2016 Reminiscence

Hey there, Oxdarock here!

Wanted to take a minute to recount the things that have occurred over the last year for me. Gonna start with the good, then recount the bad (and there’s a lot of that).

So let’s start with the good. I don’t do much gaming or at least don’t play that many games, but this year I’ve enjoyed Monster Hunter Generations, Tales of Zesteria, and lots and lots of Final Fantasy 14. Some games out now and coming out that I look forward to playing at some point. Obviously Final Fantasy 14, but Final Fantasy 15 came out late last November, so that’s something to try. Also, the recent Shantae game came out and everyone I know who’s played it has enjoyed the hell out of it. Next month, Tales of Bersaria comes out for the US, as well as Kingdom Hearts 2.8, and also another update for Final Fantasy 14. All of that is some stuff to look forward to in the next month. One day I’ll try to get back into Pokémon, but with how short lived the games are, probably won’t be anytime soon.

Now for anime that I’ve enjoyed this year. It’s quite the list, so get ready. I’ve watched and enjoyed: Assassination Classroom, Konosuba, GATE, Myriad Colors Phantom World, Dimension W, Saijaku Muhai no Bahamut, Heavy Object, Ao No Kanata no Four Rhythm, Luck and Logic, Bubuki/Buranki, Phantasy Star 2 the Animation, Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, Koukaku no Pandora, Re:Zero, Boku no Hero Academia, Kiznaiver, Gakusen Toshi, Asterisk, Big Order, God Eater, Kuromukuro, Ushio and Tora, Uchuu Patrol Lulucco, Shokugeki no Souma, Tales of Zesteria X, Qualida Code, Masou Gakuen HxH, DGrayMan Hallow, Dangan Ronpa 3 (both arcs), Keijo!!!, FlipFlappers, Brave Witches, Sacred Slayer Matoi, Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha Seasons 1-3 (currently watching Vivid), and of course, RWBY. There might be other anime that I’ve watched and didn’t finish or forgot and anime that crossed over several seasons, but this is pretty much the stuff that aired on a seasonal basis. Funny thing is that about half of this list was from the winter of this year (January). As for my top five anime out of all of these, from top to bottom its: Keijo!!!, Dangan Rompa 3, RWBY, Re:Zero (I actually cried after episode 18), and Konosuba. As you can see, anime pretty much rules my life. I would list manga that I’ve read and caught up with, but I honestly can’t keep track of those. However, I should mention that over the past year I’ve really gotten into reading light novels, all of which were released by YenPress. I have about 2o books from several series, including: Is it Wrong to Pick Up Girls in a Dungeon, No Game No Life, A Certain Magical Index, Strike the Blood, The Devil is a Part Timer, Overlord, SAO (mostly Progressive), Log Horzion, and just recently, Goblin Slayer. Thinking back, all the anime, manga, and light novels I’ve enjoyed are were pretty much the highlight of my year. 

Now moving on to my art work, I’ve enjoyed some success here and there. I’ve definitely gotten better over the year at making comics and drawing as a whole. Income wise, I’ve done a bit better, though it’s still far from proficient. I’m feeling pretty good about the changes to my Patreon and I’ve managed to add even more stuff to my online store. So it’s been pretty okay and I definitely plan on working hard over the next year. 

Huh, that was a lot more good stuff than I expected. But of course with the good comes the bad. Feel free to stop here if you’d like, since I’m pretty sure not many people like to read about negative stuff. But for those interested, press on…

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Now, believe it or not, I tend to talk about my problems a lot to the people I’m close to. However, it tends to end up being the only topic I know how to talk about at times and it bothers me a lot that I dump that on others. Of course, the reason I don’t write about it too much is because, objectively, my problems really aren’t that big a deal. I mean, there are people who’s family and friends have died, had their house burned down, are homeless, computer issues, you name it, and honestly I feel my problems pale in comparison. But as a good friend of mine once said, “Your problems will always seem like the worst problems in the world to you.” So here goes.

