Hey everyone! Ry here. It's been a little while so I wanted to give you a bit of an update in terms of of where the site's at, where I'm at, and what's happening next.

I've been on development hiatus since August. There have been a couple of tiny updates since then but, to be fully transparent, not much has happened in that time.

Between the rising cost of living in the UK, US tariffs making hosting, software and equipment more expensive, and the Online Safety Act's gut-punch to our subscriber revenue, Sheezy is only just keeping its head above water, financially speaking.

Unfortunately for me, I am a squishy human and I, my wife and our new kitten Beanbag need sustenance to stay alive and keep working.

Fortunately for me, I have had some success in that department! Very soon I will be starting a full-time development role that I have had my eye on for a while. Against tradition, this time I will opt not to dox myself online - but what I will say is that the company I will be working with are well-known in the industry for their creativity and ingenuity, and I am very excited to be joining their team.

So what does this mean for Sheezy? Well, I wanted to reframe things a bit.

When Sheezy.Art was first released to the world back in 2020, it was nothing more than a hobby project by someone who very desperately wanted to bring back the community feel of the old internet. There were bumps in the road, of course, but the feeling persisted. In 2023, I decided to try again - and here we are. Over time, Sheezy has evolved from a passionate hobby project to a full-time job. As cool as this might sound, let's be honest - when a labour of love just turns into regular labour, the love begins to fade.

Don't get me wrong - I still do very much love Sheezy and its community - you guys are incredible and seeing your fantastic work pouring in has been a genuine delight. But working on Sheezy, for me, has become a chore, and it never used to be like that.

Now that I am in full time employment, I plan to take things back to the way they were - working on Sheezy in the evenings and on free weekends, streaming every now and then just for fun - tinkering. That's the key thing. I want to have fun with it again.

So all that said, there will be no rebuild this year. I'm sorry. I know there are bugs that need fixing and new features just crying out to be added, but for the sake of Sheezy's continued existence, I - we - ask you so very nicely to please stick with us, have fun with us, and hopefully in time you will start to notice the incremental improvements that happen as I rediscover the joy of a true, independent hobby project coming back to life.

Also - please subscribe if you can! We need money! 😭

Hey Sheezers, Ry here! It's been a good half-year since the last development update, so let's catch up!

Development of the rebuild is going well. There is a lot of ground to cover, so let's break it down to what we've got so far, what's still to come, and what we expect to happen from now;

Where we are now

We are not quite ready to start alpha testing yet. In my last update, I optimistically said that testing would likely begin at the end of April, but I'm afraid that has not happened. Building a huge site like this is a lot of work for one person - perhaps I need to go easier on myself. There is still lots to do.

But there is progress to report!!

Bugfixes and Improvements

Alongside the improvements mentioned in my last post, I can confirm that the following changes will be made to improve quality-of-life around the site;

• Login cookie no longer resets 30 days from login; is now a "rolling cookie"
• Transferring artworks between personas is now easy as pie
• Flash Of Unstyled Content from Light Mode to Dark Mode no longer happens
• All interactive buttons, inputs, links etc. can now be accessed easily via keyboard shortcuts and screen reader instructions
• The site will now prompt you before leaving a page if an upload or form submission is in progress
• When submitting forms or saving data, the "Save Changes" button will now reflect saving progress _{rather than leaving you sat there staring at static, unchanging pixels on a screen, waiting forever in an endless void of doubt, unsure whether your latest journal post about how your roblox account was hacked and your robux sold to the mafia was actually posted, or if you'll just have to trust that somehow, somewhere, someone will know your pain and come to your aid and release you from this hellish purgatory}
• Cool loading bar in the site header! Oooo!
• Removed gnomes

New Features

Perhaps the most prominent new feature will be the Sheezy Forum. The staff and I have discussed it, and we are in agreement that Discord is not right for us as a community base.

Our Discord server was always supposed to be a "temporary" base for us, and over time has only become more unwieldy. As the company itself burrows further and further down the Advertising and Microtransactions rabbit hole, we feel the time is right for us to step away and transition to a more stable, home-baked community base. So yeah. Sheezy Forum. Yippee!!

