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The Old Roads

🕑 Added 2019-09-27 02:00:06 +0000 UTC

Comments

Tim J.

It had a really great use for keeping up with a large swathe of people in one place. When I followed a few artists and only used it to send notification of any posts I made, it was a brilliant tool to just do little updates in a limited amount of characters. But as I followed more people, from broader creative fields, it started to fall apart. Suddenly I was scrolling for over an hour to keep up with art posted, or music, or people's lives. I'd been talking with a friend who said the best thing he ever did to survive that place was to cut who he was following down to a few friends and favourites, and to utterly cut out celebrities. He made a very good point that the most well meaning were the 'celebrities', because they wanted to use their visibility to shine light on things going wrong. But they were the absolute worst for that as well, because it would draw out the most venomous people. Once he cut all celebrities from his feed, he said he could catch up in 20 min. and not think about the site again. In the long run, this will be good for my brain I think. I'm already feeling a lot less anxiety each day, which has itself caused a huge uptick in what I do creatively to fill the time. So far it seems pretty good :)

Tim J.

For all of its faults, Twitter did have one very good use: Quick updates to a broad audience in one place. I started using it to literally let people know when I uploaded an update here, or on FA. This quickly deteriorated when I started following more people, and then reading the 'feed' to see if any artists I followed posted art/updates there that inspired me. Celebrities were the worst to follow. They tend to be bullhorns about social and political wrongs. I can't fault them, they do have more visibility they can shed on these issues, but it quickly boils into a wall of 'wars you should fight'. These days we are presented not with just a handful of problems from a handful of people, it is every 'war' that every person insists you need to scream about at all times. The problem is it becomes a blur when they all try to scream louder than the other. The straw that broke for me was watching people literally unloading the most vitriolic, loathesome, mentally-and-criminally insane screaming at a child. They were screaming things that any rational, sane, normal person wouldn't scream at another adult, at a child. I guess I'm far too old for the 'social' media these days. There isn't anything social about it. There is only screaming. Constantly. Not conversations, just a room full of people trying to yell louder than the others, because their cause is more righteous, and their opinion is the only perspective that matters. It turned people into the most socially isolated echo chambers I have ever seen in my years. In the end, I just don't need everyone elses war. I have my own to fight, and I stopped being interested in the false sense of selfishness that is bred into us if we stop running from fire to fire. Plus I've been getting so much more done during the mornings without scrolling around on that site.

Tim J.

I had pondered finding one of those 'template' sites that I had seen being bantered around a few years back, but found that many were very geared towards business or 'generalist art' and abstracts. The couple I had narrowed down to had rules against posting anything with nudity in it (Which is their right, they have to cover themselves to ensure no legal action be taken in case some idiot goes to far). While little of my work has adult subject matter, it does feature nudity from time to time (What can I say, I grew up on 70's and 80's fantasy, which had a lot of that). I used to just make my own sites over a decade ago, which was fun, but these days I'm so behind on site coding and time that it just wouldn't be feasible unless I hired someone, or found a site that just offered up a template. Tumblr was a good choice until they decided to swing to far into 'burn everything' territory. For now, though, Patreon seems pretty good. While they ask that nothing controversial or 'not for general audiences' be posted in the non-patron feed, they do offer a way for me to post in a blog-like fashion, at least until I find an alternative.

Tim J.

I think the only social media I've ever actually liked was Google+. largely because you could put literal limits on what you would see, and people couldn't 'retweet' anything. So largely the subject matter was on a more personal and observational level. Twitter is just this giant chamber of screaming, and retweeting the worst of society I found. Either way, here's to calmer days going forward :)

Tygepc

Glad you got off that site and are supporting your mental health. Good job! Good luck on figuring out where and how to post. The most stable and reliable source I've seen is getting your own website, but that's not always an option. Good luck and keep being the awesome artist we all know you are.

Jonathan David Shukert

I could never get into social media, as it tends to quickly become way too anti-social. I fully support your decision and hope that you are now able to live a happier and healthier life for it.