So this week, to put it quite simply, has fucking sucked.
Heavy rains on Monday night caused the storm drain to back up into our basement drainage, flooding the basement. Now, unfortunately, in my town, the storm drain routes to the sewer, so instead of just filling the basement with four inches of rainwater, we got four inches of rainwater mixed with raw sewage instead. Poop and detritus all over our basement! Lovely.
We had to rush to salvage what we could (which, thankfully, most of our sentimental stuff was in boxes with trash bags that worked as waterproof linings, or in waterproof plastic bins that we got just for this reason) and have had to spend the rest of the week trucking things out and into the garage (or garbage) and cleaning up.
Tigre and I both had to get Hepatitis A & B shots, because we haven’t had them (Dicy had to get one a couple years ago because of his work) so I had to do that on Tuesday morning as well.
Unfortunately, compounding with (or possibly the cause of) my phobia of needles, whenever I get shots, my blood pressure drops and I have what I would consider an involuntary panic attack. I get shakey, pale, and just kind of light-headed for a bit, and it takes like five minutes to wear off. But, the fun part is, when I get two shots in row in short order, like I had to this time, I just… straight up pass out and go into convulsions. It’s great! :D
So, not only did I do that this time, I pulled a few muscles in the process, and felt generally garbage while trying to clean up or throw out the shit covered items downstairs. So that’s why there haven't been any streams this week.
Fortunately, we did get some guys in there courtesy of the landowners to clean up and repair stuff on Friday, so the situation, thankfully, by Sunday (today) is mostly resolved. But that’s been my week.
(It also didn’t help that one of my best friends in the world ended up in the hospital at more or less the same time due to an overactive irregular heartbeat, so I was also worried about him, his husband, and his sister that entire Tuesday. Luckily, aside from getting defibbed and undergoing some routine surgery, he’s doing fine now and is recovering at home, so that’s good at least.)
So that’s put things on pause a bit.
A few financial things…
Recently I’ve been doing “show up and get called on” style commissions in Stream, which is fine, and I might still do those occasionally, but I think I’m going to probably go back to an “on-call” system where I take submissions and go one at a time. The thing is, I don’t like the way “show up for stream” stuff feels when we’re not doing SotS, and it makes it harder to vet things. It also creates delays in the steam if someone’s info isn’t ready when their turn comes up; people get upset if they are close to the top of the list but getting sniped repeatedly over several weeks; and if I decide that I’m tired or would rather work on personal projects, people are disappointed, and I don’t like that.
While it may work great for other people, I think being able to pick and choose, plan ahead, and schedule stream days properly is more conducive to my methods for larger work as a whole. I just need to not bite off more than I can chew and only take one or two jobs at a time.
So over the next couple of weeks I’ll be once again whipping up a form for people to put their commission requests in, while also trying to work down the backlog that I’ve currently got.
Sketch on the Spot will remain largely the same, though I’m going to try and make more use of requested and required themes so that I can just vibe and get things done quickly, as well as setting up timers once again so that the turnaround is worth what I’m getting paid for it. It’s no secret that SotS is meant to be cheap and quick for the customer, and I do my best to make something cool in those restrictions, but often times it’s simply not worth what I get for it, so I’m going to have to really hold myself to the restrictions and save my enthusiasm and going overboard for stuff that I think is really special or the clean-ups afterwards.
The situation with Stripe has also derailed things a little, but I’ve already gotten alternatives in play so we’ll see how that goes in the future. I just have to set up all the available payment options and links and invoices as I’ve done in the past. Hopefully having a number of options will help people be able to do things easily, and make it harder for the prudes to whack me if it comes to attention.
I had considered using some form of monopoly money (poxbux) to let people just pay in when they can and then get what they want later, but people were a bit skittish on that, and though I would be absolutely fair and generous with it, it adds another layer of accounting on top of things and that’s just a pain in my ass, so… nah. I would rather people have no worry about that, and not have payments hanging over my head, anyway.
(Also people started saying it sounded kinda crypto-ish, and like… ew. No thanks. Though, I might do poxbux emoji or stickers for the discord. I think that would still be fun.)
The coming weeks are going to be busy, and I don’t know how much time I’m going to have to work on things, but I’m going to be working as much as I can. There are a few events I’ll be going to, and Dicy will be going out of town for work a few days here and there, as well as a bunch of things happening on the weekends. So it’s going to be a lot, but compared to this week, it should all be pleasantly normal or interesting at the very least.
So we’ll do what we can. We’re going to work towards finishing Various Happenings Ch.6, updating the disclaimer on the site (I have the graphics now, I just need to set up the redirect again), put more time into the forums, work on the Sophie comic, get back to Clara, and get that backlog down.
Once all of that’s done… who the fuck knows? I have a bunch of things I want to work on, so we’ll just see what happens.
It’s starting to cool off a bit, and hopefully summer is sliding off into autumn. Things in the world are crazy, but you’ve got to live life on the ground, so that’s what we’re doing.
Me and the family went to the beach today for a bit, and I got to actually sit down and read a book for the first time in a long time, so… that was nice. Hopefully there will be more of that in the future.
Anyway, take care, and I’ll see you all next week. ~Sali
