Triumphant Artists Main Page

WELCOME TO TRIUMPHANTARTISTS.COM!

Thank you for visiting. I think you'll find some great stuff here. I'm Matthew Lyles Hornbostel, artist and creator of this site - part of the 'Triumphant Artists Web Network'. Here I'm developing a lot of awesome free stuff for you, for release online. I'm continually streamlining this site and making it better.

Some helpful tips for viewing this website

- the most important tip is that your view of my sites may be 'cached'.

That means you'll need to refresh pages to be sure you're seeing the current version of the content.

Other tips are listed here.

I've got a lot of cool creative art, videos and games I'm working on right now, and you can see plenty of examples in the video below if you decide to click play.

What's planned for the next few months?

I'm an independent multimedia artist, and with the ongoing help of friends and family,

I'll be releasing a wide range of exciting creative projects and free stuff available nowhere else.

The current state of my work is usually visible on HornbostelProductions.com blog posts.

There are many diverse projects I've finished or am trying to complete.

I don't know if you'll like my projects; that depends on your own personal tastes.

If you like silly comedy videos, action sequences with a lot of visually impressive VFX and 3d animation work,

handmade art, miniature & practical effects and miniature art, board games, strategy, arcade and puzzle games,

first-person exploration of imaginative game worlds, etc... then probably this site and the other ones connected to it, will appeal to you.

I've shown a lot of my work to a lot of people locally and the phrase I keep hearing is "When will it be done?"

That applies to many things I'm doing that people are impatient about and want to see. A lot of people want all of my work to be made available online.

You can get a tiny sense of why by looking at the preview material I've already put in the [VIDEOS] and [GAMES] sections, but that only scratches the surface

Much of what I do is not complete, not publicly visible yet.

Often things are delayed due to unexpected problems, gaps in funding, or simply my efforts to make the projects turn out as well as possible.

In the case of some projects, mainly videos, legal concerns and lack of clear [signed] release permission from all contributors, pose risks.

IN THE PIPELINE:

I encourage you to watch the main page video and browse the site with the round blue buttons above - especially 'videos', 'games', and 'still art' - to look at works I'm developing within each art category.

Think about the fact that I have a backlog of roughly 10 hours of fun video productions that (with a bit of tweaking) could be cleaned up and put online, that's comedy, action, sci-fi, fantasy and other videos,

many of them fairly campy but they have, in all, over a thousand VFX shots and a few thousand dollars put into them so far. I hope to post them all on HornbostelVideos.com over time.

And I'd like to not only revise the old library of 'home video indie blockbusters', but keep making and adding new ones.

Then there are the games, a huge list of game projects I poured tons of time and resources into, many of which are near completion but not yet complete, often due to limits of time or funding or both.

There's a ton of great stuff there, some genuinely entertaining and fun projects and admittedly some fairly mediocre stuff too, and I want to see it all online instead of languishing on my hard drives, inching forward at a snail's pace.

I think it's absolutely doable, especially given the recent freelance work that's accelerated some of them and gotten them closer to release, but it will go even faster if my creative product lines that actually sell [on eBay, etc] actually start to turn a profit instead of breaking even or losing money on most sold items!

ACCELERATING PRODUCTION WITH ASTOUNDING eBAY SALES!

Check out my eBay shops for the rest of 2018, because although the prices have begun to increase slightly, generally they're still amazing value and there are superb new product lines on the way,

including games & video collections on DVD, new stock video content, self-published booklets, concept art collections, and other products I'm launching shortly.

What makes this even better? The unique handcrafted art items and more, ship for free within the United States.

I've treated eBay as a 'loss leader' shop for years now; though some items turn a profit, the overall loss so far on eBay content since my eBay shop opened in 2009, has climbed past $800.

I do continue to underprice many items, and my ratings remain 100% positive with 270 ratings so far.

This vibrant image below, for example, was listed on Etsy for some time before moving to eBay, a gouache painting of a winter sunset, with a village, forest, mountains and lake.

It's a landscape on canvas, it sold for under $4 in the end.

On eBay I sell predesigned works like that but I'll also take commissions.

That means for a minimal cost, even sometimes under a dollar in the case of auctions, I'll do my best to make you a good acrylic or gouache painting, colored pencil drawing, or oil pastel artwork of whatever subject you request.

