Bi-Weekly Report #14

How do we want to interpret this, dawgs? I had things I said were in the works in #13. It's been two weeks. A lot has happened. So which post was the unlucky one, 13 or 14? You decide!

ANNOUNCEMENTS

What a fucking mess. Okay.

As of a few days after my last report, I became the accountant for a NSFW furry storefront called Bunallow. It seemed like a huge stroke of luck; I'd bring in maybe a couple hundred bucks more every month to help make ends meet in exchange for doing some relatively basic spreadsheet work. I'd also been preparing to try selling my own merch on the site, so it all lined up just so and left me pretty excited.

... for about two days.

As it turns out, Bunallow was in the middle of something of a well-earned coup. The owner's handful of employees were bailing left and right, and by the climax of the fallout I was the last one standing. A week in, and I found myself in the midst of a disaster; the website's backend was a mess, the font end wasn't much better, and public relations were "we are preparing a document outing the owner as incompetent and also a sexual harasser."

That document's first iteration hit, and he immediately started speaking of stepping down and handing me the entire sinking ship. (I did not want the sinking ship.) Within six hours though he'd decided to ignore it and go on like nothing had changed.

The second draft hit a few days later, adding more reports of his behavior, more details on how the site was scamming artists and customers - some of which I was able to confirm via my own backend access and thus begin researching solutions on, not that it could undo existing damage - and a bonus recording of him dropping the ol' n-bomb as a very white French Canadian. By the end of it, almost everyone was telling him to step down, and he again tried to hand me the whole hot mess. (I cannot stress enough that I did not want the mess, nor how hot it was; the company was not registered, and I'd be the one taking on his liability in the midst of accusations of him skimming off the top, which I'm still not sure if he was doing or if the books just kept looking that bad because of how much he'd screwed up the backend. I don't actually care which it was; the end result was the same either way.) I said I wouldn't handle that responsibility on my own, and he pivoted to offering to be the man in the shadows. Given how this went the first time around, I did not expect that attitude to stick, and frankly I don't think the people putting together the document - the very former employees that had bailed just before and after my arrival and a few artists who'd worked with him in the past - did either.

They pounced. Within a couple hours, an agreement was reached. He'd hand over the site to his former bookkeeper, who'd been working to manage the backend, with me staying on as the right hand. He blamed them for me threatening to leave, as if the actual accounting situation wasn't so fucked that we are, nearly a week later, still finding new problems and fraudulent setups in that backend. We are pretty sure an artist sold a $150 body pillow and will be getting two cents out of it. It's fucking dire, is what I'm saying, and given the present state and understanding of the group's finances, your girl ain't realistically expecting to get paid for the effort for at least a month or two. The artists come first, which I won't argue with, because it was the ethos on paper that had me excited about the place to begin with.

(The artists, for the record, were also not given particularly helpful guidelines or information for how to prepare their work properly for print, which I am also now working on, because I am analytical about these things, went to school for prepress, and find the like of guidelines to be a ticking time bomb where someone's shit is gonna get ordered and not look at all how they expected, which is just more headaches for everyone involved and we're all running out of asprin over here.)

All the while, I was dealing with Discord going off around the clock. I'd wake up to hundreds of messages, have the former owner wanting me in a call with him for hours on end (being very selective about the information he shared and trying to coerce me to share my screen so he could see what others were saying all the while), and trying to assure artists and customers that I was going to do everything I could to make sure that people still got paid what they were owed at the end of the month. It was a trash fire, but as an accountant I have about 15 years of built up pride. I wasn't gonna let this mess screw over the bystanders.

So that's the week where not a lot got done, in case you were wondering how I went from "I want to post on here for y'all every day :)" to borderline radio silence. It's been a train wreck, and the cars are still on fire, though more contained than they were before. The new team is presently about five people all working to fix one guy's mess, and that guy wants to be let back in to quietly work listing products, the thing that broke it all to begin with, and a thing that would also give him access to customer addresses and emails again. Did I mention that in his attempt to prove he does his books right he leaked those!?

