The Anaether

I’m mostly posting my updates on Patreon. I’ve been wanting to post here again, just hadn’t gotten around to it.

This hentai animation seems to have gotten well-received. It didn’t seem to help when I tried to boost it by mentioning it in art shares but whatever, it turns out it wasn’t all that necessary. I took some 6-ish weeks to complete it, albeit not at the fastest pace. My process was pretty slow but steady. I wish I could just churn out one of these every month. I have a feeling if I did produce an animation like this once every few weeks for half a year, my audience would grow much faster. Although I’d like to grow my audience more quickly, it’s not my absolute primary goal. Every time I’m creating an illustration, animation or whatever, I keep thinking to myself that I really need to be telling you guys the main storyline already. I’ve created so much content around this storyline and I’d been planning on rendering the comic pages for so long, I feel like I’ve been stalling. I think I’m really nervous, but also I feel like a lot of scenes I’ve written in Act I aren’t strong enough.

I’m currently working on a cover draft for Act I. I need to use more tentative terminology because it helps me move forward, rather than thinking of the cover creation as a 1-shot thing. It’s too much pressure to think that I can’t change what I end up with, or that the first try has to be perfect.

I think I’ve pretty much failed to come up with the designs of stuff I was supposed to originally. Emblems, vehicles, weapons, robotic characters and so on. I’ll probably just come up with them whenever they show up in the comic pages.

I’ve been losing a bit more than a usual amount of followers on Twitter. I mean, it started on the day Elon Musk bought Twitter. I’m about 80% certain those are related, but also I think I’ve been gaining a bunch of followers on my sfw account because they also discovered and followed me on my nsfw account. I’d imagine once people realize how much I retweet art shares and how much of my posts are reposts of old artwork, they bail. Mostly I’m fine with this since I really don’t want to start rushing artwork. Perhaps once I get back into comic pages, I can show them on Twitter every week and put a filter over them.

Every now and then, the community I’m associated with on Twitter has a bit of a meltdown. I can completely understand that, since I actually do that fairly often in real life. However, I’m catching myself in that loop and am trying to change my own behavior by realizing that I catastrophize a lot, and I see that a lot at least in my own country. Our news is sensationalized to be more attractive click-bait. Panic and outrage are really strong motivators, and I think this is how America pushes people around a lot.

I don’t usually engage with anyone on social media around stuff like this. I’m much more likely to engage if it’s a private conversation. Otherwise on message boards, it’s not as likely people are going to discuss real issues in good faith. A lot of people just want to vent rather than have their issues resolved or accept any reassurances.

Perhaps I needed to dig around more, but I haven’t seen any concrete articulation as to how Elon Musk is going to ruin Twitter to warrant users closing their accounts. The only reason I’ve seen is that he’s a huge dick. I won’t disagree with that. He does what he likes and he doesn’t give a flying shit about people.

Perhaps there’s this fear of him letting back in all the assholes like Trump or Tucker Carlson. Well, even before Elon Musk, Twitter was already facilitating Trump’s toxic messaging that led to shit like January 6th. Like, probably everything we use or consume has had something to do with some asshole. Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple… any gas/oil company that gets the shit you buy to your house. America. America gets to go around the world, get up in other people’s business, shoot people up or at least sell weapons to other countries so they can kill and/or displace bunches of innocent civilians. Who is holding us accountable? Whose tax dollars do you think is subsidizing that shit? You think arming our allies doesn’t come at a cost?
What about meat? Nobody wants to talk or hear about that. It’s a tired old argument. Plus meat tastes awesome. You don’t want to look at what happens in slaughterhouses? Well somebody has to, and they look at the meat that goes on your dinner table so that it’s properly sanitized and butchered. But slaughterhouse workers are also horribly exploited and traumatized all the time so that you don’t have to go through the trauma of seeing that line between when an animal becomes an object that goes on your stove. Not to mention the environmental impact the meat supply chain has.

If people are going to be conscientious consumers, they should really think hard and carefully about that shit. Especially if they try to push other people around them to do the same. There should be a cost-benefit analysis. Right on the day after Elon Musk bought Twitter, I saw a bunch of artists realize that if they leave Twitter, they’ll have almost no source of income. Yeah. Everything comes at a cost. A lot of the times, making a decent living means becoming at least partially an asshole and/or being associated with a bunch of them.

Twitter was already owned and managed by a bunch of assholes. How do you know everything else isn’t owned or managed by some dickhead? Chances are they probably are. If anyone implores us to leave some platform, it’d also be great if they floated some viable alternatives. I’ve looked around a bit for alternatives to Amazon. It’s not easy at all. Other platforms are any combination of way too expensive, slow, too few customer reviews, or too small a selection of items. Inflation and price-gouging these days has been a challenge for people. Being a conscientious consumer probably means you’re either really privileged, or just really brave that you can really inconvenience yourself. But if you do inconvenience yourself, you better get something back that is worth whatever shit you’re putting yourself through.

I mostly try not to get sucked into the collective catastrophizing. I also understand on some level, but people usually just simmer down.

I used to quietly panic over losing followers on Twitter, but I noticed that these kinds of things usually have their own sort of ebb and flow. I’ve looked at the statistics of Patreon creators, for example. When they’ve got thousands of patrons, a regular month may have a gain or loss of tens or hundreds of patrons. What matters at the end of the day is that we play the long game, and how we play the long game. When our journey is longer, there’s a very high probability that there will be turbulence. I’m fairly determined to make my shit happen, and I’d think more than twice before making some drastic reaction to every perceived catastrophe. If I choose a hill to die on, it better not be a stupid one.