Learning How to Create a Domain of Abstract Angels

Hello! Can you tell us who you are and what you do?

Hi there. I’m Peter Mohrbacher, the creator of the Angelarium—an artwork project that I created back in 2005 that depicts angels of the Abrahamic religion and concepts from the Jewish Mysticism of Kabbalah, the Tree of Life. The Angelarium is basically an encyclopedia dedicated to angels in my interpretation.

Aside from the Angelarium, I’m also known for my work in Magic: The Gathering, where I created creatures, tokens, land and even several Planeswalkers. I’m an artist by trade and most, if not all, of my work are of the surreal and sublime. So if you’re into that, go check out Angelarium and my art!

What’s your favorite game to play?

I don't know if I have an all-time favorite. However, I am returning to a much loved recent game, Elden Ring, right now. Turns out that the DLC is really good and I made a fresh save and have been spending all of my free time wandering around The Lands Between. I think me and a lot of other people are doing that. Maybe it feels like a cop-out for my favorite game cause there’s recency bias, but I'm comfortable saying it cause I think it is a well-recognized game people think that's really good, so it's a safe pick.

The From Software worldbuilding has always been really good. I've always really liked the flavor of fantasy that they create. There's something about that sense of long history that's always existed in the Fromsoft games that has been really appealing to me. And the sort of weaving of the gameplay experience along with the narrative where the gameplay kind of reflects whatever the opposite of Ludonarrative Dissonance is, I know that was a popular term for a while, so Ludonarrative Symmetry, I guess, is the thing I like about it.

But the Elden Ring world, more so even than the Dark Souls world to me, feels like this larger, and realized bit of fantasy history. It's very comfortable with being grounded and being about human characters but also has this grand scope that is not afraid to get really weird. And somehow this incredibly strange world with all these really goofy things in it still manages to feel grounded and believable. And it just gives you the freedom to run around and exist in it and just kind of soak it in, even when you're not actively engaging with it. And I don't know, there's just not a lot out there that I feel like pulls all that off.

You get a sense of the actual geography of the place. Cause you're like, “Oh, I feel nervous about being here.” Or like, “This is nice and relaxing.” So you get these different senses of places as you move through them because of the way that the gameplay weaves in and out of different spaces.

On the deliberate design and direction of Elden Ring

I feel like there's not a lot of randomness in this game. It's a very curated experience. It feels like the director and the people involved in it had a very specific vision. And what you get out of the end product is a representation of somebody who really cared about what they were making. It doesn't feel like it was designed by a committee. It doesn't feel like something that was intended to appease an audience. It really just feels like there were some people who really wanted to make a thing and they made exactly what they wanted. And that kind of auteurship is something I always look for in games and art. And so having a big media product like that hit that button to me is really special.

Shifting out of a corporate environment for the sake of art

I dumped out of working in games because I felt like there is a constant gravity that pulls companies towards a kind of corporate culture. And I never felt like I got to be a part of something super special like that when I was working in the corporate world, which is why I spent the last ten years working for myself.

Angelarium has been my vehicle for just being able to be an auteur and explore things and care about them and like, do them because they feel like they're the right choice and not because it's what the audience wants or like what would be good for sales or what my boss thinks is good. I just get to make the thing like it feels like it should be and let the project lead me around, rather than all these other sorts of false, you know, bad faith expectations for it.

I think that's what a lot of people who work in entertainment are dreaming of, whether it's TV, movies, video games, tabletop games… that's what they want—to be able to do what they envision. And rarely does anybody ever get to do that because the needs of the marketplace seem to always be working against that kind of thing.

So when a big corporate entertainment product manages to actually feel like something that's personal, that has a vision, it feels cool and special, and I think it makes an impact. I mean, sometimes it gets to make an impact. You know, you get your Metal Gears every once in a while. Something that feels like it's too weird to not have just been the choice of some guy who was given way too much control over a project. And then, you know, most of the stuff that's out there, it's tough to make stuff like that. And so I kind of gave up on trying to find a corporate home that was going to allow me the pleasure of being able to be a part of something that was special in that way.

