Dear friends of Inigo,

As some of you know, my pc went belly up last month and a group of amazing people came together to raise the cash for a new rig. A MASSIVE thank you to all those who spread the word and donated. The completely unexpected support and messages of encouragement have made the last part of a very ugly year really quite beautiful.

Carol (the creator of friendsofinigo.com) started a crowdfunding page after learning that my pc's power supply died, frying the motherboard and taking a number of other components with it. My system is about 7 years old anyway so I was planning on upgrading piece by piece next year. Unfortunately, I sustained a major back injury before summer which made working at the computer almost impossible for months. This in turn led to a loss of income (I teach part time, and do occasional freelance digital art to keep my head above water while working on non-profit projects like Inigo), so I knew the chance of me affording a new build in 2020 was slim to none ... then the power supply went !POP! and I lost my only reliable means of working on Inigo, editing, and creating much of the freelance work that keeps me afloat. I scrounged together enough money to replace the psu, only to discover the mobo was fried too.

So, with a heavy heart, I messaged Carol that the usual Inigo V3 update material I post around Christmas wasn't going to happen this year. For those of you who don't know Carol; she is a trusted friend and colleague, a widely respected member of the Inigo community, and the author of Inigo's site. Everything I publish on the site goes through her. I explained to Carol that I had to replace my motherboard when I could afford to, and hope nothing else was damaged. Hearing this, she started the crowd funding appeal. I didn't know it was happening until it was up and receiving donations. I was shocked to say the least. It's not something I would have ever asked for, and to be quite honest, upon learning that it was a thing I didn't believe we would raise anywhere near the goal.

That goal seemed rather high to me at first (especially since I was in the mindset of sourcing old parts to keep my limping pc in the game), but in terms of replacing my workstation with an updated rig that can better handle, not only the modding I do, but also the 3D animation, editing and rendering I frequently undertake, it's perfect. It means I won't be living in the fear that some other ancient part could give out at any moment.

Around the half way mark, some extra support suddenly appeared from some big names who helped put the word out there, so a special thank you to Sinitar Gaming, Gopher, FudgeMuppet, JuiceHead, EpicNate, and especially Rebelzize who fired off a storm of tweets and posts that gained the cause more attention than anyone could have expected. Because of that extra support we reached, and breached the goal in no time. I honestly had no idea Inigo had so many friends in high places. :)

Regarding how this setback will affect Inigo's development: I back up my files regularly to an external drive so I only lost a week of Inigo esp edits, but there's also all the time I've lost trying to get back on my feet, and there is a lot of little things that cannot be backed up reliably or moved to a new install with ease – the custom non-destructive renaming of thousands of vanilla voice files in playlists that likely won't make the transfer, etc. All the hard data is there, but much of it will need to be re-linked, and so on. It's rather like someone walking into a library, knocking every book onto the floor, then wiping all the titles off. So ... I still have a heck of a lot of work to do getting everything back where I left off. In addition to that, after some research, I'm pretty sure Adobe isn't gonna make the deactivation of the CS6 suite on my bricked pc easy (necessary so I can install it on the new machine). They'd much rather I upgraded and started paying them a subscription. But that's a problem I'm sure I can work around. None of these issues are as bad as “I don't have a pc anymore!” :)

It's been a very tough year, financially and physically, but you guys supplied a happy twist ending. For that, I will be forever grateful to each and every one of you.
So again, to all those people who spread the word and donated, thank you. Thank you so much.


Gary

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