Pretty much, there are two things that have plagued me this year: bills and family. The first one’s relatively new, but it’s no doubt the more troublesome of the two. It all started in January when I finally decided to move back the US from Haiti in order to start life back up again here and, more importantly, get my laptop fixed since I couldn’t do so in Haiti no matter what I tried. Traveling expenses aside, right at the start I had to deal with an ultimatum set by my mom and stepdad, which was to get a part time job, save up some money, then move out. Honestly, that’s really not that bad, however the problem was that I was given only three months to do so. I tried to grin and bare it, believing that everything would be okay. Even managed to somehow get a job at a local supermarket. Unfortunately, my stepdad didn’t really make the time I was staying at the house I lived in for ten years pleasant, on top of the fact that the apartment my mom found for me was way more than I could’ve hoped to afford. After a certain incident, I got in touch with my Dad and decided to come live at a warehouse loft he rented down in Atlanta. In the conversation over the phone, he mentioned that I’d have to contribute to the bills down here in Atlanta, to which I agreed, however he didn’t make it completely clear at the time. So, after more travel expenses and finally getting down here to Atlanta, the way I contribute would be to pay a $400 rent (on a side note, two of my brothers were also living here at the time and had to do the same, starting after I arrived). At first I was confident that I could manage that, but it turned out to be quite the opposite. Travel expense left my savings hanging by a thread, on top of extra bills such as food and, most recently, a new iPhone (which, while I pay the cheapest plan, I had to put about $200 up front due to lack of credit). So, pretty much, my Dad has been on me about paying rent, despite the fact that I’m having a rough time of it, which he knew from the beginning. After two month’s of paying rent, I made a deal with him to allow me and my younger brother (who also had issues paying the rent at the time) to give all of us three month’s rent free so that we could save up some money, to which he agreed. However, that still left the other bills we were responsible for, such as electric, phone, and internet, which we had to pay in full since he’d left at the time and was currently staying in Haiti. To make matters worse, I’d accidentally back-up up his pickup truck into another of his cars: a Dodge Hellkat, and was expected to pay for that. Even worse still was the fact that I had to share an electric bill with two people who didn’t really pay much attention to electric usage (which is higher by default in a commercial area) and had to pay the internet bill myself (which was is also higher by default). I’ve since lowered the internet plan, but initially my dad had us set up with 100 GB download speed for more than $200 a month. Because my dad had left at the time, I was responsible for paying a month of that, and had to pay over $100 the next couple of months as I tried to lower it (currently it’s at 15 GBs at $90 USD a month). Despite all this, with the release of the Snapzine and taking commissions, I was able to save up a bit of money. However, two weeks before the planned date we were to pay rent again, my younger brother had lost his job (due to tardiness I believe) and decided to head back over to Los Angelos to stay with his mom and work these (he’d been offered a job the minute he touched down) on the guise of building up some savings for a couple of months. This left me and my older brother to fill in his part of the rent. It would’ve amounted to $600 from both of use, but my dad decided to take up half of that, so now it’s currently $500. Since then I’ve been dealing with bills and now currently deal with enough to warrant renting out a small apartment. Still need to deal with repairs to my dad’s care (which will most likely be about $600) and I’m pretty much using credit cards at this point). 

