I don't usually use my platform on here to talk openly about how I feel. I'm not a stoic, and if someone comes to me asking my perspective, I give it pretty freely. I've just avoided dumping whatever stream-of-consciousness nonsense into blog posts that I mostly use as updates.

But a lot happened in the last week, mostly in the online art community, and I'd appreciate my audience indulging me on letting me ruminate for a bit. Because, in the wake of the bird site burning itself to the ground, and that other huge social media platform that most of us have been using as a boomer quarantine throwing away all of its money on a worse looking Miiverse in VR, and all our scrambling to find somewhere new to migrate to... One thing's been made pretty clear to me.

I haven't felt at home on the internet in years.

I want to say it began in the mid 2010s when the lsndscape really started to shift. Even though we credit the early 2010s as the huge change in era with the advent of social media and the smartphone allowing a much greater diversity of people to use the internet, not even something as malleable as the internet can change overnight. It took a while for the effects of All Those Normies bringing their normie shit into the online culture to trickle down into my territory, and it was around this time that I just...

Disconnected?

I stopped being as active in public spaces between 2014 and 2017, only re-engaging with the wider community when I started to play Overwatch and wanted to stack with people of my rank. I think my experiences were still pretty normal at this time, mostly sticking to gaming spaces, and it was right before we all really had to deal with the aftermath of the US's trashfire election results.

The next couple of years were... definitely a change though.

During the Presidency of one Frito McCheese-Puff and his Cabinet of Ass-Clowns, the internet became increasingly more polarized as groups of people sorted themselves into 1 of 2 camps: The people who supported the blatant and continued assault on basic human rights, and the people who weren't really on board with that. And because human impulse decrees that All Shall Wear The Sorting Hat, we didn't just stop at sorting ourselves. We labeled everyone around us as being Pro-Cheeto or Anti-Cheeto based on extremely arbitrary criteria that would never actually map onto a serious pol-sci analysis, but this is the fucking internet, not a respectable environment for academia, so here we are.

It didn't just stop there either. Even when we managed to clean out the Dorito dust from the Presidential office (you know, after the boys came over for a spirited game of Smash Bros that one day in January 2021 that got a bit out of hand), we were all so used to what the online culture had become that we couldn't all just go back to the Shire where things were nice, and simple, and maybe even a little degenerate if the mood struck us. No, now we lived in the New Age, where there's a terrorist around every corner and pop-idol Corona-Chan is doing the kind of world tour most bands only pretend they care about doing. Says nothing for how the old raisin what replaced one of Willie Wonka's wagies in the White House was proving rather ineffective at preserving peoples' basic human rights.

Which means, we were still heavily encouraged to have the attitude of "You are my ally or my enemy." There was no in-between anymore.

And here I am, coming through all that nonsense with a deep, confused feeling of displacement.

I am a lot of things that don't fit easily into categories that tell you who your friends are at a glance. Often I find that, especially with younger people, others don't know what to make of me once they do get to know me. I've made a few friends in spite of that, but mostly, I think people just avoid me. And I avoid giving people a reason to, since I'm both a semi-working artist and also not enough of a dickhead to want to make other people feel uneasy. The last few years have been an exercise in considering others' comfort before my own.

So I end up feeling isolated, apart, displaced. Even unwelcome.

But I guess that also makes this easy, yeah?

I was used to moving around the internet before, and this rigid structure where a few sites own everything on it - and especially this culture that cropped up on those sites - have felt like some kind of prison for years, and the last week has left me feeling like I've finally found an escape route.

It's not that tragic to me, really, that a few billionaires are bringing about the end of an era via their own stupidity. The say fools and their money are easily parted, and I guess that's true here. I've already started shopping around for new places to be, checking out the common recommendations like Cohost and various Mastodon servers. Even revived my Tumblr, because why not? Pretty funny watching the mass exodus from the burning bird site back to the anti-sex hellscape tumblr became but maybe it's gotten fun in the last few years?

Hell, I'll probably even stay on Twitter until it dies, just because all the brands left en masse so now all that's left are journalists, shitposters, and the few artists/creatives who plainly do not give a flying fuck about anything going on in the world because they got bills to pay and an SEO gremlin to feed. It's honestly more fun on there now that funny car man has broken half of it anyway. Well besides the swath of emboldened dipshits who sub out having a personality for being bigots in others' feeds, but I guess Twitter refusing to kick out bigots is a pre-existing condition anyway. (Why do you think Muskrat Man was still there in the first place?)

Well, anyway, I'll make a more concise post that details wherever you can find me. I might also remove my Twitter from my NG page, but for now, it's a good way to verify my identity between accounts. And obviously, I'll still be on NG. I've had a lot more success here than I get on larger sites like dA. (And dA has gotten pretty creepy anyway.) For now, this is just some random blurb of thoughts I have about the state of the internet and my place on it.

Realize this is a pretty chunky read, appreciate whoever put up with it. It's just some stuff I've thought about for a while and wanted to get out there.

Now back to our regularly scheduled bullshit... (And by that, I mean procrastinating on this project that should've been done a month ago, heh.)