Thanks for the comments on the last one, even if I don’t reply I read them all, and they helped.

Health-wise: Blood pressure is improving, not as much as I hoped, but I’m no longer feeling like I’m about to die any second. Still gotta improve my diet, but I am so lazy… Any tips on healthy food and snacks for a picky eater? Preferably easy to make and cheap.

But here’s the bad news: I seriously hurt my wrist months ago because of a bad fall in winter. A bit confusing: First they tell me it’s a fracture, they pointed out some sort of crater at the top of my wrist bones on the x-ray. Now the MRI results are in and apparently it’s not a fracture? But there’s still extensive soft tissue damage I guess… There’s this thick tissue / swelling at the top of my wrist, limiting my mobility. It still hurts whenever I move it too much.

So the plan is physical therapy, and if it doesn’t improve in a few months, surgery might be necessary.

Uh anyway….. How do you guys feel about AI Art? Asking for a friend…….

Also: I did private some of the AHS pages I’m a bit uncomfortable with. Some people pointed out Mina looked younger than she is supposed to be. Kinda my fault in multiple ways. She has a pretty flat chest to begin with… that is just part of her character, but then it gets further reduced to nothing because of the demon. Then I have this tendency slightly draw the heads too big which makes the bodies look too small…

Anyway, I do need to think about solutions to this. Because the Internet is getting more censored every day. Governments implementing restrictions and Payment processors are breathing down Patreon’s neck. I bet they don’t care about explanations like: A demon stole Mina’s tiddies guys! They might come back! Or the demon might change her body further to be more TOS compliant, it’s ok guys!

That’s a big reason besides all my health problems that makes me less motivated in drawing anymore. Just the fact that certain body types are basically illegal?

Let’s say my health problems magically go away. Would I continue AHS as is? Would I rework it? If I chose to rework / update earlier chapters, why not start over completely? Same characters, similar story, but told in a way I would want to do it today. Or go with that futuristic setting I have, where Mina ends up there after being on ice for a few hundred years.

That’s it for now, suggestions welcome.

It’s not a conscious decision mind you, but I just simply went for food when I had nothing better to do. Technically I had better things to do, but I couldn’t do them without pain and without damaging my wrists or legs even more, so eating food while watching videos it was.

And now, I’m really feeling it, sitting here with a blood pressure reading of 190/119, trying to relax to get it to go back down again.

They say that your internal organs can be damaged by blood pressure this high, including your kidneys and brain, and honestly, I think that already happened. It’s either that or the brain fog is caused by covid, which I happened to contract around the same time as my health was really starting to decline, maybe it’s a mix of both.

When coming up with scenarios for comics or games I always had a little movie with my characters as actors playing in my head. Back then you could sit me down in an empty room and I would not get bored because I could just entertain myself with my mind theater, but nowadays these images in my head are like a degraded VHS with opacity set to 20% rather than the HD quality they used to be. This alone makes it difficult to care about my life… It’s like a part of my soul already died.

At this point my life is fucked and likely impossible to unfuck, due too many factors such as permanent damage to my body and mind, mental problems, financial problems, lack of mobility, doctors hating me and not taking me seriously for some reason, among other things.

So, if you’ve been asking yourself where I’ve been, there you go.

How lewd do you think the comic will eventually become in the future? (If I actually manage to continue it that is.)

Do you think there’s going to be a bit of nudity here and there? Sex? Really graphic stuff? Porn? Something weirder maybe? Something beyond even that?

I’m just wondering where people think the story is going to go, because I’ve seen all kinds of differing views on this topic in the comments over the years.

Also, if you’re expecting something more normal and the comic becomes straight up porn would that upset you? Conversely if you were expecting porn and it doesn’t materialize? Or maybe you expect pure yuri, but then there’s an eldritch abomination with a million dicks?

Anyway yeah, just really interested in where people think this is going.

However, as with everything I can already feel that I’m getting carried away once again, and in the end it would end up even more difficult. (Though still easier on my wrist.)

It would also be easier to collaborate on a game than it would be on a comic imo.

I started experimenting with the Godot engine and I can already say that I like it more than Gamemaker or Unity etc. It had proper 2D isometric support right out of the box which is my favorite 2D projection. (Though Unity recently surpassed Godot with it’s own 2D isometric tilemaps with height support for individual tiles.)
2D on the whole doesn’t feel like an afterthought in Godot like it does in Unity.

Then I experimented a bit with lighting and thought: “What if I made a 2D pixel art game with realistic lighting?” Now this is where the whole thing goes off the rails. Basically, to get realistic lighting with proper shadows you need 3D information and so I ended up looking at the 3D part of the Godot engine. Turns out pixel art is actually harder this way than more high res art would be, because ensuring one pixel equals one pixel with all that floating point math can get tricky. Especially with an isometric projection.