And finally, there's my own shop, on HornbostelProductions.com, with even more varied options for commissioned art and other stuff.

That's an even better place to find my deals than eBay now, because my eBay shop's well-established and HornbostelProductions.com is comparatively new. So I'm discounting things like crazy there and prepared to take major losses on most items.

and my blog on that same website, which features the latest news and updates on my creative projects and the state of my web network.

IF YOU HAVE NOT SEEN ANY UPDATES IN MONTHS:

Again: Here are some tips for viewing this website.

I am doing a lot of low-wage freelance work online. That's still my primary source of income and it finances all my projects.

It pays about half of minimum wage, on average. The better stuff is audio transcription, generally, which can exceed $5/hour.

But those gigs will vanish over the next year or so as AI replaces all the human workers.

That means sales and ad revenue on my web network will become crucial for me by 2019.

If the art & sale products can make even a small profit margin, consistently, that may be essential to my web network surviving and growing.

If, eventually, ad revenue can grow high enough, that might also be a viable source of income sufficient to allow me to make most or all of the creative work free for everyone to play from 2020 onwards.

I'm on a slim budget but if I can raise $4000+ annually online with my web network, it'd be enough to keep things moving forwards for me; not a huge sum but enough for everything here to advance faster.

And in the long term, anything above $5000/year, I'd pretty much be inclined to just give out to other people.

[initially partially to acquire permission to release new videos from those who are holding back signed, date-verified legal agreement], but mainly to worthy charitable causes.

GiveWell.org lists a lot of underfunded but verifiably highly efficient and effective charities.

The Against Malaria Foundation for example, can save a human life for an average cost of $200.00. That's a great idea as far as I'm concerned!

Prior to roughly 2014 I was supported fairly heavily by my family. That's substantially less true now and the big transition over time in my mind has to be to gradually phase or transition from 1) Supported mostly by family, to 2) Gig-economy freelance work on projects that aren't creative but pay the bills and cover core costs of expanding my work, to 3) Creative work, creative gigs and sale products, covering the costs, to 4) ad revenue supported so all those creative sale products can shift to being freeware and open to everyone without any price attached, to 5) an audience so large - close to 100,000 regulars - that there's a ton of surplus revenue allowing ad slots to decrease AND allowing me to give thousands of dollars away to others who need my help.

Here's where that process stands for now:

ACHIEVING MORE, DESPITE OBSTACLES

I've struggled to get my projects done over the years - maybe I have too many ideas and need to focus on just one at a time!

- but things are beginning to take off noticeably as of 2018 due to those freelance transcription gigs I mentioned.

My eBay shop also continues to gain momentum, climbing to 270+ ratings, all positive, on amazingly awesome and inexpensive creative products like my handmade art [made to order based on the subject of your choice, sometimes for as low as $0.99 opening bid or even less].

A lot of my eBay success is allowing me to expand both to new eBay product lines, and even a new WordPress blog/shop , but the prices are (for now) still often ridiculously low.

WHAT'S THE CATCH? WHY ARE YOU FREELANCING FOR NEXT TO NOTHING?

Short answer - childhood verbal abuse from peers due to social awkwardness. I was teased and treated as sub human constantly by my peers as a kid growing up, and I still think I'm not worth much.

I internalized the idea that everything I do is bad, and should be better. I am constantly attempting to prove my worth to others but mainly to myself, but I doubt it'll ever be enough for me to fully accept myself.

I feel revulsion when I see myself in the mirror. Actual, real, 'I want to punch that piece of trash in the face' hate. I have a strong self-destructive streak and blame myself for everything bad that happens because it is my fault.

Even if I didn't directly cause the world's problems, it's still my fault because I failed to fix it, or prevent it. I am responsible for all of it and must be held accountable for all of it.

That's my underlying mentality and I know it's irrational and will make my life miserable, and will also be counter-productive in countless ways, but I cannot help but view this as somehow beneficial in some way or even be perversely at peace, even happy, with the percieved 'rightness' of unhappiness with my sick self. If I liked myself, or accepted my life as is, it would be very unhealthy IMO, because I recognize that I am foundationally not a good person and never will be no matter how hard I try to be one. And not being okay IS okay. Dissatisfaction is healthy. It causes improvement, endless striving for something better. Restlessness in pursuit of unreachable and unattainable goals, that's how I sense life SHOULD be lived, it can be difficult but it is better than stopping and saying 'things are good enough'.

