BACK TO THE NIGHTMARE

We endured a pandemic. Life shut down. Live music stopped. No more going to the movies. It was take-out only at food stops. I avoided aisles at the grocery stores when it was filled with too many people.

Through all that, and a million Americans dead, it’s like we just couldn’t wait to get back to being miserable.

I’ve talked to a handful of people recently, and no one’s fucking happy. Short fuses, bad tempers, and people being shitty everywhere.

Oh, we can get back to “normal” a bit? Great. Time to be miserable.

SCREEN RATIO NERDERY

I have absolutely zero skin in this game, as I haven’t owned a TV since… 2008? I don’t even watch much TV, but have fallen in love pretty hard with all the Star Wars material on Disney+, and of course sports on Sling.

What I love most is someone post a video about aspect ratios in the year 2023 and it can be seen 215K times.

(via Garbage Day)

BACK IN THE CAMERA GAME

I finally got around to buying a real camera (Nikon Z30), and I absolutely love it. I haven’t owned a digital camera since my Bike Nerd days back in like 2010 or so, and I’ve never owned a camera this nice, period.

Sure, the camera on the iPhone is nice, but using something that just does one thing is real nice. And when I pull out my iPhone to take a photo I could see a notification about an email, a message, or whatever else.

The camera is just a camera, and I love that.

IF I’M MISSING I’M WORKING

If I’m missing I’m working,” as said by the mighty Chuck D.

Social media ain’t working, so in effect, you’re missing.

When I see big media outlets reaching just 3% of their audience, with full-fledged social media and marketing teams on staff? HAH.

As far as the 97% of your followers who haven’t seen that post?

You’re missing.

I know that’s not what Chuck D is talking about here, but he’s been off Twitter. Long enough for someone to say “you went missing.”

Nah.

He’s working.

Get working on things that work.

PEOPLE ARE THE PROBLEM

I couldn’t imagine being a laid off Microsoft worker then waking up to this news.

Everything is cruel and cold. Be a robot. No emotions. Don’t rock the boat. Eh, you’ll probably still get laid off because paying for extra server capacity for AI bots is cheaper than rising health care costs.

People are the problem, it seems.

SOCIAL MEDIA LAST GASPS

This post from Cory Doctorow has pretty much ended it for me:

This is just what Twitter has done as part of its march to enshittification: thanks to its “monetization” changes, the majority of people who follow you will never see the things you post. I have ~500k followers on Twitter and my threads used to routinely get hundreds of thousands or even millions of reads. Today, it’s hundreds, perhaps thousands.

My biggest project is Heavy Metal Email, and I usually hype my recent posts on Twitter with some fancy videos or the cool images I make. Then I’m careful not to include a link, since that’s frowned upon, and I just mention LINK IN BIO.

Well, in the past month, I’ve gotten less than 20 clicks from LinkTree.

And that’s from Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Facebook combined.

So tonight I put out a new GOODNIGHT, METAL FRIEND mix (#32 right here) and I’m not going to promote it all via social media.

I’ve go a newsletter going out to 17 people at 8am tomorrow (subscribe here if you want). So they’ll get to see I have a new mix that I just released.

And I’ve now got 38 or so “followers” on Mixcloud, so those people will get notified of my new mix.

Eh, let’s see where it goes from there, because social media ain’t gonna help a bit!

ACCEPT THE LOVE

Been thinking a lot about Patreon (wrote about it a bit in my latest HEAVY METAL EMAIL), and having been blessed with another paid subscriber this week, this bit from another writer caught my eye:

I have a small group of amazing people who pay for my writings, despite not getting anything extra in return, just to support me. And if you are one of those people: thank you so, so much.

I think Patreon has cursed us with this idea that if we accept support on a monthly basis there must be more. Something extra to shovel on top of the work we’re already doing.

I did this with my Skull Toaster Patreon back in the day. I had one extra for like $10/mo where I’d go to a music shop, buy a used metal CD, and send it to you. I think I called it Mystery Metal or something. It was insane, and a LOT of work, on top of all the other things I was doing, when in fact my main thing was posting 1-3 metal trivia questions PER DAY to social media, and sending out a 200+ word email every night with the answers.

That was a lot.

So I turned on payments with HEAVY METAL EMAIL. I was sending two emails a week anyways.

In those emails I had a section called ANTISOCIAL, which was links to horrible things that the social media platforms keep doing.

But I moved them out of those two emails, and packaged it into a Monday morning email called ANTISOCIAL. Paid subscribers get that.

Not a lot of extra work, and I’m still doing the core thing that I offer – write about how cool email newsletters are, and how social media is horrible (you can subscribe to HEAVY METAL EMAIL here).

Let people support you for what you’re already doing!