Aug news: branding, and our philosophy and beliefs

Hi all you fine Patreon folks!

We've got 2 1/2 articles for you this month.

hyper the bunny wrote the two main articles, and they focus on a couple things the community outreach team has been working on.

First, we've recently been updating things like our logo and mascots to represent our organization, led by our volunteer artist Lev. I really love this succinct way hyper puts it: "As corporate as branding can often be, we genuinely hope giving a face to our organization in this manner will be both helpful for connecting with our cause, and a fun way to express whatever we’re working on to the public."

Next, we are excited to be announcing a large update to our Vision and Boundaries, which is now a single page on our website that explains several of our most important beliefs as an organization, and ways we'll make sure that our work genuinely helps people. Several things will be new for folks who haven't looked at the precursor pages in a while. We've also further clarified the "No loss of function" section to add some specific examples of how we'll grapple with this complex and subjective topic, and how it may change over time.

The half-article at the end is written by yours truly. The head anatomy videos will be posted in September! Some specifics with the setup and rendering process took longer than expected, but we're in the home stretch and now able to give a deadline instead of just a time estimate. Several screenshots are included in this final teaser before the videos go live. We can't wait!

Finally, we have another important update: we are releasing this newsletter under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. We intend to release newsletters under that license going forwards. As well, we'll be applying CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 notices on our website to some historical newsletters as well, going back to 2023. A small, annoying side-effect of that is that we now have to put © and TM symbols for things like logos and mascots that appear in our newsletter so that we don't accidentally release those to the public as well. We need something to be able to specifically represent our organization, or else things could get very confusing, very fast. Legal stuff is annoying™. :P