I don't really add a lot of text to my art ever, let alone me sitting you down and explaining "what it means", so bear with me for a minute.

This week was a nightmare. I had a really hard time getting any work done because it's simply too overwhelming to exist in the spaces I do right now. I've tried my best to curtail this by forcing myself to not look at social media/news directly after waking up but I inevitably have to be on there to keep a presence and it gets increasingly harder to do so.

The idiots and horrible human beings that run Twitter are happy to tell you the site's doing great but those motherfuckers are wrong. It sucks out there. A lot of people are circulating factually incorrect assessments of the situation saying stuff like oh yeah Patreon links are super delisted now or throwing the word 'shadowbanning' around like it's ever been a real thing but the truth is just that the site is dying. There's less people on there and it's increasingly becoming a platform of creators posting to other creators because the audience is gone elsewhere. It's difficult for people to wrap their mind around that the place they potentially make a living off of is dying a slow death but it is and it's a point of no return. You will never have the numbers you had again. Those days are over.

"People are fleeing, but where to? What's the place they're going so I can go there?" Literally everywhere. Cohost. Tumblr. Instagram. Discord. A bunch of them at once. All of them. It doesn't matter, you are losing your 'one' place. That moment in time is gone.

It's so fucking hard to even come to terms with this because I make a living doing this. Being a person on the internet that you like that makes art that you also like. That's my job. My job comes from being able to do this and people appreciating that. And every day it gets harder. I post my work and it immediately gets scraped by god knows how many servers trying to build an engine that will spit out the most soulless garbage you've ever seen. You laugh at the bad results ignoring the good ones because it's not your reality, it doesn't directly affect you. You take solace knowing companies who wield copyright law like an irresponsible child with a knife sit in the shadows. That they'll use an army of lawyers to dismantle the algorithms that systematically steal their work. You feign ignorance when those companies don't just ignore it but use those tools themselves to wholesale replace artists they've worked with for decades. They could suffer. You could prevent them from ever seeing a penny again but it's what's $8 a month to you. It's nothing. They can have it. It's convenient. My job isn't safe and even the ones I'd have to consider as a backup are under threat.

But it's okay. Some people are finding a new home on a website that's like Twitter, but it's "like how it used to be." Better, I'm told. Don't worry, you can conveniently ignore the underlying issues and leadership that will plummet the site into toxicity and rampant harassment because, well, the other guy who's morals you question but don't care enough to cut out of your life is there. You could go somewhere better. You could build somewhere new. Somewhere that's not built by another piece of shit billionaire bastard asshole who seeks nothing but personal gain and cultural ruin. But that one guy you know is there. We could have it so much better and you do everything in power to make sure we don't.

I try to take a moment of respite to spend a few hours with the people who support me and enjoy my company on Twitch, where I'm told I need to ensure they give me the right kind of money and right kind of support and to prioritize those who spend absurd amounts of money on me because that's how I can squeeze the most juice out of them. They're a resource. They're such a valuable resource, my whole dashboard on Twitch has changed to show me how to minmax every one of them to make the most amount of money possible. Twitch likes that, because they take half of the money I earn. I'm not important enough to get "most" of my money. I have to settle for "some".

I have to start every day with this constant weight on my shoulders. Will I still be able to do what I do 5 years from now? A year? Six months? It's 9h30 AM and I haven't even opened Clip Studio and already I've lost the motivation to work because every possible angle of my work, of my career, of my art, is being poisoned and ruined by the inhuman. By bastard capitalists who want to hoard and project misery. By indifferent bystanders who watch nothing but disruptive horrors pass in front of them only to drop a like when I tell them how much I suffer on a daily basis.

It's suffocating. I try to scream onto a canvas and the audience to view it shrinks with every day. Why is it so hard? I just want to create.
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You can buy a print of this here. You can support me on patreon also.

edited to clarify my stance that bluesky is garbage and i resent people going there without even giving sites like cohost a chanceSource: https://cohost.org/aurahack/post/1744582-i-don-t-really-add-a