yeah, so i was hacked.

my new Instagram acct and a lesson learned.

I was hacked. Here is my new Instagram account. If you followed me, please click and follow here if you’d like to continue seeing my work in progress and random meanderings.

I’m such an idiot. I live in absolute fear of the Instagram account I’ve been building for the last 5+ years disappearing. All of the friends, galleries and connections, everyone i followed and loved… poof! Which made me the perfect target. I was sent a DM from what i thought was Meta (fool! fool! fool!) threatening to take down my account, unless I appealed. I panicked and immediately clicked the ‘appeal’ link, supplied my password and my account was instantly in the hands of some guy in Turkey (i just assume the ‘guy’ part, the Turkey part i’ve gleaned, because all of the emails I started getting from Meta afterwards were in Turkish.) I spent the rest of the weekend in a. desperate attempts to get the account back, and b. packing up orders from last week’s sale (omg, thank you so much!)

So, I’ve been trying to figure how to emotionally approach this debacle. I lost about 16,000 followers on my Instagram account in a minute because of my panicky thinking. First, what does that even mean, and is it really such a horror show? The first is kind of hard to sort out right now, so early on, but my gut instinct is that in the end, it probably doesn’t actually mean all that much.

Having a large number of followers can feel really comforting in lots of ways, especially those days when I’m just holed up in my workshop manically making dolls, and my brain is telling me I’m such a fool for thinking anyone would want to ever purchase these crazy weird bits of my brain, and oh my god, we’ll be thrown out of our house and what was i thinking and jesus, jana! why didnt you try harder to figure out how to go to college and get a real job and some security and like one of those 401K things and and and and… on those days, lots of numbers can feel like a big hug.

And obviously, the numbers also DO represent potential new folks who are theoretically interested in seeing my dolls.

But in reality, the number of folks who followed me vs. the number of folks that I actually interact with and who purchase my art- those numbers are far different. I had a lovely large handful of folks on Instagram that I had pretty consistent and interesting backs and forths with, I hope we all find each other again. A few of those, I’ve even been able to meet in real life and now consider friends. Most of that big handful plus many more read this newsletter, and you guys are the core of my audience, so I’m no longer panicked.

Which is the whole reason I began this newsletter. So that when the oligarchs decide to change their algorithms or some bot, hacker, whatever, does what they do, we will still be connected in some way.

So THANK YOU for signing up for this newsletter. It is appreciated so much, and has been a solace in a very frustrating, kind of scary stretch.

~~~

I’m finishing packing up orders today, and then I CANNOT wait to go back to work on the next collection. I am RIDICULOUSLY EXCITED about these new dolls (I’m driving everyone in our house nuts talking about this upcoming project.) Hoping to have everything ready sometime in December!

x jana

Again, my new Instagram is here. And if you’d like to share with a few friends who you think would like my weird dolls, it would be very much appreciated.

Thank you.