But I've always held out hope that maybe someday in the future there's some indie game studio, or some producer with way too much control at a company who would want to work with me and make something like that together. But in the meantime, I'm very, very content to just be self-employed and have that kind of creative control. It's been ten years now. I'm just starting on a new project recently and getting into the guts of the thing. And just at the beginning when it's all imaginative and it feels great.

Can you tell us more about your creative process for Angelarium?

A lot of word association process is one of those words that means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. And I keep wanting to shout it at art students, like, the process is important, but I think it's one of those things that's harder to find for me.

I like to create based on concepts. So rather than doing sort of top-down worldbuilding, I like to think about my association with an idea, whether it's memory or rain or revenge. Like whatever abstract concept there is, I always try to draw from the words I associate with that idea and imagery that pops into my mind when I associate with that idea. And so I want to create all of my characters and creatures and locations, always off of a conceptual base. 

Rather than trying to start with an ecosystem and a series of politics and the names of a bunch of different factions and sort of work my way top-down, I like to let it bubble up, bottom going upwards. And so with the angels, it was easy because there are just these long lists of angel names where it's like Samichiel: Angel of Vengeance. I'd hear that and go, “Well, that's a good idea.” 

So I just do my word association process and think about what I associate with this concept and just let it move intuitively. And that's always produced good results for me. But then when I put the name on the piece at the end, I get this result that's a little bit odd looking, and then I put the name on it. So people see the odd image and they go, “Oh, what's that?” And then there's a name under it that says “Angel of Vengeance”. And they go, “Oh, shit! That's an angel, that's so cool!”

So the process ends up kind of working in reverse with an audience member, which has been really nice. People feel like they look at my work and they say, “Oh, that's what angels really look like. And I'm like, “I guess. This is what I came to. This is what my brain did.” It's not really built on an expectation of an end result. It's an intuitive process that's built off of my own personal experiences.

The importance of self-perspective in art

I've done a lot of teaching, helping students figure this process out. And what happens oftentimes is people will ask themselves the exact wrong question, which is, “What do I think other people think the void looks like?” If you try to look through it through the sort of speculative lens of what you believe another person thinks a void is, you're just going to get a black hole. You'll be like, nothing's there. They don't see anything. But if we look inside of ourselves and ask ourselves, like, “What memories do I have associated with a void? What kind of emotions do I associate with a void? What kinds of other words come to mind when I think about this? And what kind of memories and associations and emotions do I have associated with those words?”

All of a sudden, there is this kaleidoscopic unfolding of an idea, and you end up with more material than you can even use in a final piece. To me, that process doesn't feel that hard. I came to the process kind of intuitively early in my career, and I find that not so many people are working that way. People want their work to be legible to others, so drawing off of random personal associations is not something that they reach for quickly.

But I think across a lot of different types of media, like filmmaking, music, art, whatever, I found that there are plenty of other creators that work this way, and there's a general agreement that if you just put your faith in an audience and just make what feels right, they usually respond to it.

Imagining a speculative audience or art director, I find is pretty poisonous to the creative process. I think that if you had an audience member in mind, like a person, and you know what they love and you know how to make them happy through art or game design or music, then you could create with a specific person in mind, I think.

But it's that speculative general audience that people are always chasing, or a sort of speculative art director of a person who has “refined tastes”, whatever that means. You think like, well, I should make a good piece of art. I find that any time anybody thinks they want to make good art, they've kind of already poisoned themselves against making anything interesting because they're not asking themselves what's good from their perspective.

This idea of good art often is a phantom projection of whatever we think other people think is good, and it's just impossible to launder ideas through that process. You can't know what other people think is good. We get such a small sliver of experience through our own life that, like, I don't really know if anybody's really that good at creating anything other than for themselves.