Also, adding to the previous list of new features;

• Bookmarks are a way of discreetly saving an artwork, collection or journal to your account for later
• Favourites are replacing "Likes" for artworks, collections and journals
• Emoji Reactions are coming to artworks, collections, journals and comments
• New Audio Player with playlist support and thumbnail artwork
• New Video Player complete with keyboard shortcuts
• Flipnote Support for the artwork uploader
• Clip Studio and Krita source file support for the artwork uploader
• Word and Markdown document support for the artwork uploader
• HTML, CSS and JavaScript source code document support for the artwork uploader
• Comic Support complete with multi-pane layout editor and page/chapter navigation
• Regular Expression support in artwork search
• Colour Code support in artwork search
• Previous/Next Artwork Navigation is making a comeback!
• Notifications Center makes managing your notifications a breeze
• Artwork Responses facilitate art trades, art memes, OC story building and more
• Revamped Reporting System to make the process of reporting an artwork or user account more robust

What's left to do?

Frankly; a lot. Every time I work my way through a feature or improvement, several other problems crop up that need solving. I am trying my hardest to just focus on getting the base system built and working, and I am so damn close it hurts. As soon as we begin alpha testing, I'll post another development update.

But it's not all tech stuff. In the interest of transparency, I'm going to lay down the law for a sec ^{(pun intended)};

In 2023, the UK government passed a new set of laws called the Online Safety Act that aims to protect children and vulnerable people while using the internet.

The law now requires that UK-based community websites that serve explicit content (like Sheezy) enforce legal age verification before allowing access to said content. There are similar laws materialising across the United States, Europe and the rest of the world, so migrating our business elsewhere is not a solution.

This unfortunately means that we will soon be legally required to impose an age verification system, as well as provide a comprehensive risk assessment and legal documentation that explains exactly how we will prevent children from accessing explicit content. The deadline for this is 24th July 2025.

As we will be using Stripe to power our upcoming revamped subscriptions system, it makes sense for us to use Stripe Identity (FAQ here) for this new verification layer. If you have ever purchased merch online, chances are you've used Stripe. I have been using Stripe for over a decade, and I trust them.

Note: Sheezy will never store any of your personal information as part of this process. Once you are verified with Stripe, your Sheezy account will be verified permanently, even if you delete your information from Stripe.

I'm hoping that our subscriber revenue will cover the costs of this service ^{(£1.25 per verification)}. If it doesn't, we will have to impose a subscription requirement for Explicit content. I really really don't want to do that, but it may be our only option if the verification process becomes too expensive. Only time will tell.

This new legal framework also makes "epilepsy trolling" (aka. bright flashing colours on profiles) a criminal offense - so we will need to amend our profile customisation functionality and bolster our moderation practices to prevent this from happening where possible.

We will also be introducing a new DMCA copyright protection procedure to comply with copyright law. As part of our revamped reporting system, copyright holders will have the option to create a formal copyright strike against copyrighted content that is used in on-site content without permission or licensing.

We have some paperwork to do. I don't want to go to jail. _{I'm too supple.}

Where do we go from here?

I'm hoping to start alpha testing the rebuild by the end of the year. Where we go from there depends entirely on how the testing phases go.

What is "alpha testing"?

Alpha testing is typically carried out by a dedicated in-house Quality Assurance team; in our case, that's the staffy waffies. They'll go through the motions of setting up brand new accounts, uploading artworks, interacting with each other and generally testing out all the new stuff. Ideally they will try their hardest to break everything so that I have plenty of work to do.

Once the site is stable enough, we will reboot the Beta testing phase. The site is, of course, already in beta - so this may seem a little confusing - but the hope here is that this time around we'll only be in beta for a couple of months as opposed to an entire year 🤦.

After the beta testing phase, we will hopefully be in a stable enough place to finally open registrations to all.

Anything else?

Please subscribe if you can. Sheezy cannot exist without your support - especially as we grow and new members join the party. If you can't afford to support us, please spread the word - we need all the help we can get to reinvent the web!

Thanks again for reading, and I look forward to seeing you around the site!

Cheers,
Ry

Hey there!

