An Apology and a New Focus (Patreon)

Officially back. From now on my patreon will be mainly focused on Animation. The new image and video models are just too good, I think it's time to shift the focus.

I'm really sorry I vanished for so long. I originally figured I'd disappear for a week or so to tighten up my workflow. That "one week" job just kept spawning more problems the more I tried to fix it. I burned more than $2,000 in token costs and still never quite got it all the way there. On top of that, work IRL plus a flood of new image and video model releases left me completely underwater.

I should have posted an announcement the moment I went dark. The longer I waited, the worse the ostrich instinct got. I was scared of logging in and seeing a wall of comments(mostly fans asking me to post) and I knew I'd feel so guilty and anxious I wouldn't be able to sit down and actually work or research. That's on me. Mentally I just couldn't handle it. I'm truly sorry, and I feel pretty awful about it.

I wasn't slacking those three months, though. Whenever I had a spare moment I was studying: new workflows, new image models, new video models, new editing models. Everything you see from me going forward is going to be made with the latest, best models I can get my hands on. The more posts I put out, the more I think you'll agree the full pivot to animation was the right call.

From now on every post will include a ~5-minute long animation. All of them have story. Dialogue is entirely in Japanese, but I've embedded in English, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese subtitles so you can follow along (the plots are pretty rough, but I think they'll hit harder if you can actually understand what's going on). You can download the video and pick the subtitle track in a local player (on desktop, the open-source VLC Media Player works, I don't know much about mobile players, but most downloadable players should let you choose subtitles).

At my current pace each post takes about 3–4 days to finish (which I think is actually pretty fast for the animation quality I'm aiming at right now). So going forward there will only be vote polls, and only the supporter tier can vote. I'm really sorry , I just don't have the bandwidth. But for every lottery I already owed, I will finish, as animations. Owed votes will get done too.

Sorry again for disappearing out of nowhere. If I ever have to go dark that long again, I will post an announcement.