Happy new year! - A 2020 retrospective. (Patreon)

Happy new year everyone! It's funny, isn't it? Usually "happy new year" is just a phrase. A sequence of words we say in a row where the individual words have kinda lost meaning. Not so this time around, I think. 2020 has been a tough one for many people and if we deserve anything in 2021, it's for it to truly be a happy year.

I wanna have a little look back on 2020. On the things I believe went right, but more importantly, also on the things that went wrong. This'll be a decent wall of text so if you're not interested I totally get that. I won't be talking about anything that you need to know in this post so you can happily sit it out and wait for content updates if you prefer.

With that said, let's get started.

While you can probably guess that I have some gripes about the past year, I don't wanna start it off negatively. Let's talk a little bit about the content that I delivered to you guys and how I feel about it, as well as your reception of said content throughout the year. What I feel can be quickly summed up in three points:

1) I am proud of the content that I delivered.

2) I don't feel like I delivered enough, and I owe you.

3) The overwhelmingly positive and understanding reception I get from you guys helped me get through the year to begin with.

That's not in order of priority, just in order of how I can most easily explain things. For starters, I never put out content that I do not support. Supporting a release can mean any number of things, but for me it's always that I think the work is at a level of quality that is representative of previous releases, and that if I had to make concessions, I made them because I had to, not because I wanted to.

Last year I put out my first animated release. And it was incredibly modest. But it was also produced in just three months by someone with zero animating experience. At the start of the year the goal had been to put out a Maya release but as the months raced by, it was becoming very clear we weren't going to make it. I still wanted to get experience with animation in, because I began to understand that if I had to learn as I went on my first Maya animated release, it would end up being a disaster.

So ASL4 is a fun little thing, but obviously nowhere near the scope that I wanted it to be. Still, it went right because you guys seemed to understand that just as much as I did. And it went right because of the incredible Marie Fasolt, who had my back even when things looked pretty cramped for time.

Still, the animation took up too much time for what it ended up being. Render output started to suffer and the Nvidia 30xx series production stalling meant I couldn't just go out and buy a new card to free up hours of potential animation rendering either. Out of a sense of desperation, fearful perhaps that I would lose you guys, I began to promise content that at the time I genuinely believed I could make good on, but in the end discovered I could not. For that, I owe you not just an apology, but the actual content itself.

The lockdown year was a bad year for my mental health. Now I'm not gonna pretend I have actual mental health issues because that's not the case. What is the case is what I think most people would agree with: all the isolation fucking sucked. And it wasn't just the isolation. It was the lack of anything to do. 

The year went by without major sporting events, without local events, without anything to define the passage of time and lift spirits. Like a long desert road, no end in sight, nothing to mark or define where you are in your journey. May turned into August turned into December and it went by before I even knew it. Yet it went slow all the same.

This absolutely murdered my creativity. Combined with the constant pressure to put out animation and the ever impending sense of deadline, I began to get close to a burnout. So after a certain point I took the advise of you guys - to take it easy and feel less obliged - more to heart.

I have a head full of great ideas. Dickgirl porn is a blast to make, and to consume. It's an absolute joy to be able to sit down behind my PC's and just start making something hot. Put on some good porn on one screen, crank out renders on the other. The former feeds the latter. An ouroborous of inspiration :D So I'm looking forward to making more for you guys.

After all this animated work, I also rediscovered my love for making images. Don't get me wrong, animation is fun and the hotness factor can be sky high. But composition, angles, focus, they're more of a photography thing and it's what I enjoy making. Before I felt obliged to make the jump to animation because I felt like it's what you guys expected of me. Now that I have animated, I've learned to also listen more to myself and what I enjoy.

Whatever 2021 turns out to be, whether it's another horrible year full of Covid, or a year where life returns to planet earth, I've learned that how I approach production doesn't mesh with the situation as we've had it for the past ten months. So I'm going to play it from my own strengths, and work in a way where I can deal with whatever restrictions life decides to impose.

First off, there's going to be a poll where I'll let you guys decide what I make next. After that, a Coming Up In January post. And then the content stream begins anew :D

See you in 2021!