Okay.

When I got my W2s at the beginning of the year, I immediately started filing for my taxes to get them out of the way and so found out really early in the year how much I was told I owed...and how far that was from how much I currently had. The plan was to grab as many extra shifts from work as I could muster, update my commission info for animations and really buckle down on both supporting and advertising my Patreon/Subscribestar platforms. I was at the point where I could reliably create monthly animations and still have time to develop longer form projects in between. I was in the middle of creating a platform-exclusive nude variant of my latest released animation when my computer crashed and burned. This left me with extra shifts as my only hope of getting enough income to cover taxes and living expenses. I had to wait until April 15th to file and the 1st of May to cover rent in order to make it. And I made it...barely.

I'm still above water and thankfully, additional shifts from work haven't dried up yet, but I wouldn't consider my current situation 'secure' by any means. I certainly didn't have enough to cover computer repair/replacement, and even getting a diagnostic is gonna cause me problems, but figuring out what happened to my comp was top priority. I took the hit and took it in to get looked at and figured out what it was going to cost me to get running again.

Nothing. The computer was fine and had been fine the entire time.

Yeah, whatever happened to cause the crash only damaged the hard drive. On the night it crashed, I'd actually tried getting win 10 installed on a spare hard drive using a boot USB. Spent hours adjusting bios boot priorities and using all of the like eight usb ports in the back the damned thing...no go. Naturally, when the computer repair place gave it back, it failed for me again...but then worked when I tried a second port.

Like, yeah I'm relieved and exalted, but...y'know...

So I got my comp working again, reinstalled some software, including CSP and am currently finishing up the nude variant for my platforms. I was able to recover some content from the damaged hard drive, such as my Clip Studio, Photoshop and Maya files, among a few others, but a full data recovery is a four digit price tag for what is essentially a dice roll, so that's not a likely route unless I get the devil's luck. As a consequence, a lot of things, such as all my presets and user settings, have been factory reset. That'll slow me down, but it won't stop me.

I didn't come out the other side of all this unscathed, and even the slightest breeze of a situation could fuck me over hard right now, but I caught a lucky break and the ability to start getting some momentum back. I'm too exhausted to give proper thanks to those who really took a chance and helped me through this, but I hope to have something appropriate for you in short order! Stay tuned.