Some of our members have rightfully pointed out that the Blog has gone unused for almost a full year - and that's no good! We're also well aware that a lot of you don't use the Discord server, and so may well be in the dark regarding some of the exciting new stuff that's happening.

So, without further ado, here's a big ol' juicy update post for ya! Enjoy!

Sheezy.Art 3.1.0 (aka. "The Rebuild")

You may have seen talk about a "rebuild" going around. It has become something of a meme - every time we get asked about a new feature or an important fix that needs doing, Ry tells us "it'll be in the rebuild";

It's no secret that the current version of Sheezy is a little barebones, and in some places, slightly broken. To be frank, the codebase is spaghetti and the data structure is cumbersome to deal with from a development standpoint. There are a million and one reasons for why a rebuild was necessary, but my primary driver is that I do eventually want to hire additional developers to work on this with me (as currently it's just me, Ry, building this thing by myself) and I would feel awful dumping such a laundry basket onto someone's desk and expecting them to understand any of it.

So let's talk about some of the exciting opportunities that a complete rebuild offers up;

Technical Improvements

• I've been ripping out most of the old code and rewriting it from scratch to comply better with modern standards and take advantage of our server's resources better. So there should be noticeable performance improvements across the board.
• We'll be running on the most up-to-date versions of the third-party libraries and frameworks we rely on - so you should also notice better stability and less browser crashes.
• The data structure is getting an overhaul, so pages will load faster and we will be able to do cool stuff that we couldn't do before (which I'll delve into shortly).
• Third party integrations will be completely rewritten, which will hopefully solve the missing subscriptions issues, especially with services like Patreon and Ko-Fi.
• Accessibility will be a huge focus, with the goal of becoming fully ARIA-compliant, and progressive enhancement will mean even if you're using a super old browser on a super old PC (you know who you are) the site should still work just fine, albeit with fewer bells and whistles.

New Features

A full rebuild is the perfect opportunity to add some cool new stuff, and I've been going ham. Here are just a few of the incoming features that you'll be able to enjoy once the rebuild is complete;

• Collections (aka. Artwork Folders) - a neat way to organise your artworks and favourites.
• Persona Categories will let you organise your Personas into groups and change their nomenclature to reflect how you use them - you'll even be able to rename the default 'Personas' category to whatever you want!
• Journal Categories will deepen journal organisation and search and allow you to connect journals together.
• Improved Privacy Settings - you'll be able to specify exactly who can or can't view your content, either on a per-item basis or for your entire persona or profile.
• Bulk Editing will let you make wide changes across all of your artworks at once, or as many as you need - you'll be able to quickly update almost any aspect of your artworks en-masse quickly and easily.
• Multiple Profile Photos means you'll finally be able to customise which profile photo displays for users whose maturity settings don't necessarily match your own.
• Polls - you'll finally be able to quiz your followers! Polls will be attachable to journals, comments, artwork descriptions and news posts, as well as a new poll profile block - and you'll be able to configure exactly who can see them, respond to them, and view the results. You'll get a site notification when your poll closes with a quick summary of the results.
• Account Switching will provide a quick and easy interface for switching between Sheezy accounts in just a couple of clicks or taps.
• Account Levelling - an incentive system to help nudge the community toward taking that extra step to engage and communicate (again, all opt-in). You'll gain experience points when something positive happens - perhaps a comment you left on someone's artwork gets a "Like" from the artist, or a journal you wrote gets featured in one of our news posts, or perhaps you won one of our monthly challenges - we want to help bring some magic and fun into the art sharing experience!
• Silly Buttons - fun little buttons that you'll enable on your profile that will cause all manner of mischief. From the classic 'Nudge' button that shakes your browser when a friend clicks it, to the legendary 'Pipe Bomb' that chars your theme and leaves your profile photo looking a little worse for wear until you come back to clean it up. We'll add more and more over time!
• Trading Cards will help gamify your art sharing experience - allowing you to collect your favourite artists' artwork (opt-in of course) to trade with and battle against others. There'll be card levelling, configurable moves and attributes, randomised rarity and even special effects for the rarest drops! An innovative and extremely fun way to discover and celebrate new artists.

And many more! I don't want to spoil all the surprises...

