I’d thought my site was fixed, but that didn’t appear to be the case – apart from the most recent one, none of my comics were viewable anymore! My best guess is that this is due to the Comic Easel plugin, which looks like it might be abandonware. It’s out of date, no longer available for download directly from WordPress, and its author’s web site no longer exists. Rather than trying to find an alternative, I’m porting the comics to standard blog posts. Plugins are just too much of a headache.

Themes are another annoyance I’d rather not have to deal with. How I had ComicPress set up might not have been the best-looking thing, but it worked. Now I’m trying out some of the built-in themes, and I must say, the newer ones are like reheated week-old leftover GARBAGE. If it takes more than 30 seconds to get it to display my posts, rather than making it look like my site was hijacked again, then I’m picking a different theme before I start fixating too much on wanting to break the author’s jaw.

Beyond the site troubles, the comic itself will continue sooner or later. I’d had the next section planned out as a conversation between Alice & Violet on their way home, which would reveal more information on Daisy’s Disney incident. Now I’m re-writing it to pick up right where we left off, with Daisy providing that information herself.

My motivation has taken a fair number of hits, in recent years… I could type a wall of text going into detail, but, realistically, no one is going to read it, much less care.

The latest of those hits came a few days ago, when I found out that this site had been hacked. I don’t know when it happened, but I can guess at how. A vulnerability was found & exploited, thousands of spam posts generated, and the site messed up to such a degree that no one would even SEE those posts. Fixing it took a day that I could have otherwise spent finishing a gift image that I’d originally hoped to have finished a week ago, so now I’m not in the best of moods.

Over the past three years or so, I at least had enough paying work to keep me occupied, and to use as an excuse for why I wasn’t drawing more. Unfortunately, that work had also burned me out, at one point, to such a degree that I still feel like I’m recovering from it over a year and a half later.

Attempting to channel my burn-out into a comic about Daisy being burned out, wasn’t exactly the wisest decision…

Not helping my burn-out, are a number of things well beyond my control. Among them –

• Elon Musk buying and effectively ruining Twitter, scattering artists & audiences alike to the winds.
• Crypto-bros engaging in a free-for-all, minting bullshit tokens out of artists’ works, and making a lot more money from that theft than those artists could ever hope to earn.
• The same people now pushing AI to muscle artists out entirely.
• The games, animation, and VFX industries now salivating at the idea of not having to pay artists or even actors.

That last item is especially demoralizing, because while I’m sure I’m too obscure an artist for anyone to want to train an AI off of my work, I’m not making a living off of my characters. If my role as an animator or rigger gets replaced with AI, though, then I’m screwed, because there aren’t many other things that I know how to do to earn a living.

One other thing that’s been eating away at me for several years, now, has been the lack of a quiet, private space to work in. I used to thrive in isolation, and have been struggling without it. Anyone who’s been following me long enough, might remember my semi-annual rants about not being able to accomplish anything when staying at my brother’s place around Christmas time. Too much activity throughout the day, too much noise. And even on the quiet days, his dogs would want constant attention. That’s what the past several years have been like for me, nearly 24-7. I rarely ever have a peace and quiet for long enough to where I can just sit down, clear my thoughts, and work without any fear of anyone or anything interrupting me and ripping me out of that mindset.

As I type this, I finally have two weeks entirely to myself, and I worry it won’t be enough. It could take me a week or two just to really settle into the idea that I will not be interrupted. And even if a surge of inspiration hits me today, the “why should I bother” voice in the back of my head has me wondering if there is any point to cranking out a ton of images in the next couple of weeks, when afterward I’ll be right back to being distraction-full 24-7…

8 months since my last update seems like enough time… So, what’ve I been up to, since then?

Last time, I’d mentioned that my contract might get extended by another 6 months, which happened. Assuming it doesn’t get extended again, the earliest I’ll be free to resume work on the comic or anything else Daisy-related will be in October. If it DOES get extended again, then the comic will simply be on hold for that much longer, because I’d be crazy to decline what my employer has been paying me.

My Patreon has been paused this entire time, because while I don’t want to shut it down completely and start over later, I also can’t in good conscience take money for comics or pinups that I simply don’t have the time or the energy to work on, at the moment. I do still share the occasional thumbnail sketch on Patreon or on my Discord, whenever an idea strikes, but I haven’t refined an image further since January.

Also in the past several months, the rise of A.I. and the fall of Twitter have me feeling relieved that I’m sort of outside of it all, while also feeling a bit demoralized. I hadn’t been too active on DeviantArt in some time, but their embrace of A.I. was the final push I’d needed to delete my entire gallery. Similarly, Elon Musk’s purchase and boneheaded rebranding of Twitter will have me looking for a suitable alternative in the near future.

Having little time for Daisy or any other personal projects for much of the past year has only given me more crazy-ass ideas to attempt to work on, once my schedule clears up. Several VR ideas, including a recreation of Splash Mountain, and the 1955 and 1967 versions of Disneyland’s Tomorrowland. ALL of 1955 Disneyland would be neat to explore, but just Tomorrowland seems like a more plausible starting point.

More recently, I’ve been spending some of my free time on a sort of film restoration. Basically I’m taking an animated film I’d loved as a kid, and I’m attempted to combine multiple versions to restore some of its widescreen presentation, as well as its original runtime. The film was originally released in 2.35:1 widescreen, but was cropped to 4:3 for home video. Or so I’d thought – the French VHS release was cropped to 1.85:1 and letterboxed, and found its way to me as a blurry Youtube video. But even blurry, it could fill out the image of the Japanese DVD… Except the French and Japanese releases are different cuts of the film. Both have bits that aren’t in the other, their segments are ordered differently, and there are a number of issues that would make it difficult to line them up… but it gives me something to do while I’m feeling artistically sidelined.

It’s hard for me to keep track of who I keep in the loop, in terms of comic updates. Patrons and anyone on my Discord are regularly updated, followed by Twitter. Any other sites – including this one – tend to get lost in the shuffle. “I’ll post an update later”, except I’ll forget once it’s later.

So, what have I been up to since the last page was posted in August? Working.

Contract work had been sparse for much of the year, to the point that I’d grown acquainted with – and disdainful of – LinkedIn recruiters. So, when a job came along that I didn’t have to fight for, and was pretty much exactly what I’d been waiting for for a few years now, I jumped at the chance. It was only a 3-month gig, but it paid well, so surely I could shelve the comic for 3 months?

…Barely 2 months in, the contract was extended to 6 months. And now there’s talk of another potential 6-month job after that.

If this other contract does happen, I may need to find a realistic way to continue the comic, without burning myself out. One approach would be to cut the chapter short, but there are some ideas that I don’t want to cut. Another approach I’d considered before, is doing the rest in black & white. Re-using backgrounds could also be a huge time-saver.

All told, the joke in my mind is that Daisy’s long weekend away from the diner may easily take over a year to play out. The key thing is it will play out, it’ll just take a bit longer than I’d originally anticipated.