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.
