The Far Side of Utopia

…a rather late comic at this point. We are back to Naomi ambition to visit Eliana (to find Ila).

As you can probably tell, I have not dealt with the lack-of-photoshop thing yet, so we are still doing it via my drawing program.

Eliana and Naomi do know each other, but not super well. Eliana could probably put together who it was by what she was doing, and the fact that she was lecturing a red construct in the middle of fighting it. Naomi’s personality at very least tends to be… distinctive, even if she doesn’t currently have purple hair.

Naomi does not really know a lot about red constructs. Her main experience with them so far was Atter’s, hence her referring to them as demons. They also look like creepy monster things (at least in this case and that case) so that fits what Naomi would lump into “probably demons”. Naomi is not exactly a reliable narrator, considering that while she is smarter than she tends to act, her understanding of things can be… strange.

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I did promise an update, and an update I do have. On friday, I gave two week notice to my day job that I’d be leaving. You folks here are no strangers to me complaining about it, and unfortunately with the company restructuring around COVID, things have really just become more problematic. With a huge swath of the onshore resources being cut, I’ve been left with more and more meetings at early AM and late PM hours… currently my daily first and last meetings start and end 15-16 hours apart. It’s a schedule I sort of hate, and ended up disrupting my life for things like, well, drawing comics.

There won’t be an immediate change, and we’ll still be limping along on the schedule until the two weeks are up, but after the two-weeks, there will be quite a big change. I am not going to immediately take another day job. For the time being, I’m going to spend more time on my hobbies and projects, and this is one of those. So, starting in the second half of July, we should at very least get back to regular weekly and buffered updates. Obviously I cannot do the comic for a living as I need to pay rent and eat and things; it will be part of a portfolio of things I work on. I’ll give it about a year to see how well it works, and after that I’ll reconsider and rebalance my schedule.

I’ll also be spending a lot more time on my D&D/TTRPG stuff (as that’s the closet to something that does pay my bills of my hobbies ), and some new projects; between this and that, I’ll be allocated roughly half the time I spent on my day job, which should be enough to get the comic back on track and updating smoothly. I also hope to spend more time drawing in general as it’s a hobby that I just haven’t had time for – I have drawn pretty much nothing outside of the comic pages for months now. Hopefully we’ll actually have patreon content around here again for the first time in a long time, as well just a regular consistent update schedule. In general, I don’t want to try to monetize my work more than I currently do, so there’s not going to be any big changes on that front, just more time and effort spent seeing if I can make them into something that’s more of a thing.

Ultimately this isn’t necessarily a good time to be leaving my job and source of health care, but my job was headed in the direction that I ended up feeling this was a necessary, if unfortunate, step. I was sort of hoping one of the rounds of layoffs would include me, but it became apparent that there was little real chance I’d get laid off, rather I’d just be given more and more problems from all of the other people that were being laid off and it was piled on my plate, a plate that was already sort of at capacity… both in time and stress.

So I’m going to give my hobbies a shot, and see if I can live off them. Over the course of the next year I’ll see if I can grow them to a point where they pay a reasonable portion of my bills, and from there I’ll decide what to do in the future. If I can get fairly close, I’ll keep going with them; if I cannot, I’ll either aim to supplant with contract work in my old day job field (which there is less of right now due to COVID, but will presumably be more of in the future again) or another day job – I’m a pretty well rounded and experienced programmer and tech fellow, so I’m not too worried about getting another day job if I have to down the road.

Anyway; that’s the deal and that’s what’s going on. This is the actual light at the end of the tunnel this time folks; only time will tell exactly what that light holds, but I’m pretty confident that, if nothing else, we’ll as least get weekly updates again, and hopefully more. In addition to my current hobbies, I’ll be adding a few more to the roster; if any of them seem to have overlap with the interests of folks here, I’ll be sure to let you know 🙂