I do not really believe in God. I don't think perfection exists except as an abstract and illusory concept that invariably unravels when made concrete or specific. Perfect and pure anything is horrific. Pure socialism is, in practice, communist authoritarianism. Pure libertarianism is, in practice, anarchic bloodshed. Pure religion is fanaticism and persecution of heretics. Pure non-religion is nihilism and despair. Our reality generally drifts to entropy and every idea fails when it is fully embraced. Utopia, paradise, heaven - they're intrinsically unattainable. I suspect if a God does exist, he would not be perfect because nothing ever really is - and certainly the deities of all the major religions seem to be catastrophically flawed authoritarian tyrants, albeit occasionally ones who present an appealing facade that masks the underlying problems. One of my darkest fears - more so than nonexistence - is that God exists. Because if he exists, we're all going to some sort of hell, or a heaven which is realistically likely another form of hell disguised as something 'good'.
I don't have the answers; my best guess as far as answers to the big questions, would be that those answers are unknown and in all probabilty never will be decisively known. But the people who scare me most, claim they know all the answers somehow, and yet cannot back their 'knowledge' with any credible or complete proof. If my uncertainty is sad to you, well at least it is more honest than any unverifiable state of certitude. Like most of us, I make the best moves I can in life, admitting I know precious little, that the world and the vast universe might not exist in the form that we think it does [simulation hypothesis? meta/multiverse?], that this, may even all be preordained and static - no such thing as time in the way we perceive it, nor any such thing as free will, in a four-dimensional 'spheroid' 'block universe' in which time is just another dimension of that bounded immutable state of that universe. And we'll never really be able to answer those big questions, most likely. Even if we could answer them, would we really want to know? Would the answers then terrify us?

For years after graduating (with Phi Kappa Phi honors from the University of Houston in 2010), I couldn't land steady paid work of any kind.

I graduated during the pit of the 'Great Recession' and that, combined with a liberal-arts major, meant no jobs available for some time after graduation.

I became an Eagle Scout (with Houston's legendary Troop 4), I earned a Bachelor's degree in Communications, specifically Media Production, and a minor in Studio Art.

GPA was 3.67, might have been a bit higher if I hadn't shot myself in the foot in a few cases in college at the University of Houston.

(Once I actually requested a reduced grade on an assignment, a C instead of a potential A-, because 'I could and should have done this better.')

Just because the teacher thinks my work's outstanding (and the teachers, in some cases, had no idea how I did some of what I did with my videos because I had independently learned things they didn't know) doesn't mean it meets my own standards.

And just because a customer occasionally says, upon receiving a finished artwork, that I should be charging more doesn't mean I want to charge more. I'm frequently fine with $3/hour or less as a pay rate for my work.

I'm supposedly bright (proctored IQ is higher than average but not at the level of 'genius' or anything and the IQ tests are not realistic assessments of intelligence anyways),

I work hard, I'm motivated, highly creative, I've done imaginative and inventive work for decades with or without pay (but my work is way better if I have a little bit of a budget!)

But I'm also willing to acknowledge my horrendous flaws and maintain plenty of humility given my pathetic 'red-flag' career history. And I call myself an 'idiot' a lot. Because I act pretty F***ing dumb sometimes.

(Nobody wants to hire a person who has no conventional work track record going into a job, especially someone with any sort of mental illness)

...A number of medical flaws including a somewhat weak immune system and some mental-health challenges [the core of it being some very high-functioning autism], sometimes turbulent emotions,

and a number of other scattered personal struggles I am trying to avoid discussing here because my family would rather a detailed and thorough list of my flaws not be shouted loudly from the rooftops.

I am never okay with myself or my work. I am intensely focused on doing better than I've done in the past, partly due to a sense that a lot hangs in the balance, including those human lives mentioned earlier,

and this can result in strain on my relationships as well given my insistence on pushing myself near to the breaking point trying to pull off some sort of success *somehow* not merely for money but to achieve more complete self-sufficiency, creative freedom, and to make an impact on the world, an impact on people's lives and the future... and...

