The vexing battle with a persistent computer issue looks to be finally resolved...

Yes, after a good year of random, off and on, blue screen issues, with a relatively new PC (just over a year now) it seems the source of the issue is resolved.

Apparently it was a bad stick of RAM.

While this seems straight forward enough, pinning it down was not (it passed memory tests early on but I suspect the RAM was faulty right from day one when the PC arrived from Amazon). While I did note this issue in a prior post  (and a few other times I think) I didn't want to be posting about it all of the time as, frankly, it just comes off as excuses the more one leans into complaining about something like this, no matter the reality. It was a pretty frustrating issue; not frequent enough to be utterly crippling as to producing work but enough to hamper output and what I focused on (planned to dive back into Zbrush but no dice with the blue screen issues). So, ultimately, it was getting in the way of producing as much work as I had intended.

I won't get into details about the issues beyond saying the blue screens pointed to a variety of possible causes (as blue screens often do, they're a pain in the ass) including potentially being related to Windows updates (they were occurring the day of updates or a day or two later). Every time I thought I had it (I was leaning toward the original liquid cooling unit causing over heating problems leading to blue screens. It was over heating, so I replaced it, but it wasn't the cause) , boom, they would pop back up again. The various Windows scans (including the memory test) would often fail as much as they might work so it was additionally frustrating there as well. Eventually it started to point to the likely issues being RAM, even though the PC's memory seemed to be working.

With the indicators pointing to RAM once again, naturally I tried to run some memory tests again and... surprise, surprise, it failed. At this point it's either bad RAM or likely something going wrong with the AsRock mother board I have in this thing. I went for replacing the RAM and went with 32 gigs this time over the original 16 (cause what the hell, why not go with overkill).

Well... it was the RAM. Bad RAM certainly would explain the more vexing and bizarre crap the machine was doing so, as far as I can see here, we're good to go now. Sure, this won't utterly eliminate blue screens from happening entirely but constantly reoccurring issues, yes. About bloody time.

So, in closing, I have a lot I hope to do and catch up with. While I didn't just stop producing entirely due to this nonsense I did intentionally fall back on the Clip Paint "re-paints" of older works because Clip Paint seems to be incredibly stable when you're simply painting. I do plan to return to a wider variety of works, including the NSFW material and fully returning to Zbrush 3D works. That said, hopefully those of you that have stuck it out have been enjoying the new FOIL paints and the addition of full PSD files to explore as well. I've certainly enjoyed working on those and there will undoubtedly be more.

I'm not entirely sure what direction I plan to take the Patreon thing here (assuming Patreon remains a viable platform) beyond the certainty that i will be posting all new works full resolution versions exclusive to Patreon along with sharing more PSD files and potentially more detailed breakdowns of process, etc. Of course, any NSFW material will be exclusive to Patreon entirely (again, unless Patreon ends up making the platform nonviable and I have to go elsewhere).

2020 has been... a hot mess. Not simply for me, for all of us 2020 has been a shit show. I'm still here, I've made it through financially sound but, none the less, I'd like to do something more with Patreon so we'll see where things can go from here. Assuming I've finally got the problem with the computer solved (and I'm pretty certain I do) it should be smooth sailing to some degree from here on out.

Whether it's just a few of you, or eventually many, as always, thank you for the support guys!