My heart skips a beat as the words touch my retinas, the notification chime ringing in my ears like a flashbang. I start to sweat. My stomach ties itself in knots. All I want to do is put down my phone, back away slowly, and get under my covers holding onto a little plush Siberian husky. But I’m not at home right now. I’m out with friends. Good friends, but not the kind who can wrap their arms around me and tell me it’ll all be okay if shit goes bad.

Clear the notification. Leave it for later.

“New reply to your comment”

Which comment? Where? What did I say? Was it a silly joke, or was it a thoughtful opinion? My heart races again. No. I don’t want to look at it now.

Next day, I’m home. I open up my inbox. There they are. I’d forgotten about them last night. I turn white. I’m all alone now; just me and the comments. The words of random, anonymous people somewhere on the other side of the planet, judging me. Taking the communications I’d poured my heart and soul into and scrutinizing them. Scrutinizing me.

I’ll look at the reply first.

“Wow, you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.” Etcetera etcetera. Bashing me over the head with why I’m wrong. I’m not wrong, of course, and I clearly know what I’m talking about better than this guy. For some reason, the ignorance makes it sting more. And it really stings.

The knots in my stomach tie themselves into bows. My throat clenches. It was everything I’d feared: rejection, disdain, scorn, hatred. I know it’s meaningless and insignificant, but I’m helpless to stop the debilitating haze of gloom that overruns my senses. Everything looks flatter. Grayer. My head throbs with a dull pain.

I know people on the Internet are dicks, and I’ve seen it a million times before. But when it happens to me, it’s still a slap in the face. It still hurts.

This is why I wanted to let this wait until I was someplace safe. Because when you look at a comment on something you made — no matter if it’s the most insignificant thing — if it means something to you, then anything can happen. They can utterly destroy you in five words.

But on the other hand…

I open the reply to my video. “That was one of the best things I’ve seen in a long time.” He goes on for a whole paragraph telling me what he loved about it. I’m smiling. Beaming. Walking on air. I feel like I’m flying. Like I could take on the world.

This is how it goes. Every single time, when I open one of those emails, it’s a game of roulette. Am I going to feel stabbed in the heart for the next ten minutes, or king of the world for the next twenty?

Why didn’t it work? Well, I’ve outlined a few reasons here already. I’ll repeat a few key ones:

• “Look, we’re on BitTorrent and use Creative Commons!” is not a valid promotional strategy. Pioneer One beat us to the punch with the TV-on-BitTorrent thing. Everyone else is doing Creative Commons. It’s not newsworthy anymore. Techdirt will not write about your radical new business model until you become wildly successful with it.
• The Kickstarter time limit does not help your fundraiser go viral. The desperate motive for backers to tell all their friends to pledge money RIGHT NOW seems to be overhyped. It’s an angle you can use in your own promotion efforts, but it doesn’t magically get everyone to tell their friends. Furthermore, sometimes an opportunity for fundraising arises after the time limit ends — for example, we’ll be screening YFIAS at the NYC Anarchist Film Festival (don’t worry, “anarchist” is just a scarier term for “left-libertarian”; no Molotovs will be thrown), but that’s not till the second week of April.
• The Internet is not the best place to promote an unknown thing that runs more than 10 minutes. Overwhelmingly, the most support came from people I’d spoken to or met away from keyboard. If you have little to no reputation, you need to start offline.

Let me expand on that last point, that the Internet is not the best place to promote an unknown thing which runs more than 10 minutes. Having thought more about that, I’ve realized that’s not necessarily true. It was just true for Your Face is a Saxophone. You know why?

Because I really, really, really botched the first three minutes of the pilot.

Case in point, Adapa said on the YFIAS Suprbay thread:

I also didn’t get past the opening credits. I meant to go back and watch the rest but…time is short and, like most people, there are lots of other things competing for my attention…so I never did get around to it.

So if the opening (of any future project) is weak you would be better off pulling it (with the hope of improving it and resubmitting later even at the risk of that not happening) rather than pushing ahead. You generally only get one shot at people’s attention.

Anecdotally, I heard this from a lot of other people. Statistically, here’s what YouTube Hot Spots had to say:

Low points on the graph mean that a lot of people stopped watching the video at that point, compared to videos of a similar length. In that first part of the graph, it’s really, really low.

The opening scene was the weakest in the entire episode. That made me feel terrible putting it out, but I just wanted to put it out already. Future episodes, however, will absolutely, positively, open on a high note.

Oh, yes, there will be future episodes.

Production on Your Face is a Saxophone will still continue this summer. Just because we couldn’t secure as much money as we’d hoped to by now doesn’t mean we’re not doing this. Maybe we won’t finish till late next year, and maybe we’ll have to put it together with duct tape and string, but dammit, world, your face will be a god damn saxophone, whether you can spare nine-thousand measly dollars or not.

Now, if you can spare some money, we’re still taking donations. Details are on YFIAS.com under the Support our Fundraiser section. We’re still offering sweet rewards based on how much you donate, like a DVD of the finished season, T-shirts, all that stuff.

I’ll also look into getting grants or something like that. I don’t know. I’ll figure out something.

It’s one in the morning and this post isn’t as coherent as I’d hoped it would be.

Perhaps my unrelenting FTP transfers (hey, I want to get my font size to look EXACTLY right, and that involves updating the CSS over and over) triggered a red flag. Oh well. I sent the techies an email.

Oh, by the way…Dear School of Visual Arts network administrators: This is my website. It’s not evil. I promise. Thanks. Also can you give me Diggs? That would be awesome.

So now we wait…