July 2023 Dispatch
For a week or so, I’ve been thinking about tweeting something like “hey, if you’re a creator who uses Twitter to connect with your audience and you haven’t set up a presence somewhere else—be that Mastodon, Tumblr, BlueSky, Cohost, whatever—then you’re putting your business at risk.” But I hesitated about posting it to Twitter directly, because I wanted to say other things and wasn’t sure about formatting a tweet thread. Finally, last Friday, I decided “I have a Dispatch coming up on Monday, I’ll just say it then.”
Oh irony. If you haven’t heard, on Saturday everyone suddenly found that they were limited to reading 600 tweets a day, unless they paid for a blue check in which case it was 6,000. The site’s owner claimed that this was to prevent scraping, but numerous smart people have noted that (1) that is not how you prevent scraping, and (2) throttling bandwidth looks a lot like what happens when you don’t pay your platform bills. Anyway, there was another exodus to BlueSky (which temporarily shut down signups as a result) and Mastodon (as I noted from a small spate of follows there) and probably some other places.
Look, if you want to stay on Twitter, that’s fine. I maintain my two writing accounts there for business reasons because there’s still an audience there, but I’m not really posting anything personal (I do like and retweet, but sparingly) because I can’t bring myself to draw more engagement to that site. The owner is pushing transphobia openly—just recently he boosted a transphobic documentary and declared that “cis” would be considered a slur—and making the site friendlier to right-wingers. The thing is, even if you remain on Twitter, a lot of furries (and others) are fleeing. Your audience is going other places, even if it might not feel that way from your follower count. The site itself might remain up for some time, but its reach is already suffering.
I’ve moved my presence to Mastodon and am enjoying it. It’s not without its own problems, but a lot of furries are there. In a couple recent promotional posts that I made on both Twitter and Mastodon, Mastodon posts got about half the engagement that Twitter did, already. You know which direction that balance is moving, too. I’m @kyellgold@furries.club, so if you’ve just moved over there, look me up! I have not felt very motivated to post recently, but I’m trying to be more active.
If you don’t know where to start with Mastodon, the first thing you have to do is pick an instance. There are a lot of them, but it’s easy enough to switch and it doesn’t matter too much which one you pick. If you want to post 18+ content, check the server rules; most furry sites allow it but require you to mark it sensitive (easy to do). Then go to the instance’s main page to request an account, and they’ll walk you through the rest. When you log in, you’ll see three timelines: all the other posts on your instance (Local), the posts of everyone you’re following (Home), and the posts of all the servers your instance is connected to (Federated). I usually stay on Home myself. A lot of people have their Mastodon usernames in their Twitter bio, and you can find other people by following your friends and seeing who they boost (retweet). It might seem daunting but it’s really quick to get your basic timeline set up.
Anyway, in June I finished a draft of the sequel to Unfinished Business, called Wolftown 2 until I’m settled on the title What Life Remained, which I’ve second guessed a couple times. I want to see if anything comes out of the text, but so far nothing’s jumped out at me except maybe For The Living, but I don’t think I like that as much.
I also started writing that horror story I talked about last month. I’m excited with how it’s going and can’t wait to share some of it with you!
This month is gonna be busy because we’re going to ComicCon again. I’m hoping to get a few copies of Price of Thorns to sell there, but even if not I’ll be at our booth (#1236) for a few signing times over Thursday-Saturday. Check my Mastodon feed ( ;) ) for details. FurPlanet did have pre-release copies of Price of Thorns at AnthroCon and sold out of them, which was very cool. It’s up for pre-order at Amazon, and if you’ve already gotten it, that means you can leave a review there when you finish it! Reviews help so much, and pre-orders also help (though if you want to wait and get it from Argyll, I don’t blame you).
Books: Audiobooks: we are working on getting The Mysterious Affair of Giles, Winter Games, and Titles done and available to you. All three have been recorded and are now under our review to send back to the narrators for minor corrections. Return From Divalia is available everywhere now. If you have read and liked it, writing a review is one of the most helpful things you can do for it, and it’s free! (It doesn’t have to be on Amazon, but that’s still where most people go for their books.)
Other upcoming releases:
The Price of Thorns: Scheduled for November 2023, some pre-release copies available at conventions, pre-order at Amazon. In a fantasy world where stories are woven into the fabric of magic and life, Nivvy the thief is hired by a mysterious woman, and this job will change his life in ways he could never have anticipated.
Squeak Thief: Complete but not scheduled yet, maybe late 2023. A rich mouse hires a fox thief to steal from his own family, but the job quickly spirals out of control.
In progress: Robin Hood fanfic and Ty Game sequel (on Patreon), Wolftown 2, untitled fantasy world project.
Streaming stuff:
White House Plumbers (MAX): Woody Harrelson (as Howard Hunt) is great but Justin Theroux is amazing as G. Gordon Liddy in this drama-with-jokes about the Watergate scandal and the two nutcases at the heart of it. The humor is largely of the “can you believe these guys” variety, and given what they’re being asked to do and what they actually do, it’s fair to ask whether emphasizing the comedic is a good way to approach this material. I think there have been enough serious treatments of Watergate that it’s probably good to laugh at them, especially as this series makes clear that that’s the thing they would probably hate the most. Lena Headey, Judy Greer, Ike Barinholtz, and Domhnall Gleeson round out a terrific cast, and the writing is very sharp.
Nimona (Netflix): I’m a sucker for a good shapeshifter movie and this is a very good movie with a very good shapeshifter. On top of that, it’s a queer movie and then an even more queer movie, and while it follows a good pattern of beats, I couldn’t always predict what the next beat would actually be—or I was absorbed enough in the story that I wasn’t trying to. The setting, a contemporary world that’s grown out of a medieval one and still retains the trappings of it, was really interesting, and the characters, though not terribly complex, were fun and distinct. Plus, there are a couple moments that made us all go “oh, this is a furry movie,” and it wasn’t just the three or four scenes that felt exactly lifted from Zootopia (I mean, if you’re going to lift scenes, that’s not a bad source).
Love and Death (MAX): The based-on-a-true-story series about an affair in a small Texas town and the murder that resulted from it. Elizabeth Olsen and Jesse Plemons are great, and the supporting cast are also very good. The story seems true-ish to life in that it wanders a bit and I finished it wondering what the point of it was, but the performances were all excellent (I found myself appreciating the lawyer maybe most after the two stars).
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (theaters): We all loved Into the Spider-Verse, and Across is a very worthy sequel. Love the characters and the worlds and the story and the style and I don’t want to say more about it because I’m afraid I’ll spoil something, but I loved this movie.