Hello everyone! I'm updating with some disappointing news, and will copy this update over to MGR2 and the 2nd market since not all backers overlap. I'm very nervous to publish these but here goes.
All orders WILL be fulfilled. So please don't think yours won't!! Currently, 23 more are going out on Monday. I wanted to get them out on Saturday but ran way out of steam. Unfortunately my average for any orders of 5+ pins is only 2 an hr. Smaller ones do go faster, every 5-10 minutes, but we're still focusing on the last few that are combined with Chocolat Chaud because I strongly fear another imminent postage increase and all of those orders wind up 5+ oz when finished, meaning there's actually a deficit already in what cost was paid thru the survey for shipping.
Mine and Cryptic's goal was to get all out before the new (rescheduled because of AQI last month) Ypsi Pride date, and then the remaining Ghostly Gallery-only orders right after, BUT I'll be real with you, we are just in free-fall. I don't actually know when the fulfillment on my end will resume because I have Matsuricon labor day weekend, and the last time I was physically capable of doing 2 weekends in a row was 4 years ago so I'm very concerned.
As a bit of a background (I don't like toeing the line of "making excuses" vs "trying to explain delays while taking accountability"), Cryptic and I both have ME/CFS. "Chronic Fatigue Syndrome" is actually a really harmful moniker for it that came 2nd due to most physicians not believing it exists. Its correct name is Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. Now it being psychosomatic is not as widespread a belief because long covid has caused ME rates to skyrocket, and more are taking it seriously, but I have had ME since my teenage years, as has Cryptic, though his has not progressed as quickly for whatever reason (maybe due to less comorbidities?). FFC/HoloCat recently publicly announced that they have also had ME since serious health issues late last year/early this year. It's generally brought on by sudden illness or severely traumatic/stressful event lowering the immune system.
This is a really serious condition where the hallmark symptom is getting worse after time due to exertion: Post Exertional Malaise. There is NO consistency to what the body finds to be "excessive" exertion, so it is really hard to pace oneself. Because of this, the increase in severity of the disease is pretty random from person to person.
I honestly find it unfathomable that 2017-Feb 2020 I was doing all conventions solo. Giant suitcases lugged through amtrak and greyhounds and lengthy car rides, set-up and tear-down alone, and honestly from about '16-'19 my average "work week" was 70hrs: manufacturer negotiations, designing, the occasional convention, handmaking literally everything that went on the cases when I did decoden for 2 yrs, packing and shipping orders, quality checking products, etc. Now it's difficult to even push 20, and that includes writing for my visual novel (which are extremely wordy) in development, which has been WIP for 6 years now which is tremendously upsetting and shameful for me even if backers have been mostly patient.
It's super embarrassing but my health got so bad that I had to drop out of uni, and that was 10 years ago that I had to.Wow. I don't know if I've ever admitted that publicly like this. I have been running on fumes for 1/3rd of my life... I didn't see there being another way to financially survive other than conventions, and it has deeply cost me physically instead.
I cannot apologize enough for not being faster. I feel serious crippling guilt over it. These days even going out for errands means I have to recover in bed (sans pet chores and having to heat up ready-made or simple foods) for 1-2 days, and I have to wear bilateral knee braces to even leave the house because of my hEDS. I am likely to have to become an ambulatory wheelchair user by this time next year because of that condition and ME.
I'm so, so embarrassed over this even though I know in my heart disability is not shameful. Even more embarrassed that as a writer, I am apparently incapable of being concise even though I meant for this to be only 1/2 the length it is. My heart rate spikes to 120 at minimum for showering, packing orders, or any kind of cooking or even standing up quickly due to POTS and ME, and there is quite the list of other things making me fall apart. I feel really terrible about my creative output so severely declining along with the rest.
I don't know if any more merch campaigns of any type are in my future, especially since I'm trying to stop making new things unrelated to my attempt to develop visual novels. But I really can't continue to do conventions for long, as they permanently worsen my baseline and doctors will not help me with ME OR hEDS, and I can't manage my online shop at the same time as doing that. That's why I've been attempting to find the energy to run a closing sale for the last year... So the Ready-To-Ship - though that unfortunately has become a loose promise lately - markets will likely continue sporadically to clear me out of stock, but new things not so much unless collabs.
I can't explicitly speak for Cryptic because he's a more private person but he is also really, really struggling, regarding the simultaneous delay in spider and geode fulfillment.