What’s your opinion on AI and its impact on art?

AI’s kind of interesting because beyond whatever tagging and waiting system is put into it initially, a lot of these AI systems depend on human feedback to say, like, yes, that is actually a picture of a girl holding a koala. And so it requires a lot of feedback training from people to tell it like, this is a good image. That image sucks. But what you get is this soup of aggregate feedback from, like, the imagery of the average person; which is kind of for everybody, but it's also kind of for no one.

And there are ways of making AI images that look more personal. But most AI imagery has this look to it that is kind of soft, plasticky and maybe a little bit too refined to the point where I think is off-putting to a lot of people. And we've kind of grown a sense of how to identify it now that we've all seen thousands of AI images. And this is part of the problem of it, is that there's no individual taste behind it. It is literally just a thousand monkeys on a thousand typewriters creating all these millions and millions of images and then ranking them in some sort of big, universal aggregate. And it's just not a good system for creating good art.

The humanity missing in AI art

When you look at something like the Angelarium, you can tell that there's one person behind it. You just take a look at it, and through all the different types of weird characters and color palettes and various stylistic choices throughout all that work, it's clear it's just like one person spending a ton of time making a bunch of stuff. Intuitively, there's a humanity in it that's evident just by looking at a big pile of jpegs.

I think that's what a lot of people are after. I mean, certainly for myself, as a consumer of art, having somebody make something that looks kind of like House-style Magic, the Gathering, to me, is kind of boring. But when I see somebody who has a style of art that just shows their taste and their voice, I get more interested. Even if they're not as good technically. I want to see a human being in the work. It's more important to me than the work itself.

As somebody who's been at this whole sharing art on the internet thing for a while, it does not get better, the comments on imperfections, I mean. I know so many artists whose main struggles in their career are the feeling of not wanting to have pieces judged poorly, and so they hold back a lot. And when they do share stuff, it's very anxiety-producing for them. It's one of the main problems artists end up dealing with, I feel like nowadays is this sort of panopticon-like feeling, so it's very uncomfortable to post art online these days.

Social media being the panopticon of online art

I used that word with my wife the other day, and she asked me to define it. You know, it's this prison where you have one central tower looking over a bunch of different prison cells. And the prisoners have to behave because they're never sure when they're being watched and when they're not. And we've sort of locked ourselves in one of these things where we're expected to share what we do with the world, but we're never sure if anybody's actually paying attention.

Since we don't necessarily even get quality feedback from what we post, we’re never sure if maybe our faults are being quietly tallied somewhere on the internet to be brought up against us at some future date. And this feeling of uncertainty of, like, punishment or reward for being an internet presence, sometimes it's a little addicting, sometimes it's just terrifying. The terror of that is hitting a lot of people these days, I think.

I'm always encouraging artists, like, please just post. The process of making work, I think, is made better by culminating it with posting. Because there's this uncertainty about whether or not something's going to be received well when it's in progress or when it's done. And it's so hard to judge your own work. To hand that process of judgment over to others, to me, feels like an essential part of the completion of a piece because it's not healthy also to just constantly be in a cycle of self-judgment. And so to allow others to like or hate what's being produced, I feel like, relieves the creator from having to live in a permanent state of self-judgment about what they make.

More on how corporate systems can negatively affect art processes

As I was saying, about how corporate products have this tendency to sort of operate in bad faith, forces of the market are always pushing us to things that are against our creative urges, because of the concern for an audience. Is this going to be praised? Is this going to make money? Building a firewall between the creative impulse and the need for attention and money on the internet is important because when you let them come in contact with each other, bad things can happen.

There are a lot of different strategies for creating that separation, like if someone is creating it by posting the work anonymously, that's fine. It's good if it allows them to feel like they can make the photos they want without concern over how it reflects on them as a person. That's healthy. Though there are plenty of implications to it, it's so tricky.

