Hello, everyone! Long time no see! We have a lot of updates for you today!

SOCIAL CREATURES

The first one is the longest one: much like everyone who sees the writing on the wall and doesn't live near the river (de)Nile, we've scaled back our usage of Twitter. It's disheartening, given that it's the only site where our updates and promo have been the most successful but as of now, it's also competing with Tumblr for "least visibility"--and Tumblr is winning. We are worried that for our second future Aradia Beat venture, we may not be able to be successful but we'll cross that bridge if/when we get to it.

Unlike most companies or people, however, we have chosen to not be on Threads or Bluesky. It would be too many links to provide as sources, but Threads and Bluesky have too many risks for us to consider using them, not less being privacy and data concerns. (Bluesky even causes your blocklist to be public!) Instagram has become a "happy bots DMing us after every post" landscape, but there, the damage was already done long before Threads existed. As for Bluesky, we recognize that we are shooting ourselves in the foot, given that now everyone has chosen that to replace Twitter (for the moment) and thus, it's where all the "eyes and ears" are. Would it be useful for the second Aradia Beat and all future ventures to be on Bluesky? Yes, of course. But we truly do not feel comfortable being on Jack Dorsey's reroll at another Twitter. We also don't think that a site that hides your profiles and requires you to make an account in order to be able to see others' profiles is worth anything. If we cannot see what you can provide for us, is it truly really any good?

Therefore for now, we have moved our primary social media account to be on the Fediverse. We will still post on Twitter but most updates will now be through the Fediverse. We believe there are ways to use the account as an "RSS" feed, so once we look more into that, we will let you all know how it works!

In the meantime, come follow us on Socel!

GIVE ME THE BEAT!

The second update involves Aradia Beat volume one. We have ordered print proofs: the first one resulted in some errors in printing and there were even mistakes pointed out by Mixam that we couldn't do in time--hence, we decided to make a second print proof with said fixes. The second copy came in last week, and we even took video! You can check that in our Kickstarter update here.

The last fresh update is that we have also finally sent digital rewards! This includes pdfs for the magazine and/or the merchandise catalog, two sets of wallpaper designs (for desktop and phone), the free paper doll, and the trading card stretch goal, promised as a printable PDF for all backers!

Please check your inboxes if you are a backer and let us know if there are any issues!

FOR A SUMMER BY THE RUNWAY

Did you know that the collective does zines? Yes, we do! These are zines done by the members of the collective, free for everyone to enjoy!

Our first one is GLITTER AND GOLD, a lookbook featuring characters from our comics dressed to impress! Due to certain issues we had with the PDF, we only provide it in an executable form--which means that you can read this zine like a real flipbook! There is a browser and desktop version.

(However, when we went back to these files recently, we saw that the PDF exported just fine now?! Perhaps we will update this listing with a PDF in the future...)

GET GLITTER AND GOLD HERE

Our second zine SUMMER IN ARADIA debuted this year, also known as the beach episode! Featuring characters from our comics enjoying the summer while it lasts...This one is a proper PDF!

GET SUMMER IN ARADIA HERE

that's all we wrote

Those are all the pertinent updates we can think of! Please let us know if we forgot something. Thank you for all your support, and we hope you enjoy this update!