#I've updated my patrons on some of those details as well but won't go into it here

[mochibuni]

Monthly Update - January

Like last year I'll be going over my art goals for 2025, but before that I wanted to talk about the state of my Patreon, as well as my storefront, commissions, and so on.

Late last year I came across a post discussing that Patreon was really supposed to be a way for people to support their favorite creators to give them the ability to make the projects they want to do. Somewhere between the beginning and now Patreon has morphed to a kind of storefront with increasing amount of incentives that became the creator's sole work instead of the projects they wanted to work on.

I definitely fell trap to this, and like so many have pointed out, it's really not sustainable for so many artists to do this. I found that out pretty quickly and I felt like trash having to pull back nearly all of my incentives and felt like I wasn't giving anything deserving of support. Unsurprisingly this didn't help my depression and anxiety at all loool.

I know I've already pulled back a lot on Patreon and other venues, largely because of health problems. I'm hoping a lot of my health issues become less in 2025 and I can get back to making things with less pain. With that in mind, I'm trying to change my mindset about Patreon in that I am going to treat it as a place people can give me monthly support and understand it is because they want to support me and not solely because they want something more. I'm hoping freeing myself from thinking these obligations exist will improve my health and art overall.

That isn't to say I won't be offering bonuses for Patrons! Free members and Discord members still receive access to all of my WIPs and wallpapers (though this is because I don't want to Glaze my WIPs all the time, so I'm putting them behind a free membership to make it harder for bots to scrape). Paid members will receive high res files and any coloring pages and digital prints I make, which I like making both of those so those will continue to happen.

I will be posting coloring pages on my Ko-Fi storefront for purchase, and I'll try to be better about uploading my designs on INPRNT and TeePublic. I actually would love to create more T-Shirt specific designs, but, you know, health and time.

At some point I do plan on reopening commissions and streaming on Twitch again. Dan has been helping with my new set up and encouraging me to get back to it, and I've been more excited about the prospect by the day. Tarkin's death still weighs pretty heavily on me, especially since I liked to have him on stream and his health decline is also why I stopped streaming last year. But we have a new puppy! By the time you're reading this Sheev Pupatine has made it to our home and we're likely franticly trying to clean up after him.

Okay will all of that business talk out of the way, let's talk art goals for 2025! Please feel free to join me in making your own creative goals for the year.

1) Continue pursing full illustrations with detailed backgrounds.

I did a little bit of this in 2024 and it's something I really want to keep pushing for because I want to join projects that usually require such things in application portfolios.

2) Keep working on body diversity.

I actually think I did really well pushing myself on this last year to the point that it feels a lot more natural to not draw tiny pale shoujo girls. My diversity could always be better, though, so I'll keep at it in any of my work that suits it.

3) Practice traditional art.

Traditional Art August gave me confidence and inspiration working with traditional media that I have been itching to get back to it. I don't know if I'll need to make another monthly event to force myself time to work on it, but I will be pretty mad at myself if I don't have at least one traditional art piece next year.

4) Rework my promo and branding material.

I've been meaning to do this for a few year, but I always put it off because it requires so much work and new art and I've just never had the headspace for any of it. I don't even know if I have the headspace for it now. I did make a new icon for myself, but I'm not sure I'm entirely happy with it. I need a new banner to match the new logo I made over a year ago. I need new commission and storefront promotional graphics. I need to finish my sprite edits for stream. I need to work on Sparkling Sweets for stream as well.

5) Learn how to make a zine and other pdf projects.

My discord agreed to help me with this and we're going to be participating in a year long creative project that I can then use as practice for creating pdf spreads. I'm pretty excited about this in general as I haven't done a collab project since the Tumblr hate group tried to drive me and others out of fandom. As long as my group keeps me accountable, I'm confident this goal will actually happen!

I hope you all had a pleasant holiday season! As foreboding as 2025 is turning out to be, I do wish the very best for us and that we survive the year largely unscathed. Thank you for being here and continuing to support me! I really wouldn't be here doing what I do without all of you.

