Ashley/Alterutra ~ nb trans fem haunt ~

Comix, DJ Chunes and Illustration
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Despite my funy badge in my pinned I do rechost NSFW stuff for your consideration
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lexyeevee
@lexyeevee

i first signed up for twitter because i was going to a furry convention and it was effectively like an ad hoc group chat with a bunch of people who were also there. after that it turned out to be a cool little adhd box so i kept typing things into it

then i wrote an Epic Lulz Takedown of php on my rinky-dink blog and it exploded. there was a link to my twitter on my blog somewhere, i guess, and i got several thousand twitter followers overnight. suddenly i had an Audience, of complete strangers. and i liked babbling about computers so that was fine. i did more posting, and the tech people now following my blog's atom feed read it and put it on reddit and HN, and number went up. which is nice because i like numbers. felt like a score.

later i would discover that working for a tech company was sapping my will to live, and go off to do my own thing. that meant leaning into the following business plan

  1. tech blogging
  2. ???
  3. profit (patreon)

it did sort of work, although i don't understand why. i would write a post about funny unicode characters and well-paid tech people would give me $20 at a time. i put some milestones for writing more things per month, but i ran kind of low on ideas and it was starting to stress me out a bit in the same way my job had

then some weird and kind of fucked up stuff happened


first was kiwi farms coming after my spouse in 2018, which led to sizable chunks of several social circles we were adjacent to turning on us. the Good Number dropped like a rock, and so did the patreon dollars.

i don't want to super get into that right now, but ever since then i've felt like my tweets are more aggressively defiant, always proactively bracing against a nebulous antagonist that might show up at any time and with any size. seemingly the only defense was to present myself as someone you don't want to mess with. the fox bristles to seem bigger, so as to ward off its enemies. (it didn't help that one of the 2018 events was someone digging up an exceptionally bad — or, at least, very poorly expressed — take i'd had in 2012... in the form of a tweet.)

on the other end of the spectrum, i found that mild niceties like complimenting an artist's work would increase the chances that they'd notice me, and if they'd already heard stuff about me and didn't like it, they'd obviously block me. and this makes sense and doesn't mean that the compliment was a wrong thing to do in the first place, but to my mildly traumatized caveman brain it sure felt like it, so i stopped really doing that.

but then the nft thing happened, and i am a mildly eloquent tech groucher, so i made some very pointed tweets dunking on them as a whole concept, at just the right time for ten thousand new people to follow me. and suddenly the audience was mostly people i don't know.

and all through this i am struggling to keep patreon viable, but i can't summon up the willpower to spend days in a row on big informative blog posts any more, especially knowing they'll then get blasted out to thousands of strangers. why risk some nightmare scenario like kf callouts meeting hacker news comments, when i could simply, not?

so now i'm relying on two things: tweeting, and the actual stuff i make. and like, people love my tweets still i guess. i get 1k+ likes somewhat regularly, sometimes on totally unexpected stuff. this is an audience that came from twitter rather than from hacker news, so it's people who use twitter and appreciate twitter culture. on the other hand, "give me two dollars because i told a joke you like" is a somewhat harder sell.

so that leaves stuff i make. i've still chugged along making little games and gizmos this whole time, and i err on the side of releasing them for free because it just feels bad to charge for something that costs me zero to duplicate. but a difficult text adventure about my cat is far more niche than a post about unicode blocks, something that almost every programmer will have to deal with at some point.

so that leaves me trying to make twitter bangers and interesting work and just sort of hoping that this will lead to patrons via some kind of magical alchemy, since, after all, i don't really understand why people pledged real money for blog posts either. and meanwhile it's a little bit discouraging all of the time that the things i care about a lot are not the things that these strangers are drawn to me for

like i basically hid in a cave for 6~8 months to write a chip's challenge emulator, a work of 100% passion-spite, because an update had broken chip's challenge 2 in wine for years and there were only emulators for chip's challenge 1. and i was really proud of it! i think it is cool as hell. i thought maybe it would catch on a little bit. and it mostly did not. i think a few people play it sometimes but i've only seen two people talk about it or even link a level they made with it, and i know them both personally.

that's just how it goes, i know. but it makes me a little nervous for the passion game i've been poking at for years, which i want to try to sell when it's done. how am i going to manage that if i can't even drum up interest in a free game that already has free nostalgia?

we got some minor games press coverage, you know. exactly once. within 48 hours someone had made a vague comment about drama surrounding my spouse, and the editor quietly removed the mention of our game. no one involved ever once tried to contact us.


