Filling you all in

Hi, everyone!

The ongoing power issues here continue to make a mockery of any attempt at time-management. March started out with some clown attempting to dig up and steal a transmission line out of the ground... they failed to steal the line because they were interrupted, but their tampering caused multiple faults all over the neighbourhood... The technicians took forever to isolate and fix the faults, and even when they did, another issue would pop up within an hour or two and cause another total shutdown. Consequently, for the first half of that month, we had several days with no power at all.

Even after they fixed that all up, we were still faced with continuous rolling blackouts at stage 4. (If that doesn't mean anything to you, I explained it in the last update.) With piles of work to get through, lots of deadlines looming, and a massive shortage of time on my hands, I landed up shelling out a small fortune on a battery backup so I could keep my computer on and keep my productivity up.

The battery's pretty nice... It charges quickly and has enough charge to keep my PC up and running for just over 2 hours. That's enough to make stage 4 loadshedding irrelevant, so that's good! The battery is far from a perfect solution though...

• It can't help me if the power is out for more than 2 hours at a time, so cable theft and other faults are still a problem, because they typically take a lot longer than 2 hours to fix. It's also not adequate for stages of loadshedding higher than 4, those have 4 hour blocks of outages. Unfortunately, since early April, things have escalated to a point where stage 6 is now the norm, and cable faults and cable theft are still regular problems.

• Lithium batteries only have about 300-500 recharge cycles, and I'm burning through 3 cycles every single day, which means the battery only has about 3 or 4 months worth of useful life, and I've already had it for more than a month and a half.

• Any CPU or GPU intensive activities drain the battery really fast, so I can't do any of those while the computer is running on battery power, and that means I have to try and plan which activities get done when. Fortunately drawing and colouring in Photoshop are not particularly power-hungry, so at least I can stay on top of that part!

My major hold up at the moment has just been that there has been far too much work to get through. but not nearly enough time to cram it all in. After March started out by wiping out a solid 10 days worth of productivity, I've been working like mad to catch up on everything.

Fortunately, a lot of that work has been art that I can use for paper minis, so I have enough finished artwork in the bank to churn out weekly minis for several months. I just haven't yet had the time to do all the other stuff necessary to turn them into products and deliver them to you guys.

Things are starting to even out again though, and I've wrapped up most of the work that's been keeping me busy, so I intend to set aside a whole afternoon this weekend to sort out those minis and schedule a whole string of posts. I'll probably release two weekly minis a week for the foreseeable future, until I've caught up with everything.

After that, I'll see what I can do about trying to finish up the next Champion. I'll also need to take some time to work out a new strategy to keep this project going and viable, but that is a topic for another day.

In the mean time, I'd just like to thank you all for sticking with me through this particularly frustrating rough patch!