At the end of September 2024, beloved social media website Cohost shut down. Cohost was a site with a bold proposition: What if we start a social media site that treats its users well, one that doesn't exploit people and track people and show them intrusive ads? What if we make a social media site that has no clear monetization plan?

When they ran out of money and shut down, a lot of folks were left without a good place to post their weird nonsense, myself included. But unlike most people, myself had a backup plan. I call myself Mr. Encyclopedia because for a long time I had a website called The Encyclopedia of Pointless, where I enjoyed posting my silly nonsense for up to dozens of friends and acquaintances. Luckily, I had recently rescued my venerable old URL, eopoint.com, from the clutches of spammers and domain squatters. I had been planning to relaunch The Encyclopedia of Pointless for a long time, and now I had a motivating factor.

Running on the venerable wiki engine pmwiki The Encyclopedia of Pointless is reborn, and for the time in nearly 20 years the old "Choose your own Error Adventure" collaborative interactive fiction fever dream is back online to shock and offend a new generation of Internet.

Oh yeah also I made art.

Well, here we are. Just you and me, with nothing between us but a thin layer of HTML and CSS. And PHP and SQL and some other acronyms I guess. Cohost? Patreon? Who needs 'em? Social media is dying, but the Web abides. Twenty, no, twenty-five years later and I'm still here tapping away in Notepad because this site's built in rich text editor doesn't play well with the javascript I have to embed to get these galleries to work. Whatever! You're not here for this rambling, you might not be here at all! You're here bear witness to the artwork I made this month and let me tell you folks, I made some artwork this month.

We've got Natashas a plenty, as we always shall. We've got Evangeline, and Virginia is here trying out some new fashions. And good old Hitomi Kanzaki, my 90s anime muse, is here as I use pen and page to think about how her unique style can be adapted my unique style. So that's it! Stay tuned for any breaking news but otherwise I'll see you again in November for the next roundup!

Every time I've logged into patreon the last few weeks I get some stupid little popup about ways I can squeeze more money out of my audience. I'm not doing this for money. It rubbed me in exactly the opposite way Patreon probably hoped it would, and that's why all my art is now here on dimestore.fun instead of Patreon. I intend to keep posting art here, and maybe even make art roundups going even further back.

I also plan on closing down that Patreon at the end of the month, so I've updated the links above with the best places to keep up with what I'm doing. From now on this website will be the number one place, but bluesky and mastodon are there for you social media weirdos. I'm also going to remain on Ko-fi for anyone who truly wants to continue to support me financially. You don't need to do that, I think we've all proven conclusively that getting money isn't what motivates me to do this.

Anyway! This month we have our requisite number of Natashas, as well as Virginia, Evangeline, and Asher. There's a picture from a brief period when I spent too much time thinking about Rise of the Shield Hero (not recommended). Also a couple of attempts at hand-drawing an entire comic page. They turned out not half bad, I think.

Have you observed it? An increase. A significant increase in artwork this month. Despite getting covid and being out of commission for nearly a week, despite several days off work for lack of work to do, still I have drawn many things. How? Unclear.

We've got Natashas, often appropriately dressed for summer fun, and Evangeline and Ashley and Asher too. Virginia and Maylea is here too, looking more foxlike than ever. Anyway, look forward to next month when I will be making either more or less art than this.

You might notice that there's a lot more art this month. Funny story, I've been working a different position at my job where I spend hours loading parts into a machine for testing in an environment where I can't have my phone but I can have my drawing supplies. It takes about ten minutes on a good day to finish testing a part, so that's a lot of boredom that translates into a lot of art!

Don't worry, it's probably temporary. Another project I started working on this month is scanning all the art that hasn't been properly scanned over the last few years and organizing it with tags and proper dates. The fruits of that labor are now evident in the quality of the art uploads you can enjoy on this website now.

You may notice some colorful digital images featured in an update that is traditionally just pen and paper. That's because I have started sketching digitally with an iPad and Apple Pencil. They're crude and not up to the standard for what I consider "finished" (just what is up with that Virginia?), but they represent an important step in my artistic progress.

I've made attempts at tracing 3D mockups for backgrounds in the past, and I intend on returning to that, this time using Procreate. I also need to experiment with scanning inked lineart to color digitally in Procreate, since at the moment sketching and inking on the tablet already feels better than coloring. For whatever reason, my techniques that work in Clip Studio Paint and IbisPaint aren't working as smoothly for me in Procreate.