During an evening in late September 2026, I was messing around with merch ideas. I get myself into those grooves sometimes, and over the past few years most of my ideas hadn't gotten to a place where I'm satisfied enough with the concept to drop it. But during this evening I thought to myself: "I have never dropped any Rust-related merchandise over all the years of me daily uploading." And it's really because I've never been big on gamer-style merch, so I never had a plan to have any sort of Rust merchandise.

I had thought of my original Rust character Doug, who went away after they updated character models for the first time in many years (June 4th, 2026), and I spent a heavy fraction of my daily uploading journey with this character. So I started looking back through old thumbnails and just messing around in Photoshop, and on the second thumbnail I found Doug with this face, which I then cropped out and started putting on different things. The first was the magnet. But after seeing his goofy ass face on a teddy bear, I loved it lol.

It eventually led to all the items in the collection, and I couldn't stop laughing that night because of how goofy and unserious it felt, but it felt right on a lot of levels to me. So I decided to get some samples sent my way, test and see the products for myself over the course of a month, and decided to push through with it.

I'm happy to say after all the years I finally dropped a collection that's Rust-related and brought Doug back into the picture after being gone for multiple months as I write this.

Regardless of the day, what's happening in the world, or even the state of Rust, DOUG HAPPY.