Waggle Waggle Waggle (Patreon)

Haha, I’m having a harder and harder time updating here! Like, I only wanna post something if I think it’ll be Worth Your While and, of course, all my half-formed scatterbrained thoughts don’t feel good enough to waste your time with so I just… don’t update. It’s dumb! I know it’s dumb. Just some irrational performance anxiety that I’m putting on myself. It’s not you, it’s me.

So, here. I’m giving myself permission to give you a jumbled little update and it’s ok that it is not An Essay From My Heart.

Matt and I have recently switched up some of our day-to-day functionality! …Not sure how to word that. But stuff we used to do, we’re now not doing. Or doing differently.

1) Social Media
I stopped reading my replies in Twitter about a year ago and would rely on Matt to pass along the ones that needed a response or whatever. But then with all the harassment and death threats and stuff, that job was fucking with Matt’s mind too, so now we’ve actually hired someone to monitor social media responses for the both of us. That’s so bizarre to me. Like, that’s something an actual celebrity does, not two nerds with a medium-sized webcomic. But, here we are. Once a week our person scans through Twitter and Facebook, relays back a selection of tweets they think are worth seeing, and then documents harassment in a spreadsheet so we can take it to the police when need be. It’s amazing how much of a relief it is to not be looking at this stuff. I mean, not even the negative, horrible things. It’s just not… it’s not healthy to be exposed to thousands of people having thousands of contradicting reactions and opinions about you and your work, be they positive, negative, or in between. Also, now I don’t have to see ten replies to each of my tweets, explaining my jokes back to me [weeping in happiness and relief emoji]. I have about 2/3rds of an essay written about how being on social media is like dating an orgy, but it gets kind of twisted up on itself so I haven’t shared it yet. But I will. It was inspired by the running gag in Zoolander Two, where Hansel is dating an orgy.

2) Scheduling Guest Comics
Ok, so for the last three years we’d only put up guest comics when I physically could not get a comic done on time and when we’d go to visit Matt’s family once a year. Earlier this year I kind of wrecked my health meeting a bunch of intense deadlines and it’s just been becoming more and more obvious that working myself to the point of collapse (literally) just… is not tenable. So now we’re trying this new schedule out! Now we’re SCHEDULING to do a guest comic after every fifth or sixth comic that I complete! Hopefully knowing that I have an attainable reprieve on the horizon will keep me from burning out so hard on a regular basis. The current comic about Vestibulodynia is only the second time we’ve tried out this Scheduled Guest Comic plan so far, and I don’t feel a… huge difference in my health yet. Haha, in fact, the FIRST time we tried this out was the Fursuits comic and then the next week when I was supposed to be back on the clock, that’s when I woke up so weak I couldn’t stand up so we had to use a SECOND guest comic anyway.EL OH EL.

Is this too negative? I don’t THINK it is, but then I look at what I’ve written and it looks like kind of a bummer? Harassment and bad health, bit of a buzzkill. But I don’t feel bad about this stuff! Honestly. It’s just the way life is and I’m used to it so it doesn’t seem like a downer when I think about it? But then I see people’s faces when I talk about it and it’s like ‘oh right, maybe this isn’t what one talks about in polite conversation.’

Hoo boy. Better stop while I’m ahead. Here, enjoy these reference pictures that I turned into an animated gif! (With new Helioscope intern Alissa Sallah “helping” in the background) See if you can spot where this pose shows up in next week’s comic review of the Leo dildo, on September 20th!