but then enter twitter's sale and slow demise, and i start poking around the ol' mastodon account and cohost. and i discover that a big flock of familiar faces instantly follow, and many of them are the same people still on the patreon, the same avatars i enjoy seeing in my twitter replies. and i wonder what was even the point of the thousands of twitter followers? even when i am trying to transmute them into a livelihood, did that audience actually help? when the things i really like making are more personal and not this lowest common denominator stuff, does a crowd of strangers do anything?

i look at mastodon and i have 4k followers and so many of them are tech people with photos as avatars. just like the initial swarm on twitter. and i don't know what to post there. i end up only talking about mastodon itself because that's what they expect. i try posting adult art with a cw and i mostly feel a tension, like i've made worlds collide for those people.

i don't think i appreciated how much i squeeze myself into a box on twitter. used to be that my most appreciated tweets were cat photos and half my followers could name them all. that is... somewhat less true now, but i also stopped posting as many cat photos after kf used them to doxx us, so i just bitch i guess and the audience eats it up. meanwhile my timeline is half full of screenshots of alt-right horror figures i blocked eight years ago, seemingly no matter how many of my friends — acquaintances? — i mute.

i don't like it but it's not just the numbers. i still like to know if folks like a thing i said, i think. it's a whole culture, combined with baffling financial incentives, topped off with a half-invented bad reputation that any given person may or may not care a whole lot about. an endless parade of random encounters.

i don't know what to do from here really. i oscillate between feeling like i have a big support network and feeling like i have nobody. i don't know if a new website fixes it — there are already prominent posters here that have had A Problem with me before. will they still have a problem if they see me now? should i try to make only mundane posts so as to stay off their radar? do i keep my head down for the rest of my life?

maybe reposting was a mistake. sometimes i miss livejournal


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in reply to @lexyeevee's post:

[hug]

i resonate with a lot of this. working in tech has been killing me too, and i always thought about starting up a patreon or something - but it never felt justifiable to ask people to pay for my shitposts either. then i also got to a point where shitposting about tech made me feel just as bad as working in tech, and now i don't know what the hell to do. hoping to make some sort of living off making indie games, but i like releasing stuff for free, so...

anyway, thanks so much for writing this up. you're one of my favorite internet people and i'm glad you're here!

omg it's so weird to hear that still. in part because 80% of my tweets for the last few years i look at and i just feel like... who even is this. who wrote this. am i the sort of person who writes like this?

well thank you, and good luck. i'll let you know if i figure out the secret to indie game dev communism

same for a lot of this, ugh. one reason why i have have so many alternate accounts in places, because after a point it's like, you literally cannot just be a person any more

Watching your saga unfold has been heartbreaking, as you've had to grapple with a whole lot of crap coming your way, real life tragedy, internet dickwads and trying to juggle engaging with the audience and monetising your very existence while still making stuff you actually enjoy making and writing you enjoy and everything being big mystery box.

And it's both weird and understandable that you're stuck in this position where actual-photo-as-avatar (I will keep saying "avatar" instead of "profile picture", fight me Gen Z and less terminally online people) when tech insights/jokes brings in that audience, but I still mostly remember you for a combo of Doom + Pokemon + horny furry stuff more than the PHP post or tech hot takes.

Hoping that you can find a new equilibrium that's better and healthier under these current times (even if that seems a bit naively optimistic) and that you manage to get some more interest in your games once Fox Flux is ready for the remastered public demo?

Also, I know it's just a drop in the bucket with living expenses, but I'm finally in a stable enough financial situation (and not getting as many bad brain anxiety worms about it) that I can chip in to your Patreon - going to try and make some time to go over some of the older posts and try out a dev build when I get a chance ^_^;

(Seeing a long post from you on this site is a delight even if the subject matter is grim, and seems like it'd be a good size for stuff longer than a tweet or toot, but not quite blog post worthy?)

i do appreciate being known for Misc Stuff — when people tell me they know me primarily for the php post i feel a little bit like i want to crawl in a hole, haha

i'm trying some things, i guess, like being less ironic on here (which is nice for medium-length low-editing stuff that i didn't even realize i wanted to say, apparently) and i just made a non-tech mastodon to populate and stuff

also thank you, hope you enjoy fox flux and that i can finish making a god damn demo out of it soon

this feels very familiar. there's definitely something bleak about comparing 1. the engagement my art gets on twitter from my 1300 followers 2. the engagement my art gets on my locked masto account followed by 40 friends half of whom live within a train ride distance of me 3. the engagement my random snide remarks about twitter gets on twitter. if my main audience for my actual art practice is just a small group of friends, how do I sustain myself? if my main audience on social media is just there for me posting snark, what's the point of being there at all?

and that's without getting into the crab bucket dynamics you discuss which feel like a poisonous holdover from tumblr and twitter culture, seeped deep into the ground soil of these communities.

