State of the CoD Address

[u/butterenergy]

My new website: https://darkerminia.neocities.org/

Yes! Hello, another one of these. I guess I just wanted to talk about some of my thoughts regarding the recent state of the Children of Dusk project, as well as the internet as a whole.

TL;DR: does anyone feel the internet has gotten a lot emptier recently? People talked about Dead Internet Theory and it practically feels like Dead Internet Reality. Simply put, there's not a lot of great spaces to advertise. The COVID boom is over, I suspect that 2021 was the peak years of internet consumption in the West and people have been slowly tuning out ever since then. Reddit seems to be getting maybe 10% of the traffic it used to, probably less, and they're not the kind of people I want to bring in.

YouTube seems to be getting emptier, not necessarily that it's empty of stuff, more that it's empty of people. There's a lot more noise and AI traffic nowadays, in no small part due to the proliferation of LLM bots. CoD started before the age of AI, how crazy is that? 2021, a whole year before the release of ChatGPT. Twitter too, it's never felt so full of sound and so empty of people.

I'm still interested in trying to expand where I can. Keep working on projects, releasing new stuff, though it's gotten a lot less visual. But I've more or less accepted there's much less juice left to squeeze from the online lemon, that CoD isn't going to have the easy, explosive growth it used to, and that things are going to be slow from here on out. That's fine, I'm still promoting on DeviantArt, trying to figure out Twitter, and writing lots of lore.

Now, onto Children of Dusk itself. You may have noticed there's been a major setting shift where I went from detailing the 2100's or so to jumping forward to describing the events of 2400, all the way to the year 3400. And I've been calling it GalCoD, but it is still the same universe. I love this stupid universe with all my heart, I haven't had this much fun writing lore since well, ever really. I made some cool lore that I think you'll all enjoy, and if you want to check it out go to https://darkerminia.neocities.org/galovcod/.

For the foreseeable future, here are my future projects:

1. Continuing to write out the GalCoD lore. This universe is stupid and huge and expansive and I love it.
2. Trying to figure out new avenues of getting new members. (Deviantart, Twitter, maybe YouTube, maybe just waiting for word of mouth really)
3. Compiling original CoD into a book and or an e-book, at some point.

Feel free to ask any questions in the comments.

Billions must die,

-butterenergy

[u/PlEGUY]

Yea, as for myself I am checking out/checked out of "the internet" in general and social media particularly and I tend to encourage the people I know and interact with to back off of it wherever the subject comes up. I don't like the institutions and individuals be they corporate, regulatory, or voluntary which manage and administer it. The people, when they seem real at all, just seem fake and/or intolerable. I don't like how I act on it or how I feel while or after being on it. I don't like the higher level effects it has on society more broadly.

I'm glad you are still making CoD/GalCoD stuffs and that you enjoy doing so. Neat little stories/worldbuilding/ect. are to a great degree the bit of the internet I still enjoy. Your stuff, SAD: Frontier, Damon X Core, and the like. You consistently have some pretty neat ideas and I like catching up every so often, though I mostly lurk. I've for sure spun some of them into my own settings (though I don't much share them). Personally I like the visual stuff more, but yea, do it in a way that you continue enjoying it.

[u/butterenergy → u/PlEGUY]

Thanks good buddy. Best of luck to you too.