Bottom line is I'm weird.
I don't really believe in perfection as a valid thing, yet I pursue it wholeheartedly, or at least I pursue a state of 'less broken'. It's paradoxical really. I'm not sure if free will exists, yet I believe in blaming myself vehemently for my actions and seeing myself as fully responsible for them.

Inconsistent? Yes. Very. You can learn a little bit more about my values and the ideals of my web network on this page if curious.

I chose a major I was passionate about, even obsessed with, an impractical one I admit, and I kept learning and honing my skills inside and outside of, and after, college, but it was difficult to find any viable career path.

I'm in some ways the unpleasant stereotypical example of the American millenial - idealistic, impractical tech geek, college grad with no normal job, the guy about whom others have said things like 'how can you be so smart yet so stupid?' and 'Look at this loser. This guy is what's wrong with America." All that said, I'm also what works about this country - Intelligence, integrity, independence, industrious work ethic, entrepreneurial drive, creative ingenuity, and a constructive, perhaps naive, optimistic belief that through my actions and effort I'll somehow improve my own life and the lives of everyone around me. Quite frankly, I want to prove everyone who doubted me wrong. I don't want to be seen as a failure anymore, I work hard - perhaps in a Quixotic attempt to acheive the illusory and indefinable goal of 'creative success', and despite missteps and years passing, and occasional discouragement, I am still convinced that someday I won't be considered an utter failure anymore.

I couldn't land a 3d animation job in the increasingly crowded visual effects or games industries, partly because this whole social pretense - 'selling myself' is uncomfortable to me.

I'm kind of awkward and it can be hard for me to convincingly promote my work or look confident, even when I know my work, my skills, and the services I offer are quite good. I can state the objective facts about my qualifications but I feel a bit weird doing that, and I tend to supplement such messages with brutal self-deprecation. Most job applicants won't do this. I'd rather do it - the employer deserves a balanced view of who they're hiring, not just positive traits.

Ultimately, I shifted my aim lower but of course couldn't even land work in lower-end jobs like retail, because, you know, I suck at life.

If your ability to 'sell' yourself is weak and you lack self-confidence on a basic level, you get passed over repeatedly by less qualified but more pstable applicants,

and get overlooked by people who offer expensive but unremarkable work. Offering to work at $5/hour or less does not fly except with some of the smaller, short-term projects either, I've found.

Countering a gig offer of $10 per hour with 'That's too high; how about half that amount?' results in strange looks from employers.

But I like to do that, it feels fair to me. I did eventually figure out that I could take $10 per hour and then claim the job took a fraction as much work [in hours] as it actually did.

I did this previz thing years ago for $2.20/hour but the employer figured it was minimum wage. I got their task - a 3d virtual tour of the inside and outside of an extensive 62-room building, done with 100+ hours of labor, for $250 when anyone else would likely have charged $4000+.

Win-win!

I know it was deceptive, but in that sort of case, the deception was not malicious or illegal. It was an attempt to get the employer's work done for less, because they were more important than I was...

and I'm totally okay with that sort of work at that price range. Charging more back then especially, when my skills were weaker than they now are, would have felt like cheating to me. Still kind of does; I want to provide amazing value wherever possible while still somehow getting my own creative vision off the ground. And my projects have always been lean cost-wise, and I do all the work on them pretty much myself sans any salary [who else would give a **** about my video or video game productions? Everyone hates an 'idea guy', I know this, so instead of being the 'idea guy' I am the 'idea + execution of the idea in every area' guy and that's how stuff can actually get done!]

You customers / employers on short-term gigs financing my creative oddness? You all rock, I don't want to take you for granted and I'll do everything I'm able to exceed your expectations as a vendor, providing you outstanding value. Heck, I'm even prepared to take a loss on some items if that helps - I've done that fairly often actually.

INDIE EXPERIENCE, INDEPENDENT THINKING

Other people don't get how to make a VFX-video blockbuster comedy with impressive production values, or a video game that's equally amazing and epic, for under $1000.

I do. It comes from necessity, having a ton of hard-won experience, having made a lot of mistakes and learned from them, having read extensively and developed a broad skill set, and being willing to do 95% of the work involved in your personal projects by yourself, unpaid.

