Hope everyone is doing well and hanging in there at least! I'm very thankful for getting a Spotlight(!!!!) award! That made my day seeing that! :D
Timelapses on YouTube, PeerTube
Been making good progress on my timelapses, trying to get one out a week from my backlog. The main hiccup was finding out YouTube has started putting AI upscaling on Shorts, without the creator's consent. I only made the odd Short to test it out (or accidentally when I uploaded a short length video) and so it doesn't affect my regular timelapses, but I don't trust YT to start applying that to videos as well. We can only hope they'd add an opt-in/out option in the future, but what they' done is awful.
So I finally got around to setting up a PeerTube account on their MakerTube platform and am uploading my timelapses there too. I'm still uploading to YT as well but linking the PT video link and trying to spread the word. I'm also open to other video platforms, but I had been eyeing MakerTube for a while so it finally pushed me to start using it. It's been nice to use, and I like how your Account can have multiple Channels and you can subscribe to either one. Channels can be for different topics, like timelapses and art tutorials, and Channels can have Playlists for more organization.
Mentally it was more frustrating debating to drop YouTube but I do get an OK amount of views and recently the odd comment, so it's doing something. And with art being a source of income, I can't ignore it. Well, maybe if/when they start applying it to videos then I'll drop it. At least I'll have some timelapses on MakerTube so I'm not starting from scratch.
Art Stuff
However I'm behind on posting my ArtFight pieces here! Still making progress but slower than I thought it would be. Partially cause I'm also checking out Cara as well. It's also against generative AI which is great, so I want to try it out and support its usage. It does mean I'm posting to Yet Another Platform but if I either spend a small amount of time on it each day, or skip a day or two and then spend more time on it other days, I think I can reach a good balance. We'll see!
For September I have two pieces I need to get done. One is an "overdue" raffle drawing that is almost done! I'm hoping to finish it this weekend. The other is for a secret project that I don't think I can share outside of Tumblr until mid October. I've been a little bit nervous about meeting the deadline but yesterday I made good progress, so I hope I can keep that momentum going!
Once both of those pieces are done I'm looking forward to focusing on commissions and personal art again. I don't have any big plans for personal art, but it's been a while since I've drawn my OCs... so might see more of those!
However I did download Blender recently and have been wanting to get back into 3D stuff... who knows what I'll end up doing!