Apologies for lapse in posts, life updates!

Hey folks, thanks for your continued support these past couple months, I've had a handful of issues really mess with my time management and art morale lately that I think I've turned a corner on and been having a lot of better days, figured I'd let people know what's been up.

So a couple months ago I found my entire Patreon page was getting pirated and redistributed en masse on and off over the last year. I was really upset about it for a while and it was super demoralizing whenever I thought about plans for my patreon, but after some more thought and reminding myself that the people seeking out pirated patreon content were rarely ever going to offer me any financial support anyway, and since there's nothing I can do to stop them (trust me i've looked into it, just a bummer artists have to deal with since we have so few protections), I really gotta just press on and try to keep it out of my mind. Which I've gotten a lot better at doing, thanks in part to a more recent event...

A few weeks ago, my partner got suddenly fired from a job they loved over some absolute BS, and it's been a big hit to our financial stability so I'm having to take on more commissions to compensate. We're doing ok now and they'll start receiving unemployment checks soon, but I know I need to keep doing my best to improve my time management, and I gotta tackle head-on anything that might cause me to neglect my Patreon supporters.

At the same time my partner lost their job, I also had some difficult family stuff to deal with in March-early April that I won't go into detail about, but suffice it to say they're doing much better now after I did some traveling to visit and help out with moving, and my stress level and emotional state have gotten massively better since that's hopefully in the past now. I underestimated how heavily it was weighing on me until I finally got the chance to get directly involved and help them out, and realized how much better I felt on the other end of it about two weeks ago - I've got the steadily rising resting heart rate data on my Fitbit to prove it, followed by a sudden drop to healthier levels after I got back from traveling.

Anyways, a lot of stressful stuff was messing me up on a daily basis and I let it discourage me from posting my art or posting to Patreon, but things are looking up and I've been freshly reminded that it's an essential part of being a full-time artist and I'm redoubling my efforts to stick to the plan - posting my work here for patrons to see first as a timed exclusive, then make the post public after a day or two or three for people just following my Patreon not on any tier just for updates, and post it elsewhere too like Bluesky and Furaffinity. I've got a HUGE pile of gamedev content to share too - I've had very little time to actually code more stuff in GameMaker, but I've done oodles of concept art over the last couple months I just gotta scan and post.

So yeah, sorry again for the pause in posts, gonna keep at it! I've got a ton of art I'm super proud of to share!