A tremendous thank you to the overwhelming number of you who have been so so patient, more than I could ever reasonably expect. I also appreciate all of you regardless of how this has impacted you emotionally (I really am so sorry) so so so much.
I will be resuming fulfillment HOPEFULLY early September after Matsuricon, that's the best I can probably do. There are less than 2 dozen left, and then I can also send out the rest of the Ghostly Gallery-only orders also, with the extra money the convention has brought for shipping fees (please check the updates for that campaign if you are a backer and missed the most recent ones). Thank you.
I've currently got more than 50% of orders out. I posted last month about my health issues, and lately I've been really wondering if what I was "acutely" ill with in April was actually a newish covid variant, considering how WINDED I am all the time now. It's bad. 🫠 I already have POTS, and had mild asthma, but now it's just hard to exist without wheezing. So I'm having to seriously pace myself, and I'm getting a portable EKG I was wearing for 2 weeks taken off in roughly 13 hrs. With this, my hEDS, and my ADHD, I'm also constantly getting injured like a bad slapstick comedy (did you know it's possible to simultaneously jam your toe under and bang your forehead on the edge of an open door while trying to pivot around it?), and every time something like that happens I'm out of commission for a day or 2 so I'm trying to really race against the incidental self-sabotage.
That being said, I'm finally starting to get back to an existable baseline post-Colossalcon, and the remakes have mostly been looked through, so I've been packing things again. As a reminder, most pledges are being bundled with Chocolat Chaud's, Cryptic Compendium's, or both - and shipping costs have skyrocketed so retroactive excess shipping fee refunds for people who paid it multiple times unfortunately won't be very high, if any...
Since a lot of people also backed MGR2 and Geode Pets, and some even asked to bundle my snake preorders with them, some pledges going out are actually up to 6 orders per package and way more than I realized are actually 30+ total pins. You all are amazing, it's crazy and really heartwarming (albeit exhausting in current context) packing for like 4 hours and I'll only have half a dozen orders done, because each one has dozens of combined pins plus Chocolat Chaud's that were already packed. 🤯 Like, I'm really just blown away!! There are a lot of smaller orders too, which my stamina really thanks those backers for, but I'm just so shocked and grateful. I'm very sorry that they piled up like this, but it did give me a new perspective that I wouldn't have necessarily had if I wasn't fulfilling so much at once. I am so, so thankful.
Cryptic Compendium is also really not doing well right now but has been carding things too, and just got done sorting all the remakes and the frogs for Geode Pets. There are no longer any external barriers - "just" time and energy - to getting those orders with all 4 of our campaigns (+ some snakes) + Ghostly Gallery pins finally packed. He cards his stuff, I card mine, and I do the final checking and packing everything together, including the freebies like the backed-all-5-campaign pins. If I somehow missed something in yours, please let me know at [email protected] as soon as you've received it.
I'm rapidly trying to get everything out; you've all waited waaaay too long to receive these pins, and I also feel a lot of anxiety about these girls and some of the snake preorders still being pending. I have a ready-to-ship campaign that's a sequel, I guess, to the "gacha market" that will go live at the end of this month...but I will try my best to get my current pending orders below 40 across all 3 things (MGR 1, MGR 2, snake preorders) before that goes live. I'll post about it properly this weekend.
Thank you so, so much for your patience, seriously!
I'm so sorry for pausing fulfillment again and being so quiet!! I have been extremely sick. I started having an extremely mild weird sore throat April 7th so stopped packing then, had a dr appt April 9th where he said he didn't see anything, got outrageously sick April 10th, have practically no memories from April 11-16 or so, and am still catching up on sleep because TMJ pain prevents me from keeping my mouth open when I sleep... so for quite a while I wasn't sleeping at all due to severe congestion. High dose antibiotics helped me immensely, but I still get out of breath just from walking around a bit, and I refused to touch literally anything that would ever be leaving the house because it would be repulsive of me to do so when I was so snotty. Also, in retrospect, I was so dissociative from lack of sleep and pain that I likely would have gotten orders incorrect even if I wasn't leaking from my face and decided to pack with gloves on, so it's a good thing that didn't happen. I've been unbearably unproductive in pretty much every area of my life, especially if it's off my phone.
I have no idea what I was sick with but I didn't want to spread it to anyone (between you and me, this sentiment excludes the teenage boy who deliberately violently coughed on me and laughed because I was wearing a mask at costco on April 8th! Ugh!), and it really concerns me that I've lost time like I did. I feel like that isn't normal. But I think I'm on the other end of it now!
