October 2024 Update: Open Ocean

Date: [1st Oct 2024]
Categories: [journey]

Today's Tune: Re-undulate by Kankitsu

There's so much more to see.

Today, October 1st, 2024, is the day Cohost entered read-only mode. That sentence means a lot to some people, including myself, but there's a chance that sentence means absolutely nothing to you if you stumbled across this blog via some method that wasn't me promoting it endlessly on Cohost in the last couple weeks.

In short, Cohost was a website that started in 2022 and will run (or did run, depending on when you read this) until the end of 2024. It's a site that I enjoyed my time on, a site where I made new connections and new friends, a site where I felt seen and valued in an online space where no other website, or app, or platform, or social media made me feel either seen or valued. There were no visible numbers aside from comments. There were CSS crimes. It made posting an art again, rather than an act. Personally, I wouldn't call it a social media platform as it didn't tick the usual boxes that you'd expect to see for social media. When I first joined, I mentally filed it away in my head as a blogging service, but quickly realized that it had something special going on. It offered people a box to put images and writing and code in and share it with no expectations of algorithms and somehow that was enough.

While it wasn't social media, I won't sugarcoat that it developed many of the problems that you'd see on social media in terms of harassment, dogpiling, minorities being shouted down, and the like. I wasn't part of it, I wasn't targeted by it, I didn't see it directly, but I take what others have said about their experience at face value. The legacy that Cohost leaves behind will be picked apart for a long time, I'm sure. My pleasant experience was only one facet of the full experience. Yes, Cohost offered a better experience than what else is out there. It's also important to acknowledge that when the bar is so low that it's in hell, it's not a hard bar to clear.

If there's one thing I've taken away from the last month or so during a year of my life that feels like much of it has shattered to pieces, it's a strange sense of hope. I've seen people start newsletters, spin up blogs, learn how RSS feeds work. These are things I learned about, too; I've maintained a blog for a while, but I never took it that seriously until Cohost announced its closure. There's so many feeds to follow, blogs to bookmark, people to reach out to in the hopes that I'll keep those connections. Some of them will fade away, as happens in life. But maybe some of them will stick. It's been a long time since I felt that sense of newness.

It's given me some hope during a period of my life where things have felt increasingly hopeless. There's a few projects I've wanted to get to for a long time, or I meant to do more of this year and haven't been able to put as much time into as I would have liked. I'm going to put more effort into those things from here on out, as I'm recognizing more and more that there's only so much time available.

So... what's next, anyways?

• Daily Drawing: Starting in 2011, I uploaded something I worked on the previous day, every single day as a form of accountability to myself to draw daily, if only just for a little while. A couple years back I dropped the daily uploads, but taking time to draw nearly every day (taking physical / mental health into account) never stopped. I've considered bringing back the Thing a Day process, but the daily uploads were causing me a lot of stress. Still, I think it'd be good to get back into sharing more WIPs, as a key motivator for me is recognizing that art is not made in a vacuum and does not simply pop into existence as a completed work.

• Comics: Terraform has been at the heart of much of my art for a long time now. I've definitely spent too much time, too many years, trying to get it right instead of just making it. I'm learning to let go of the notion of making it perfect, having restarted it twice now, and pushing myself to complete the tale from start to finish. That said, I also want to give myself some grace, and make next year the one where I really, truly get it going again. I also have Zero XP Hero in the wings, a more recent one where I feel like all the bones are there and I'm motivated to make a greater push for it. Right now it's mostly the core idea and refining characters, but I really like that core idea and the characters so I hope to have more on this in the coming weeks and months.

• Streams: I'd like to get out of my own head and get into streaming more. I had bigger plans for this year but Things Kept Happening and it's been tough to put myself in the right headspace for it, often trying to find the right balance of art and entertainment, worrying about having something ready, being unsure if starting from scratch on a stream will result in anything good, and ending up talking myself out of the process entirely. Repeat roughly the same sentence but with video games, as well, and you've got where I am currently when it comes to streaming. It's something I'd like to change. In fact, it's something I'd like to merge with my next topic.

• OBS Crimes: Somewhat related to the above and with a name that's a bit of a memorial to Cohost's CSS Crimes, I've come to recognize the other side of the coins for streams for me is recognizing my love of the creative process and making overlays, alert systems, and, over the course of the past year, things like Bun-E03's Super Quiz (an automated quiz board) and interactive Gift Shop interface with randomized items and descriptions generated dynamically where people can move a cursor around via chat messages with more features to come. My latest little idea is an MST3K-style overlay where active chatters cause people to show up in seats. It's fun stuff to develop, and I want to make as much of it as I can share-able in ways that others can use it.

• I Still Don't Know About Commissions: This has come up more than once, and while I like the idea of doing commissions, I tend to give myself anxiety over them, fixating on them super hard and agonizing over where they fit in with everything else I want to get done any given day, usually dropping everything else because it's the only thing I can think of. It's very much a me problem, and I have real trouble with the headspace I put myself in.

• Considering Adult Stuff: I've joked in the past about how when I decided to try my hand at an adults-only account on Tumblr, they instituted the "porn ban". When I decided to spin up an adults-only account on Twitter, it got bought out by a depraved billionaire. When I started to create an account on Pixiv for adults-only art, they changed payment processing so that only 18+ accounts with previous transactions could continue to accept payment. To put it bluntly, payment processors fucking suck shit and ruin everything. But I have my own web hosting, and I can do what I want with it. So there's more to consider and explore there.

The last decade and some change has put us all through the wringer, condensing the once-open Internet into four websites all posting pictures of each other to generate capital-C Content in a desperate chase for infinite growth, to skim some money off of someone else's work, to appease Capitalism for just one more day. If there's one big take-away from Cohost that's resonated with me, it's a reminder that we don't need platforms. We have each other. We can make and curate our own spaces. I'm going to do better at curating mine, because one of the greatest forms of creative resistance, at least in my opinion, is to make something not for an audience, but for you and the people you care about most.

We don't need to confine ourselves to little toxic pools. Not anymore. We were convinced that was the only option, but we never had to do that to begin with.

There's a whole open ocean to explore still.