3002 Clear And Sincere.

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I really wasn’t sure if the previous page was going to land properly when I wrote it. I went with it because in the moment it felt correct. It’s hard to judge something like that because an audience isn’t usually a single entity you can predict. A few people clearly indicated they understood what was going on between them though so I felt like I had done a good enough job for most people to get to more or less the correct understanding. In the old days it was pretty common for people to be waiting for the next page to drop so I got comments often moments after I posted a page. I always found it reassuring to get that first comment and was able to sleep better, or relax more easily. That kind of culture online doesn’t really exist anymore. It was a huge deal to have your new page up by midnight way back when. If it didn’t show up people would start tweeting at you. That kind of thing hasn’t happened in a long time. The same amount of comments appear eventually now. Whenever people feel like checking in. All culture has changed, not just online culture, but this is the only aspect where people seem less intense about it now. I couldn’t even tell you for sure when it stopped. After covid maybe? Everything’s such a haze in my memory I just don’t know. I remember waiting to read the new pages for the webcomics I used to read to appear each midnight for years, but as they ended one by one nothing filled the space and it stopped being a habit. I hold myself to the midnight posting schedule mostly to give myself structure now. That said, I also want people to feel assured that it will be there when they decide to check even if they don’t want to wait till the middle of the night to see it. I’ve been in this long enough that I’m kind of a vestige of an internet that doesn’t really exist anymore. My nature is to hold to doing things the same way essentially forever unless something absolutely stops me. I’m not sure how much of that is just me being odd, or human nature, or upbringing. A lot of people who used to do webcomics moved on or evolved to doing other things, if they didn’t just vanish. Sometimes I wonder what became of some of them.
It’s kind of funny now that I think about it because I often get comments like “I used to read your comic back in high school and I suddenly thought of it and was pleased to find it still here, and still updating!” I’ve become something of an internet porch light waiting for people to come back home to me. I don’t particularly yearn for that older version of the internet. Maybe some parts of it but I’m not pining for Myspace or anything. Maybe talking about how things are different now is just a function of getting older. Although I sort of feel that I’ve always been prone to looking back over change in this way. I guess I just don’t have a lot else to talk about. Webcomic things are still a primary thought for me even though I’m largely cut of from any kind of peer culture that may exist now. I think social media kind of destroyed what it built in that area over time. Once it turned into endless arguments, virtue signaling, purity testing, and mob rule a lot of people just kind of wandered away or left it to push out updates. It became way too easy to lose an audience than it was to gain one and that reduced the value to near zero.
Ah well, whatever. I have better things to do that go over this stuff. I’m sure you do as well. To that end I will wish you a pleasant and safe weekend. I’ll see you on Monday. Until then, change all your passwords.