it’s weird to be seen

After taking a few months of enforced downtime from appearing on camera, it was wild to launch the Tigereyes poll on Near Mint Condition and hear that people missed me.

Missed. Me. My face as expertly framed and curated by the hair & makeup team who wake up at 5:45am New Zealand time to get me ready for these streams.

Even in the world of just comic book influencers I am a micro, micro, micro influencer with a tiny amount of name and face recognition. But, it’s still recognition. Perception. Being seen.

And, I have to tell you, that is deeply, deeply strange in ways you don’t think about when you are praying for it as a teenager.

In the first year after I launched CK I was still a teenager and I used money from my first full-time job to buy my own webcam. You have to consider, this was in the beforetimes, when cell phones didn’t even have cameras. The ability to broadcast the inside of my apartment to the internet in real time was groundbreaking technology.

There was no hair and makeup team. At points there was no wardrobe… I made many unplanned appearances in the nude on the internet. And some planned ones. I was totally unfiltered.

Alas, there was no OnlyFans at the time to monetize my hot twink bod. But I digress.

(hear me reading this post)

The point is that in those early days I hungered to be perceived in any way I could make that happen. I loved the idea of broadcasting my life 24/7. I was convinced I had something worth watching. I was a college student with a horrible roommate working my first full-time job, a songwriter who couldn’t stop churning out songs, a dating newbie who just had my first messy breakup, and a hopeless romantic pining over a pair of unattainable friends while subsisting on a diet that was at least 49% vodka.

That version of Krisis could have never imagined I would be on a YouTube stream that would be viewed 20,000 times in one month, let alone this week’s Tigereyes launch being seen 10,000 times in 48hrs. I mean, never mind that YouTube didn’t even exist back then. I was fighting for my life to get 10 people to listen to my singer-songwriter podcast! We are now several orders of magnitude beyond that!

The part of 24/7 broadcasting I never really considered at that point were the eyeballs on the other side of the broadcast. When you are just trying to find ANYONE to pay attention to you, the idea of 20,000 pairs of eyeballs is completely abstract. Each of those pairs come away with a perception of you, an opinion about you. That version of you is never exactly who you are and what you’re about.

Now, 20,000 different versions of you are living in people’s heads all over the world and you have zero control over them. They are Jamie Madrox dupes or Orphan Black clones or rogue Cylon copies or whatever your chosen geekdom may be, who have fled their creator and are off living their own lives outside of your influence.

When all of those versions of you live in people’s heads, people start having conversations with them that you aren’t privy to. They love their version of you. They trust them. Or they hate their version of you! They think you’re insufferable!

If you are seen enough times by enough people, then people with different versions of you in their mind start talking to each other on the internet about those versions. This is why famous people say “don’t read the comments.” It’s not because they are scared of reading one bad review. It is because it is deeply, existentially weird to read people who are talking about a version of yourself that does not square at all with the human being you know yourself to be… and yet each of those versions are all still real and true to the eyes and minds of the people who have seen you. They have a relationship with those versions of you.

I am lucky that CK has been a site with broad recognition amongst comic fans for years now, even before I became a regular co-host on Near Mint Condition. I have, in fact, met people in real life who know me from my site or my own YouTube channel. However, I have hit new levels of perception this year that I have never previously considered. People missed me! There have been posts made about me that don’t even tag me. People asking each other what my injury was and if I was okay. Angry emails about bad decisions I’ve made and how I can’t be trusted. Google searches about private information (which I wind up seeing because the searches lead to click-through to CK).

Whelp 2001 Krisis, there’s that perception you ordered. It arrived 25 years later than you were hoping for, but now you have a little taste of it.

It’s weird to be seen. It’s weird to exist in the head of someone you have never met, or to an internet commenter whose real name you will never know. I want more and less of it at the same time. Part of me wishes I could drop everything and broadcast myself 24/7. The Crushing Krisis Pull List stream. The Crushing Krisis music review show. The Crushing Krisis hanging out with my friends podcast. The Crushing Krisis cooking show. The Crushing Krisis jogging through the living Lord of the Rings set that is New Zealand live stream.

The Crushing Krisis sitting on my couch staring at the wall because I am all out of brain and I physically cannot type anymore today because my arm hurts live stream.

I don’t think I have the time or capacity for all of that at the moment. Not even the last one. But, in the world we’re experiencing right now, I’m very thankful to be seen by anyone, and I will use every second of that time to try my best to be as loud as possible, as helpful as possible, as kind as possible, and as much myself as possible – knowing full well that whatever people take away from that won’t be anything like what I intended.

It will keep being weird and I guess I’m going to keep doing it until people stop paying attention.