There's definitely a need there to want to preserve what makes someone want to make a great piece of art in the first place. And, like, creating some amount of separation between that and the praise and money, there's got to be some strategy in place to make it happen, because if you don't, your creative drive is going to be ruined. You're either going to become fully demotivated or you are going to lose your spark and make stuff that people ignore. One of the two will happen, maybe even both; one, and then the other. That’s bad. 

As somebody who's lived for the last ten years exclusively off of making their own art and then selling it on the internet, this is a problem I have to consider constantly because there are plenty of times when my need for money leaks into the work and makes the work bad. Then I need to rediscover and recorrect how I can get back to creating for the sake of creating so that I have a product to sell to pay my mortgage. 

And so it's this constant cycle of failing and then rediscovering success and going back and forth with it over and over again. It's like never a fully solved problem.

Do you have advice for people who want to live off of their creations like you?

You know, I didn't get into art because I thought it was a good idea. I got into art just because I became obsessed with it. And leaning into that selfish, obsessive feeling is natural to me. Like, I just want to make my weird little guys, and at a certain point, I just lose sight of what I'm even going to do with this stuff. 

If I can point myself in a direction where I can create selfishly, then at some point that desire will take over during my work time and I'll make something good. So I found that some artists have a really hard time getting to that space mentally because they're always worried about what others are going to think about the work. They want to please others. And I found that a lot of artists that do a really good job of having their own voice, they are just very, very comfortable with a kind of creative selfishness.

And it's not like they are broadly selfish people, but there is this... I don't think I have a better word for it, but they just want to please themselves through this repetitive behavior. And it's like a kink or a fetish. There's a certain repetitive behavior that just makes them very happy for reasons they can't explain. And they didn't come to a conclusion about it. They just discovered that it was in them. I've seen people just get so weird about their materials. You know, they just love pencils and the way that paper feels, or the way that they feel about their material, painting materials, or like, their digital art setups and that they just get totally locked in on it as a tactile experience, and they never get sick of it.

Gamifying business processes

And so making room for that obsessiveness feels really productive. And then at some point, for me, I need to make some money out of this stuff. So I've always been good at kind of dealing with abstract systems. The challenge of trying to figure out a marketing funnel, website building, merchandising, these kinds of challenges kind of look like machines to me. They're like a series of interlocking pieces that marbles flow through. I like those kinds of games, I like those kinds of challenges. So it's this weird little puzzle thing that I try to solve, and the points are actual dollars, and I'm into that, too. I've always been into that kind of problem-solving as well, it's just another natural obsession of mine.

I used to think that a lot of artists were shortchanging themselves by not being more involved in the business of their work by merchandising and stuff like that. And over time, I realized that a lot of my peers really hate that stuff. Instead of it being like a fun puzzle game to them, it is just like the most painful, emotionally painful experience they can imagine. And so I feel like I'm in this position that a lot of people want to aim towards where you get to make whatever you want and you get to make a living off of it. But I actually warn people away from this lifestyle quite a bit because I know that most artists hate the problem-solving part of merchandising and marketing. 

So usually I try to get a sense from people if they are interested in that side of things, and if they have, like, an anti-interest in it, I try to advise them to never, ever do what I do because it'll just make them very sad and they won't get what they want out of it, and it'll be a huge waste of their time.

I would say it's overly simple, but yeah, I don't know if there is a process to being a greedy little art goblin that just wants to make their trinkets in a certain way. I've run across a lot of people who really want to have their own personal voice in art but have a hard time because they're the kind of person who just lived their whole life trying to always fit into the social needs around them, trying to always reshape themselves to the needs of those around them, and that's just how they are naturally existing.

And so this idea of making what you want is a horrible uphill battle to them because they have no analog in their own life. But I don't know, I'm pretty autistic. But for me, the idea of treating this like a video game, and I'm going to try to gain mastery in it for my own pleasure just felt totally normal. So I went through learning art in college and doing a lot of self-teaching online. And to me, it just felt totally normal to just try to always answer the question about what I wanted. What would make me the happiest, what's given me the most pleasure as a creator?