He had basically every product as weighing zero grams. A $30 mousepad and a $180 mousepad both made the artists about ten bucks. I have never gone from benevolent to wanting to angrily bite somebody so quickly. It's like it brought out an actual animal in the core of my being, a wild and angry beast that cannot believe it's putting up with this shit.

So yeah. That's been taking some of my attention, clearly. Sorry about that. It was supposed to be easy work, super part-time, for a profit share. It ate a week of my life on a month where we were already absolutely struggling, and now I'm fighting to get back into the swing of things as I slowly sleep off this weird emotional hangover.

I could probably elaborate more if I weren't trying to be at least slightly professional here. I don't think I got through a single conversation with this man before he asked if I had tits. I don't think he intends to be a problem, but I don't think that assessment actually reflects any better on him in this case. Around the 20th time a person falls down a flight of stairs after being told to just take the elevator and responding with "I GOT THIS," you sorta stop feeling like it's worth trying to talk sense.

... So that's that.

Let's see what I can salvage from the wreckage for the rest of this.

GAME DEV

I've added a few new game rules to my controller object that have accidentally resulted in more content. Oops??

Basically, I was trying to add Frenzy mode - a game mode where strategy is forsaken a fair deal in favor of simply hauling ass - and was balancing it around a bug where the rate at which your energy bar drained was not increasing like it was supposed to as the game went on. The added rule to make it harder - as it seemed absurdly easy and I just didn't notice why - was to add a restriction for a minimum match size to actually start recovering anything. This actually proved to be pretty interesting on its own, enough so that I'm considering adding a couple modes specifically to utilize it. One of those might be a sort of Hell Mode for the players who prove themselves competent with the rule sets individually. Just... let them deal with all three at once. Good luck, chumps!

So yeah. Free content, I guess!

I really need to solve the UI for setting up user profiles though. That and the leaderboards are what stand between me and letting y'all give it a whirl at this point.

COMMISSIONS

I'm down, but not out.

Completed:

• Mufflebun's sexy horse man and his big fucking horse-man penis.

• Lys's necromancer shenanigans

• PWYW comms x2

In Progress:

• Ottercat definitely not drowning Crysis

• Spritz's goddesses

Upcoming:

• Zombie Make-Out for Rowlet

• Sweater Trio YCH Results

• rabbit ass

PWYW comms are shifting to a $30/hr. format (two hours max per)! It's more clear with regards to what I'm doing and what buyers can expect.

I would love to be able to use vgen or something for this, if I could just... get into vgen. 😭 for now it's just the stream's tip jar link.

WRITING

I might have chipped at this. I genuinely don't remember. I've been so focused on other shit that it all feels like a blur. Seeing I hadn't done Slime Forest's alt mode rules yet two weeks ago genuinely surprised me, so yeah I probably did something. Probably.

This last week or so was rough, man.

ANIMATION

I made a zombie ottercat for halloween and it moves. It is not shaded yet. I thought it would be quick. It was not quick. I need to stop thinking things will be quick. It's a trap!!

I've also plotted out and started selling slots for an animated haunted house YCH. I worry it is both underpriced for what I aim to do and far too expensive for most people. Let's see how it goes together.

AND THAT ABOUT DOES IT

Finished Hi-Fi Rush's story right before the shit hit the fan. Glad I got to enjoy it before everything spiraled into such exhausted chaos that I caught myself several times just staring blankly at my desktop instead of just going to bed or something. Other than that, I've poked some NextFest demos. ButtKnight was fun as a game but all the smut stuff was pretty damned rapey and I do not care for that. Really disappointing. There's also an indie Meteos that I find infinitely harder than actual Meteos for some reason. Is it the screen size? Is it that the icons all blend together for me?? Is it both??? Is it just harder???? I don't know! But it sure was Meteos, to a "we might get sued" degree, so we'll see what happens.

Also, the Erenshor demo, a simulated MMO where you can chat with NPCs. It seems to work on a keyword system, but that doesn't make it any less wild that when I got into it and said goodnight to my literally non-existent yet deeply self-defeating tank, he gave me shit despite the fact he was the one who couldn't stop dying all the time.

Fuck you, Sparkles!

• Sera