August 2020 - The big heckin' update (Patreon)

 Happy weekend, patrons! I’m checking in with a long but VERY EXCITING update today! The main thing being WE’VE REACHED ANOTHER MILESTONE GOAL: THE DISCORD SERVER!!! There’s lots more info to share, so if you’d like to skip to a specific section, here are the topics I’ll be covering:

Patron Livedraw 

Twitch Livestream schedule

Community Showcase

Merch Update

Patron Perks Update

Discord Server Info

New Milestone Revealed

Now let's deep dive into it!

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PATRON LIVEDRAW

This month’s Patron livedraw is being bumped back a week to Friday, August 28 from 6-8pm CST. If you’d like to add the Doodle for Food streaming and events calendar to your Google calendar, you can do so here. The $10+ tier peeps will get a link to submit requests the week leading up to the stream. As always, it’s open for everyone to hang out and watch on my Twitch channel. It’s a whole heck of a lot of fun, and I’d love to see you there if you can make it!

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TWITCH LIVESTREAM SCHEDULE

I’ve been testing out the livestream schedule for a few weeks now, and it has been an absolute blast! The stream has really been getting an upgrade lately, from community points, to chatbot commands, to leaderboards, to a HECKIN’ DOG CAM. I’m still experimenting with the exact schedule, but currently, this is what’s settled on:

Tuesdays (10am-1pm CST)

Wednesdays (10am-1pm CST)

Thursdays (5-8pm CST)

I’m currently contemplating moving the Thursday stream to a Monday time since Thursdays and Fridays are pretty long and tiring with my part-time job. As always, if the stream schedule changes, I’ll make note of it on  Twitter, the DFF Events Public Google calendar, and the stream countdown panel beneath my Twitch channel.

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COMMUNITY SHOWCASE

In the past few months, many hilarious and talented members of the community have created amazing content, so I wanted to take time to highlight a few of those posts!

Fanart

This amazing fan art of the Good Boye Guild characters by arts_by_iris. I'm majorly impressed that they got the details of the costumes correct when I can't even do that! haha

A lovely chat regular, ninjacat, asked if I accepted fan art. I said yes, but I was NOT expecting to have fan art drawn of myself! This was truly a lovely surprise.

Memes

While making the sub badges on Twitch, we decided to use comic sans for the numbers. I forgot it was comic sans and at the end of the stream had a panicked moment. Yinyang captured it with a meme.

I was trying a new hairstyle on stream and it evolved into me making a terrible firelord cosplay, which was meme'd by the lovely Mango_VA.

Stream Clips

There have been plenty of... INTERESTING moment on stream lately. The viewers are quick to capture said moments. Here are a few of such clips:

#CoolWithTheKids  

Toot Toot 

Muted Mic  

Tweets

I also got lovely tweet updates from Clive's Tier patrons once Clive's family members began to arrive. I was tickled pink that they were received so well.

These things make my heart overflow with happiness, and I want to once again thank everyone for turning this thing I do (making art and posting it online for the masses to read) into a legit community. I appreciate you all so much!

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MERCH UPDATES

Portrait Commissions

Commissions have been coming along nicely, and have been an unexpectedly popular item in my online shop lately! I’m very grateful to have this extra income source while I’m between projects, and wish I could keep up with the demand! I usually try to finish about 6 commissions per month, but I may have to back down to 4 spots, as other projects seem to be ramping up. As patrons, you get first dibs, so if you’d like to reserve a commission spot for September (or any other month, really), just shoot me a message. Here are a few I’ve worked on in the past few months:

Enamel Pins

I’m also slowly but surely working on designing some enamel pins of all the DnD dog classes. As a test, I’ll be releasing them in sets of 3 at a time. The first set will be the Magical and Musical set, which includes Wizard (Presto), Sorcerer (Name TBD), and Bard (Dandy). Here are some thumbnails and sketches of the pins so far:

Patron-exclusive Merch Item

Finally, I’d like to discuss an idea I have. The United States Postal Service is currently undergoing a lot of struggle right now. Many artists and small business owners such as myself rely on the postal service for our businesses and are looking for ways to help send more funds to the organization. For that reason, I’d like to draw and send out another Patreon exclusive merch item to all patrons pledging $3+ in September. More deets for that coming soon!

