I know we entirely missed Year 9, but sometimes that is what life is like!

Can you believe the site is still around? Can you believe that we are still around?? Ten years is a really long time — it’s 3,652 days, apparently. Ugh what? Don’t think about it too hard or else you might get stress hives!

It was a cold dull day in February of 2015 when we decided to make a site together, Dollissa and I. I can’t remember where we were or what we were doing, and I don’t want to search it out… I assume we weren’t actually both in New Jersey, but maybe we were. We were almost certainly in dramatic throes of some kind, not knowing what life is about or how to live it — but we were reading dlisted! Oh that’s one of our triumphs. After dlisted went away, I wrote Michael K a thank you note, and he wrote back! All of my wisdom about writing fan mail to important celebrities proved to be worthwhile.

You’d think that after ten years, we would be vastly different than what we were, but it turns out that once you are solidly into your adult years, everything is more or less the same until you fall and break a hip and realize that you’re old, surprise! At least, that seems to be how things are going. We are petrified fossils of perfection, however, with recognizable patterns of alternating productivity and indifference. It still continues to be the case that I have a big enough plate that sneers can fit when I’m hungry for them, vs. all the rest of the writers who have day jobs and/or overwhelming life predicaments. Or, in the case of Dollissa, she keeps wanting to write hyperlocal things for hyperlocal news. She misses her days of school newspapers. Maybe this year we will start a real one up — but you might never know about it!

What has changed in the past ten years is the world. I look back on 2015 and see that it was a time when we weren’t gripped with world event related dread/rage every single minute of every single day. Do you remember how that felt? There were four years at the start of sneer campaign that were painful to us, but we tried to distract ourselves. Then a widespread disease came and messed with us the same as most of you. Then the civil unrest. The serious things that made us feel like sneering, sure, but not in a funny way that we wanted to vent publicly. And now, well… 2025 isn’t our favorite kind of time, but we need to sneer while we still can, I guess is the most dire and horrible way I’ll say it. I don’t LIKE serious sneers! However, #beSNEERIOUS seems like a good tag to add to our list of [checks tag numbers] over 2200 tags, apparently. 2200?? We are efficient. We aren’t ridiculous.

Have some trivia:

• Total number of posts made vs. number of posts immediately abandoned mid-idea: 1188 posted; innumerable abandoned or forgotten
• Number of comic types currently on the site: five, and a new one possibly coming in later
• Number of in-jokes that no one outside of a handful of people could ever possibly understand: thousands
• The number of our 2200 tags we actually remember to use on posts: about fifteen
• Cats gained vs. cats lost during this time: We gained 9 and lost 8. We started with 5.
• The number of our writers who have been way too close to death in the past ten years: 2 — stop it, all of you. Be well.
• Number of our writers have fully lost interest: 3, I think. And 5 more we’re not sure about.
• Just how many overindulgent self portraits at this point: 32 tagged as such, but really every picture of one of us that I illustrate is pretty overindulgent.

And now, have the latest overindulgent self portrait:

So what’s next for us? After having moderate success with establishing a real life public event about cryptids, should we go for something we are more interested in? Something like The Sneer Campaign Ice Cream Social & Smugness Symposium. Sneerists & Queerists Daytime Gala. Doll Party Productions presents Doll Production Party (in cooperation with The Vent Haven Museum). Maybe we will get a 3rd House for the Sneer Compound. Maybe it will be the church on the corner. We can start an unchurch, or a temple for Thoth, or a temple for Super Satan.

Make no mistake, whatever we wind up doing, we will be thinking bigger while we think smaller, closer by, in our real lives. Because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but the internet is kind of dead lately.

And of course, within the next ten years I really will finish that CYOA story I have been working on for the past nine years. I really will!!