Staying Connected, Let's Get Sleepy Concepts, and Recommendations

In the image carousel, Let's Get Sleepy illustrations, one old and one new. I hope they charm and delight you! More on this below, but no, I am not making another Sleepy book.

This week has been a hectic one — everyone is sick, including my partner/wife/significant other/her-own-person, who never gets sick. Plus, the dinguses who run the internet have decided to make the whole place a lot less fun, so I've spent an unpleasant amount of time researching alternative email newsletter providers and wondering whether to delete my Tumblr account.

I've been using Tinyletter for thirteen years to send out the Delilah Dirk Newsletter. Today (the 29th of February, 2024), Tinyletter shuts down. I am sad. They offered a good, useful service, but the misery of this turn is that there are no comparable alternatives. Even if I admit that reliably delivering email is more difficult than it seems, every other provider that offers this service charges exorbitant fees. But they also assume that I want to barrage you with emails, which is not the case. I want to send three or four straightforward emails every year (not week, not month), to roughly 1100 people, and this use case is simply not catered-to. Best case scenario, I can pay $7-$10 every time I want to send out the newsletter.

Meanwhile, Tumblr has changed their practices in unpleasant ways, making users potentially vulnerable to exploitation by Large Language Model and Machine Learning outfits. I wasn't using Tumblr much anyway — juggling social media platforms, it's the one that keeps falling through the cracks — so I'll probably just stop.

Which means if you want to stay up-to-date on Delilah Dirk, the options in order of effectiveness are…

• Patreon. You're already here. Good. Do you get posts emailed to you? I do, and I like it that way.
• The blog RSS. I haven't been updating the blog much, but if you're in the habit of checking an RSS feed (or you get one emailed to you), I assure you that when important things happen, I'll post them there.
• Mastodon. I really like  Mastodon — it's ad-free, there's no algorithm, the platform feels  mature — and I think it's easy to get into. But it's not as guaranteed  that you'll see posts as, say, an email newsletter.
• Bluesky - I have also been posting to Bluesky, which is shaping up well as a platform. Signup is now open to all. But it's also no newsletter.
• Instagram - I have been posting less to Instagram, because it feels like a chore.  Still, it's also the only place I've been posting inking videos like this one and this one.

Lately I've been feeling like the internet is no fun anymore. It's difficult, but I'm going to continue doing what I can to bring lightness and hassle-free pleasure to at least one little corner, and thank you for your understanding as I navigate the rise and fall of these capricious platforms.

^ Above, Sleepy pulls into Beach Station. The train is loosely modelled off of BC's famous Royal Hudson. Below, Sleepy guides the cats through a donut dream-land. The former is a new illustration, the latter was a concept piece from 2017 while I was still working out the story. In that incarnation, Sleepy was a sort of chaperone, escorting the cats through various dream-scapes. Like a tour guide, but more helpful. The finished story is more grounded in reality (sort-of, kind-of, ha ha), so I had almost forgotten about this whole dream-scape angle, but having revisited it recently, I was reminded how much fun it was.

Readers, I owe you the final instalment in my retrospective look at DD2. It will have to wait, for the reasons above as well as the fact that I have an illustration project that I promised to deliver as soon as possible.

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Flatting for Chapter Four of Practical Defence is coming along steadily. Should I reveal that my ambition is to deliver two coloured chapters in 2024? Well, it is. You'll be seeing Chapter Four in full colour soon.

Can I get Chapter Five done before the end of the year? [ I tug nervously at my collar. ]

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Hey, speaking of the internet being less fun, one aspect of this is that it seems like so many decent items of entertainment slip through the social media cracks. For example, many people on my Bluesky timeline are commenting on how the new live-action Avatar The Last Airbender doesn't stack up to the original. 1) Well of course, it was always going to be unnecessary at best. 2) Why isn't anyone talking about good things they like and recommend? Why is everyone wasting their breath talking about things I shouldn't be watching?

A good example of this is Netflix's THE SEA BEAST. It was released in 2022, and despite being supposedly plugged into the animation community, I saw no one talking about it, until Abrian Curington posted about it recently. I haven't watched it yet, but the trailer looks amazing and the reviews are great. HOW DID IT TAKE SO LONG FOR ME TO HEAR ABOUT THIS.

No one seems to talk about the reboot of ALL CREATURES GREAT AND SMALL, but that's easier for me to understand. It's not really "for" my demographic. I grabbed some DVDs from the library, and while the video quality sucks, and the main character gives me cavities, it is gorgeous, and I find it genuinely enjoyable.

I've also just started EXTRAORDINARY — on Hulu in the US and Disney+ in Canada — and it's hilarious and sweet. Thank you to Charlie Jane Anders' newsletter for recommending it, under the headline "The Funniest TV Show You're (Probably) Not Watching."

What else am I missing out on? EXTRAORDINARY will get a second season soon, and I'm sad it's taken me this long to hear about it. I'll bet there are other treasures that I've unwittingly scrolled past. What do you love right now? What's bringing you joy?

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Until next week,
I remain,
hopefully keeping the internet fun,

TC