New Subscription Offerings

We're revamping the subscriptions system so that you won't need a Ko-Fi, Patreon or PayPal account to support us. You'll subscribe directly via the site, and there will be more pricing options too.

New pricing options will include annual subscriptions as well as multi-buy one-offs so you can treat all your friends to a sub if you're so inclined!

Important Changes

Moderation will be undergoing a radical change. As the site grows, the sheer amount of art we have to moderate also grows - exponentially. While the community was young, our wonderful, generous team of volunteers was just about handling things. But the reality is that persistent growth makes manual moderation unsustainable.

We want to keep growing, and we want to keep you all safe. We won't be leaning on any patchwork solutions like "AI" - rather, we're going to try shifting to a more community-based approach to content moderation.

Our mods will still do what they're best at - browse the site, make changes to artworks where necessary, create reports etc. - but we will also be introducing a new role; "Community Moderator".

Anyone can apply to be a Community Moderator, providing they are 18+, have been active on the site for at least 6 months and do not have any flags or warnings on their account. Once you're approved to be a community mod, you'll gain an extra set of controls underneath artworks, comments and journals - a kind of souped-up "report station".

Your role, as a community mod, will be to find artworks that breach our rules or terms, or that might need some attention to maintain the safety of the community, and report them to us using this new station. Reports that are then processed successfully by our staff will yield you a large number of account experience points, and build our trust in you.

When you reach a certain level as a community mod, you'll be featured on our staff page, and we'll even write something nice about you! We'll have 'Employee of the Month' competitions, you'll be invited to some of our staff-only activities, and who knows, maybe you'll get a promotion!

Also - we are very much aware that a lot of the community stuff happens exclusively in our Discord server. While this was a good solution for us early on, it has become apparent that the community is now too large for us to keep relying on Discord for information delivery.

As part of the rebuild, a brand new "Help Portal" will be populated with FAQs, guides, tutorials, resources, anything you need to know about Sheezy, we'll pack it full of useful info. We'll also be revamping the news page with a search bar, thumbnails and more to try to make it easier for you to stay in the Sheezy loop, if that's something you want to do.

Casual reminder, too, that we post regularly on BlueSky.

I Have a Feature Request/Bug Report!

That's great! We're extremely lucky to have such an enthusiastic and creative community - and we want to hear your ideas.

As part of the big rebuild, we'll be adding a new "Surveys" feature to the site, alongside the "Polls" feature that we talked about earlier. Surveys will be published regularly and will be a direct way for you to give us feedback, request new features, vote on rules or terms changes, or express your feelings regarding your experience using the site.

We'll also be moving bug reports site-side so you won't need a GitHub account to report issues to us.

So When Will It Be Ready?

This all sounds wonderful, doesn't it?

"But Ry," I hear you cry, "when will this masterpiece finally come to fruition? When can I escape my woes and upload art online for imaginary points so I can feel better about my insecurities? WHEN?!?"

Firstly, let's get you to therapy, you poor soul, you. Secondly, I'm afraid I don't currently have a concrete answer for you.

As it turns out, developing large websites by oneself is in fact a rather taxing endeavour. I'm taking a short break for the winter holidays and will be back in action in the new year - and should have something ready for the Staffy Waffies to start alpha testing by the end of April. Testing and bug fixing can take a good couple months, especially if something big comes up. So realistically we're looking at June/July time before you can expect any of these wonderful new features.

I can only apologise for taking so long with it - I consider myself unbelievably lucky to be able to work on Sheezy as my full-time job, and the team and I are unendingly appreciative for all of your support, wonderful comments and feedback, and for being honest with us.

Thanks so much for reading,
Much love,

Ry

That's right!

Every 8 hours, we'll be releasing 10 new registration slots! Head to sheezy.art/register to grab yours!

Also, every Friday at 7PM GMT we'll be hosting a Sheezy Stream over on Twitch wherein we’ll be giving away 10 Subscriptions at the end of each stream!

If you'd like to enter the prize draw, simply fill out our Subscriber Giveaway Form! We'll keep your username in the roster until you win.

Note that existing subscribers are not eligible to win, but you can still enter a friend's username if you want to gift the subscription to them!