And then I've emerged out into the world and got to know a lot of different diverse people and discovered that that is actually not an impulse that everyone shares equally. It's an impediment, in a lot of cases for people. So that's the primary challenge for a lot of people. And then some weirdos like me fall into it so naturally that we don't even realize it's a challenge for others until we grow up.

What approaches have you taken to the business side of art that were influenced by gaming?

Well, back when social media was good, it was like, you could try to figure out all of the different ways of making a post that would give the greatest amount of outcomes. Like likes, comments and subscribes. And so there was always this, like, trying to post perfectly and play the numbers on posting frequency and different types of how you frame content and tagging and descriptions and basically creating a brand in that way. It was always very gamified because it's got a lot of numbers attached to it. 

These days, I don't feel like I understand the rules of the game anymore. It all feels very much more random than it used to. So nowadays, I honestly feel like I am losing this game of marketing and brand building because the world has changed so much over the last ten years. 10 years ago, the Instagram and Twitter algorithms felt like they were sensible. 20 years ago, it felt like in DeviantArt, it was possible to get thousands of people to see a post and care about it.

I have some large following counts on some platforms, but those were all made during a different era, back when it felt like the inputs and outputs on social media correlated to each other. And now we live in this black box world where stuff sort of just goes random, but there are still best practices— I know some people who have a better grip on this system, but there's something about the gameplay of the internet nowadays that just eludes me, and I just feel like I can't wrap my head around it the way that I used to. But I'm still working on it because I have a strong interest in figuring it out. 

What’s the most fulfilling experience you’ve had so far in your career?

I don't know. I love to be a villain about this and just shit-talk everything that I've ever made for a company. Why? Just because whatever creative fulfillment I've ever gotten from working on a corporate thing is often undercut by either the brand doing something so horrible to their own reputation that I don't want to brag about it anymore, or they took my work, made literally a billion dollars off of it, and then paid me pennies and it's so demotivating to have to feel exploited and coerced and taken advantage of that. 

I don't really have a lot of super positive feelings about my contributions to those efforts. While I have some creative pride over the work I've done for Magic: The Gathering, they have done a very bad job, in my opinion, of properly compensating the people who work for them. Especially during the time when I think they were at their peak a few years back, record profits quarter over quarter. They were kind of quietly funding all of their parent company, Hasbro, to the tune of billions of dollars a year. And almost none of it found its way back into the hands of people who actually made their games, whether that was the designers, the writers or the artists.

I knew people who were working inside the company. And the employees weren't even getting paid well. It all just goes to board members and executives at the top. People who don't actually create things and don't care, who are just a bunch of empty suits, figure out a way of funneling literally billions of dollars out of the pockets of fans who care about these things. And it bums me out.

It's not a popular opinion because, like, you know, the side of these things that we see is the fan side of things. The people who make it are all great people, the people who are those people's bosses, who are also creative people, also great. And to criticize a product because of what happens from their corporate overlords. It's an arrow that has to first fire through a crowd of really good people. And it's tough to aim those shots precisely enough to hit who you want and not do collateral damage. It stinks. And so I find myself constantly at odds with the question of fulfillment in my career. Part of the reason I like to just work for myself is because it’s creatively fulfilling and self-publishing my books has been excellent. 

But I haven't done a lot in terms of games yet. The thing I mentioned earlier that I'm currently working on is a tabletop RPG. I got a publisher for it and I'm building a world guide at the moment. And I'm absolutely loving the process. It's super fulfilling to think about gameplay and factions and politics and come up with NPCs and character classes and all this kind of stuff. It's a joy, and I'm just reveling in it right now.

And then, at the end of the day, I've got a good relationship with a publisher who is giving me a fair deal as far as my ability to exploit the work for myself and own my creations. And so I feel really good about it. But, I mean, at the moment, it's all speculative, like it's all a work in progress. So I can't really claim that as a big win yet.

