Once upon a time, we decided that we wanted to build an empire — we as in “Dollissa and I, the Best of Best Friends.” We created the site which you are on right now as a step of this plan. We never really determined what the empire was going to be exactly, aside from “us.” “Our brilliant minds and attractive senses of humor is all the empire we need, babe,” we told anyone who asked. Or that’s what we would have said had anyone asked.

But I guess as time wears on, our idea of an Empire has become not just “us” but also our friends, too. And this is why we developed Sneer HQ and eventually the Sneer Compound. We wanted to have parties and to host guests and to network deliciously. And maybe we would will start some sort of empire-worthy business… Publishing? Entertainment? Sin-tertainment? Edutainment? Who knows!

Ever since my school years, in the distant past, I have always wanted to build my own city. A little of the credit goes to the games called SimCity, but even in middle school (which predates those games), I would draw maps of ideal towns. It was a little diversion, a little game. In high school, I’d tell my friends that we should just buy up some property in the middle of nowhere and found our own town. Looking back, I can’t remember if anyone was as enthusiastic about it as I was, but then as now — it didn’t matter!! I yearned for Unicorn Valley to be a real place, and in fact that’s where all of my stories were set back when I was drawing those unhinged comics in the early 2000s.

As we all aged into adulthood, families started to be made, and debt started to be accrued. Dreams began to die. Pretty devastatingly standard life stuff got in the way! Although it might fun to buy property and build as I had once dreamed — I have to accept that that is expensive and not as many of my friends are as handy as I thought they’d turn out to be. Myself included. I thought for sure at some point I’d learn to build even a simple spice rack. Yet here I am, my spices in a drawer.

My plans changed because adaptability is an important quality to possess. I determined that maybe instead it would be fun to take over some tiny deteriorating town. Again I wanted it to be in the middle of nowhere. We could find a town with a population of under 500 and start buying up the ramshackle hovels. We could restore the existing vacant buildings and provide the goods and services to each other from our own small shops. We could have our little government and city council of friends. After I moved to such a small town, the grim reality set in that the local weirdos would (rightly) view us as interlopers and they would make us uncomfortable for decades until one of the sides won — and they wouldn’t be the ones inclined to go anywhere.

But every great empire needs a physical location! We decided it! Whether or not that has to be true, we chose to believe that and worked with what we had. Maybe we couldn’t build a town, or build a house, but we could find an existing city that had cheap real estate prices. Cincinnati and the surrounding areas were ridiculously low-cost places to live in the mid-2010s. We struck house oil in the city of Covington in 2016 and continued on in glory. I’ve already sung this song to you, and it is a song I will continue to sing forever.

So this is my final offer. Everyone can just move to the city we selected that already has things we like. We have been busy convincing our friends to move here one by one and I’m glad to report that it’s finally starting to work! Additionally, people we didn’t know before have also been drawn here as if by a magnetic force (me, I am the magnetic force, I know it). Then we meet them. And we are all relieved to find more people that we would have been friends with already had we met — we were friends all along without knowing!

Now it’s YOUR turn.

We Have Stipulations:

• Be one of our friends in the first place; be sure we like you
• Being within walking distance of us is preferred
• Visit us frequently, here in our homes
• Casually hang out with us on our porches, in our yard
• Vote for us
• Invite us places, even if we decline more often than is strictly polite
• Don’t see us too much though. Let us breathe
• Pet-sit for us when we gallivant

Our Generous Offers:

• To also watch your pets when you are traveling
• Food or money when you watch our things
• Housewarming gifts — trinkets, cookies, art
• We will invite you to parties
• Give you places to garden
• To give you space so that you can be secluded and alone
• To include you in our community schemes
• To vote for you unless you’re running against us