Heya, my name is James. Or, to many of you from Tumblr/Twitter who are reading this, theycallhimcake, or just Cake. I'm a guy who's known mostly for drawing cartoons/comics, but my life primarily consists of dealing with things related to animal husbandry, my family's business. 

We have a big ol farm property in Upstate NY, where we had sheep, chickens, and dogs, as well as a greenhouse where we sold plants/soap/random stuff. It was pretty quaint and peaceful.

On May 10th, 2016, we had a pretty massive fire that, in addition to severely f'ing up our house, burned 3 seperate buildings to the ground. Due to a severe code violation imposed by the guy who rennovated the house before (he built a wood stove into the side of the property's original house, a tiny little building we referred to as the "smokehouse", when you're actually supposed to build those bastards about 25 feet away from anything, GOOD THING THE INSPECTOR FORGOT TO MENTION THIS WHEN WE WERE BUYING IT AHAHA), it caught fire at 3am.  I was woken up at around that time to find the kitchen and puppy room (where we kept newborn puppies/their moms, and yes, somehow they're okay). After several hours and 80 firefighters, they finally got the fires down. 

We lost the smokehouse, a large 8 car garage (where we kept a lot of stored stuff),  and the upper area of the barn. Our house was significantly damaged, with most of our belongings suffering from smoke and fire damage.

"But", you ask, reading this, "Where are the goods? Where are the hot, juicy pics of the decimation? I wanna see some BURNT UP SHIT" To this I say, "I gotchu fam".

The house currently has a ton of boards all over it.
Entryway:
Kitchen the day of:


If it ain't destroyed completely, it's covered in soot/water/debris. Luckily most of our bedrooms were compartively okay, but everything is smoke damaged. 

Of course that bastard is still standing : D you can just imagine him saying "DID I DO THAAAAAAT". What a jerk.
What's left of the barn

This is what's left of the garage. I actually lost a lot of shit here, including all of my childhood toys and other stuff I had in storage. I had a pretty sweet skateboard. Damn. But, what's worse is we had a LOT of stuff overall, christmas decoarations, shelves of knick knacks, tools, appliances, expensive stuff. 

Sure, the birdhouse/tree that were next to it were fine, but it somehow melted the side of our car. What the FU-
Look at this goopy fried egg of a headlight.  Jesus.

And of course, my poor lawnmower. : <


"Okay, okay, but what about insurance? They'll cover everything right?" Hahaha. No. You know how insurance companies can be... we still have 10s of thousands of dollars in damage after insurance that'll have to come out of our pocket. The barn isn't covered at all.  What money we DO get from personal belongings will be used to go back into the house repairs.

Meaning we're not likely going to have money to replace my smoke damaged equipment, and I currently don't have a home, and won't for several months.

Whiiiiich brings us to the whole GoFundMe thing, which I decided to launch under the suggestion of many of my friends.

My living situation has changed 4 times in the first week alone, mostly due to the distance I need to be near the property to tend to the animals. I'm going to be looking into moving out as soon as I can find a mode of transportation/have enough money, though for the summer I'm still going to need to help with things until we gets things downsized animal-wise/under control house-wise. I have no idea how anything is going to go... fires don't just f up a house, they f up your entire life for a bit.

I have expensive computer equipment to replace, as well as some other stuff, and that's not even getting into my living expenses, transportation, etc. I primarily am looking to replace my computer/tablet (I'm a digital artist who makes money with these things, and I can't really afford to go too long without them), but hopefully I can look into getting a new car, among other things. I don't even know if my game consoles work... agh, being a nerd is terrible in times like this. At the time of writing this, we're not even allowed to clean things right now.

I set the goal at $3000 not entirely expecting to meet it, but moreso as an overall look at what I'm going to need intially. I'm honestly happy with any sort of help that anyone would be willing to give me. I like to spend my time entertaining folks in the small way that I can, but times like this really throw a wrench into things like that. If I can get ANYTHING from this, you have no idea how happy/grateful I'd be. I can get my life back to normal, somewhat, having one less thing to worry about.

I have temporary equipment, but, like I mentioned before, I need to replace it. 

Anyways, thanks for reading guys. If you feel like tossing a buck or two at me during a particularly shitty, money-consuming time, I'd definitely appreciate it.