Looking good so far, but I achieved this by putting an invisible 3D mesh behind the sprite, if lit from different angles it would often cast shadows on the sprite itself, ruining the illusion. Then I tried putting it in the same spot as the sprite, this time with front face culling enabled, but since the mesh is not fully convex it creates a lot of artifacts.

I’m not very good at programming but the ultimate solution is probably to generate these meshes automatically from depth maps, then project the sprites and normals onto them with a shader, using world space, or screen space (not sure which) instead of tangent space. But I don’t know shaders at all so…

As you can see, my perfectionism is getting the better of me yet again. A regular old 2D game with less complex lighting would probably be good enough.

But it’s hard for me to resist this temptation, of trying to make things look even better.
And this is an issue I’m also facing with my comics.

Now, I’m still dealing with the insurance to be able to replace my stuff, but some nice readers stepped up and donated money. Thanks to this, I was able to get the essentials already, like a new bed and some clothes. Otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to afford anything, because right before all this happened, I spent all of my savings to purchase a Dell Canvas pen display. I didn’t even get to really use it yet with all that’s been going on. Luckily it did survive the fire, because it has no vents for cooling or anything, so none of that corrosive smoke was able to get into it. Good thing I didn’t get that Wacom with it’s vents and cooling fan eh?

A lot of you sent me nice messages, donations, and someone sent me some of his old computer parts to get me back up and running. Some people also offered to help with the comic in a collaborative manner.

I haven’t responded to almost any of you and I’m sorry.

I guess you guys can tell by now that I got some mental problems. Dealing with other people in any way is difficult for me. For example: I spent more than two months drafting up just the one letter to the insurance company, most of that time I was sitting there panicking about nothing. Ideally I’d just live in the woods all by myself somewhere, because I’m really starting to realize that I’m not made for living in a society… but that’s not very realistic. So, when I don’t respond to your messages, this is why. It’s not that I haven’t read them, it’s that communicating with people is just super stressful for me.

Anyway, I’ll probably be able to move into my apartment again in a few weeks, there’s still some gaping holes there from the removal of burnt pipes and insulation that need to be filled in, but other than that it’s just about moving stuff back in and refurnishing.

After that I’ll be able to tell you what I have in mind for continuing AHS.

That’s all for now!

I can’t update AHS a lot and I’m pretty sure the majority of readers abandon my comic because of it… but despite this, I still got a good number of patrons.

Now imagine how many patrons I’d have if I wasn’t a complete wreck?

This should be motivating as hell right? I could make this my job!!!

In reality it turned out the be the carrot on a stick dangling in front of my face that I will never reach. Hope is cruel.

Next year is the date I wanted to have finished AHS and moved on to the next project, instead I’m not even 1/8th of the way there. And given my ever deteriorating health, I will never get there.

So, I won’t be able to finish AHS and I’ll take all the other ideas I had to my grave? What’s even the point in going on?

Someone suggested writing instead of doing a comic. No fuck that. I’m a visual person and I can’t write to save my life. There’s webcomics I stopped following because they switched to mostly text. It’d be kinda hypocritical for me to do the same. Something like a visual novel mayyybe, but I’d rather make something like a turn based rpg, but who knows how long something like that would take me…

Some suggest working with another artist. I did actually try that once, but it ended in tears. I’m not cut out for working with people honestly. The subject matter of my stuff is another thing, people might work with me now, but they don’t know what the story has in store… And then there’s a matter of payment, If i worked with someone I’d want the art to be on par with mine and of course I’d pay for that. But my financial situation is so dire, I don’t even have money for the last week of each month.

So, if I only have one comic in me (if that), do I really want it to be AHS, a comic I have many regrets about? If so, do I completely remake chapter 1 and some of chapter 2 in order to try and make it work? Or If I’m remaking chapter 1 anyway, change the whole thing to take it in a direction I’m more interested in? Or just make something entirely different? But what’s the point if I don’t finish that either?

Maybe I should make a lewd image patreon for the time being.

I don’t know… these are just the ramblings of someone trying to cling to a life that’s probably over at this point.

My shoulder still hurts. It’s been almost two years now and I’ve lost hope things will ever improve. I’m also dealing with an opportunistic infection right now, due to a weakened immune system, apparently from being depressed / stressed out.

One stress factor actually being my Patreon… More and more I feel like keeping it going is unethical in a way, because I know I won’t be able to ever finish this comic with the way my health is going.

Not sure what I’m going to do.

Anyway… that’s all for now. bye.

So for the one-off donations there’s now my Ko-Fi.

And for a Patreon alternative there’s now my Liberapay.

Liberapay is interesting because it’s a nonprofit so they don’t charge additional fees. It’s different from Patreon in that you have a wallet there that you charge and then slowly use up, that is how they reduce transaction fees. Also, no rewards or anything there, which is fine by me since I don’t do rewards right now. If I ever offer real rewards on Patreon, I would keep them behind the paywall only for a limited time anyway.

Oh hello!

Well well well.