Could that project you’re working on right now be Project Mourning Star?

Oh, yeah, Project Mourning Star. That’s the code name for it right now, I've kept thinking about names for the book, but I haven't come up with a name that I'm confident in yet. So, yeah, Project Mourning Star is the Angelarium tabletop RPG. The Angelarium books don't create a world that is a good vehicle for adventure, so I am creating a kind of spin-off world that's sort of set in the future of the hundreds of years ahead of the books to create a space to be able to make stories, NPCs, cities, factions, monsters, adventure, the whole thing.

And my initial experience with it has been extremely positive. Everybody who I've pitched this to and shown concept art has been giving me massive thumbs up. So I feel very fulfilled by it right now. And I feel like there's an interesting opportunity here because tabletop in the last ten years became mainstream and got big. So going into it, I tried a run with tarot and divination, which is a natural fit for my brand, and I discovered that that's a super niche little community that's very noisy. And I wasn't as into that, personally. So I found myself working again in kind of bad faith and then marketing to this tiny little audience and realizing, like, oh, what am I doing with this?

And now I'm pivoting back to gaming, which is a personal love of mine, and discovering that there are a lot more opportunities there. I'm really looking forward to making a lot of gaming-related stuff over the next few years with the tabletop RPG standalone adventure, plus a bunch of stuff people can integrate into their own homebrew games. And then I've got minis in the works. I'm gonna be making some dice DM screens, like the whole kit. You could have a whole Angelarium gaming kit if you wanted. And I get off on that stuff, so I'm looking forward to making it so I can have it for my own personal collection and then see who else in the world likes it.

Current size and state of his community

So I've been on Patreon longer than almost anybody. I got on there right when it launched, and I grew it really fast during its initial rise. And then there was a point several years back, where I pivoted away from handling a lot of stuff myself because I was doing all of my own printing and shipping myself out of my basement, and I needed to offsite all of that in order to make more time for myself to be creative. 

Also when I went to go buy a house, I didn't want to have to buy a place that also had enough room to run a small business. And trying to run everything locally and by myself is just a huge drain on my time and attention. So I ended up having to reformat my Patreon to be a lot more automated and take away, have only digital products and not be able to offer physical stuff through it as much. And so it declined pretty sharply. And then I found myself in some creative doldrums or like, taking on side things like the tarot that some of my audience was into. And so the Patreon peaked years ago and has been on a bit of a decline. 

But as of this morning, I've just launched a new initiative because I'm working full time on the RPG, I'm trying to make people aware of the fact that if they want to watch me build a world guide from scratch and they want to be able to see what I'm doing and have feedback, they can come on to the Patreon and see the stuff. I'm posting at least five new concepts every Friday, sometime Saturday if I'm a little behind, but I've kept a really good pace over the last couple of months with, like, making a lot of stuff and posting it.

And now that I'm on that cycle and I feel confident I can keep it up, I'm promoting the fact that this is like the sort of new era for me right now. The initial wave of feedback was like people saying, “Hey, don't you just want to do a Kickstarter?” And as somebody who's done a lot of Kickstarters, I got to tell you, there’s a lot of tricky parts to doing that.

Kickstarter project problem

I had a big failure, which was I did a Kickstarter for a book that was half-illustrated and half-written at the time I kickstarted it. I pre-sold $250,000 worth of books, and then it took me five years to fulfill them. During the production, the writing and illustrating part of it didn't go the way I expected. Production went bad, and then the whole thing ended up culminating during the pandemic.

So it was a lot of problems, many of which were self-inflicted, that were learning lessons that I'm never going to repeat my mistakes from. And so the idea of trying to pre-sell a book that I have done zero illustrations and zero official writing for, there's no stats for anything. I don't even have a firm grasp on what gaming system I'm going to use. And people were like, “Oh, you should pre-sell it!” I'm like, “There's no way I’ll do that again.”

