Well, after 15 years of using this new fangled "Twitter" thing for microblogging, that's enough of that. Back to normal ranting.

(For the record, this is not a rant about twitter, it's about me and the internet over the last thirty... years... oh geeze, it's been that long?)

When Twitter was just a new thing, i kinda liked the idea of using it for quick micro blogging (since i was such a slacker about writing rants) so i added two new twitter accounts to the main site in 2007.Twitter has kinda been my primary social media home for a long time and my experience with it has always been pretty decent (weird huh?). To be honest, I think i've just been lulled by the convinience of it. Writing a rant requires some time and some actual thought while plurting out a tweet is a 'toss out and forget' usually. Ironic considering how much i like to go on about things.

(It was kinda fun going back in the Wayback machine to see if i could find out when exactly I added the twitter feeds to the Megatokyo site. I joined Twitter in May 2007 and it looks like I added the feed stuff in late July or August. I also used to have a 'status' bar for the next comic. Hah, i've always been a comedian).

In the short history of the internet, there have been plenty of shifts between different sites and services that you would use as a primary way to stay in touch with and reach out to people. For me there are five primary formats I work with: live chat (to talk with people), microblogging (for larger group interactions), art sites (for sharing art and sketches), live video streaming (for online drawing) and commercial sites (for selling stuff and support). All of these overlap a lot (for instance,i've been mostly using twitter to post sketchbook stuff). I have switched servies in all of these categories many times, so switching from one service to another is nothing new... but is always a bit of a pain.

For example, for me I have always used text based communication services with friends since the early 90s. I remember getting into arguments with people on an online dial-up Bulliten Boards and having to step away from them because OMG i couldnt believe how upsetting arguing with people online could be. :) Then when the "Internet" came along (back when it was the new thing, it had been around for a long time already) I started with an America Online dialup account and discovered Newsgroups and Rec.arts.anime which is where I found out that Kimagure Orange Road was not just four videos but AN ENTIRE TV SERIES... well that started me trying to connect with people to track down some of these obscure fansub things (which required phsically mailing VHS tapes backand forth, none of this download and watch stuff).

Note that this was months before America Online added a web browser and let you directly access the World Wide Web. That was an intersting day when they added that.

It wasn't too long after that I ended up on a beta program run by the University of Michigan Alumni Association where you could get dial up access and an email account (my email address is so old that it is just three letters. I still have it, it is my work email).

Of course, with this world of websites out there i wanted to make my own. One of my online friends had a university account and was willing tolet me use some of his spacefor my first website (still can't thank you enough for that, Ben). Now, the history of me an my websites is a whole separate rant, but the one thing i wanted to get to was that there was this one new communication service out that I started to use, mostly because it allowed you to put a banner on your website that showed if you were online or offline: ICQ.

Ilivedon ICQ and it was the main way I communicated with people for a long time. I used it so much and for so long that I still don't recall why I ended up switching to AIM's Instant Messager. Maybe it was all those disks they kept sending me, I don't know. Then Isomehow ended up on IRC in a channel that for the early years of Megatokyo we made a point of NEVER mentioning to fans (because no one wanted an influx of MT fans there). That's the place where this annoying guy with the nickname "Largo" would often go off on l33tspeak filled rants and random idiocytill someone kicked him from the channel. It'stherewhere he hounded me about he thought we could do something cool with this awesome domain megatokyo.com he owned. First, it was for some vague anime news site. Then, somehow, it ended upbeing this stupid comic with these two idiots based on us who went to Japan and got stuck. Like that was ever gonna go anywhere.

As the years went on, I kinda stopped using AIM and was pretty much just on IRC. I ended up migrating away fromthat channel to other channels that grew out of Megatokyo fandom like #megatokyo and eventually a channel called #fredrin that grew out of the Justin.tv based IRC channel. At some point we moved over to EFNet and things were stable for the longest time... until they weren't. About four or so years ago, I set up a Discord server and that's pretty much my current "live chat" home.

Ok, that was a lot (one bad thing about rants is, no text limit :P), but my point in all this is look at how much things shifted for me in just one of formats I use over the last thirty years. Services change, online homes change, move, migrate, fall apart, get better, become unusable, grow, die... it happens. The constant that *I* have that a lot of younger creators don't is my own website and domains that I fully control and that, while old and creaky,are still here and not going anywhere.

Well, the above is about 5,674 characters which would be over 20 tweets. Yay for talking too much.

So, i'm shifting away from twitter, which means two things - dusting off some old services that i havent posted to in a while and trying out some new ones. Here is a list of places you can find me and follow meif you are interested in them:

discord: https://discord.gg/qSB8FdB (an invite to my primary hangout these days, the Megatokyo server, been around a few years.)

tumblr: https://www.tumblr.com/fredrin (My old tumblr site is still up and running, just gonna start posting there again. It is a goofy place.)

mastodon:@fredrin@mastodon.art (I'm on the mastodon.art server, but you can follow me from any federated server. You can find out more about mastodon here at their website, also this is actually a pretty decent introduction to how to use it heresince it is a little different than twitter. Join me, i'll be trying this out for a while.)

instagram: https://www.instagram.com/mt_piro/(yes, it's Meta, yes it's commercial, but I have it and i will experiment with this for a while to since a lot of people are already here

pillowfort: https://www.pillowfort.social/fredrin(This is a new art posting related service that is still in beta but worth experimenting with. Beta costs $5 to join currently, though you can get invites from people who use it. This is very much a trial, we'll see how it goes.)

facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Megatokyo/(More of a legacy thing, this has been around for years. Using facebook is more than a little flawed, but i do maintain it and post comics here when they go live).

And, of course, there is this website and it's RSS feed (yes those still work! Google for RSS feed readers if you dont use them already), there is Twitch where i do live streaming on a regular basis, Patreon if you want to support me by becoming a Patreon, not to mention the little side webcomic Tokyo Threat Documentation Project that i've been doing over on webtoon, and my rebuild of my online art in my artstation website you can find at fredart.com.

Anyways, this has been a rough patch for Megatokyo itself lately (as you may have noticed, its been a while since a new comic). This is because i have to replace the comic thats up with four pages of comics in the MIDDLE of the current comic. I'll explain what's up with that in my next rant (which will probably be in a day or so as i work on it) so hang on, more info on that shortly.

Piro