Every dollar winds up on the screen, or in the game, it's not wasted or misallocated. I learned very quickly that that was the only way I could get my vision realized with what I had. I don't want to be rich.

I just want to have enough to make my ideas a reality and to make a lot of cool things - enough to make the projects I envision making and have the world able to enjoy them, laugh at the jokes in my comedies or get wrapped up in the stories I tell, get excited by the action sequences, amazed by the visuals. In the conventional video and video game world, 95+% of the budget is salary. But really, if there are no salaries, there's no reason you can't make something massive that looks and sounds like a million bucks with just a few thousand of them.

And while this is not technically a non-profit studio - I think the term is 'sole proprietorship' - it'll continue to maintain an indie mentality and methodology no matter how much money I make. So pretty much anything I earn over, say, $5k or so per year, I'd like to give to other people, because as far as I'm concerned, it's beyond what is actually needed to cover basic expenses and my own projects. To groups I love, people I care about, even total strangers who happen to need help. Because it will make more difference to them than it would to me. I am known as a 'Santa' by family because of my many gifts to them at Christmas, and my friends know I cover the costs of our meals out routinely. My friend Michael has described my birthdays as 'Hobbit birthdays' because when it's my birthday I give gifts to the people who attend, not vice versa! I give to charities rated as highly efficient and effective by organizations like GiveWell,. If you want to help the world, please take a look at what they, or other valid sources, list as charitable causes that actually are effective. I favor mostly some mix of healthcare related causes that can help people who are sick or malnourished, educational charitable causes like KIPP that result in a population capable of logical reasoning and career success, along with some environmental causes because the future habitability and viability of the planet matters to me a lot. I won't have children myself but I fear for how badly things could deteriorate by the time today's children grow old. I do not generally favor giving to abstracted causes, i.e. religious groups, churches and the like. I'd like to see some direct real-world benefit to the giving I do. But this is just my POV here.

I have spent a bit of time volunteering, and I'd surely give a lot more if I had a lot more. And yes, I intend to pay my cast members on an ongoing basis for projects if they'll agree to let me place their work online. Because I love the work, the line between work and fun often blurs, and that passionate creative obsession is what makes me happiest in life, creative work is a lot of what still makes me feel joy, when other things do not... and what frustrates me the most is when it's impeded by obstacles, especially technical problems like 3d animation software crashing, bugs in my games I can't make sense of, or arbitrary interruptions when I'm very focused on getting things done. Do I want to make money? Yes, but mainly so I can keep working on the creative projects I want to work on, and get them done! Money equals creative freedom in my view, and anything beyond the baseline - anything beyond the margin necessary for creative progress - will be given away. I'm absolutely serious, whether you believe me or not.

DESTINATION: AWESOMENESS

Even the $5/hr I'm starting to make on some of the better-paying freelance jobs now is enough to result in an EPIC WIN for everyone - me, my contributing actors, the audience who see more stuff here, and even arguably the freelance employers. It's a terrific value for those who hire me, especially as I continue expanding my skills, equipment, software, available product lines, and my ability to do outstanding work generally. I've recently launched a video channel through HornbostelVideos.com and some content there already gives an indication of my VFX skills. I want to release video games and multimedia content, still art and comic books. I want a lot of great stuff to be posted here by the end of this year and I am now convinced that this is entirely viable.

And given the fact that I've seen thousands of people visit this site, just in the last three months, I'd say things are now clearly headed in that direction. And I've got a rather long list of inventive ideas that could multiply that exponentially over the next few years.

