Love this from Rolling Stone: “Johnny Blue Skies, the guy formerly known as Sturgill Simpson, will release a new album only in physical format.”
No streaming, just vinyl, CD, and cassette.
As Steve Vai once said, “I get paid the most.” As more artists call the shots, and resist the allure of giving everything away for free, then we’ll see some actual change in the creative world.
Spotify won’t one day wake up and start paying more. Nor will the general public just stop streaming everything for $10 a month.
Got 40+ registered for tomorrow’s BREAK UP 💔 WITH SOCIAL MEDIA Day Zoom call tomorrow at 12pm EST (Feb 14, of course, still time to register).
Three hours a day is… a lot. I’ll be deleting the YouTube app (too easy to get caught up in scrolling Shorts while making lunch, or reheating my coffee), and the Substack app. Now that I can schedule Live streams via the desktop, I can finally ditch the app, as that too is just way too easy to scroll scroll scroll a few times a day, which adds up.
I love doing live stream stuff, and I feel like I need to figure out how to do that via YouTube or something at some point.
MIST: Like Google Docs, but for Markdown files, by Matt Webb.
I want to be able to share a Markdown doc as easily as sharing a link, and have real-time multiplayer editing, suggested edits, and comments, without a heavyweight app in the background.
It was 13 years ago today that NPR’s Ask Me Another Twitter account gave my Skull Toaster project a little shout.
I posted well over 2,000 nerdy metal trivia questions on Twitter, and also over 1,000 email newsletters with the answers (and backstory). From 2011-2018 I did this as a living resume; showing potential companies that I could build audience, build community, and handle daily content for both social media and email newsletters, which is now the basis of my work over a decade later.
This stuff takes time. Don’t let the online guru’s fool you – it’s not as easy as just “pick your niche” and then “post content.” Anyone can buy a domain name and post for a month, but it takes belief and vision to do it for the long haul, even with no guarantee of making $10,000/MRR or an email list with 5,000 subscribers.
I found via The Trend Report that Kamala Harris is launching Headquarters, “the new Gen-Z led progressive content hub.”
The announcement video was posted on the official HQ Twitter account (here), a 28 second video clip made in a conference room explaining that it’s where you’ll find the latest of what’s going on, and meet and revisit with courageous leaders.
No mention of the URL, or any sort of call to action. Just to “stay engaged” and “I’ll see you out there.”
So the HQ Twitter profile has a link: headquarters.news, which links to…
… a Substack Welcome page.
This annoying Welcome page “feature” can’t be turned off, but a quick Google search will tell you how to avoid it.
I skipped this by clicking the tiny X in the upper right corner. C’mon, take me to the “the new Gen-Z led progressive content hub” already!
That’s it, folks. That’s the new Gen-Z led progressive content hub.
No video (nah, save that for social media, I guess).
This was posted on Feb 5th, and I’m writing this on the 8th (I guess nothing much has happened since this initial post).
And the Substack About page hasn’t been updated, leaving the generic default text; “Join the crew,” are you kidding me?
How do you launch this without some already published “meet and revisit with courageous leaders” posts, as mentioned in the kick off video?
How do you launch this without having an updated ABOUT page?
How do you launch this without any video, branding, or images?
How do you launch this without links to resources about registering to vote, or how to contact your elected officials?
How do you launch a “content hub” like this in 2026?
There is a magic to the rooms. The spaces, the theaters, the clubs, the bars, the back porches.
I came across Roddy Bottum’s “These Rooms,” which was an eloquent journey into all sorts of rooms, weaving the magic with the turmoil, and everything in between.
“The rooms of punk rock, don’t get me started. Where we are as a youth, as a celebration, as a rebel in our lives at the pinnacle of what matters, politically, protesting, being together and the sheer volume of the music as it comes off the stage, the pits, the shine of those shows, the drunk dumbness of becoming who we. become and the strength of that.”
I’m turning 50 this year and still remember the community centers and basements and feeling the floor shake in a second floor apartment in Brookyn that was for some reason accessible only via the fire escape.
Then a good friend sent me this video of the great Ian McKellen on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, talking about live theater, and doing anything to be in those places, and the magic that happens if only we get off our fucking phones.
It’s the rooms, the spaces, the theater of humanity that endures, that allows the magic to happen, the let me find these two different pieces on this morning and to put them into a blog post that is accessible around the world via the web browser that ships on every smart phone.
Recently there was a cold snap and a road nearby iced over – it was in the shade and cyclists kept on wiping out on it. For some reason the council didn’t come and salt it.
Somebody went out and created a sign on a weighted chair so it didn’t blow away. And this is a small thing but I LOVE that I live somewhere there is a shared belief that (a) our neighbourhood is worth spending effort on, and (b) you can just do things.
Something about live radio really intrigues me. That you can turn something on and speak, and people could hear it, but you don’t really have numbers or metrics to see who’s tuning in. Not like YouTube and Twitch streams, you know?
With Macrowave you can do that straight from your Mac, and anyone with a web browser can listen in.
I messed around with Blast Radio years ago, streaming from Abelton Live, and people could listen via the app. Afterwards you could download your “show,” and I pieced them together into a HUNTERTHEN album.
