Firstly the most relevant subject: There may be a minor setback on the upcoming animation, due to an unknown bug in Blender which I seem to have encountered. In essence, most frames render just fine and take somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes to produce, however a few specific frames cause Blender to freeze internally. For some reason I cannot understand, Blender does thankfully recover from the crash and resumes rendering the frames in cause... however this can take several hours in between tiles per affected frame, causing the process to remain suspended for as much as an entire day on some frames.

Since I render animations from the console, I can't see much of what is happening in order to properly debug this. If it continues to be bad, I may investigate the problem further and file a bug report with the Blender staff. I don't yet know how many frames might be affected in total, but hopefully the animation will still be out by next month in a worst case scenario.

In different news, other problems are less technical and have more to do with humans being unbearable creatures; After receiving last month's payout from Patreon, Paypal suddenly demanded that I send them proof of my identity and where I live, under threats that if I don't offer it they may have to limit my account later on. Why? Apparently it's because I have received too much money, and due to the US passing some law against money laundering several years ago, all banking systems are now required to check the identities of customers.

I've already closed my eyes to the obvious invasion of privacy this implies, and to the disgusting idea of being asked to send scanned documents over an internet connection... thus I offered them everything they asked for. Normally they should just see the files and confirm that everything's alright! But of course we do not live in a world that is normal, so I worry they may find reasons to complain that "this ain't right, and this ain't right either" and I might find myself dragged into god knows what problems. This is especially the case since back when I made the account 10 years ago, I only included my first two names and forgot to add the third, which I imagine can be a likely source of conspiracy theories if the staff happens to lack basic common sense.

So remember everyone: If you're an ordinary person on the internet using a service like Paypal to receive money, you may be affected by random social issues you have absolutely nothing to do with, because our governments are "fighting the bad guys" and we are all collaterally affected by society's mighty struggles. Kinda like how your entire life needs to be monitored in order to stop terrorism, how artists need to be persecuted for drawing the wrong characters have sex in the name of fighting pedophilia, how fictional schematics of weapons should be regulated because 3D printers may someday use them to spawn nasty guns, and so many other things in this big complex and retarded world. Please society, don't mind us peasants and do go on... we totally understand why everything can't be simple and people can't not be spied on or persecuted unnecessarily, even though we actually don't.