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Since my hobbies aren’t part of my comic in any meaningful way my desire to talk about them on social media falls flat. People follow me for this & that’s about it. In theory they might want to see me talk about movie trivia, or something, since there’s a lot of media references, but I tend not to because I feel like the internet at large has that covered to a degree that makes anything I have to say irrelevant. So there’s a disconnect between myself & the point of my social media, which is to promote “my brand”. Really though, the site feeds the social media & not the other way around. People don’t find the comic from twitter, they find my twitter from the comic, or facebook, or whatever. You get attached to the comic & then go to the patreon, hopefully, which I now casually mention seamlessly in the blog posts, like a master salesperson. (XD) Social media rarely helps you find new audience members anymore. At some point, I’m not sure exactly when, every social media platform switched from being useful to feeding only itself.

Do you remember when people used to get discovered on facebook & their shops would have an explosion of sales? It used to be a regular occurrence. When was the last time you remember reading a story about that? I think the last time I can recall was at least 7 years ago. On top of that the things that make my work interesting or compelling are not the same things that make me interesting. The comic is kind of a distillation of the most personable traits I possess, whereas on social media I’m the complete broken, emotionally unstable mess, who pushes people violently away from himself. Trying to resolve that disconnect may be a fool’s errand. I don’t have whatever it is that other creators in my field have that make them successful on social media. My personality basically means that I play every aspect of life on hard mode. If I chose that at the start of the game I made a terrible mistake.

At the same time I see people be assholes openly & get all kinds of support, which I also don’t understand. There’s some kind of magic sweet spot that I can never seem to find. Maybe you need more talent for it to work, or something else. Whatever it is I don’t have it, or I just can’t crack the code. I can’t network very well because other creators almost always infuriate me. It’s sort of a running joke on the discord how I’ve had negative interactions with almost every other well known webcomic creator. Even ones I like for the most part.

a while back I tweeted some advice a guy gave me, in passing, a long time ago. I tagged him in the tweet so it wasn’t like I was trying to take credit, but I also didn’t want people to think we were buddies. So I was like “X guy isn’t my friend or anything, but…” & he was like “We aren’t friends? :(” But really we aren’t. I’ve spoken to him MAYBE 3 times in 15 years. Never in person. Like, that’s not “friends”. That’s acquaintances, or collogues, or peers, or something lower on the scale than friend. But now he thinks I don’t like him because I didn’t want to misrepresent our relationship. I didn’t want to name drop someone like I’m hot shit. I was trying to be the ethical guy & it didn’t work. My interactions with other people tend to have these minor disasters, especially online. so I can’t network, or anything.

I dunno. I’m always the odd one out in every situation. I don’t agree, or I see both sides, or some defect that screws things up, so I have to just be out here alone all the time. You’d think I’d be better adjusted to it by now.