Waffle

The fundraiser brought in $ 465.
Rogues of Clwyd-Rhan update schedule to change to Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday

It's June now, and while I'm not quite out of the woods financially yet, the sky hasn't fallen either, so I'm going to call it a day as far as emergency fundraising is concerned. The readers of ROCR raised $ 465 in donations, and the sale of an original page by me and Calvin brought in another $ 75. Thanks to everyone who donated!
The reason I'm not counting the art sale towards the donation total is that there are costs involved which I haven't quite got the full picture yet, and obviously I have to share the profits with Calvin Bexfield, whose background art made that page so stunning. So I'm not sure how much will be left at the end of the day.
The donations ended up paying my taxes, but not my rent. No worries, though, I'll be able to make the payment some time this month through overdrafts and money coming in from clients.

The fundraiser also paid for five extra updates in June. To accommodate those into a workable schedule, I'm changing the update schedule to Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, Friday - the same update schedule as Candi, which does quite well with that. Having a break in the middle of the week should allow me to pace the production of new pages so the work doesn't get too rushed, with DFG doing the colouring in the first half of every week, and Mravac in the second half, subject to availability in both cases. I'll have one Wednesday update in the final week of the month, though.

The fundraiser will remain open for a little while, though I'll stop pushing it like I've done. There's still the opportunity for any reader to bring the total up to $480 and wreck my scheduling plans by making me have to add in another extra update!

...it was good. I don't think it quite lived up to the promise of the first half, though. While there was plenty of great characterisation and acting, and superb dialogue, the resolution and all that followed it didn't work for me. The resolution was rushed and seemed like an anticlimax. The dénouement showing the Doctor as avenger was ... defensible in terms of his established character, but when the rest of the characterisation is so spot on, merely defensible just seems weak. And the patriotic button-pushery in the epilogue definitely really did seem out of place and out of character for the Doctor, who doesn't really make a habit of going back to check what becomes of the characters after an adventure. What's next, the Doctor going to Jo Grant's place for a cuppa tea? It sort of worked, as button-pushery always does, but I resented that it did. It added the syrupy aftertaste of altogether too much American TV drama to a series that, usually, is better than that precisely because it doesn't do that sort of thing. Might as well have had the Doctor transformed and redeemed by LUUUURVE, which I'm glad to report he wasn't.

Still, those bad moments were very few - probably adding up to less than the time it took me to type them up. In all, Human Nature and The Family of Blood gave us 85 minutes of outstanding, award-worthy TV drama and five minutes of slightly dodgy stuff at the end. Not bad at all. Best of Series Three so far.

Afterthought: I'd like to read the novel some time. But even apart from the novel, the idea of the Doctor living a human life has been done before, e.g. in the "Winter" section of the Big Finish audio Circular Time, which is the best bit of that collection of short stories.

The final wallpaper in the series is the very first I did, way back in 2002. Contrary to what I said earlier, this one, instead of the Sabbath wallpaper, may have been the first one I coloured using Paint Shop Pro in the studio. I can't really remember, to be honest.

In any case, it's not really the best one out there; I'm mostly including it for completeness sake, and because a lot of people like dragons.

I may do some new wallpapers as donor incentives. People have been telling me they work rather well, actually.