I'm going to experimentally pay for Tumblr's "Blaze" on one of my posts to see what the effect is, if any. I don't plan to use it often, but if I'm using this site as part of my silly little content creator job, maybe it makes sense to advertise some things?

I don't even know what it would make sense to use that feature on, either... posts with my official video releases? Stuff like that article I wrote about the experience of going viral? ... posts about my merch store? (oh god I don't want to advertise the merch store, I haven't added anything to it in ages).

On the other hand, Twitter was never that much of a Business Platform for me, either. That site and app is insanely bad at driving traffic anywhere else, which is part of why its ad revenue was so low depite the huge user base. Getting people to click away from Twitter to anywhere else is like pulling teeth, even for people with million dollar marketing budgets, and so I just... kinda never tried, really. Partly because it never seemed worth the work, partly because it was my personal Twitter before it accidentally became my Business Twitter.

Tumblr in that regard is different though. Four years ago, someone posted an outtake from a shitpost video I did laughing myself half to death over an article about how millennials are killing mayonnaise. That outtake went some degree viral on Tumblr, and that virality did prompt a lot of people to go find the full video on YouTube, making it briefly the most successful video on my whole channel.

So I dunno. Maybe it makes sense to use Tumblr for Business™ in that way. Not that I think I can manufacture a viral hit, of course, but maybe paying to have my work shown to more people on here could be worth it? I guess I'll find out once that Blaze goes through the moderation.

It sorta ties in with a broader pre-post-Twitter reflection I've been having about how I use social media, though.

I don't want to be my job

My personal twitter became my business twitter entirely by accident, and while it was fun at first to have thousands of followers on my personal shitposting, it wasn't fun at all in the long run. At a certain point, usually somewhere past the 10k follower boundary (or if you had the misfortune of having a pre-Elon checkmark), people stop treating you like a person or a fellow poster, and start treating you like a brand, a celebrity (however minor), like a Public Figure. And on the one hand that's good, kinda, because if you have a larger platform, you do deserve more scrutiny. On the other hand, it means you can't be a person on your own social media.

Dark humor, in-jokes, dumb shitposts with friends, dunking on some random hot take, all of that starts to come with the danger that some stranger, who is determined to misunderstand what you post in the absolute worst possible faith, will see it and start yelling about it.

And if, as a person who has a bigger platform, you yell back at them, or dunk on their bullshit... yeah, there's a real risk that you're the one being the bigger asshole, actually. When you have a big Twitter audience, you have some responsibilty for what happens to the things you put in front of that audience. And if you have fans, they might want to defend you, and if you have a lot of fans, some percentage of them aren't going to know how to act or where the line is, and go way the fuck too far.

It's the reality of having a public profile. People will come at you in absolutely wild ways, accusing you of saying absolutely insane things that they have derived from truly deranged (often willful) misinterpretations, and you can't respond to that like a person responds, or you run the risk of being the one who does more harm.

And so you can't be a person on your social media anymore. You now have to be a Public Figure, and if you don't figure that out you're gonna get in trouble. I should have made a private friends-only account on Twitter far, far earlier than I did, I should have made an official brand account far, far earlier than I did. But the only way to know that is in hindsight.

... which leads me back to Tumblr. I've been thinking about Doing Business™ on Tumblr - Blazing my posts, doing SEO, promoting my brand and all that other shit that technically comes with the job I ostensibly have.

I fled back here when I saw Twitter start to torch itself, because I need to post somewhere, but do I need to post for myself, as a person?

Or do I need to post because I am TBSkyen the YouTuber and posting is part of my job, my brand and my online personality which I crafted as a layer of separation between myself and the audience but which has at this point become so entangled with my real self that I don't know the boundaries between them anymore?

Am I going to look back on this and realize, as I did on Twitter, that I should have made a private, friends-only Tumblr account right from the start, and not mixed the personal with the professional and with Posting? I have around 2000 followers right now and this is still fun and casual, but what happens if I manage to luck myself into a real following again? When am I going to dunk on something I think is dumb and cause the person who posted it to receive actionable threats because someone who likes my videos doesn't know how the fuck to act?

Anyway, this is the kind of shit that gets powerblasted through my brain when I pay $10 to make some more people see one of my posts on a website - how's your morning going?

Hi! We are Eight & Lav the hosts of The Fate of Serenity, a YouTube production featuring voice actors, manga/anime artists, a video game record label, special effects artists and editors to bring you something new and different! Saturday morning cartoons are back! Follow Eight & Lav as they track down the shattered remains of the Crest of Twinheart, the source of all magic in their universe, across video game universes backed by a soundtrack of the best video game musicians in the world - Gamechops! Follow us on Cohost and on YouTube to catch a new episode every Saturday @ 8am. Say hello in the comments and tell us what your favorite game is! MUCH LAV!

Despite being my first ‘proper’ cohost post (is it cohost? Co-host? Have we got a Spider-man hyphen situation going on?), this isn’t about the potential demolition of Twitter.

No. Instead, it’s about my monumental and dramatic return to Doing Things. For one reason or another that I won’t bore you with (QRD: got married, was nearly homeless, bought a house, changed Day Job company, got a dog, family bereavement, honeymoon, whole Thing), I haven’t been as consistent in producing Good Stuff in 2022 as I’d like to be. That all ends now(ish).

First things first, I am a game publisher and the first thing I need you to look at is NekoNecro, a high-quality, hand-drawn, immensely polished and frankly nearly AAA 2D platformer from my good friend Jay.

This’ll get a proper rundown post eventually but for now, just, y’know… Go and buy it. Just do that. Trust me. It’s brilliant.

So that’s Jay sorted. I guess let’s do Meeeee.

I run a YouTube channel. It’s called Let's Talk Game Design and it’s all about talking about game design, because I’m very good at naming things. You should go check that out. It’s not had a proper upload in ages (see the QRD above) but that’ll be changing soon. There’s a lot going on there too, so go look at that.

There’s also a couple of things that haven’t made it to LTGD yet. One of them is this.

It’s a sort-of ‘artistic’ story-driven nearly ‘cinematic’ top-down twin-stick shooter with the working title of Enough. I’ll have to elaborate more on this in a video because, looking at it, it doesn’t look like the sort-of thing I usually make. It’s quite a little bit slower and more thoughtful than you’ll have seen from my previous twin-stick shooter coverage (as part of SMASH, which is still coming, which you should check out on That Channel That I Do) and it’s as close as I get to making an ‘art game’.

It’s something I’m hoping to flex one of my stronger but as-yet-unused skills on; writing. I am, believe it or not, a pretty good writer (please don’t take this post as any indication of that, I really like parenthesis when I talk, I don’t write like this, please stop judging me oh jesus no the pain). In fact, I’ve got a couple of novels you’ll be seeing eventually! I’m very multifaceted, y’see. Dunno if you’ll like them, but we’ll get to that at some other point because I don’t have anything to link you to yet.

There’s another thing I’ve just started work on, which I can only really tell you about, because it doesn’t exist yet. See, for my honeymoon, I visited DisneyWorld in Orlando. And as part of that, I rode the very excellent Tower of Terror. When I came off that, I couldn’t help but think “man, a low poly, low res, elevator-based horror game could be really simple and fun”, and oh boy is me thinking things dangerous! So, that might happen, at some point. That’s a thing to think about.

And that’s me, for now! Lot going on, lot to catch up on, will all get posts of their own. But hello world, I am on Cohost. Officially.