Have you given much thought to that? Those people are YOU. They’re part of your mind. Even the objects in the dream that you’re seeing, hearing, touching, and otherwise interacting with are YOU. They’re alive. How do the characters in your dreams ever surprise you with what they do next? Why do they ever disagree with you? Why are you arguing with that rude lady in the checkout line at the grocery store when she’s YOU?

There must be some reason, right? Your mind manufactures dreams for some reason. Maybe the various things in your dream are symbolic of some inner conflict or dilemma that you’re trying to figure out and you’re working through that thought process with personifications and metaphors. Maybe your brain is strengthening certain neural connections and solidifying memories and the dream is just how your conscious mind experiences that process. Maybe your brain is just emptying the trash of trivial thoughts and memories like when your computer runs a maintenance protocol to save space on your hard drive and keep it running more efficiently.

Regardless, everything that is you is a lot more than your conscious mind. It’s your subconcious. It’s your hormones–they affect your decisions. It’s how hungry you are. It’s the pain you’re feeling at any moment. Dreams about our teeth falling out are common when we have toothaches. But do you wonder if part of your brain is a lot smarter than you realize conciously and maybe it knows exactly what it’s doing and why?

Sleep tight.

This is somewhat related to an article I wrote a while back called What we are and what we aren’t.

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I won’t pretend to ignore the obvious downside.  This means the comics aren’t really free anymore.  One question I suspect is on people’s minds is whether $40 is really a fair market value.  I myself am very curious how often a new comic will get released by that math.  To get an idea, it would take $2080 of yearly contributions to get back to a weekly schedule.  That’s $10 a piece from 208 fans or $5 a piece from 416 fans, for instance.

I realize this is a fairly unconventional model for a web comic strip so allow me to explain.  Back when I was releasing comics on a fairly regular schedule, I wasn’t getting much feedback to keep me motivated.  I tried to persist so that I could someday make this site profitable in some way that would at least justify all the time I was putting into it.  The traffic of the site wasn’t really increasing at a noticeable pace and seemed to have leveled off somewhere fairly well below most web comics.  It’s possible that it’s just a niche subject and that’s the nature of the beast.  I’ve got other creative projects now like the radio show (and more on a tv show to come later) that I’m simply more focused on and they’re quite time-consuming.

I hate to go here but it needs to be said and maybe it can change.  Even more discouraging was the apparent lack of enthusiasm from a lot of people who claimed to be fans.  For instance, I added social networking buttons some time ago to make it easy for people to share the comics, like Reddit, Digg, Stumbleupon, and Facebook.  Those buttons didn’t appear to be getting much use at all.  Back when I first started the site, I could easily spend another hour at the end of a long work day posting the comic on various liberty-oriented message boards, but eventually I stopped.  You can only toot your own horn so much before it gets embarrassing (unless it gets you a porn deal).  It’s just so much more powerful when fans of the comic create that potentially contagious buzz.  So I hoped fans would eventually take up that baton.  For the most part, they didn’t.  What spoke volumes to me was how I could make a clever comment on Facebook about some little anecdotal event in my life and get 20 likes and a long thread of comments but most of my comic links died amongst the proverbial sound of crickets.

So I’m honestly skeptical that there is enough enthusiasm to raise money for a more steady release schedule, but I’d love to be proven wrong.  Maybe I simply failed to make the comics good enough to get that kind of enthusiasm for which I’m willing to accept responsibility.  In the meantime, I figure this will at least put a stop to the complaints about no new comics from many of the same people who could rarely be bothered to click “Share” on Facebook or repost the comic in a relevant message board.  So if you do consider yourself a fan, but not so much that you want to contribute financially, I understand.  I encourage you to go to the Support page and scroll down to the free and easy ways to support the comic and show your enthusiasm in other ways.  If there is hope to change the chip-in release model some day, your overt moral support in the form of promotion will likely be the source of it.

I’m also doing my part to simplify the art and streamline my process.  If it doesn’t take as much time out of my schedule to do a comic, I won’t need as much incentive to put them out somewhat more regularly.  I’m not giving up on this site.  At worst, it will remain a hobby with an occasional comic when I’m feeling particularly inspired and have some extra time, but I hope fans of the comic will realize that it’s actually a part-time job when I’m releasing comics regularly and I can’t afford that kind of time right now without compensation.

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