I'll do a Kickstarter when the book is done, when the book's ready to sell and when it's ready to send to the printer. When all that’s prepped, I will absolutely do the biggest possible Kickstarter I can, and it will come with tiers with minis and dice and DM screens and the whole nine yards. But between now and then, I've got a long way to go, and I need to keep making money during that time. So I'm turning to Patreon to see if I can get the Patreon to create a kind of financial floor for me during the production time on this and try to make the production a transparent process for my Patreon backers while just showing, like, more high level, farther away teases to people who aren't subscribers.

I was at one point sending out about $1,000 a week in refunds for backers who had lost faith and wanted their money back. And so I had done a good job preserving the funds during that long production time on the Book of Watchers, and I was just handing heaps of money back to people who had lost faith, who were convinced that it was a big Kickstarter failure.

But eventually, the book came out. I'm proud of it. I fulfilled everything that I promised in the campaign, and I've gotten to do a couple of campaigns since that did alright. So I feel, comfortable launching new ones when they're ready.

Though in this new one, I've never done it this way. I don't know if it's a good idea, but we're going to find out.

Is it true that you were invited to the Joe Rogan Podcast?

Oh, that was a joke! So the story with that is about, I mean, it feels like about once a week these days. I get these scam emails that say, “Would you like to be on so and so celebrity podcast? We'll pay you $4,000 to be there.” And so they're like, “Oh, I'm a producer on the Joe Rogan Podcast. I'll pay you $4,000 to be on the Joe Rogan Podcast.” And I'm just like, that doesn't make any sense.

Number one, I am not famous enough or interesting enough to be a guest on the show. Number two, Joe Rogan's not offering Elon Musk $3,000 to come on his podcast. Does it make any fucking sense from any perspective? And so I get these all the time, and now I've just started messing with them.

The way the scam works is they say, “Okay, well, we're going to have you on a Facebook podcasting platform” which all of you may know there is no such thing as a Facebook podcasting platform. And so what they do is they have you log into your business Facebook account and they have you set up a few things. Because the Business Suite on Facebook is so confusing, they have you set up a new user called “Podcast” that is granted certain backend permissions.

And they say, “Oh, these are the podcasting permissions you need.” Then they have you generate a key that allows you to authorize this user. There's a link, it sends an email out to the user's email with a button that says “Click here”. To activate this, they have you email it to yourself, and then right-click on the activation button, copy the URL, and then paste it into your public-facing website link on your Facebook page so that they can discreetly extract it, approve it, and then they have control over your Facebook ad account so they can go and spend money to spam.

They can spend your credit card and use it to spam ads on Facebook for whatever bitcoin scam or whatever they're running. And so I recorded myself following through these steps once to see if maybe I'll make a YouTube video someday about exposing how the scam works.

So I have some guy, some dude with an Indian accent walking me through the steps and me screen recording myself as I go through it right up until the final step. I said, “Say hi, YouTube!” And then he immediately hangs up for me! And so I was getting these pretty regularly, and at one point, the one supposedly for the Joe Rogan Podcast came up and I was like, that's hilarious.

So I publicly tweeted a screenshot of it and was like, I refuse to go on the Joe Rogan Podcast, as though they were ever really inviting me. And a lot of people were confused. Some people thought it was funny. When I try to shitpost, people don't know me well enough to know what to think. And so a lot of people get confused about what I'm trying to say or what the joke is or if it's a joke. So it's normal for people to not know what's going on, but people close to me thought it was really funny.

Where should we go to learn more about you and your projects?

My number one spot is angelarium.net. I try to keep that website current, and it's got links to all kinds of other stuff. There are links to Patreon, Discord, Twitter/X, Pinterest, Tumblr and everything from there. Plus, you can see all the art and writing that I've done for Angelarium over the last ten years. It's all up for free. And, you know, there's also a link to the shop there, which is how I end up paying all my bills.