Where My Head's Been At (update)

This update will (attempt) to explain where my head is at, and give context as to why things have been the way they’ve been. It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these and I feel I have a fair amount to say, so now’s as good a time as any. This mostly revolves around revelations of self-teaching and the grindset ideology I’ve been living by for the past year or so.

See, one of the problems with being self-taught is that the lessons that I would’ve just been taught by a mentor, have had to come through long and arduous revelations and epiphanies. I was absolutely stumped and demoralized when my drawings that I thought were great weren’t popping off in the numbers (likes, retweets, etc). This was a problem for me for months, I couldn’t stop thinking about it, especially since I wanted Jinn stuff to be my main source of income. Eventually though, after countless crazy theories and running in circles analyzing my work, I figured it out; I just kept going with my first initial draft of ideas.

Porn is extremely impulsive. It’s very easy just to go with the first idea that makes your boner excited, but that doesn’t exactly make for good or memorable work. However, if I whittled a draft down to a general concept, iterated on that concept, then they’d get better and more refined, more unique. And what do you know, that process resulted in some very successful work. The drawings with Autumn and Chloe out in the cold was one of the first to go through this process: Initially it was just them walking in the cold, then it became Autumn using her boobs to keep her hands warm, then came along the idea for her to use Chloe’s boobs instead.

Now…if you were paying attention in high school English like I evidently wasn’t, you’d realize that this process isn’t exactly anything new or groundbreaking. Ever had to write an essay? Write a rough draft, revisions, then a final? Congratulations, you just went through the exact same creative process I did, without even trying. But because I wasn’t taught these things, it felt like a huge deal. I felt like I unlocked an infinite success glitch that if I could somehow keep up the pace for, I could be on track to having my own nice place and a couple thousand every month in my PayPal.

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I often keep thinking about releasing that one final video that’ll cap off my “career” and allow me to hang up the Jinn jacket for good, and I gain a lot of mental relief from these thoughts. The thought of that “The End” video, releasing all my stuff for free then off I go. However, I realize in hindsight that maybe those thoughts are a sort of translation my brain is using to represent a feeling it can’t really put into words.

The feeling I’ve come to understand now is that the pursuit of trying to “game” the system, to obtain the highest numbers I possibly can, is what’s killing my motivation for drawing. If I was someone like MrBeast, and I had a massive team around me that helped me with this and that, worried about numbers for me (and I didn’t value my mental health), then sure, I could pursue getting the maximum amount of likes with every drawing and animation. 

But evidently I just don’t have that kind of capacity, because after just a couple drawings and animations I felt the burn. I just can’t care that much about the new animation. Not because it’s bad or that I don’t like it, it’s just that my pursuit for perfection has lead me down a dark pit, where I’m not seeing any new likes or Patrons for months, and the only way out is by finishing the animation, but the light is getting dimmer and dimmer. This dark pit is the reason why I made only 7 drawings in 2023. In 2022 I’m pretty sure I made over triple that.

Again, this may seem obvious to you, but if you came to me before I started working on “Free Refreshments” and told me, “Hey, the enemy of progress is perfection, stop chasing likes so hard”, I would’ve laughed at you. I would’ve said I can’t focus on drawing whatever I want, because every fun drawing is just wasted time that should’ve been spent making something that really makes the big bucks, gets me more Patrons. Ironically, it did the exact opposite. That basic, obvious rule of thumb, is the latest in my series of shocking revelations.

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Last time I checked, I had around 85k followers on Twitter (christ almighty). Someone replied to my "need a girl" joke tweet saying that I had been losing followers. I said it's because I don't post a lot. I shrugged it off. After a bit, though, it genuinely got me thinking (that's what I get for playing the cool guy). By taking months at a time just to make one thing, I’m letting them down.

I recently posted a drawing of Chloe with a popcorn bowl resting on her boobs. I had thought of that idea while waiting in the laundromat, and felt a jolt of genuine excitement. The next day, I drew it over the course of two days on stream and had a blast. It’s going to come out on Twitter tomorrow. It’s not going to get a lot of likes. But it doesn’t have to. The way I see it, I need to just start drawing again. 

My drawings don’t get 10k likes each, or my animations don’t hit 20k…who cares? It’s nice, and I can focus on getting a big success every once in a while, but trying for every drawing is just absurd. There’s so many little ideas, so many little character moments that I can draw. The amount of likes and retweets ultimately reflect how novel your idea is, and if I had all the time in the world, I'd make every idea novel and perfect. But sometimes, all you want is some popcorn.

There’s three types of work I can make now:

• The Big Earners. My worked-through, iterated, well-thought-out ideas that bring in big numbers and supporters.
• The For Fun Ones. The ones I do on a whim that don’t earn as much, but exist to a) make my experience drawing more enjoyable and less of like a job, and b) keep fans around, happy, and satisfied, even for only a little bit.
• Commissions. Self-explanatory.

Is there a balance between the three? I believe so, even if it’s 70% Fun, 20% Comms and 10% Big Ones. I’ve begun to think of it as how film directors operate; think David Lynch or Orson Welles or Pes. Those guys made commercials to earn the money to make their full length projects. I’m making fun drawings so I can keep you guys around to support my Big Earners. Upon posting this…update/essay/thing, I’ll see a number of supporters below my name that is absurdly higher than what’s represented by my actual Patron count, which suggests that there are a lot of you just following; waiting in the wings for me to start giving more. If you are one of those people, you’re in luck.

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I never intended to leave you all in dry spells for months, waiting extremely patiently for my next drawing. It just happened because of how I chose to go about learning (alongside other factors like me moving out and a couple mental breakdowns). It would be incredibly ironic for me to have another major revelation and make this whole post meaningless. But let’s hope that doesn’t happen. Something about this feels right…it feels like the right move. Hopefully.