I'm testing a feature on the website. I sat down and wrote a bit of code, and from now on I can publish new pages and they will be available to patrons only, and patrons can log in and view them on the website.

Basically what I've been doing on Patreon before, except better: I've removed a lot of unnecessary steps for myself, and made it more obvious for those who would want to read new stuff. I don't have to publish pages twice, they're finished, and I need to press only one button to convert them to public whenever I want.

The code is still a bit shaky on my side and I can think of two or three ways to improve this, so I will keep testing to make sure that they work better, but for now it is good enough and I'm going to roll out the updates on the website. Honestly, I'm way too happy that I managed to pull this off. There was a point in time when I was thinking about moving the entire website to Wordpress because it has Patreon plugin. But hey, I have brains! I wrote my own thing for GetSimple!

Anyway, I would much appreciate new patronage and help with testing this thing.

Okay, okay, but.. How does it work?

Simple!

1. Open dreamdb.com and witness something like:
   
2. Become very excited and click the link.
3. If you're logged out on Patreon, it asks you to register an account or log in, and then one of three things will happen:

• If you're currently my patron, you give permission to my app to store some data and give you a cookie, and then you can read the page.
• If you're not a patron, you get redirected to a page where you can become one, and then proceed as above.
• You don't login, don't pledge, don't get access, get lost somewhere in the links and nothing happens. That's a possibility.

Followers don't get access. People who don't pledge to a tier don't get access (custom pledge to a tier is ok, but custom pledge without isn't).

If the process was a success, you'll see thumbnails, "unlocked" icon and won't get redirected anymore:

I will also make sure to notify everyone when new pages become available for Patrons and when they go live for everyone.

Why do this at all?

Sometimes I post a thing, and then go back and change it. Sometimes, I make mistakes, copy-paste the wrong stuff or forget to erase something. It's a messy process and I would love for people to lend me a pair of eyes and say if anything is wrong anywhere. I've also been sharing pages on Patreon before and it felt like I needed to do 3000 extra things to publish everything after that. Also Patreon's post editor still FUCKING SUCKS. So this feels more natural and I have more control over presentation. If you help me, we could make this thing become better (and I could pay website bills and maybe eat). If you don't want to or can't support me, then nothing changes for you: pages will go live whenever I decide to make them public and you still will read all the stuff. But I will still share secret art on Patreon, and there still will be free posts about how I make things, so maybe consider at least giving me a follow (for free! did I mention following is free? FREE).

This post on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/posts/29126703/

Wow, I haven't written these since I quit LiveJournal.

Let me start on a sour note. Just like this year did. Oh boy, did it start wrong. I was so depressed the first few days, it wasn't fun. And then throughout the year there were quite a few dips. But somehow I'm piloting though these high turbulence zones with less damage now, and I think that's great.

I've been looking for a job since may and still haven't gotten any, and that too sucks. I had to cut a lot of expences, including a good hosting for ddb. (Yep, this is now truly made of shit and sticks, but somehow still works.) No commissions happened this year as well. Heck.

Inktober happened and it was also a big disappointment for me this year. I almost wish I hadn't decided to go with the Discworld theme. There were a few pics I'm really proud of. But the ones that attracted more attention were either from the uber popular books, or gathered likes because, apparently, liking Death is edgy?? I know that the fandom holds That Gay Shit infinitely higher, and I've done none of it, so of course things were not that interesting. And as soon as I stopped drawing it was as if none of it happened, everyone instantly went back to ignoring the existence of my work. Honestly, I've no idea what happened, but I could've just as well never done any of it for the same amount of satisfaction which I got out of this (which is equal to fuck all).

I had to kill our Facebook page. Because Facebook is evil. Even though there was absolutely no point in maintaining it (look at previous news for details), I would've killed it anyway. In fact my personal account is scheduled for deletion tomorrow too. BYE.

And don't even talk to me about the fleas.

But you know what?

I started posting things on Tapas and Webtoons and had a lot of fun on these websites this year. Posting on there has also helped me understand how people view and read comics these days. I've also learned a lot and put effort into making my pages look better.

So, let's take a look at the stats. I posted 107 new pages this year. But if we count stories with multiple page like SBBM as one then it's 73 stories. My favourite is still the goddamn SOCK.

I've finally finished Dogtown. There is going to be another chapter but it's taking place a little bit after next events in DDB, so I'll start drawing it SOONish.

I've also started posting new pages in DDB, and.... there's so much script written this year it may take me years to draw it all? And it never stops writing itself? I am a slave of this story now. By the way, I do intend to publish DDB and nothing but DDB in 2019, so get hyped. After all, I still need to kill Homestuck.

Habits are now going back into slow mode and probably won't be updated regularly. I have a few topics which I wanted to draw, so maybe I'll do that and kind of consider this comic as finished.

In the big art department not that many things happened this year. But I've uploaded most of my work on Artstation. Deviantart is still alive too, althogh it feels lacking in features, and less and less relevant.

Some bits of design have changed on DDB, story pages are now slightly different :o) One big change is something you don't see, something I've already mentioned. I had to change hosting. Now we're live from inside of a thing configured with my own two hands. It will be free for awhile, and then I'll have to move again. Hopefully I'll find funds this year enough to pay forward.