In case you couldn't catch our most recent Twitch Stream – Original Members may now sign in!

If you had an account on the site back in 2021/22 - and you didn't remove it before we shut down - you'll be able to sign in using your original information.

Frequently Asked Questions

We're sure you'll have plenty of questions, so to help you along we've included some of the most prominent ones that we tend to get asked in this post for your convenience;

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I deleted my account before the site shut down. Can I get it back?

I'm afraid not. Account deletion is permanent - there is a possibility for us to recover some of your artwork files, but your account itself cannot be recovered.

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I found a bug, or the site is behaving strangely. What do I do?

Please get in touch with our Technical Helpers - either on their profiles or in our Discord Server. If you're 100% sure what you've found is a bug, take a look in our GitHub Issues page to see if it's been reported already. If not, feel free to open a new issue!

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I don't have an account. Can I gain access?

We're still offering Early Access to Subscribers! You can subscribe by heading to our Subscribe Page and selecting a payment provider.

Remember to Claim Your Account when you're done!

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I have an account and I've subscribed but I can't see my benefits. What gives?

You'll need to link your accounts under Account Settings – you can link your Ko-Fi, Patreon and PayPal accounts, which should automatically assign your payment to your account for you.

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How can I reset my password?

Head to the sign in page and click the 'Help' link.

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What benefits will I receive for subscribing?

You can check out our subscriber benefits on the Subscribe Page.

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I'd like to help out! Can I apply to join your staff?

Absolutely! You must be 18 or over, and ideally have previous moderation/helper experience. Please feel free to fill out our Application Form.

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As always, if you ever have any questions that you can't find the answer to - Our Helpers are happy to help out, or you can hop into our Discord Server and ask in there. Alternatively, you can always email us.

G’day! This post will be a long one, you have been warned!

There has been some confusion as of late about what our current plan/roadmap is looking like, plus some other queries regarding information that’s already out there floating around. Hopefully this will provide the clarification you are looking for.

Firstly we apologize for dropping the ball. We’re always learning and are trying our very best, but are somewhat limited in terms of resources, and with a lot of Ry’s focus being the site itself there are some important things that were allowed to slip through the cracks.

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January 1st – subscribers will be added to the Private Beta

This can be considered “early access”.

This decision was made for a number of reasons:

• Subscribers will receive one of the benefits they are paying for - early access entry. It is, in fact, a benefit.
• We can stress test the site's server and the staff can get accustomed to the content moderation flow, without us all getting immediately overwhelmed.
• It will give Ry more time to fix bugs and make improvements where necessary. We want to deliver a smooth, well-performing site, and that only happens through rigorous testing and bugfixing.

More to note on this:

• It has been speculated previously that content would be wiped when the site goes live following beta testing. This is not the case. After January 1st, there will be no more site wipes.
• Regarding tier access, any of our subscriber tiers will gain you early access to the site. The lowest tier price is $3.
• To be clear – this is not a pay-to-enter scheme. Subscribers are simply getting very brief early access for the sake of testing.
• You can subscribe at any point before or during early access to gain entry.
• We understand not everyone is happy with this decision and apologize wholeheartedly for not communicating this plan better before now. We are actively working on improving our communication.

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Previous site members who are not subscribed will gain access in early February

• This timeframe is subject to change due to any number of issues that may arise but we are hopeful that it will be accurate.
• If this timeframe does change, we will inform everyone as soon as we are able via our social platforms and Discord announcements channel.

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If all goes well we will begin registration rollouts in early March

• If the site performs well and no more breaking issues are uncovered, we will slowly begin rolling out registration slots for new users.
• There is currently no timeframe for this - as soon as we are more confident about when we can begin this phase, we will make an announcement via out social platforms and Discord announcements channel.
• Rollouts will begin on March 1st in chunks of 250 registration slots. The slots will be announced well in advance and will be first come, first served.

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If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to a member of staff on Discord, Twitter or BlueSky - we always have our ears to the ground and rely on you - our wonderful community - to help us grow and improve!

Hey everyone.

It’s been a little while, hasn’t it?

