Hi (Patreon)

Long time no see :)

The most important first: I have a couple of ideas coming for the next few weeks, If I get to finishing them soon enough, they'll be coming out at around the same rate as they used to last year (2 - 3 per month). I'm not going to pretend I am overflowing with original* ideas as I have kind of ran out, so we'll see what the future holds for me.
The rest is me rambling, so if that's the only news you care about, you can leave this post here

On a note that most of you won't care about, twitter is suspending the free access to their API starting on Thursday February 9th, aka in a week (!). How is that important?

Well, engagement was already low to average on what I upload, and I had developed a few countermeasures, like adding replies or retweeting myself in the few days after I upload my tweet, to have it appear again on your feeds. But I was not doing that by hand, all of that was automated, and that's thanks to their API.

I'm a junior dev, and I love to tinker and develop in-house solutions for very specific problems. I have a script I have developed that automates a very large part of my job when it comes to releasing my work, and part of that script is posting the base tweet on Twitter, replying to it with credits so as not to deboost the tweet with links, then a few days later reply to it and then retweet it. None of that will be possible to do starting next week.

The problem with that is not only that I lost dozens of hours of work in a pinch, because Musk decided that the sinkhole that is Twitter should make money, but also that I'm 100% sure I won't remember to do all that by hand. It's not only tedious but also feels unrewarding. I may set expectations for myself too high, but I do care about the engagement, I love to see that people reply to me tweets, or just that they like it. To think that several hundred people are like "Yeah. I like the stuff this artist makes. I vibe with it.", that is rewarding. And granted, they're just numbers. But seeing something flop just brings my mood down, and it does not make me want to keep working on such stuff. I'm not a person with a strong spirit when faced with adversity, even though I try to be. I might one day just start all over again on a new account, to get that feeling of freshness anew, or outright quit when the negative outweighs the positive.

It's a shame that all of that is happening by the same time, since I have hired a designer to overhaul my website entirely (no ETA on the date), and I'm super excited for that, as I know they make fantastic stuff. I love making Blender stuff, and I love sharing it. I don't want everything to end abrubtly because some megalomaniac asshole had no foresight. There's no other place I know of but Twitter where you can have essentially a blog where you are someone, and not just a name. There used to be tumblr, but I'm not welcome there with what I make, and it's already in a great state as it is today. Reddit is as impersonal as it gets, DeviantArt flags 3/4 of my content (rightfully), Rule34 is... Yeah. The one alternative I see is Pixiv, which I actually enjoy using, but they have the same problem as Twitter will have, no API to speak of. And web scraping isn't even a thing on Pixiv, at least not something I can figure out (and believe me, I have spent evenings and nights on it).

I'm very happy that, worst comes to worst, I can afford to lose all revenue generated by my Blender works, as I've always seen it as a hobby at most, and never a job. I'm over the moon that you chose to support me, and in case my mind goes to shit one day, I'll just pause or close this Patreon for however long I need. as much as I ramble about having a "personal" blogging service, Patreon in my mind is first and foremost exchanging money for content. Be it my thoughts, works in progress, teasers, goofs, or early access, you get something in exchange of your support. I do answer each (reasonable) DM I get, be it here or in any other social I use, so don't hesitate to reach out if you ever need to.

tl;dr I'm back with a few things cooking, but who knows for how long.

I'll open this post up for non patrons in the near future, but I thought y'all should be the first to know tha absolute state of my online presence.