A belated happy holidays! +update (Patreon)

Hello everyone! I hope your holidays are going well, and have gone well. A brand new year and decade rapidly on the way!

Things haven't gone as smoothly as I'd hoped they might, this year. But I can't deny the fact that it did go well; the support from you all has only grown, even despite slowness on my end. And I'm so incredibly grateful for that. Thanks to all of you here, I've been able to more freely add to my library of 3D content, I've been able to pay for new equipment, I've been able to have that reassurance when things were going badly for me that I still had an income, no matter how small it might be in the grand scheme of things.

It might not be anything I can make a living off of - yet - but it's absolutely enough that if push came to shove, I could keep myself fed, I could pay for small necessities. And honestly, that's kind of mind-boggling that what was once just a weird little... I don't even want to say it was a hobby, it was just something to fiddle with. And now it's providing me with such a valuable sense of stability, as well as just support.

It feels good. And thank you, all of you. <3

----

Life is still going a bit slowly for me right now, it's a bit of a struggle to get the energy I need to just do simple tasks, to finish work; I'm not sure if I'll manage to make any art to celebrate this new year, though I'd still like to give it a try! Tempered expectations. But again, thank you to all who have stuck with me despite that.

There's a lot to look forward to. I've stalled slightly on my experimentation with DS4 and Iray, starting to again hit the limits of what my PC rig can handle. But I've made enough money this year that I think I can afford some pretty hefty upgrades; a new processor, definitely. New motherboard to go with it, some storage expansion and speeding-up (SSDs have become much more affordable, and in much larger sizes). And hey, possibly another graphics card as well, knowing now that I'm moving towards render engines that can really utilize the power.

We'll see where it all leads, shall we? It's a little daunting right now, trying to once again do research on what CPUs and GPUs are worth buying, what else I'd need to get, how much I can squeeze out of the money I'd need to spend. And at the same time I'm trying to continue working with what I have, to keep improving at what I do and keep enjoying it all.

I'm struggling with it all right now, I'm not going to lie. But it's much less of a struggle than it could be, and again. Thank you all for helping to keep it as small as it is.