[frtools]

800 followers, dang!

Well then, I did not know that this would blow up this much. We apparently hit 800 followers recently, and I did not even notice!

It's been quite a bumpy ride over the years as you all know, but one I am happy to have pulled through. Although there have been next to no updates to the site and it's toolset recently, I have learned a lot on how to deal with many problems.

I've learned how to do image manipulation

How to effectively parse URLs for data (like dragon's and their properties).

Automated fetching new changes to dragons and genes without even having to visit FR itself. Just run a script and commit changes.

Learned how to deploy the website and all it's background jobs without supervision.

Implemented SSL with automatically renewing certificates.

Created a discord bot that is in many servers, mostly to fetch dragon data.

Learned how to minimalist scrape the site for specific data, such as finding new items, checking news posts or fetching user ids based on name to cache so I don't have to fetch the user again in the future

Implemented many local caching methods such that data only has to be retrieved once from FR

Created a pretty expansive user profile system

Attempted to ensure that all site functionality would be available to logged in and not logged in users through means of 'secret keys', basically passwords for that specific feature.

I can probably list many more things but that would be going into a lot of detail. Below the cut I'll write some more stuff, but for those who read this far already:

Thanks for all the support <3

I recently mentioned that my cost for the hosting increases, this is what a normal month looks like for me and starting this period it will be about 10 or so euro more. This is all to keep the service running smoothly, without any downtime, paid out of pocket for you all to enjoy. Any assistance in helping offset these costs are always welcome : )

You can do so either by becoming a patron or just toss me a coffee.

So what is in store for the site in the future?

Honestly.. probably not much. Eventually functionality will cease to work as Flight Rising makes changes to their front facing API and I won't be able to get the data needed for many things anymore.

Having said that, I have been messing about with the idea of a redesign of the front end, making it a little less developery and more user friendly. But life has been busy for me as of late with a new job since almost a year ago, other hobby projects I have been neglecting and games that have come out that I love to play.. it just doesn't leave much time for a project like FRTools that I have no direct gain from myself other than gathering more programming knowledge.

That said, if you want any specific feature added I can always look into how much work it would be and maybe it will get me hooked?

Regardless, let's get the follower counter to 1000 next before stuff breaks down completely :3

[roast-ifs]

Hi there!

I hope you're doing as well as you can in these trying times. I absolutely love When It Hungers and I know in your last update you mentioned you didn't know when the next update would be as you have a lot of stuff going on IRL, but I was just wondering, are you still working on this at least?

I'm loving it and can't wait for it to come out! :)

Hi!!

Thank you, I hope you (and everyone here) are doing well too :)

It has been about a year since the last update and needless to say, I have desperately needed the break.

Short answer, yes! I am still working on WiH!

I've outsourced the game's UI design in twine to help with getting the launch ready, in terms of writing itself I haven't done much at all. That's largely because during 2020 I treated WiH like a full-time job.

I was writing 8-10 hours 5-6 days a week and could because my job was work at home during pandemic lock-down and I could write off writing WiH as working.

Then my job started up again in 2021 and I tried to keep the same stride I had before and burned myself out quick lol.

BUT I'll have everyone know I have finally finished the entire outline of the story. That might not sound like much to everyone but for me it's huge because it will allow me to write confidently through each scene, knowing where it's leading.

I plan to go slower this second go round at the game, to give myself time to appreciate the story as I'm writing it instead of mad-dashing all over the place. I've re-read several scenes and don't even remember writing them it was that bad during 2020 :'D

So, when the game does start having updates again, they will be smaller and slower for my own health and reasoning. I'm going to start writing with purpose in April (the same month I started writing WiH in 2020!) and see how it goes before making any promises about when the game will have it's official twine launch. I'd like to get most of the re-write done before doing any kind of public update though.

