July 2021 update (part 1) (Patreon)

Been fairly productive this month so far (which is mostly why I haven't put up an update until today - sorry about that);  managed to wrap up all of my remaining commissions, and I'm now concentrating my efforts on my own works, with priority given toward Patreon and FANBOX, considering the lack of content last month...

With regards to my seemingly never-ending health care saga, I went to the hospital to fill out the necessary paperwork to see if I qualified for any discounts or financial aid;  I was told I would get an answer within four days of the visit...which was on June 21st, or eighteen days ago.  Not surprising, since the last time I was in the situation, it took four months to get an answer from the hospital's financial department...

On the hardware front, things have not been going so well;  as I live in an area that is especially prone to lightning strikes and power failures in general, with an electric company not exactly known for its reliability even at the best of times, a solid, reliable UPS is a must-have for a PC here.

Unfortunately, there have been several occurrences over the past month where my UPS has failed - once where I was in the middle of saving a file for one of this month's commissions.

Instead of giving me approximately a half-hour of battery backup, my PC lost power in less than ten seconds.  As a result, when I powered up my PC again to pick up where I left off, the main and primary backup files of my commission were corrupted, and thus useless.

Although I managed to retrieve another backup, the file in question was from a day prior to the one I was working on - thus I lost several hours' worth of work and had no choice but to start over.

In addition to losing my work, I'm also quite concerned with hardware damage that could result from such power outages.  Although my current UPS has given me over a decade of reliable service, this isn't the case anymore, even after replacing the batteries on it recently, on top of my new GPU which is more power-intensive than my old one.

So, it seems I'll be shopping for a new UPS to replace my current one - the one I'm looking for isn't exactly cheap, but it's much less expensive than replacing an entire PC...

Finally, with regards to commissions - I've finally finished with a new set of rules and guidelines, which should provide for more clarification and less headaches for the commissioner, as well as myself.  However, I will be taking a break from commissions until next month, perhaps September - I simply feel like concentrating on my own projects, and I wish to create some related art for these new commission sheets as well...