Hi all, thank you for another frankly amazing year full of crazy adventures.

It hit the ground running, following closely from my puppy trip to Germany, and went from strength to strength. It was when I started really exploring my plural and more adventurous sides again that things have really hit its stride; given how things have progressed, I'm very grateful for it.

This has led to where I feel full of ideas I absolutely need to get down on paper, while still struggling to work past personal hangups in order to execute. I'm really excited and hopeful for it, but likewise apprehensive because the pressure on myself to do a good job of it is tremendous.

Your continued support lets me take the time I need in order to commit and do the work in order to achieve my goals. I'm determined to do just that, and share that success with you.

It feels like it's been a long time coming, and I'm eager to see where it'll lead.

Merry Christmas everybody.

Hey!

I've been working really hard on a bunch of art I can't share yet because the store I wanted to sell designs based off of it wasn't working great.

The comic speaks for itself, but yeah. I'm trying to avoid leaving myself deadlocked because of a problem that's outside of my control, and the store seems to be behaving well enough now.

If you're curious, check it out. Every purchase helps me out a lot.

Yup! I figured that my best bet for getting the word out and meeting people would be to use my own platform to blast it out there, cause despite talking about it a fair bit on Bluesky, social media is at best an unreliable tool for spreading important news.

I'll also be hosting a panel about maintaining an online presence, which has admittedly grown increasingly more difficult in this day and age.

I hope to see some of you at the event, so let me know if you'll be there!

(Disregard the note at the bottom there, I've been preparing for an upcoming project with some data collection on socials. If you missed out, you should follow me there!)

Most important part upfront: PLEASE keep a keener eye out for and report any weirdness or problems on the site to me if you notice anything unusual. I just got done moving it to a new server and things might've gotten broken in ways I'm not aware of yet, despite thorough, albeit brief, testing.

The past few weeks I've been quietly making preparations to migrate my entire hosting setup onto a fresh new server because the one I was using was set to be decommissioned. Over the past 24 hours or so, I've gotten that done and dusted, and boy howdy was it a scary and frustrating ordeal.

But, here we are!

To be fair, it's a lot less exciting for y'all since, if I've done my job properly, you shouldn't have noticed a single thing (except if you tried to access the server during that time cause it was in maintenance mode but shh).

So yeah; as I mentioned at the start of the post, for the next couple of weeks please be a little more vigilant than usual, and quicker to report any strangeness going on with the site. There may be things I won't have run across since I'm using it in different ways than you all do, but if all went well then you shouldn't see anything amiss.

See you all in the New Year!

Hey!

Jager Darklite needs to secure a baseline monthly amount for his comic series' crowdfunding campaign to make it feasible for him to continue making art full-time, and is currently running a subscription drive. This is due to a sudden change in his situation, which has put a lot of pressure on him both mentally and financially.

Jager is a good friend of mine who makes absolutely stunning art that frankly feels as though it's tailored specifically to my tastes; involving gratuitous amounts of transformation, magic, messing, diapers, and even hypnosis! If you're into what I'm well known for, you're sure to enjoy what he's got.

He's running this campaign until around end of February, by when he'll need to be more self-reliant. He'll be making pages in the meantime to give early pledges something to enjoy until then, but he'll hopefully meet his goal and keep making more well beyond that!

Please do consider supporting another great artist who's already contributed a lot to the community. I know I would wish for the same if I was in his position, and I know y'all appreciate dedicated creators and the art they make for us, too.

If you're unable to afford a monthly subscription, you can share the campaign on socials with the buttons below!

This really, really sucked to have to make, but here we are.

I'm crossposting this everywhere both for visibility, and because I'm especially pleased with the art itself despite the heavy feelings it conveys. Pupbun dissociating, Chocolate taking charge, Ruby looking scared.. All the things at once made this very hard to make. I thought to add Soul looking worried about us but in the end I just couldn't do it.

I won't tell you what to do, but FA doesn't deserve our attention. It hasn't for a long time, but with Dragoneer being gone, their sheer unmitigated incompetence knows no bounds.

I don't know how I'll handle migrating off of FA, but at the bare minimum I'll be posting on there a lot less. A huge chunk of my work will immediately get me banned off of it now so, given the insane fuckwits out there who'll report the entirety of my gallery again on a stupid whim with zero recourse, attracting as little attention as possible will be my safest option anyway.