Thank you! Stay safe and healthy everyone <3

[teratron]

Wonder Woman Reviews: Historia: The Amazons #1

By Kelly Sue DeConnick (writer), Phil Jimenez (artist), Clayton Cowles (letterer), Hi-Fi (colorist), Romulo Fajardo Jr (colorist), and Arif Prianto (colorist).

---

So this was pretty rad.

This book was announced back when Black Label was first launched in the pre-BatDick days of 2018, along with a slew of other titles including another Wonder Woman-related one by Greg Rucka titled Diana's Daughter. That one by Rucka sadly never got past the pitch stage and he had to shelve it but I wasn't too broken up about as even though Rucka's my favorite WW writer, this premise interested me more and I was interested to see a new high-profile writer take a crack at Diana's world (even if Diana won't be in that much!).

This project sat in development hell for some three-to-four years for a variety of reasons (Covid being among them, obviously) but probably the biggest reason is Phil Jimenez taking his time on the art here. Having followed his art updates this and read through this a few times now, I can definitely say it was worth the wait.

For those unfamiliar, this series looks to tell the complete history of the Amazons prior to Steve Trevor's crash landing on Themyscira. Our first issue here sees us begin on Mt. Olympus with Hera and the other Olympian Goddesses (Athena, Aphrodite, Artemis, Hestia, Demeter, and Hecate) coming before their male counterparts and bringing them to task over the treatment of women in Ancient Greece.

Those familiar with their Wonder Woman will notice the first 2/3rds of this issue bears a lot of similarities to the first issue of his defining run back in the late-80s. There are however some key differences here that DeConnick brings that differentiate it from it's predecessor. The first being a rousing condemnation of the way women were treated by the Ancient Greeks and, by extension as their supreme beings, the male Gods themselves. The tone here (perhaps unsurprisingly) being far more fiery and condemnatory than in Perez's run, along with removing the motivation for the Goddesses to ensure Olympus' survival in case worship of them fell out of favor.

The other key difference being the inclusion of Hera into the backstory of the Amazons.

Despite being the Greek Goddess of Women, and the "Great Hera!" catchphrase, Hera for most of Wonder Woman's history was a footnote at best. Even when Perez expanded Wonder Woman's patrons to include other goddesses besides Athena and Aphrodite, Hera was noticeably not one of them. Brian Azzarello, of all people, was the first writer to actually give her some prominence and usage in his run back in 2011.

It's clear here, DeConnick intends to correct on that as she's pretty much the main character of this issue and (along with her wardrobe that Jimenez gives her) steals and is the center of every scene she's in. The ending also making it clear Hera's machinations will continue on into the next issue at least.

This however brings me to the stuff that actually has me interested, that being the origin of Hippolyta. Much as I liked the scenes on Olympus, the more down-to-Earth scenes with Hippolyta and this new take on her origin/backstory (unlike anything we've seen when we are even shown stuff about her history) are what really have my attention in where this series will go. Her story here in this issue plays off well with the scenes on Olympus where the Goddesses castigate their male counterparts for the treatment of women in the ancient world, Hippolyta's scenes actually depicting one such cruelty that drives it home for us, the reader.

Phil Jimenez was already my top Wonder Woman artist and this one issue alone has pretty much solidified he's never getting dethroned. Whereas much of DeConnick's dialogue/scripting was concise and to-the-point, he contrasts her well with some of the most gorgeous and detail comic art I've seen in ages. I'd be remiss not to mention the good work colorists on this book, Hi-Fi, Romulo Fajardo Jr, and Arif Prianto, all did in making many of these scenes look as good as they do. In particular one page with Hippolyta that involves a lot of running. I almost exclusively buy single issues digitally but I would absolutely say go out and get a physical copy of this.

It's still probably the hype talking, but this genuinely does feel like one of the most ambitious Wonder Woman-adjacent stories in probably ever (maybe Morrison's Earth One series for a recent comparison). I've read just about all of Wonder Woman's various origins DC's offered up over the years. but I've never been more interested to see where this goes.