So, the internet, right?

It’s a mess these days. A goddamn mess, and it’s built that way specifically to boost the profits of a few major corporations. You can’t find anything because the more time you waste on a website, the more you’re “engaging” with it. That’s growth, and growth is what we sell to stock investors, so growth is good, even if the product is objectively terrible. You can’t find anything on Youtube, Twitter is a bird’s nest and the bird is dead, and I haven’t logged into Facebook in years because I realized it never once recommended a good book and the faces weren’t amazing either.

And here was my website, doing nothing but pointing to social media and messy websites that don’t actually help you find anything I ever made or did. Part of my site’s old design was born from a feeling of hopelessness. Why bother actively maintaining my own website when I know the company that owns Youtube also controls search and discovery for websites too? Generally, my thought was, “they’ve won, who am I to argue?”

It wasn’t that those sites promoted me better than I could promote myself. It was that I knew they’d created an ecosystem where the quality of their promotion is all that matters. That is, until I decided to make my own pizza crust one day, and after finding a really good recipe once, it vanished. Simply gone. I had to re-create it from memory as best as I could, experiment with the ingredient proportions until I got it right, and then had to write it down myself. I realized, that bread recipe is going to be me eventually. If I just let Google hold the wheel, it won’t matter the quality of what I do, eventually I’ll vanish away and it’ll be impossible to find me ever again.

So while I can’t get my website easily found in a predatory SEO system, I can at least use my website to present an organized list of interesting things I’ve done so that, if you were curious, you can find those things without any frustration. Just pull down the menu and click something that sounds good, it’ll take you directly to a playlist with that whole series all lined up, in order. I put all of “Stebe Boy Hotdog” and “Simiantelligent” on the website, so you don’t have to read it on Webtoons. I also uploaded some old desktop wallpapers made for Patrons, because it’s been ten years since they were made, but it’d be a shame if nobody else ever saw them – they’re quite pretty pieces.

At any rate, the one place that metrics are showing any growth or new viewers is on this website, likely from people discovering the “We Will Not Play DnD” podcast. Those numbers aren’t taking off or blowing up, but they’re steadily rising, bit by bit, in the way you might expect for a small, hard-working little enterprise that still has people to reach. The way that you used to see on the internet back when “subscribe” meant you’d get notified of new content you wanted to see instead of based on what the platform felt would be more “engaging”. That means, if this keeps up, eventually the website is probably going to be more of a hub for anything I do than any social media site, if only because the social media sites are so willfully negligent.

To some, I may sound like a bitter old man ranting at a changing world, but I’m going to leave it off with this: the last time I built a web page with WordPress, cPanel had a button I could click that would install WordPress directly with no fuss nor complication. Today, when I went to go do it again, the software told me I would need to pay for a premium version of “Softalicious” to gain the ability to install WordPress. WordPress is free. Not only free, but also obscenely easy to install: you drop a file into your root directory and then extract the files. That’s it! And that, in a very precise nutshell, is the difference between the internet today and the internet ten years ago. When I was young, the people trying to trick you into paying for Limewire were scammers and criminals, but today, those same people are running the whole place.

I’ve said this before, but when you know tomorrow’s going to be worse, the best time to get things done is today.

I depend on support through Patreon, so anything helps! Never donate through the Apple App, because they’ll swipe 30%. I’ll update the website with short posts whenever new podcast episodes or etc go online.