Happy Friday afternoon.
I got sick this week. Probably caught a bug from the mall. After a few days of rest and lots of liquids I think I’m mostly better.
Made progress on the next issue of the Endless Monday Monthly. Spilling out my guts for the Words Korner. Now I need to rearrange it all into a coherent column. Also wrote out the comics and sketched out the panels, and got the okay from the next artist for the next Artist Interview. So far, so good!
I didn’t get a lot of art done on account of my being sick, but I did tweet a lot.
Stuff about Twitter
There’s a lot of uncertainty and confusion around what’s going on on Twitter right now. My entire timeline is artists linking to other places they can be found in the case Twitter just goes away. I’m generally skeptical of grave predictions of existential doom that happen every once in a while (like when the wording of some terms of service changes or some hot new Twitter-killer app For Artists is announced or whatever) but this time around, I actually think it’s a matter of time before Twitter just goes down and doesn’t come back up again for days or weeks or months or forever. Like the PSN outage, except people actually depend on Twitter being up to do their jobs, or find clients, or disseminate important info during crises, or any other stuff more important than video games.
The new owner of Twitter single-handedly gutted the entire company, first by firing half the company immediately after taking over, and then incentivizing the rest to leave with a frankly bewildering ultimatum, promising terrible working conditions for people who stick around. Departures include entire teams of highly knowledgeable staff critical to the stability of the platform. Not to mention all the global compliance and regulations and FTC consent orders that need a bunch of lawyers and experts to navigate (also fired or resigned, probably costing the company billions in future fines it absolutely cannot afford).
I’m seeing lots of Experts with 8 dollar Blue Checkmarks talk about how Twitter isn’t actually doomed or whatever, but no one’s saying Twitter’s going down because of some closed offices (as if the servers live there or something) or because the algorithm changed or something comparatively small like that. When it goes down, it’ll be because one of a hundred different possible reasons within the distributed system breaks and no one knows how to fix it because the entire SRE team is gone, or because of some security breach by bad actors (security teams gone), or some major privacy incident caused by some bad push (privacy and compliance teams gone). The fact that it’s still running is a testament to the reliability of the systems that Twitter built over the years since the Fail Whale was a thing, but at some point some alarm is going to go off and the poor engineer on-call won’t be able to fix it because the subject matter experts were all fired. And these major incidents can be very complicated and difficult to recover from, even with all the experts at the top of their fields working on them.
Here’s a good thread about many of the things that can bring down Twitter (or any big web service) at any moment. It’s quite accurate based on my own experience working in the same field at a large tech company.
I’ll actually be very surprised if Twitter can survive the World Cup (which starts this weekend) without breaking in weird and terrible ways. Typically huge events like this require dedicated staff hardening and scaling up the infrastructure in advance to weather the immense spike in load, but, you know. Otherwise, it’ll break a little bit at a time, as problems pile up and the skeleton crew left is too overwhelmed to fix them all. Until, *pbbfffpbbbpffbfbbfffhhh*.
Anyway, doom and gloom aside, it was a nice li’l community bonding moment all around. I guess the fear of never seeing your friends again (especially the people I like seeing interacting with each other on my timeline, but never really had the chance to get close to) has that effect. Twitter is so important to the art community, not that the new owner knows, or cares, about that. What a sad time this is. I also posted more text on Twitter than I probably ever have, but to my surprise, people didn’t seem to hate it. Which is good. I just can’t seem to shut up. Subscribe to my newsletter.
It was also a nice boost to my other socials. Even if Twitter goes away, I can still be niche internet microcelebrity!
If you’re on Twitter right now, why not spend some time following your favorite artists on their other platforms, too? Just in case, you know? Mine are here, by the way: https://hcnone.com/links/
In other news, I was thinking about how I could use a tiny bit of my career experience and use it in a cool and productive way with this little art community, and was thinking I’d just write up a few articles on the basics for setting up your own internet presence, eg. setting up your own website, domain name, shop, different services I’ve tried, etc. I figured it might be helpful, especially in this climate where there’s the ridiculous possibility of a big critical social media platform just straight up disappearing.
Okay so, for the rest of the weekly wrap-up…
Stuff I drew
Nameless bunny-suit character
lol. Idk. Whatever.
Persona 3 Female Protagonist aka Kotone Shiomi
A commission request. The last request in my queue, and now I’m probably not doing requests or commissions again, because (while I’m pretty happy with how all my commissions turned out) I’m still bad at drawing stuff for other people for money. It stresses me out. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll try again later.
Yeah, so, only 2 pieces total this week. I was sick. You’re not my boss. (unless you’re a paid supporter, in which case, sorry, Boss)
Since Twitter is circling the drain, my plan for art (when I’m no longer sick) is to just draw whatever and post garbage there until it dies a stupid death. So next week should have way more art. Making lemons with lemonade, as they say. Wait…
Cool art
Just look. I love this artist.
Which was a follow up to my Halloween drawing for 33_dott:
Anyway, what an honor to do this fun little art trade thing together.
Other Stuff
DJMAX Respect released their third Extension type DLC this week, which is really cool. I’ll be playing it this weekend. The game and all its DLC is on sale this week to mark the event, so it’s a good time to get ‘em all. Highly recommended if you’re interested in rhythm games at all. One of my dreams is to make art for this game in the future. One day…
Ok, I think that’s it for the week. Have a good weekend! Hopefully Twitter will still be around for the next one!
The paid content today is a 30% off coupon code for the hcnone shop. I’ll also throw in a random Skye postcard print ($5 value) for free if you use the code. Wow, it’s already worth it! Also some sketch versions of previously posted artworks, because why not. Also, my eternal gratitude.
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