Updates regarding life and Patreon in general

I'm making this post to address my unintentional absence these past few months, among other Patreon-related things.

Patreon's Charging Sales Tax Later Today

Most of you already follow more than one artist on Patreon, so I'm sure you must have heard about it last month. For those who haven't though, it seems that Patreon has planned to start charging sales tax starting July 1st to comply with the law. As stated in Patreon's FAQ, only some people will be affected by this (depending on where they live/are located).

If you'd like to know more, please check out the following link.

Pending Patreon Content

First and foremost, I cannot apologize enough for all these delays that are out of my control. I thought that I finally managed to get back to a stable and steady pace of work, only for other things to come crashing down on my plans and bringing them to a halt. My laptop's GPU died (possibly some other parts are getting there too) and I could barely use it for anything after that happened. Multitasking was no longer possible as everything would lag and stutter, graphically resource heavy programs (such as games or Photoshop) would have painful-to-look-at distortions rapidly flying/flashing across the screen at all times, and even light resource programs (ie. Clip Studio Paint, which is what I use to draw) became affected by it eventually.

Despite the system slowing down to an excruciatingly frustrating crawl, I somehow managed to back up all of my important data to an external HDD. The only things I lost were the majority of my browser history (because the speed was so slow that it stopped Firefox's Sync feature from working properly) and maybe some save data from a game or two that I hadn't played in years. Because of that it took days to backup data that would have normally only taken a couple of hours to do so... I wiped my system clean (after trying to get a bootable USB to load properly more times than I can count) and reinstalled all the default drivers, yet the issues were still there.

Thankfully, I was able to get a new laptop and have already reinstalled most of the programs that I used often on my old one. The same goes for my music and all the drawings I had on it. For now, the December drawing is finished/ready for upload and the one for January just needs to be colored in. Everything from February-June will be lined first, then colored (hopefully I'll be able to post WIPs that way). Of course, I'll still post the missing polls, even though we all know what poll option's going to keep on winning, haha. To catch up, these polls will have a much shorter time frame than usual.

Discord Server's Status

Some of you might recall that at one point someone expressed interest in wanting to help liven up my Discord server and the idea of making it publicly available for all. Fast-forward to nearly half of 2020 and there still hasn't been any activity in the Discord server since last year. At this point I'm not really sure if making it public will even bring it back to life. I'll try to give it one last shot and will allow people to generate invite links (iirc that's currently disabled) soon; I'll make another post once this is in effect.

If the Discord server is barely used/not used at all by the end of year, I'll shut it down. There's no point in keeping the server open if it's just going to keep gathering cyber dust.

Daily Life Update

My family and I are doing fine; there haven't been any health complications so far. Everyone's been rather nosy these past few months though. Even though my brother went back to his room, he'd still barge into my room way too often. The same could be said for my family whenever they ask for things that they could easily do themselves. The exhaustion has finally caught up with me lately and I've found myself falling asleep whenever I try to take a short nap.

The power's gone out quite a few times again and the earthquakes are as sporadic as usual. We also had that whole haze situation caused by the Sahara desert's dust last week, which made it pretty annoying to be outside without a mask while doing chores at home. Even if you didn't have any sort of breathing complications it would still hurt if you breathed while being exposed to it. It looks like mainland US seems to experiencing the same thing by now.

Other than my old laptop's GPU dying (which I mentioned in the previous section), my TV has been damaged by all the shaking the earthquakes have caused. While it can still be used, it now has multiple horizontal lines running across the top of the screen. It's really distracting to look at. That TV's been with me since high school and while I can't remember the exact number of years that I've owned it, I do know that it's a bit past what's considered its average lifespan. I'm not really sure when I'll be able to replace it.

It's already 7:40 AM over here and I really need to get some sleep. I hope you're all safe and doing alright wherever you live, despite the situation the world is currently in.