MY PROJECTS AND YOURS, REALIZED WAY FASTER AND BETTER THROUGH OUR COLLABORATION:

-Hire me at $4.50/hr to edit video, do color grading, to work as an editor, compositor, visual effects artist, DVD / Blu Ray author - or you could hire me to make handcrafted art on paper or canvas, or to make miniatures, or 3d game assets, level design, web graphics/design, maybe Photoshop editing and some other types of graphics work. You'll find, as have my eBay customers, that my work is a great bargain even at this price, as I am pretty good at what I do and the cost involved is still absurdly cheap, way below minimum wage. Buying my art or sending a gig my way in 2018 while it is still cheap and I'm still largely unknown,while there's less competition for more hours of my freelance time, would clearly be a superb value for money, all factors considered, even if what I create isn't entirely perfect. There are modern art works that sell for millions and aren't that interesting. There are lots of old works by masters who are long dead. And then there's my work, a miniscule fraction of the price of those old and new items, that's detailed, shows some degree of actual craftmanship and skill, and is genuinely affordable for you to purchase. A search of the top five most popular made-to-order commission art services on Google, reveals that for a 12"x16" acrylic painting portrait of a person or pet, the available price range is $130 at lowest and $330 at the highest. Some of them will claim $50, then charge extra fees for the acrylic paint medium, fees added for every subject added, and shipping fees on top of all of that! You could order a custom personalized made-to-order item from my shop on eBay and have it made based on a subject of your own choice at that size, for as low as $0.99 as a starting opening bid on auctions, or as little as $9.99 or so for Buy It Now. It's not a lot of cash, but if that seems risky somehow, even with the 30-day full-refund policy, you can try buying an already-designed work which is more predictable. (I'm launching a new batch of pastel art there soon!) The only downside, the way I sometimes fall short as a vendor, is that sometimes I miss the 3-day shipping target by a bit, it may take more like a week in some cases where I'm unexpectedly getting a ton of 'Buy it now' orders all at once and some of them are really big artworks that I know I need to dedicate many hours to to maintain a good quality level. You can look at my ratings on eBay to see how many people have appreciated my work.

You'll also soon be able to order prints on my own shop soon too - not just inexpensive photo prints, but printed T shirts, and posters, made by me without a middleman getting in the way. (Zazzle and CafePress are good but they'll charge you a bit more than needed.) And those could be your own custom-request design too if you want that.

You can order art from me on eBay, which is where I've accumulated most of my sales so far, from people like you - here you can order custom, handmade, made-to-order art based on whatever subject you choose.

I've been described by many customers there - check my eBay account ratings, 270+ of them so far, fully 100% of them positive at this time, my ratings are solidly positive both as a buyer and seller:

-"Fast but generous with his talent, great sense of light and color, communicative"
-"A lot of detail went into this beautiful painting of my past yorkie Thank you!"
-"Better than described, fast shipping...just love it"
-"Incredible! So special! Great work! Thank you!"
-"Great working with and would highly recommend to everyone. Thanks again. ****"
-"Very fast and great piece! Thank you very much!"
-"Excellent will shop again real artist( legendary )"
-"Artist did great work. Very pleased with painting"
-"I can not thank you enough for this. It is beautiful and I love it. Thank you!"

The same outstanding customer service you see there extends to my other venues, even if they are not yet as popular or well-known as my eBay shop. Yes, it's true that I may not always be the fastest (I can get backlogged and I try to do as good a job as I can, on every item I sell, which at times means delays of as much as a week or two) but I DO deliver the work as promised, often with far better quality than the recipient expects, especially given the bargain pricing.

If you feel like these items 'made to order' are still risky, which I can understand since you don't see it or know how it will actually turn out until after you've paid, there are also items I've made in advance, my own designs, and those are also available.

You can order already-existing handmade artworks instead. They're faster to deliver given that they are already made, you know exactly what the item looks like and what you'll get before ordering, and the prices are actually slightly lower per size of the artwork!

There was also a Zazzle shop, where I sold prints of a few of the items I'd attempted to sell via Etsy. Now the print sales are being shifted to my own [Hornbostel Productions] shop because that way I will be able to deliver the same quality cheaper than Zazzle can!

That shop is my own shop - an SSL secured venue using WordPress and WooCommerce, which offers much of the best of all of the above options, but even cheaper and with no 'middleman' raising the effective price with tacked on fees.
Even setting aside the issue of Etsy or Ebay or Zazzle fees, which can increase pricing in effect by 8-23%, there are additional deeper discounts that'll be available only on my own shop as I am trying to establish a track record beyond the third-party places like eBay and am prepared to take some significant losses in order to gain the first few positive customer reviews on my own store. There are great coupon codes available ($5 off codes) and a loyalty rewards program with 12.5% cash back in effect, plus a further-reduced membership option on top of all of that - $5/year VIP pricing - all of this going WAY beyond the prices being already lower than on my eBay venue! And there's also the random banner codes at the bottom of this page... potentially you might even be lucky enough to grab a 90% off code.

