It can be. But there is a certain existential dread, in the hours after sharing something, when you fear it might all have been toil in obscurity

I feel this way.

I had some faith this time as I saw a good handful of readers opening the email just moments after I'd posted the newsletter out!

And while I figured Hacker News would be a coin flip, for other sites that show link previews, I was optimistic that the cartoons would encourage a click, too. In a time where many writers are using soulless AI-generated poster images, just putting in a token effort to do something original goes a long way.