Hey everyone... Thank God it's Friday. Last Friday started out a mess that extended through the week at my full-time job. And now I can update you on that situation and we can try to get back on track here.

First, the boring IT stuff - reason I didn't work on game at all this week:

By now, if you read any news at all, everyone has probably seen the various headlines about the Crowdstrike/Microsoft outage event. If you haven't, Crowdstrike is a pretty big antivirus company. Our company handles Accounting and IT for multiple other companies, and we use Crowdstrike. This event caused Windows 10 and 11 computers to crash to a blue screen where 'startup repair' or other methods to repair simply didn't work. In the simplest terms, CS sent an update out which added a bad driver file, with Windows instructed that this file is necessary in order to start up. Hence the blue screen loop people were getting. The fix was actually fairly simple... boot it into safe mode, delete the file, restart - back to normal again. Easy, right? Shit. Try to talk users through this over the phone. To add to this complication, our computers all use bitlocker so in order to even boot to safe mode, everyone needed a bitlocker key as well. That key is 8 sets of 6-digit numbers with dashes between each set. And if you happen to bump the ESC key on that screen, the computer reboots (several times) before you can get back to the repair options. You'd be surprised how many people did this. Anyway, so that is what I spent my week doing. One of our companies is local, our biggest one with the most users. I dealt with them in person. Some of these computers had more issues than simply deleting the file. They were booting to a black screen. For those, we had to reset them (reset but keep files). Our computers are managed via Azure or more accurately, Intune. So resetting isn't terrible... but adds a bit more work to getting a computer back to normal.

As of today, we've pretty much completely recovered from this mess. And today should be a quiet day. I'm back working from home and if it stays pretty quiet, I'll be back on rendering images for LH episode 4 again. I'll be doing that over most of this weekend, right up through my birthday which is Sunday (the day I originally wanted to have this update completed). No sense whining about it now I suppose. I'll just press on and continue working on it until it is finished. A lot of you have sent supportive comments and messages. You guys are the best, really. But I think you've waited long enough on this update so I'm gonna get my ass back to work on it. Meanwhile, enjoy your weekend! Love you all, ...Fire

PS: The special render is for my birthday of course... but I hope any of you who have a birthday close to mine enjoy it as well! Who wouldn't enjoy being served cake by these lovelys? Happy Birthday ;)