times than the Wii U], and the SD card location on the New 3DS is awful. Apart from that, it the perfect on the go system for me! Not only can I play a vast variety of games (from as old as Atari games, all the way to PS1 games), but it's also a pretty decent way to doodle or animate on the go.

[Funnily enough, the custom theme I chose was practically random, and was only meant for testing purposes, but I loved how it looked so I kept it. I'm thinking of doing my own custom theme someday]

And because the listing conveniently came with a DS Flashcart, I also decided to repair my old DS lite, by Frankensteining two broken DS lites together. A black & red one (which was my brother's), and a silver one (which was mine). The result looks just like some of my old 2000s era PC cases, and I love it.

Lastly, my mom celebrated her birthday recently, and I decided to give her a print version of her favourite drawing I made as a gift. She loves it.

But that's enough of my ramblings. Here's this month's funnies

Holrad needs to learn how to be patient sometimes. All he wants to do is run around everywhere he goes, and picks fights with everyone.

All and all, kind-of a boring month. Sure it had its highs, and it got better by the end, but like 90% of it was still a slog to get through.

Basically what I'm saying is I really want to go back to how it was back in February where I was tinkering all day. It's just fatiguing to keep doing things that you're good at, but aren't passionate about. Ya feel?

But anyways, that's it for this update. Thank-you for reading if you have, and if you didn't then...I dunno, you be you I guess. At least read the funnies.

See you next post!

Before I start this month's update, I've got to mention how I was awarded User of the Day on April 28th!

Firstly, of course I got awarded something during a busy day again.

[Second time in a row too!]

Secondly, welcome new users!

+~~------------------~~+

~~I'm on hiatus!~~

+~~------------------~~+

Please enjoy my past content, and my occasional doodles.

Not really much else to say because I'm busy putting my life back together at the moment.

Or at least that's what should have happened. Here's basically my April in a nutshell:

Great start! Been stuck helping my family members all month instead of working on my own things.

And the best part is I'm still not done helping my family members.

[never say you're available if you're the IT guy of the family, the work never ends!]

Another thing that happened in April is I finally went to court against my landlord, and I won, by a landslide. Like, I didn't even have to try, the landlord fell apart in the hands of the judge because he was lying the whole time. It was hilarious!

Lastly, over here the weather is looking a lot more spring-like recently. I mean it only took almost the entire spring season, and summer is only a month away, but hey. Better late than never right?

Looks like it's Holrad's turn to take care of his sister. The hijinks never end with these two.

Well, that's pretty much all that happened in april.

I'll probably be seeing you next month for another update

[Wait, this is a text post, how can I see them?]

See you next post!