Really not sure what to make of my family at this point. The move to Atlanta was pretty sudden, so my mom didn’t take it well. That said, because I realized I couldn’t live in NJ anymore, I pretty much stopped putting up with a lot of crap them. From March 8th, I’d pretty much stopped talking to the both of them, only contacting my mom via email. It wasn’t really out of anger, at least toward my mom, who’d tried to help me stabilize myself financially, even if she didn’t believe my art could sustain me. It was more to of a resolve to prove them wrong and limit the negativity arguing with them would bring. If there’s one positive thing dealing with all of these bills has done, it’s that I’m a bit more confident that my art can sustain me, which is why, after nearly a year, I finally had a skype call with my mom on her birthday December 16th. Still, I really can’t understand my two father figures, both of whom have pretty much put me in a financial rut. I pretty much have no savings and the bills keep piling. I honestly feel worse towards my dad then stepdad (who I’ve yet to speak to). I asked him for help and yet, aside from “giving” me a room, he hasn’t really done, well, anything to help me. Which, at this point, isn’t much. Contributing could’ve been something as simple as paying the electric and/or internet bill back when it was $200 USD. Instead, while I’m staying at a place he rented out, I pay enough bills to warrant an apartment. In an effort to try and reduce my bills and stress, I’ve tried convincing him to help me move into my own apartment (I’m mostly incapable of doing so due to my income not meeting the requirements) and yet all the most common arguments I’ve gotten is “What’ll you do if something happens to me?” or “What is happens when you can’t pay rent?” (Cause he’d sign, it’d most likely be in his name, so missing a month would hurt his credit). I’m not even sure why that’s still a question since my current situation is actually worse that what I’m trying to move into. Remember how I said I live in a warehouse loft? If’s a huge space with makeshift rooms that he signs a lease on three months before I moved here. The rent: $2500 a month, now $2625 as of 2017 (aside from the business he owns, for those of you who know of the hip hop group “Salt n Pepper”, he has a pretty close history with them). Now after doing a bit of research online, there are a few apartments in Atlanta that go for roughly $500 a mont or so. If anything happened to him while I lived in my own apartment, I’d be able to manage, versus now where if something happened, I couldn’t hop to pay off even a month’s worth of the rent. And I’m about to enter my fourth month of paying $500 of rent plus extra bills, so I currently have a record of paying rent. I’m not even sure what answer he’s looking for at this point. Now, in his defense, the accident with his car back in the summer (which has since turned me completely into a pedestrian) was completely my fault. However, the twist is that neither the car I was driving, nor the car I hit had insurance at the time, without my knowledge. I just cannot understand the point my Dad is trying to make or if he’s mad at me for something. Regarding the latter, I can only think of the time I lived with him over the last 5 years in Haiti, where I mostly relied on him. However, the only times he went out of his way to support me financially during that time were during the first year when he paid for about 2 or 3 plane fights to and from NJ and paying replacing my laptop. Aside from that, I gradually started paying for everything I need or used, from the plane flights, to the food I ate, to filling up the gas tank for either the stove or generator, and filling up water jugs (the last two are third world county nonsense I had to deal with down there). Only things I heavily relied on him for were transportation to and from the supermarket (which also stopped being a factor since I started walking to one nearby which was a 2 hour round trip), or if something went wrong with the electricity, internet or water. What’s more, it wasn’t really a money problem, it was a language barrier issue (the national language in Haiti is Haitian creole) and affected both of us rather than just me. In terms of money he had to go out of his way to pay for me specifically, I’d say it’s somewhere between $8000-$10000 in the 5 years I lived with him, which pales in comparison to how much my mother spent and worked as she raised me and my younger sister over 18 years. I don’t know if he’s noticed, but from my end things aren’t as great as they used to be between me and him. What really sucks is that all this confrontation between him, as well as my mom and stepdad, is all because they don’t believe that my art can support myself, to the point where they don’t want to deal with me that much financially. The strange thing is, I’m not even sure why. Like, while I rather this wasn’t the case, I’m the type of guy who does what he’s supposed to and whenever he wants to break the rules once or do his own thing, he gets in trouble, or gets yelled at, meanwhile other people my age around me are doing stupid shit and not getting any flak (or more flak than expected) over it. I may not have been making enough money to completely live on my own and become full independent, but at the very least I have an income and am trying to make it better. Why can’t they be fine with that? It’s not like I ask for much. I’m a pedestrian, I’ve slept on a mat for several months since I can’t afford a bed, I’ve frozen my but off in this makeshift room, and unlike my brothers, I don’t have a girlfriend or a kid. At this point, I’m so concerned with building a successful income that I’m borderline misogynistic, as I have no interests in seeking to build a relationship with a woman (not saying that I hate women, just that actively seeking a relationship or sex is more of an expense than something “fun”). I also can’t afford health insurance, which might bite me in the ass down the road (though in my defense, health insurance is mostly a ripoff with how much needs to be paid in deductibles). So yeah, while I feel good that I don’t have to heavily rely on my mom who’s worked her butt off all these years, I can’t exactly understand why my Dad has a problem giving me a bit of help when he can drop a good $10,000 on impulse. Only real solution to this is to work even harder at my art so that I can pay off my bills, actually save money, and somehow meet the requirements to rent my own place with no help. 