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PATRON PERKS UPDATE

I’ve got a couple of quick updates on perks for various tiers, so I lumped them together in this group.

Kermit Song Update

I managed to get a karaoke/instrumental version of “Take on Me” and I hope to record it this upcoming week. I won’t lie to you guys. I think...I think this is gonna be rough haha. LISTEN. I promised you I’d sing any song. I never promised I’d sing it well! I guess only time will tell though, huh?

Clive’s Tier

Last month the first round of Clive’s family members were shipped to their new forever homes. Each member has a unique name and bio. Now that I’m pretty sure each rock has safely arrived, I’m putting together a little post to collect and showcase the rocks and their bios.

Foodie Family tier: Wallpapers + Fan Art

I’ve created a couple of wallpapers for the $5+ tiers this month: the Warlock dog and the Magical Dandy. I’ll also be releasing another coloring page. I’m kind of struggling with ideas for fan art lately, so for now, I’m going to stick to making more wallpapers and coloring pages. If you’re in the $5+ and would like a coloring page or wallpaper made out of art I’ve already created, feel free to request it, and I’ll be sure to whip up something for you. (Fan art will go in this tier again once I get the urge to draw it)

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DISCORD SERVER INFO

Thanks to your generous support, we reached the coolest milestone to-date: A new Discord server! I was doing a bit of researching and planning ahead of time to prepare for hitting this goal, but it happened so quickly it took me by surprise! Here’s a rough breakdown of several important things relating to this goal and the upcoming server:

General timeline

I will continue planning and working on the server, server rules, and a server bot that will do cool bot things until the end of this month. Toward the beginning half of September, I’ll open the discord server for a beta testing period to all patrons and Twitch subs. After 2-4 weeks of beta testing, I’ll open the server to the public. I’ll make another separate post related to the server once we get closer to its grand opening. Don’t forget: patrons at any level will have access to patron-only areas! You guys helped make this server possible, so you'll get to reap some sweet sweet benefits for it.

Looking for Mods

Several people have expressed interest in helping mod the server, so I’ve decided to have an open call for mod applications. I’m currently looking for about 5 mods to start. If this is something you’d be interested in helping with, please CLICK HERE to fill out the mod application form. I’ll begin reading through and contacting candidates starting Monday, August 24 to hopefully get everyone up-to-speed.

Why I'm excited

There are lots of reasons I'm excited about hitting this milestone. Mainly, it'll help make keeping up and chatting with you guys easier. We'll have a better place to document fun things like the memes and fanart I listed above. It'll be a place for me to get to know you all better and to share more about myself (plant pics, book recs, etc). And finally, I'm always so excited to see how kind and wholesome my community is, and I would love to create a space to help encourage and foster growth for said community.  You guys rock, that is all. 

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NEW MILESTONE REVEALED

As promised, since we hit the previous milestone, it's time to reveal the next goal. The next new milestone will be.... 

...

(drumroll, please)

MEGAN PLAYS A SCARY GAME ON STREAM!

The milestone description reads:

 Huzzah! Once we reach this milestone, I'll put on my brave pants and play a scary game! Patrons will pick which scary game I play on a livestream. RIP me.

This was originally set for a different milestone level, but my stream viewers pointed out that it would be a good time of year to do it since Halloween month (the month formerly known as October) is coming up. 

A tiny part of me hopes we can hit this goal by Halloween to have an extra fun scary-themed stream, but also the very scared part of me hates that I'm doing this to myself.

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THE END

If you made it through that entire wall of text and photos, give yourself a big ol' pat on the back! Lots and lots of very cool things have been happening and are in the works and sometimes my updates turn into novels.

Thank you all so much for helping support my work this year. It hasn't been an easy journey, but things are looking up and I'm so excited to see where things go next.