I'm doing this wholly with the expectation that I'm going to lose the entirety of my 19 year archive on that site at a moment's notice, but I simply can't afford to let my now single largest audience go so completely to waste, at least not before encouraging them to find me elsewhere.

As of today, I've been running my own crowdfunding site for 5 years! The Yeariversary was yesterday, but I can still celebrate.

Thinking back to when I first launched the Candy Shop, I remember very vividly struggling hard with expressing myself in ways I wanted to. I was terrified of scaring folks away with the things I wanted to make - kinky or otherwise - and well, now look at me.

I sadly haven't had the time nor presence of mind to focus my efforts like I did this time last year for Kinktober, but I've been prioritizing some important life stuff and making bigger plans with my art for when hopefully won't be long from now. I'll be back to business as usual as soon as I can manage, cause I do miss making as much art as I can muster for y'all, and not of any one genre either.

Given recent events with my FA suspension and cohost's closure, I've definitely been thinking a lot about our collective online presence lately. I'm really grateful that I'd divested myself from relying on any one platform by having this site going for so long, even if the continued upsets and frustrations still affect me.

I know I say this often in these kinds of celebratory posts, but it'll always bear repeating; thank you for believing in this crazy pipe dream of mine. I've had to claw my way up to here slowly over these past 5 years, and the fact that I've gotten as far as I have is not something I take for granted. I know I do things a fair bit differently to my peers, in ways that might not be all that popular, and I often lament scaring people away and stifling my own growth. However, if that were true, then those of you here genuinely believe in what I have to offer.

And that means the world to me.

Here's to another exciting year.

I'm so pleased.

I got to participate in Artconomy's Brushie Awards, and after I put out feelers for folks to nominate me for the categories they felt I was suited for, I was set for a fun surprise. Imagine my excitement when last night, at the ceremony, I won the "Cutest Art" award, and then got nominated for every single category.

I take commissions via Artconomy and you can check that out here.

I'll not belabor the point, but for ages I've done my best not to let my wanting acknowledgement for my art get in the way of creating it. I want to focus on making for the sake of it above all else.

That shouldn't stop me from appreciating when it does come my way though. It really means the world to me, so I made something appropriate to commemorate, celebrate, and show my gratitude for it.

Thanks everyone. I might be aiming to do this for me,

But I've gotten as far as I have because of all of you.

(Fun fact: this is the first full illustration I made on my new 2-in-1 laptop. Aside from a few little quirks I'm finding ways to work around, I'm really happy with it!)

A few weeks ago we hit our new highest subscribed patrons count of 104! I wanted to wait a while to see if the 100+ figure would persist, and it has!

This is a huge milestone for me, especially since it's on an independent, solo platform. I've always looked forward to when I'd get here, especially since installing the stat counters on the site's landing page, and the journey was long and difficult, but we're finally here.

I really wanted to make this post to celebrate with and thank everyone who contributed to my crowdfunding endeavors over the years, especially since my subject matter isn't always to everybody's liking and I've had a history of being unreliable with my projects at times too. It feels good to know that there are folks out there who want to support me, not just bankroll my art.

With that in mind, I especially wanted to thank all of you who've been with me for a long time now, over many years; since all the way back on Patreon, and some of you even before that still. So many have helped me on my journey, but without you, I genuinely don't think I'd be here right now.

Not to dredge up bad vibes in a celebratory post, but I've always struggled with gaining and maintaining followers and subscribers. I only mention that to emphasize even further just how much I appreciate every single one of you who've followed along and supported me throughout this long and crazy journey of mine - through the good and the bad, the productive and the slow, and the joy and the sadness.

Here's to another 100 more.

_{Confetti background texture created from "Confetti" by ADoseofShipBoy and is licensed under CC BY 2.0.}

Last weekend, I decided to eradicate my years-long upload backlog totalling about 200 images across nearly 150 posts in one fell swoop.

I don't have an exact date targeted right now, but I want to be done with this by the end of the week at the latest. I'm about halfway there as of posting this; there'll be a lot going up all at once when I'm done, so this is just as much a heads up as it is a warning. You'll be seeing a lot of me for a couple days.

Those of you subscribed here will have seen most of the art going up publicly since it'll have come up here months, if not years ago now. But I still hope you're excited for the news, cause it already feels like such a load off to have gotten all that upload work done and dusted.