That being said, I finally got word yesterday that the remakes should ship to me early this upcoming week. I'm going to hold her to this and bug her every day if they don't ship by Wednesday. And now that I'm no longer a ball of snot, that means I really can start fulfilling again next week also.
I really do apologize, this came out of nowhere!! I am so upset about it...
Just posting to let you all know I still don't have the remakes...
So as a refresher, this is what I'm waiting on still that is needed to fulfill the rest of orders, because they're coming from the same factory.
MGR1:
Fixed Elfling
Fixed Baphomet
Missing qty + remakes of ghoul (they sent me 50 less than what I/we paid for initially)
MGR2:
Green drippy mini bat
(And Cryptic's campaigns are waiting on the cateye effect mini bat and a bunch of spider remakes, namely the dango and lemonade)
Last I was told, they're in printing. That was over a week ago ... and I do nudge her pretty regularly. Meanwhile she keeps posting on instagram every day the pins they're making for their larger clients... 🫠 so sorry everyone. Truly as soon as they show up I will be dropping everything to grade them and get them out.
I've been steadily packing up orders that require those missing pins already, and just leaving everything unsealed but with the name on the package. That way I know each one still needs one or more of the above pins. There's 30+ small boxes of those mostly-filled orders right now. Many also are Cryptic Compendium spider and Chocolat Chaud gallery pin orders combined with the monster girls.
But with this, and the changing weather causing us both to have so much head pain/migraines, the house is really unproductive right now.... ;;;;
I've been putting so much pressure on my manu to have remade these pins, but they're still not done!! 🙃 Honestly I have long since fully lost my mind because of it, I am so sorry. Because I don't want to majorly put this manu on blast, our correspondence showing timeline is censored and attached below as backer-only.
I very strongly emphasized that I NEED at the very least the remakes of Baphomet, Elfling, and the additional 50 Ghoul I paid for that they didn't initially make me, before CNY. Of course, also C's white dango spider and hopefully the lemonade spider too - prioritizing the pins that are currently entirely unfulfillable to attempt to instill some sense of urgency... I can't believe how many months it's been since the campaign ended, I can't apologize enough. This is actually crazy.
I do have 2 updates to share though, they FINALLY at least showed me what Baphomet and Elfling's eyes look like now in order to preserve the glow effect: The eyes have been reversed essentially, the enamel is now glow and what was print before will be inverse. So, the black sclera of Baphy will now be print, iris of Elfling will be print and pupil is enamel. However, she told me for the Elfling pic above that it's the old print colors still but not to panic, so I think...they gouged out the enamel of the samples they held onto, in order to confirm the eyes first? I don't actually know if that's possible, but to save time and money it makes sense to me.
I don't have updates on anything else yet ........
The good news is... that I received Chocolat Chaud's giant package of US orders!!! So I will be able to bundle those with as many remaining as I can.
Japan is not shipping to the US right now except via the very expensive Kuroneko Yamato, which is why this unfortunately had to happen, it was far more cost-effective to send that box to me (and incur a giant duties cost on top of it) than to charge, then spend, an actual fortune sending out each individual small package from her home in Japan. Her health is far more at-risk than mine and I really want to get this done for her, so we really appreciate those of you who have been super patient and understanding. Early Summerween seemed to have a bit of a fulfillment curse, but we are FINALLY all getting everything settled.
Because the current plan is to keep this group event pin-centric and I won't be doing pin-only crowdfunding again, I am unlikely to return to this group project this year. I love everyone involved and I hope despite the hiccups that you'll continue to support those who do participate again 💖🎃 Growing pains (and finding new manufacturers) suck, but these designs were still fun for us all to make, and Cryptic is happy it went so well as his very first online sales venture. 🥹 Though that is still being fulfilled also. Thank you!!!
PS: for some of you, I'm unable to pre-emptively credit you free shipping from the MGR2 survey to combine the two pledges, because I don't know how much your package will weigh once all 3-4 (including Chocolat Chaud's and ALSO possibly Cryptic Compendium's) orders are combined. USPS costs also unfortunately rise every Jan. I WILL give refunds of overages to everyone who was overcharged on shipping, each night that I'm doing batch-printing of labels. Because of Katsucon, most orders containing MGR2 pins are going to take a while still as I unfortunately only was able to send out the survey just this week. I apologize for it being extra convoluted!!