thank you for giving voice to what feels like an increasingly common experience of disenchantment with these spaces.

yeah i'm not really sure where to go from here. i guess it's at least nice to have realized in a really tangible way that i'm kinda just ephemeral to most of this audience, and maybe scurrying off to a different website is /good/, because it'll filter them down to the folks who actually have some vested interest

still not sure how to turn that into income but maybe it'll help me feel less fucked up all the time lol

im here from being vaguely adjacent to you for a while in internet spaces and being vaguely aware of what you've had to deal with, (and reading your blog which is very good btw), and im so sorry that all happened

the conflict between "be a Known Figure™ so that hopefully people like that and give you money to live off!", "be a person so that you can maybe make friends", and "hide away so that people don't just suddenly and arbitrarily take issue with you en masse" is a hecking messed up one and i hate it

here's hoping the internet from here on is kinder

online communities really need a vastly more effective weapon against evil people than vague, impersonal, co-optable, profit-driven "Report This Post Or Comment" systems. any community of any size needs a robust ability to drive bad actors out of the community forever if it is to survive, a problem which radically transforms as it scales up. i wish i knew what this means we should do in general, but for now i'm just darkly angry that the kind of shit you went through even happened.

We wish we had anything to add to this than "big mood". The dark effects of clinging to numbers, how stifling the ultra-publicity of Twitter is, ... the longing to return to Livejournal... ... just, yeah.

i think a lot about the gradual move towards the home timeline, and how that exactly parallels twitter getting worse and worse, as it became optimized for making us miserable so they'd get more ad revenue.

I've been following you for a long time, and I respect you both for your technical prowess and your Epic Dunkz. Also, your cats are cute. What you've done with Chip's Challenge is quite literally insane, and I don't think many people could do what you did there.

I hope you keep doing your weird stuff, regardless of how well it does with a general audience. Because the world needs creative people like yourself, you should be free to pursue your interests.

Finally, what's great about Cohost is that there's an incentive to leave a comment instead of just a little heart. I totally know what you mean when you say that Twitter put you in a box; I've had the same realization a few weeks ago. What's the point of going viral if all it brings is harassment and getting copied into BuzzFeed articles? Is that really what we were all collectively chasing?

I hope you continue to be well. Please know that this little heart will keep following you regardless. ❤

Getting harassed like you did is a terrifying ordeal. One of the only things you can say about it once you've been through it is, I guess it's at least good that it's not quite as bad as it once was... and also that I hope you're healing okay.

Cohost is a new and interesting place. In contrast to Twitter, this place feels like it doesn't have any of the kinds of people who make me uncomfortable posting the things I really want to post. I hope it stays that way.

so much of this hits home hard.

and meanwhile it's a little bit discouraging all of the time that the things i care about a lot are not the things that these strangers are drawn to me for […] and i wonder what was even the point of the thousands of twitter followers? even when i am trying to transmute them into a livelihood, did that audience actually help? when the things i really like making are more personal and not this lowest common denominator stuff, does a crowd of strangers do anything?

i spent years chasing the good number on the birdsite, only to find that it was hollow. i didn’t have 500 friends, i had maybe 30 friends, plus 470 people who may or may not have liked one tweet i wrote or thing i made at some point in the past, but on average, would never interact with me again and in practice only made me more self-conscious about what i post.

and i was really proud of it! i think it is cool as hell. i thought maybe it would catch on a little bit. and it mostly did not. i think a few people play it sometimes but i've only seen two people talk about it or even link a level they made with it, and i know them both personally.

very familiar with this feeling. i make stuff, but for a variety of reasons it’s rarely stuff that anyone really ends up caring about. i wish i was content with just making what i want to make, without tying my motivation and self worth to how popular it gets. but i don’t know if “just accept that no one will care about any of the weird things you make” is the best thing to take away from this anyway, even though that might hurt less. wanting the things you make to bring people joy and improve their day is good and healthy, after all.

anyway we don’t know each other, but the things you make regularly bring me joy and improve my day. i appreciate reading what you write about a bunch of things, from game dev to music theory, because of the way you approach learning and solving problems, and i enjoy the cute and hot things you draw. i hope you stick around, find a way out of that box, and someday catch a fucking break from all the harassment.

hiya!

i oscillate between feeling like i have a big support network and feeling like i have nobody

this part in this context really grabbed me because i have related Opinions

basically these days i'm like strongly convinced that public posting feed places are terrible places to have friends in, chat rooms are just far better for that. discord is where i got actual close friends for the first time ever. i'm not even used to writing short posts anymore, my "share thisss" instinct has been entirely rewired towards my chat channels.

that honestly seems like healthier on a deep human level or something like we're meant to spend hours in a lil tavern and only brief moments in the public square