Happy New Year 2025 from MILK+ VISUAL!
(Download a hi-res version of this image off our Patreon to make your wallpaper!)
Hey, everyone!
It’s been a while since something’s been posted that isn’t on the Patreon. 2024 was overall a tumultuous time, impacting the delivery of multiple things (Soundless artbook, website redesign, etc.) and resulting in a lot of radio silence on our end. Such a shame after 2023 was such an active year for us!
In 2024, we also saw quite a lot of change in the landscape of social media. This has left us with one place gone (Cohost), another about to disappear (TikTok, though we didn’t post there much in the first place), and a third looking a lot less viable for any further posting beyond major announcements (Twitter). We also gained a new space—Bluesky—and, in the wake of ever-growing crackdowns on adult content creators, changed what we put up on our Patreon out of an abundance of caution. If there’s one thing we can say we released amidst all of this upheaval, it’s the 2023 Premium Story Collection, our first ever paid item to ever be released.
So, in the wake of delays and all sorts of wary weirdness going on in the country we are unfortunately established in, what now?
We keep moving.
Who knows what will happen? We will go through this year cautiously with that in mind. There’s no sweeping roadplan here. I still live in an iffy situation, which means I lack quite a lot of resources, from having the money to prioritize anything other than getting work to medication access. This is what primarily caused the failure to deliver on 2024’s goals.
Another driver in our feet getting dragged is weighing our options in switching to more adult-friendly platforms and how we can manage our social media when the world is moving incredibly quickly. I’ll let the earlier paragraph about our social media getting all switched up speak for this bit. It’s kind of hard to work on anything when you have to spend a couple hours setting up new accounts or writing goodbye messages!
And a third driver, though very minor, is a reexamination of what 7388, our next game, should really be about. Back in 2018, learning language models that generated responses were pieces of rudimentary AI technology that most didn’t really care for or even know about. Making quirky and likable LLM AI characters for the audience to sympathize with didn’t come with any ethical baggage. Now, we must ask the question: Should Energy-Guzzling AI Girl Merope become worthy of being a Marketable Plushie? Will someone recreate the Torture Nexus if I make her a little too fun? Writing sci-fi was so much more fun when there weren’t armies of wealthy losers who can’t read and like to pay people to make resource-eating gizmos for them.
There’s a solution to this that I’ve come up with. 7388 is so early in development that making a major directional switch isn’t really going to do any damage. It’ll look familiar on its surface, but the underlying story is completely different.
…But I’m getting ahead of myself. I have to finish that artbook…Next time we think about an artbook, it’s going to be when we can pay someone to design it…
Anyways, that post was sad. We hope you had some wonderful holidays! And we also hope, very deeply, that we can bring you great things this year!
