My world's on fire, how 'bout yours?

I use lyrics to title things a lot, even when the song isn't really relevant. I still find it amusing that I have an EPIC action-drama-romance MLP fic that's entirely Beatles themed. Why? Because Pinkie Pie romance in the first chapter = Honey Pie in my brain for a moment, and I just rolled with it.

I was re-reading that yesterday, because I've been comfort-reading a lot lately. My brain is MUSH and I have no spoons but I finally blocked myself from reddit for "mush-brained, time-wasing reading" so I have to do other things, and reading my own stories takes zero energy. I know what's going on, I don't have to parse anything, but I still like my own words. I write them for myself first, after all, not for an audience.

On the topic of audience, though, and getting back to everything being on fire...

Twitter.

Yeah.

The memes have been impeccable, and watching Musky Boy burn 44 billion in real time has been fun, but, well, twitter is sort of all I've got right now. It's the one, sole, single platform that's got a good community for writing stuff, sewing stuff, fandom stuff, furry stuff, queer stuff, horror stuff... All the stuff I do, including and especially NSFW stuff. There's NO other social media platform where I can effectively advertise 100% of my stuff. Literally. None. And that's a bit of a problem, given I make my living selling all the above stuff.

All the places that at least allow most of it have various other problems, compared to twitter. Like, furaffinity allows most of it, but it's SHIT for the written word. Sofurry is a little better for writing, but it's very small and I've never gotten much traction there. AO3 allows all the stories, but no advertising that I sell them

And so on.

Here, of course, also allows All The Things, in a way I like even better than twitter's laissez faire "we don't bother to ban anything" approach. Buuuuuuuuuuuuuuuut I can hardly make a living if my marketing reach is counted in single digits. Not unless one of you wants to be my single fabulously-wealthy patron, a la the Medicis. :D Would I love to be a kept artist? Fuck yeah. Is that gonna happen? Fuck no. Alas.

So yeah. I'm feeling immensely stressed out by all this. I've been feeling that way for a while. Having twitter be my one and only functional marketing tool really bothered me for ages, and here's why. If it crashes hard enough, things are going to be hairy.

Also my social life will minorly crater? I am making a point to put up content and try to grab a following in a lot of other places. Postybirb is a nice tool for that, since I don't have to craft individual posts for all the places, I can just click a couple of extra buttons for each site I tack on. It's even gotten me using pillowfort again! But that's for posting, for hanging around and shooting the shit with people, twitter and discord are where I'm at, and so when twitter goes, there are people I like that I don't know if I'll manage to keep in touch.

One can have the best of intentions, but if one's social media use and theirs don't end up meshing, you lose touch. There's people I exchanged off-site contacts with when livejournal crashed and burned, and I'm still in touch with some, but I haven't talked to others in years.

The whole mess is annoying and stressful and I'm not happy about it, except for the bit where I can laugh at how stupid Musk is, and even that bit is frustrating, because he shouldn't have been in a position to buy twitter in the first place.

I'm always glad you fine folks are here to babble at! Don't get me wrong there! Just...a guy's gotta pay the bills, including damn expensive vet bills, somehow, and DW isn't the place for that. I don't know what will be, going forward.

P.S. If any of you do want to socialize with me in a more casual way, my personal discord server is here: https://discord.gg/PPumsuwT and I'm Aidan#7687