Work, Work

This week's progress report is brief. Not to mention, a specter of a past housing issue came back last night.

The upcoming ZS Expac doc acquired a few more pages and most of last week was spent editing it with Nonesuch for quality assurance. It's made a huge difference. I didn't do as much writing in this period but what's important is that there's a sense of collaborative spirit rekindling in all this and I feel like a lot of the old memories are coming back to me. If that makes sense, ha ha.

Last week too, as you've seen, Imgur went into a silent purge of sorts so I moved all my art albums to Dropbox. That's all well and taken care of now, but I feel it important to talk about the contracting of the 'freelance artist sphere', as I call it, or the sphere of work-for-hire artists who all gravitate towards twitter. Upcoming changes by Elon are making it impossible to send DMs to users unless you are both following each other, or you, the sender, are a subscriber. If this is implemented it's likely that future art will dry up almost completely; if it's implemented I foresee a lot of nihilism and stress that will cause a massive diminishment of the talent pool.

In other words, I don't think you'll be seeing many new art pieces and new blood coming in, and that is very disappointing. Another thing that I did not mention in my previous explanation for nine months of silence is that I've also, rather abruptly, had my fair share of artists suddenly vanishing off the internet or failing to call back. Worse: I've been effectively robbed at least two times in 2023, with a rotten commission only happening once in 2021. No less than five artists have either dropped communications entirely for no good reason, consistently failed to deliver the expected quality and thus canceled, or just went traceless into the void. At least two of them I built a very strong rapport with and it still weighs on me. The sheer stress from this has been intolerable.

Things have to change for the better, sooner or later. As always, thank you very much for your patience and support. Stay tuned for more.