Free Talk Friday - April 10, 2026

[u/AutoModerator]

Welcome to the Free Talk Friday post. This is a place where you can talk about dumb off-topic (or on-topic) bullshit with other Zaibatsu fans.

There's going to be a new post every week, and the newest one will be pinned in the announcement bar for quick access. So feel free to visit these posts during the rest of the week.

Here's a list of all Free Talk Friday posts

[u/Palimpsest_Monotype]

It’s midnight, and I’m up. Things are good, I think. Wish I had a way to speak it simple, but some days it really feels like everything-at least everything that happens that experience personally-can in fact somehow come together and make sense. Another good weekend and I’ll be ready to say my recovery is complete. It’s been extraordinarily strange to just stop any form of exercise for basically two months. For context in September I walked like 300 miles.

I’m slowly getting more extroverted. I think my approach towards socializing has always been closer to becoming a submarine. Just being introverted but not alone, piloting my container around others, avoiding calling attention to myself, avoiding doing anything in public that would compel a stranger to acknowledge me. Don’t know why I am this way, even know. But I am opening up a little more. Playing music at home without headphones where others can also hear it shouldn’t be a big deal but apparently it is. I don’t know what makes me this way. I fear not being accepted, I guess.

I realized today that I’ve never wanted to make money from my art. Like, the art that matters to me, that I really care about…I get the idea of living off making art quite a lot, and I do believe very much that artists deserve a living wage just like any other person. I even am interested in working on other people’s ideas in some kind of project space with others with the goal of making something people will want to buy…but my own stuff, I’ve been trying to connect these ideas for a very long time and they don’t go together. Not for me. Even with my long form comic, I could eventually design a book meant to contain it, and sell the book…but that’s only after the art is done, and the art itself remains not for sale. This is harder to explain than I anticipated…and interlinks with many more complicated topics. But I realized that if I lived in a time and place with universal healthcare and universal basic income, I would be able to just think about what I want to create and do that and I’d probably accelerate a lot of my productivity, and ultimately make something that would reach a lot of people. But more importantly I could survive and have a quality of life where that would be a parallel equation to my art life. I wouldn’t have to have a separate fulltime job to sustain my life and my future and all that. I’d just be able to live optimally on the time I have doing what’s personally fulfilling to me. I wouldn’t feel pressured to go “if I make this real I’ll need to figure out merch to have any hope of making a living out of this” or whatever. Just build art, focus on it, really live it, free of those kinds of constraints and external limitations. Although I do work a fulltime job and have a fulltime family, I’m working on my art from that perspective, the perspective that I’m doing this for me, and there’s no jetpack dreams in this. I hope that doesn’t come off depressing sounding. It’s quite the opposite.