Hurry, quick, we don't have much time! The sun's briefly turned it's cosmic head and neglected the temperature enough for me to throw out this scrawled missive: Tell my family I love them and that Arx Fatalis was surprisingly boring.
Welcome to the second monthly "I just released a newsletter, so here's all of that again" update where, you guessed it, I just released a newsletter! It has a remarkably similar array of nonsense as its peculiar predecessor - comic strips, a rambly tangent, puns, a character deep-dive, a crossword and such - but with a few added shinies!
In deference to my long, procrastinatory history of indulging in variant sudoku I have, for the first time, made my own! I then, for the second time, made my own! Only smaller.
Indeed, dig long enough and a 6x6 and 9x9 sudoku can be unearthed in the newsletter. Try the puzzles section, it might save you some time.
I've also been messing around with less-arithmetic, arguably much more cursed, but hopefully original variants which I hope to show off next month. They're quite silly.
I've also revved up a section where I permit myself saw through the infernal undergrowth of the interweb to find and display the quiet floral pleasures I'd otherwise keep to myself. After all who am I to deny you your own quiet pleasures?
This month it was Pete Beard, who makes delightfully in-depth, minimalist and rather relaxing biographies of illustrators from the 19th and 20th centuries. He focuses on their lives, works and (cruelly enabling my magpie brain) techniques. It's a lovely time, so go scroll through the archive and click whatever thumbnail takes your fancy.
So, supplement aside, what else have I been doing? Sweating, largely. Both myself and my tablet have stood (or lain) in solidarity for being unable to function in this stifling new standard of summer heat. Many ideas, too little energy. Bleh.
I could, however, slide myself up into my chair to fiddle around with some low-level miscellany. This included extensive note-taking for a future video and illustration project, updating the social links on my website to not include quite so many fascistic billionaires, developed and thus-far maintained a humble social media schedule, and penned a small menagerie of alt-text for slightly larger menagerie of art and comics. The latter takes so much longer than you'd think.
Oh, and this Norman Rockwell study. People seemed to like it.
Streaming! My word, what I wouldn't give for that to be literal. Alas it's the digital kind, wherein we've jettisoned ourselves from the bow of Arx Fatalis and it's peculiar plot pacing, and now lie adrift on the amnesiac waters of XIII. It seems to be, you may be aghast to learn, a good game. I know, unheard of.
Saturday gang games find us flung from our retail restraints into the undead unrealities of World War Z. So far everything's going fine. This can be confirmed by nobody being alive to disagree with it.
And naturally our sleepy Sunday scribble sessions have scontinued regardless of whether, for the past couple of instalments, I've felt like my mind was gently bobbing in the inflatable pool of dissociation. But that's what friends are for! To pick up the slack. Right? Right?
And that, aside from all of the other things I wrote, is all she wrote. As for the next fortnight, the indifferent tyranny of the giant fusion reactor in the sky notwithstanding, I've got comics to construct, commissions to cultivate, highlights to hammer out, crochet to create, puzzles to ponder, and another update to, uh, up-make.
Thank you as ever for your otherwise woefully thankless support! I hope you feel that the supplement is a worthwhile endeavour for your efforts, but I am very much trying not to let it slow down anything else. Failing, but trying.
Look after yourselves,
Crispy 💜