Hello! It's hot. I'm hot. Literally, of course. Most hottish. Many heats are occurring at this moment in time. Hence I consider it my moral obligation to keep this brief so we can all return to having our heads submerged into the slipstream of one or more desk fans.
It's not July any more! Will wonders never cease? As such we have our closing statements from the office of July themself, which we can take you to... right... about... now!
There's an interesting corollary to the cessation of July, and that is that it's now August! And with the initiation of a new month we ring in a new friend: This time we're saying a hearty hello to a big ol' stronk'un with many a muscle, freckle and grin.
Skipping over September for a second, I've also had my head orbiting around October insofar as work has begun on my fourth RandOCtober challenge! I've collected together mine and m'friends' OCs, foraged a bunch of styles, randomised them together (filming the process for video-based posterity) and have begun cracking through them; Three pieces have been completed (friend-chosen body part sneaker-peekers below) and about half of the batch have been very roughly sketched out to inspire in me the confidence that I actually can do them, maybe, hopefully.
I'm very excited for a bunch of these prompts, so fingers crossed! Less fingers crossed for me and the challenge and more fingers crossed that my increasingly heat-intolerant drawing tablet doesn't go up in a plume of smoke before the challenge ends and I can thence get more commissions to pay for a new one. 🥴
Outside of this I managed to carve time into my hectic schedule (of drawing fanart for my friends and fanning myself) to draw my most recentest RPG character Rowena! An unfortunate Borderlandsian mathematician who was sent to Pandora to 'educate the populous'. It transpires that if you want 50% of Pandorans to know arithmetic the most efficient way to achieve that is to kill all those that don't.
Oh, also Abacus is there, the glorified speak-and-spell classroom aid which Rowena outfitted with a few little tools of self-defence.
A non-trivial quantity of writing has been happening of late. The long-espoused October Noir is beginning to have its loose threads connected and the story is starting to get a much more satisfying and justified ending. Although it's worth bearing in mind that I'll probably never make the whole thing, so I don't know how much that's worth in the long run. 😅
Streaming has (you won't believe this) continued unabated by all except heat and pollen! Our journey through Lies of P on Tuesdays and Wednesdays is drawing to a conclusion some time soon and will be replaced by one or more small piles of jank so unstable I need two computers to film them. Saturday friend games are, as I understand, pivoting from Middle Earth over to Tamriel in The Elder Scrolls Online. Sundays remain our wind-down social doodle times by virtue of me still not having decided on a drawthrough. And our morning doodly strims will henceforth (and September-back) be devoted to putting August in various comic situations for hyucks and giggles.
Right, I can feel the keyboard melting beneath my fingers so I think it's time to set up another desk fan. I hope you're all keeping yourselves at comfortable temperatures and generally un-unpleasant states of being, and I thank you all for your lovely support. I'll be back in two more weeks with a fresh bundle of contextless limbs!
Look after yourselves,
Crispy 💜