Progress Report (Sort of) (Patreon)

Okay folks. I just had a fucking awful day yesterday. The issue I had pop up early this month was dental related, and they'd thought it was going to be like a $5000 fix. That was...bad, given that I currently only make like $20,000 a year because of attempting to make the games thing and other creative endeavors actually pay. Unfortunately, when I went to the Oral Surgeon yesterday, he took one look and said, "Nope, you've got much bigger problems." Currently, I don't even know how big. But he was pretty...dire. After, you know, charging a fucking $400 consultation fee that no one told me was a thing. And saying he needed to send the damn scans off to be professionally read by an expert.

Yeah, I pretty much spent the rest of yesterday trying to get through a series of panic attacks. Made all the worse because my general practitioner is a fucking hack that refused to refill the medication I use for those panic attacks last time. Despite the fact that I use like, maybe 4 doses of Xanax a year and only ask for refill when the damn things expire. So I can't even treat the panic attacks. Which, frankly, I'm struggling not to have another one of as I describe all this.

All of this is just an explanation. Don't worry, it's not leading up to anything ridiculous like be taking a break. I'm already so thoroughly fucked financially, that taking a break isn't exactly an option anyway.

What is going to happen is that I'm shortening the build size a bit this month. Not a lot, I'm almost through rendering for Talia's weekend content, which will mean that there's a full 9 animations in the build. Frankly, that's the size of builds I was managing last year when I had to bounce between Left Hand Magic and Haven't Port every month anyway. So it's not going to be a small build, just smaller than I'd wanted (and have been managing so far this year). Under normal circumstances, I could probably squeeze in Trix's content too, but I am not up to my normal heavy crunch period. I think if I tried that exhausting grind right now, it would probably end in a total mental health collapse. Which would obviously be bad for both me and my projects.

I think that cutting the build a bit short will give me enough time and energy to complete everything else. I was supposed to do a lot of work on The Starship Promise yesterday for example. But...yeah...that didn't happen. I was barely able to force myself to kick off a few renders throughout all of yesterday. Thankfully, one of those was a animation that took most of the day to render anyway, so the day wasn't a total loss.

Anyway. I always try to be an honest as possible with all of you regarding the builds. So this is just a warning of that. I'm also seriously considering cutting one of the Short Stories next month just to take a bit of the pressure off. I haven't decided on that yet, it will probably be decided depending on how the next few days go. That's the only thing I'll consider cutting, though, which has been my standard policy for a few years. The extra short story monthly was technically a goal reward. Back when Patreon goals were actually a thing we were allow to have. Fucking Patreon taking away useful tools...