When I first released Sheezy.Art Beta to the public in 2020 I, we, were absolutely blown away by the response it received.

They say everyone needs a hobby, and my hobby, as silly as it might seem, is building websites. I never originally intended to release the thing at all - so you can imagine my surprise when, a year later, we were inundated with thousands of passionate artists wanting to be a part of our fun little adventure.

Unfortunately, timing was simply not on our side back then. I and many of the other Sheezy team members were only a few months into a university course, attended with the intention of becoming a qualified animator to satisfy my other hobby. I was an unemployed student, relying on student loans to survive, and suddenly I also had a bustling community to tend to and pay for.

It was damn near killing me.

Shutting down the site was a decision that followed a lot of sleepless nights - I was devastated to lose something so special, and I know that a lot of you were devastated too, which only made the decision harder.

Despite letting it go and retreating back into my hermit shell to recuperate for the last couple years, all I’ve been able to think about, every waking hour of every day, has been Sheezy. Not necessarily the website, but you. All of you.

I did you dirty by creating this community and wrenching it away so suddenly. And I’m sorry. From the bottom of my heart, I’m sorry.

Of course, circumstances were out of my control. But I still failed you, and that’s something that’s been eating away at me ever since.

Fortunately, time heals all wounds.

Things are different now - you’ll either be happy or indifferent to hear that I graduate this November and no longer have any working commitments whatsoever.

I got married! And my wife just so happens to be one of the most supportive and loving people I’ve ever had the pleasure of knowing.

The planets have aligned, so to speak, and so, in typical Ry fashion, I have been building a website in my free time.

Sheezy.Art Version 2 will be available for beta testing at the end of November.

The original team is backing me up once again, and we will be opening a brand new Discord server on Halloween 🎃

Come join us for our inaugural Sheezy Discord Stream at 6pm GMT on October 31st. There may well be a couple treats in it for you!

I know a lot of you will have many questions - and we’ll be around on Discord to answer them for you.

To answer some of the questions I’ve seen floating around already:

• It’s still me, Ry, developing the site by myself
• The original core team is still here, raring to go - we’re hoping to re-recruit more of the originals as time goes on
• Our rules, terms and policies remain exactly as they were right before the site shut down. Nothing has changed there
• Your data and artwork will be waiting for you where you left it, providing you didn’t delete it before the shutdown
• Your account will be hidden by default, and you’ll need to sign in once the site is ready to make it public. I want to give everyone a chance to tidy things up a bit - it has been a few years, after all
• The new site is built with React - at a certain point I realised it was apt for me to get with the times
• We are thoroughly anti-NFT, anti-crypto, and are actively figuring out how we should approach AI art

I am very opinionated when it comes to AI. For the site’s various functions, there is a possibility that I might implement some kind of AI to ease the burden on our moderators, but I want to make sure that nobody’s data is going anywhere they don’t want it to go. We’ll be actively discussing AI art as a team and will also field it to the community as to how we should approach it - whether we ban it outright or implement strict tagging criteria. But that’s a conversation for later on down the road.

One of the most important questions I see people asking is “How can we trust you?” - and it’s a fair question. I understand that perspective completely, and I don’t blame you at all for wondering.

Frankly, I can’t give you a good answer. I’m just some British guy who likes building websites and making art, and who wants to meet and hang out with other artists.

Whether you trust me or not is up to you - but I hope you’ll agree with me when I say that whether the site succeeds or fails, having a community come together the way ours did is an immaculate treasure, and something that I’d be overjoyed to be a part of once again.

Also - to speak candidly - I have no interest in doing anything else with my time. I want Sheezy to be my career. I’m more than willing to pour all of my blood, sweat and tears into making this an online home that we can all be proud of, and all feel safe within.

This time around, I have been lucky enough to secure a small bundle of funding that can go straight toward hosting and service costs. Monetisation will likely happen much the same way it did before - Patreon goodies, Discord extras, etc. I am still adamant about avoiding ads.

I’m excited beyond words at the prospect of bringing back our charming little ethos to this colourful corner of the internet - and we, the Sheezy team, really hope to see you around.

Can’t wait to get this thing built!

See you soon,  
Ry

🎄