Other good things that happened in 2018: one important heretical artifact has been acquired thanks to Steven. Jesus was found. Crowley kept on Crowleying. Discord is live. Patreon was restarted and now has some cool shit.

Well, I am incredibly hungry right now, so I have to wrap it up. I probably forgot to mention some things. Many other tiny good things happened. The year was alright.

Seems like I'm going to meet 2019 hungry, horny, sleepy, while listening to some Japanese music and updating DDB. And believe it or not, that's the best kind of state for me. I hope 2019 will be mostly like that.

We have our own Discord server now. And by "we" I mean me, you and everyone who folows my dumb ass for comics, art and other stuff. JOIN.

I'm new to Discord, but I looked at how other servers function and set up a few things, so we should be good to start. So, let me explain what in my opinion is so great about it in relation to dreamDB:

1. I'll be sending all new pages and art updates right there, so it's a great chance to bring you the news about what's happening and present it in orderly fashion. I have separate channels for art, news and new pages. Basically, it's like the front page of dreamdb, except now you can also get alerts when anything changes.

2. I've been looking for a commenting system or a forum for a long time, and I might still install something on the website, but Discord server is just a lot quicker, takes no effort to set up and is easy to join and start chatting. So I thought, fuck it, who cares about comment count beside every post. Just come in and yell at me and others about new comics.

3. There was a voting widget on every latest page recently. I've removed it because it was very limited in options and wouldn't let me set it up the way I wanted, so I had to hack into it a bit, but it still sucked.

   On Discord.... you can just slap any emoji or emoticon on a message about an update. Heck, you can react multiple times with different emotes. That's way better than being heavily restricted by some asshole developer who made extra reactions paid. (I mean, technically they're also paid on Discord if you want to bring in emotes from a different server, but you're free to use ALL emoji).

   The only downside is that you have to open Discord and THEN click a reaction. The upside is that Discord is awesome and you can also yell at me and others about new comics.

Of course, in time we can figure out new ways and reasons to use it. But for now the fact that it works as a news feed + discussion platform + reacting widget and IS FREE outweighs everything for me.

The only fucking downside for me is that I can't install it on my phone, because it's an old derpy windows phone :0 gib me money so I could buy a new one (´Д｀。) Although, Discord can be installed on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS, so there's a way to use it for everyone.

COME ON

JOIN

 

Other news

I killed the Telegram channel and my Patreon page because both were absolutely unusable and unnecessary. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

I also stopped drawing Inktober pics, might still catch up but with something different and smaller than Discworld. I had an idea to draw main character entrances in every book but... multiple things majorly pissed me off and I have just deleted five paragraphs of angry text from this post. I suppose what angers me the most is that I cared about it a lot and got nothing out of posting these drawings. Not even new followers or something. 

I think that's it for this Inktober.
Can't be arsed to draw any more seeing how the majority of people find drawings through retweets\reblogs and don't even attempt to discover what else I drew.
I'm stuck in this meaningless exchange of likes and I don't like it ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

— dreamDB (@dreamDBmirror) October 24, 2018

IT GETS WORSE AND WORSE. YOU'LL FINALLY UNDERSTAND WHY IT'S CALLED DOGTOWN. EVERY CAT HAS TURNED INTO A DOG. EVERY HAT, EVERY HAND IS A DOG. EVERY DOG HAS GROWN AN EXTRA DOG ON ITS BODY. MADNESS IS EVERYWHERE.



Anyway, as I promised, I ran the first part through Deep Dream generator and I wish I could unsee some of it. I guess, Halloween came early this year.
 
You can grab it at Gumroad ->  CURSED DOGTOWN.
It's free, unless you want to generously tip me as a thank you for suffering through the process of making this abomination.

Dead

It is official. DreamDB's Facebook page is a zombie now. I announced its death and pinned this to the top of the page:

Honestly, let it rot. Just look at the stats. The page has nearly 2800 likes. Okay, not all of these people will actually see what I post. But this is the real number of people who see my posts across a few months:

This is pointless. POINTLESS.

REANIMATED

Finally I found time to restore old pages from DDB, which were made years ago, depended on a really outdated piece of code. I thought the would be a pain in the ass to remake, but all of a sudden last years of coding socks and whatnot flexed their skills, shoved my fears aside and I reanimated everything in two days. And, I mean, literally reanimated. Took old assets, ported them into other software, recreated frames, rewrote code. They're all fresh and new. For now.

Something newish

Evil spirits of coding have possessed me again, we spent a few days hanging out and conjured a beast. That is the STICKER PICKER. Das right. Everything is explained on that page. Basically, I didn't expect that people would want to pick different stickers from different themes and offering only pre-made sheets was clearly limiting as fuck to you folks. So I decided to give you an opportunity to combine a sheet from whichever ones you want. You can also buy pre-combined sheets and individual stickers from that page.

Something green

I've decided to stretch my grabby arms and occupy some space on Webtoons. I hate that it allows only jpegs, and only 800 px wide. But I love how even those few pages I uploaded immeadiately got some attention. That's awesome! I started with adapting Habits, but I guess all of my stuff will be found here.