TAKE A LOOK AT THAT IF YOU WANT THE BEST PRICES POSSIBLE ON UNIQUE, BEAUTIFUL HANDMADE ART!

If you have any questions about any of the services I offer or have a specific creative job you want accomplished related to video/vfx production, handmade art, 3D assets for a game, etc, there's also the option to email me. I have contact info on the 'Forums' of HornbostelProductions.com, and you are free to post messages there about whatever topic is relevant, like offering me a gig, asking a question or two, or discussing my games, videos, art or other projects.

IF YOU WANT TO HELP GET MY WORK ACCELERATED AND RELEASED FASTER:

-Spread the word about my websites, or my specific projects/services, and share a link by email or using a post on forums/blogs you frequent, somewhere relevant where you think people might like something I did. Please don't get spammy with this though.

-Follow me or share my posts on social media. You can also join my mailing list through the Social Media page [or] via the link on the forums.

-Bookmark this page and visit every now and then to see what significant new things have been released, maybe once a month or so.

Right now I have about a thousand people who are doing this, which is nothing short of astounding to me. Thank you all so much! Part of the key here is that if the number of regular visitors climbs up tenfold from where it is now already, this web network will be entirely self-sustaining. As in, between the sales and other revenue sources, I'll be able to maintain my current monthly budget without needing freelancing! This would mean all my time would go towards the creative work - no more transcription or Mturking or mind-numbing nonsense of that sort diverting my effort away from the actual cool things. Bonus, if you saw the supporters page, you know you can actually make a bit of cash directing people to my site with the HornbostelProductions.com affiliate program! If they buy anything there, you could make a small percentage of that sale amount as a thank you for delivering the sale. And it's a safe SSL-secured shop, from a vendor who offers outstanding work at low prices with a successful track record on eBay. So if you want to join that program, that's right here.

- Do something else that helps me develop my projects a bit that I'd like to release online but which costs you nothing or very little and which might even benefit you. There are a few extra examples of ideas in that category here.

- Buy handmade art or my new stock media DVD on my eBay shop or buy a copy of my new project 'Miniature Multiverse' after its late 2018 launch on Itch.IO. The Miniature Multiverse website is here. Or you could let people know about the project, before the full game is ready to launch, as I plan to have a reduced-resolution free version available.

I KNOW ALL OF THIS HAS BEEN A LONG READ, and it kind of bothers me to be requesting all this, but I am trying to get a lot of projects done that I'm convinced are, or could potentially be, great entertainment. But if you don't care about any of what I'm doing with videos or games yet because you don't yet know enough about, or understand (or like) what I'm trying to finish, I totally get that. It is your call, after all. Some of my stuff is admittedly pretty campy, quirky or offbeat, so if you don't see potential in anything I'm working on, you're free to ignore my work. I'd understand, especially after this irritating monologue or whatever you call it. But I really do hope you'll all stick around, partly because some amazing, even astonishing things are going to show up here for free pretty soon, and partly because if you'd like custom artwork for one of your projects, I can help you fulfill your creative vision cheaply and efficiently. Feel free to contact me on the Forums.

Thank you for reading this. Thank you so much for being a visitor here. I'm amazed and grateful by how much support you all have given to me and to my creative work, and whenever you make a choice to support my work, I'll work hard to try to give you something stellar in return over the months that follow. Thank you.

I'm using some [limited] ad slots again from Project Wonderful. Given the increasing quality and quantity of web traffic lately here, might actually be worth doing now. Below this message is a promotion from another website owner, unrelated to my own web network. I'm not responsible for anything on their sites, nor do I personally filter the ads that rotate through the slot, so good, bad, amazing, dumb, hilarious, crazy, questionable or otherwise, so don't credit/blame me for whatever link appears down there. I don't control other peoples' websites. Okay?

Ads by Project Wonderful! Your ad here, right now: $0

Also, here's a randomized link of my own for you:

TRIUMPHANT ARTISTS

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TRIUMPHANT ARTISTS

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Microsoft Internet Explorer
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Google Chrome
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