(var)tober
Oh boy it's October, you know what that means? You guessed it, time to do some thing every day of the month based on a prompt! Will you gain anything from it? Maybe? Will anyone look at it for more than 1 second before swiping away? No! Will it take up more time than you expected and will have to drop out after a week because you have an actual life and work schedule? YEP!
I remember when, like, Inktober was a fun thing everyone did. Back when your Instagram/Tumblr feed was just pictures of your friends lunch you could post a drawing every day and your buddies would hit like and you kept going.
Now you have a fully loaded 18 hour day, carving out two hours every night to draw something eats into your cooking, laundry, cleaning, etc. You start rushing through the drawings. You won't have time one day so you draw two in advance. The quality of day 1 is light years beyond that the last day, if you even make it to the end. The prompt is too vague, the thing you drew looks terrible. You scroll through everyone else's feed and see fully fleshed out drawings they spent hours on (or did months prior) getting shared like crazy.
THEN the folks who started it end up fumbling the brand and it becomes a "Super Bowl" problem where we all have to call it the Big Game but we all know that's not what it's called. So now we don't call it Inktober anymore, no more hashtags. Do hashtags even work these days? Now it's Drawtober, Sketchtober, Arttober, Promptober, Papertober, whatever. But you still do the drawings and prompts and all that. You have to make up your own prompt. You post every day. The algorithm eats the posts.
Nobody sees it. They only get shown videos, so now you prop your phone up by your sketchbook to get some action shots but it's just you scribbling and erasing over and over. Your desk isn't covered in potted plants and pink kitten paw keycap shit so it gets buried. The AI scrapers feed on all the new images, in six months it will be able to generate drawings that look like yours.
You sit back at your last post on Halloween realizing you were probably better off spending the month writing and drawing an entire comic book while you eat the candy your kids gave you. They say it's gross. Now you're eating four month old stale Whoppers wondering what happened.