Happy TDoV, everyone. This year's came with... A lot of new and somewhat overwhelming ((good)) experiences.

I'll start with the post I'd originally planned to make, and save the big announcement I ended up adding last-minute for second. Make sure not to click away before you scroll all the way down cause I wouldn't want anyone to miss it.

For most of the past year I've been putting a lot of thought and effort into bettering myself. Not just insofar as my transition, career, and relationship goals, but to make sure I don't make any awful mistakes like the ones I made last year while doing all of those same things.

I've always been suspicious of myself as someone who's just overcompensating for my awfulness just beneath the surface. That I'm ultimately doing what I do purely for my own benefit, and if left to my own devices I'd run amok and damn the consequences. On the one hand, admitting to this makes me feel like I'm victimizing myself despite being the instigator, but on the other, realizing that I could and did cause real, lasting harm to others - especially those I should've cared for the most - did result in real trauma for me, too.

I know I've regained a lot of the trust I lost since then, but the carelessness that led to me losing it in the first place makes me feel like there's still something out of view that I might not have considered. The harder I push and the further I get towards being who I want to be - and be seen as - then the worse it'll get if, and when, I slip up again.

With that out of my system, let's move onto happier things.

As some of you know, this week has been... A journey. I genuinely don't think that I'm the same person I was last Sunday.

I've done a lot of reflecting on my experiences lately and honestly, the way that some of the things that happened came together in one fell swoop still feels surreal to me. It's almost as if, had anything gone any differently, I wouldn't be here right now, sharing this with you.

On that note, I'll stop rambling and spill the beans. The picture, quite literally, speaks for itself well enough.

I genuinely hope the day's treated you all kindly and even if it wasn't a great time, that you had a little bit of peace and quiet.

Where have I been? Short answer is "Christmas."

I've been a little swept up off my feet the last couple weeks, mostly in a good way. The minute I finished up the art I had due for Christmas day, I moved on to the next thing and that was a laundry list of things my family needed me to, and that I wanted to do for them.

It's been exhausting but very rewarding too, and I got the last payoff I'd been waiting for just today. My mom suggested I make a montage to commemorate my younger nephew's first year with us and it just kinda blew up into a whole thing for the entire family instead.

Wasn't easy to do - in both a practical and emotional way - but I'm very glad that I could pull it off.

There were a bunch of other technical projects around the house that I'd either been putting off or that cropped up last minute, and if you know anything about my relationship with tech you'll probably guess how easy and straightforward those tasks ended up being.

How's this left me?

I've been just about entirely offline from social media for the past week or so, only interacting regularly with folks on my Telegram group chat and Discord server. I may have been a tad burnt out from the effort I put in and crashing as hard as I did right after, but I've taken good care of myself since then.

HRT has been kicking in a bit, but so far it's mostly been psychological effects. Nothing I haven't managed to handle, but it's still taken some more spoons to stay on top of things on that front too. Let's just say that it's been a bit of an adventure, but it's certainly one I've been preparing for for a very long time now. Get therapy if you have access to it.

So what's next?

TL;DR is that I got a lot planned and am really excited to get back into the swing of things.

I have something special coming up for myself and some close friends to roll in the new year, but that shouldn't stop me getting started sooner rather than later.

I got a decent backlog of some really fun commissions to finish up, as well as post up for y'all to enjoy, but also a lot of crowdfunded projects I've been wanting to dust off and get rolling for absolutely ages now.

There's really never a dull moment with what I do and just about entirely a case of how much time I can/am able to put into things and which of the several projects I wanna work on will get it.

I will take one last second to remind you that I am a crowdfunded artist and supported by a wonderful community of folks here, on my site. The better it does, the less time I have to worry about making ends meet and the more time I have left over to focus on just making cool stuff to share with y'all.

Even if you can't afford that, I appreciate you following and enjoying my art in any way you can. Thanks for helping me turn what could've been an absolutely disastrous year into one where I learned so much about, and worked hard on improving myself too.

I feel like I'm in a great position to finally get to where I've been striving to be for the past 8 years or so, and I'm hoping it'll lead to more and better work from me for you all to enjoy real soon.

I can't fuckin' wait.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, everyone. I hope it brings good things to you all.