2023 In Review (t'was bad) (Patreon)

New Year's has come and gone and I hope y'all survived it with everything intact! ♥

Let's talk about last year and what's going on this year. And, unfortunately, it's not positive.
I'm just gonna write from the heart on this one.

tl;dr
• Starting a new job this month, for mostly financial reasons.
• Unsure how/if Slop will continue; will have to see how much time and energy I have at the end of the workday.
• NOT QUITTING, GIVE ME TIME TO BALANCE MY NEW JOB AND SLOP.

2023.

A year of stagnation for SloP. In early 2022 I grew incredibly rapidly to 25.000 followers and this year I barely scratched the 28.000. Now, that's not nothing to scoff at, it's still a large number and it's not incredibly important, but to me it's indicative of something being off at the very least and it's one of few things that I can look at and see if I'm on the right track.

If I had to point my finger, it's probably a mixture of AI, algorithm, changes on the platform and probably the amount of releases I did this year. Or worse and scarier, the quality of my work.

I'm pretty unhappy with the 3D landscape and platforms currently. Every artist has been fighting an uphill battle for forever, but with AI art and the algorithms and the shadow bans and people releasing my content for free all over the internet, I just feel a bit... drained by it all at this point.

Drained. Is this burnout?

The Dionys set is still rendering. It's been over a year since I've worked on it. And I loathe the project and I loathe how much time it's taking. It has burned my momentum and I feel like the love I have for this work has taken a hit by it too. It NEEDS to come out, but I don't WANT it to by this point. I feel like this project has stifled my creative energy for so long, because if I make something, I can't render at the same time.

The Discord server is another energy drain for me, honestly. The original idea was for it to replace Twitter. This was during the time that Musk was actively making worse and worse changes, so I needed something I was in control over and something people could opt-in on.

It has been a lot of work (and money) setting the server up and I feel like it's all in place. But honestly... it's too inactive for me. There's almost 800 people on there, yet less than 10 people active. Maybe more pushes for people to join the server could work, maybe.

Starting a new job.

This SloP work has also sort of isolated me. I don't have colleagues, I don't have people around me for months at a time, sometimes. And throughout the year, I've declined social events or festivals for this work because it was stagnating and I wanted to work on SloP instead.

I've held hope that maybe this SloP stuff could get me into the 3D industry or be sustainable on it's own after a while, but I don't think it will. So I'm starting a new job this month. With colleagues and people and... a payroll and health care.

I'm gonna have to see what the schedule is like and how the planning works and all of that and how it'll impact SloP exactly. But I can predict, less activity, obviously.

What now?

SloP will continue. I'm not quitting just yet. I've still got plenty to render, between Dionys, the hiking set with Daria and Linde, the sauna set with Claudia, Nina and Alice and the bus set with Daria and Nina. There's plenty that can render whilst I'm at work.

I think we're going to have to wait and see for now, see what the work-load is on my new job and if I'm able to still do creative work on my days off.

I'm also posting this so you can make an educated decision on if you still want to support me at this stage. I can imagine, with the SloP ship on rough waters and seemingly sinking, you might want to bail. If so, thank you for the support over the years and no hard feelings. ♥

We'll talk soon.