😺 + 🔞 = 😒

In a previous post, we wrote about how Zazzie, a fluffy cat that shows up in our books, helped us create a recognizable image across platforms. However, we believe he has also led to some misunderstandings, and things might look weirder now that we revealed his secret in Penny and the Silver Key #3 (as long as anyone reads it, of course).

No one has come out and told us that our account wasn’t what they were expecting, but we still find it rather odd that several cat-focused accounts followed us on Instagram. Sure, just because you post exclusively about cats doesn’t mean that you don’t want to read some horror quotes and see some colourful gory comic book panels, but it got us wondering if our name, The Snarky Cats of Ulthar, and our profile pic might not give people the wrong idea about what we post about. The fact that none of those accounts save one ever liked any of our posts (and that single one did it in such a suspiciously excessive way that we used the Make Them Unfollow You option) didn’t help clear things up. What is clear enough is our Profile, even if we sometimes have the feeling that not everyone bothers reading it, and we’re not even talking about the 🚫 DM bit. At least that’s what we think happened when someone offered their book cover designing services. Unless that was a not-so-subtle way of letting us now that our art sucks, which is a little insulting considering our books are digital comics… However, that’s not what made us want to write about our social media profile, which is pretty much the same in every platform. The reason we wrote this post was because we ended up in another Bluesky List.

Besides 🚫 DM, at one point we added the No Under 18 emoji (🔞) to our Twitter/X Profile. We did it because we wanted to post whatever we felt like without running the risk of someone reporting the account for something. We were mostly thinking about the violence and the occasional swearing, though we’ve also posted some naughtier panels on Twitter/X and Instagram. By the time we thought about it, we weren’t doing much on IG, though, so they got no emoji. When we joined Bluesky, we had already changed our Twitter Profile, so when we copy/pasted it, the emoji came along. However, we haven’t posted any naughty stuff, and, let’s face it, the naughtiness in our series isn’t that frequent. We have posted some bloody panels, so the 🔞 should still apply. Unfortunately, that particular emoji is more often used by porn accounts and, as everyone must know by now, there’s a large Furry community on the platform, and most of it is NSFW. Judging by the other accounts on that List, what we think happened is that someone took one look at the emoji and our Profile pic, and deduced we were a Furry porn account. Really, there’s no other explanation for that – the List can’t be that old and we haven’t posted any gory panels in ages. Honestly, we blame Americans, who seem to have a bigger problem with sex than violence, and therefore look at No Under 18 and immediately think PORN. We removed the emoji from our Bluesky Profile, did the same on Twitter/X, and lo and behold, we're no longer on that List! To be fair, we have no idea if it was because of that, but we didn't change anything else, so... However, there may be a bigger problem, and one that isn’t as easily fixed.

The first time we wrote about Zazzie, we explained that we decided to adopt his handle (agoat4zazzie), which we mentioned in Geek Addiction (Book 4 of An Introduction to the Fine Art of Monster Slaying), as our own for fear that someone might want to use it for nefarious purposes. That was our (deluded) reasoning, even though we already knew the meaning behind it. As we just revealed it (we kinda already had with the header image of our first spin-off blog), we’re finally thinking about what it might look like, and it might look very weird. However, we don’t see how we could change it. A cat fits with our chosen name, they both work with Lovecraft fans and people who’ve never heard of him, and the handle is unique enough that any confusion with already existing or future accounts is unlikely. Also, considering the low number of followers we have and how many of them might not be seeing our posts very often thanks to the algorithms, a radical makeover that could leave us unrecognizable is probably not the wisest move. We really can’t afford to lose the little attention we managed to attract. Besides, we have nothing to change it to. We’re always complaining about the blogs, but coming up with a new blog is way easier than thinking of a new handle + username. That’s basically our public online ID! Honestly, it feels more daunting than changing our legal names.

We really didn’t think this one through, did we? Maybe we should just rely on the fact that since almost no one is going to read our book, almost no one will know…