You know what they say: Monday is funday! That's also true of Sunday though. Better than bluesday Tuesday I guess. And I always forget where whensday comes. I guess it doesn't matterday.
Okay *looks down at clipboard* we've got a shipment of fluff here. Who ordered two crates of fluff? Anybody? Well I'll just leave it here for now and check with the foreman.
And now that's cheered us all up, it's time for our regularly scheduled ✨excuses✨ section of the update, wherein I attempt to convince you (and to a greater extent myself) why the rest of this update is, to be generous, on the meagre side.
We begin with the mysterious term 'Bad day'. This is a cover-much stamp I lollop into my daily work journal to explain to my future self that the energy and/or the brain was not forthcoming that day, thus stalling work, leisure and/or being conscious. I recalled there were some this last fortnight but after tallying it up for this update I wasn't expecting there to have been seven! This goes some degree toward explaining why it still feels like the 3rd of August: I've not really been conscious for half of it.
But in my lucid moments things have, gradually, been developing. I completed a silly little commission whilst amassing doodles, paintings and comics for this month's newsletter. I'd like to show you this, but I can't. Except that's a blatant lie: I can show you it but I don't want to. A touch of the dramatic, and all that.
I also - inexplicably to all including myself - developed an !cocktail command to add to my stream bot. This will randomly generate you a cocktail recipe from 20 or so templates, jankily constructed from any number of alcohols, soft drinks, garnishes, additives, glasses, mixing implements, measurements and such. As a non-drinker myself, the existence of this can only be explained with the same umbrella hypothesis as whatever miasma's been causing these 'bad day's. A fever was suggested, something I cannot disprove.
Streaming! Golly it's nice to have something to separate the days, isn't it? We've run our Final Fantasy V playthrough into the ground and/or void just in time to hop into the delightfully spiral-laden world of Lost in Random! And gosh if we aren't getting mad kissy with it! ^3^
Speaking of wrapping things up, we've wrapped up a couple of million zombies from World War Z's arcade shooty times ready to head towards the light. The Dying Light that is! And, naturally, our week is punctuated with the soothing balm of socially-idle doodlage, this fortnight overcast by the presence of prolific romance cover artist Elaine Duillo.
A little housekeeping before I go: Since basically nothing about running a Patreon has ever gone the way I expected it ought've, I'm in the process of revamping this page and its rewards. And by revamping I mean something reminiscent of those home-makeover shows from the early 2000s where they take a house with a bunch of personality and turn it into a featureless off-white void whilst looking very pleased with themselves.
Gone are the tiers, gone is the Discord integration and gone are the monthly doodle rewards because, quite simply, they weren't operating as intended. The doodles were almost entirely left unclaimed and any claim would be so out-of-the-blue as to disrupt whatever workflow I'd be struggling to maintain. The Discord is too comfortably reinforced as a place to hang out with friends to be interrupted by well-intentioned strangers, and efforts to keep them separated with roles and dividers felt antithetical to the promised reward.
This all largely evaporates down to the same crystallised fact which I find myself learning almost as frequently as I forget it: Successful people aren't always successful because of what they do; They may do what they do because they're successful.
Patreon incentives, the purview of many a successful creator, largely only work when you already have eyes on you. The overheads then get swallowed up by the existing magnitude. I learned this with physical rewards some time ago, unsuitable for a small-scale operation even prior to the world's postal infrastructure collapsing in on itself like an over-egged Victoria sponge.
Of course I have you lovely lot for whom I'm supremely grateful and wouldn't trade for anything but... that's the extent of it. There are no fringes or peripheries to grand, shambling crowds whom I can tempt into the middle with trinkets. It's all just middle. A lovely middle, absolutely, but I simply haven't put in the work to deserve anything more. So a-streamlining we a-go!
(Side-note, my initial draft of this post read "[Insert something not depressing]" here, so here's a doodle from a recent RPG session)
And with that I am impelled to snap my head down to get as much completed in the next two weeks as physically possible. Why, you inquire? Well this time in a fortnight I'll be hurtling on a bus towards Wales for relaxing friend times! Before then though I hope to complete August's newsletter, perhaps a standalone comic and, if we're very lucky, the long-touted Dead Island highlights pt 2. You never know! I sure don't.
Until then a reiteration of my appreciation for your support of me through thick and thicker: Uh... th-thanks! At most three.
Look after yourselves,
Crispy 💜