Shifting a bit from my family problems, we now have my artistic problems. I’m pretty much a pay artist, as it’s how I make a living, however I’m also a starving artist. Most of my thoughts over the year is how to make money with my art while still being able to proceed with my projects and enjoy myself. Doodling and random drawing are pretty much nonexistent thoughts for me, mainly because, in most cases, whenever I think to draw something random, the thoughts that pops up are “What’s the point” and “How will this benefit me”. In most cases, I don’t exactly think of the process of drawing as relaxing. In fact, I’ve been so concerned with justifying it as a job to my parents that it’s pretty much become that, and not in a good way. I’m constantly torn between working on commissions, continuing my current projects, or starting new ones and I’m always in a rush for all of them. The concept of “slowing down” or “taking things easy” isn’t something I can really be comfortable with when I’m struggling to make ends meet while trying to retain my sense of fulfillment and sanity at some points (I’m not so far gone, but it gets stressful at times). I really do just want to fill up my store drawing all the things I likes, which I believe others would like, while not worrying too much about how long it takes to finish everything or if a new pack in my store will sell well because, surprise surprise, even though my Lusty Lamp series features a lot of characters from anime and the like with different fetishes, I’m not making a killing off of it. Not even close. It really hit me hard the past holiday season, mainly November (I can’t stress how much I currently hate this time of year). Truth is, in an effort to try and make a pack that would be a hit, or at least sell enough to ease up on my bills, I worked on and completed the Snapzine Issue 4, a 17 page comic (or 13 pages and 4 illustrations if you want to be technical). From the planning to the coloring, with completion times ranging from 6 to 15 hours per page, the amount of time I spent on the pack as a whole was a bit over that of a full time hourly job. With bills piling up from not having enough to pay bills, I was really hoping it would sell and cause my other works to sell, even going so far as to hold a sale during the week of it’s release. However, the amount it sold was nowhere near what I was holding, and even with the combined sales of it and some of my other works, it barely affected my bills at all. Needless to say, it left me pretty depressed, and still does even now. I was only barely able to deal with bills due to some money sent by a friend and my mother as a birthday gift (which was the reason I finally decided to speak to her). I also have to thank my patrons, as the amount they gave me was at least twice or more than the amount of a single sale (though during the first week I had four declines and was short of about $100 than I expected so that was also a blow). So yeah, sob story aside, I really have a hard time figuring out what needs to be done when there’s so much to do between commissions and my own projects. Currently, what I’m trying do with the Lusty Lamp is something of a web comic, in hopes of building interest in it and my Patreon. I’m gonna start offering this to my general audience as well, but I’d hoped to draw people in with discount commissions that centered around the Lusty Lamp as well. Despite the fact that discounts with commissions have generally not been beneficial to me in any way in the past, the way I handle it this time makes it a bit more worth it. I really do wonder what draws people in though. Like, in terms of my personal projects, while I generally draw what I like, even if a lot of it is fetish stuff, it’s all mostly rather safe, lightly perverted stuff. I can’t help but wonder if people are more interested in heavier sexual content with more out there fetishes beyond huge T&A. I eventually plan to get to all of that, but I want it to really means something, which explains all the buildup I’ve been doing so far. Maybe that will draw people in and will be when things take a distinct turn for the better. Who knows? Also, in terms of drawing people in, I have to wonder how artists who are super popular get to be super popular. I’m aware that I’m fairly known in the fetish community that I’m in (or I think I am), but I have to wonder what draws people to other artists in droves. An example to this would be Tumblr and Picarto. I’ve avoided using the “Best of Tumblr” app because of how the exceedingly low amount of notes that I get. I’ve seen many, many posts about how things like the number of posts, or comments, or favorites a picture gets doesn’t matter, however as a pay artist who’s income is linked to their popularity, it is indeed a factor. I know I’m not amazing, but I know that I’m not bad either, so I really don’t care much about what others think about my skill level or the things I draw but it leaves me pretty dumbfounded, when my work is of a fairly similar level of other artist I follow and has similar fetishes. If there was one difference that I could point out, it’s that a lot of my work isn’t porn or smut (which I don’t have an issue with and even desire to do a lot of at some point). Same thing goes for when I stream on Picarto. What draws others to have such a huge audience or an active audience without much of a stream notice when mine barely reaches the double digits and can be inactive for up to an hour? Aside from not drawing enough smut, the only other reason I can think of is that my best works, my comics, are behind paywalls, which is unfortunate, but isn’t something I’m gonna change. Of course, attracting a large audience isn’t the only thing that baffles me. I also don’t really seem to draw much attention from my fellow artists who are of a similar skill level in the same fetish communities as I am. This is something I’ve noticed for a long time, artists getting together and doing collaborations or art trades with other artists, or even big multi-streams with other artists. Meanwhile, I don’t really get any approaches from any of them. Of the art trades I’ve been in, I’ve had more bad experiences than good, and most collaborations offers I’ve been given aren’t really equal collaborations. In terms of the latter, being that most of my attention is drawn to making a livable income, I’m not really interested in any collaboration (or at least dropping my current work to participate in one) that doesn’t have the promise of appropriate compensation or enjoyment in the end, so that settles that matter. As for art trades, I don’t mind being asked, but I’m a person too. I have a level of interests and expectations, so if I don’t like your art, then I’ll say no. Of course, given the nature of my past art trades, I’m very unlikely to be the first to ask someone else to have one at this point. But yeah, I may not be able to become friends with every artist I like (again, I had a really bad experience attempting to do so that still picks at me to this day), but at the very least, I would like to be noticed.

Anyway, there ya have it folks. The good and the bad of this year for me. Next post I make will be the goals that I set for myself for the year of 2017, so it’ll all be positivity and optimism!

With that said, Happy New Year everybody!