Writer, musician, wizardly guide to platform independence
From Raj Kaur, “Blue is immortalised in my sketchbook, from a session with wonderful Beth Spencer.”
I submitted a photograph as source material for Beth’s online drawing session, and this is from Raj’s sketchbook. I took the file and sent it to a local printer, and they made me a nice print.
I miss my buddy.
Blue returned to the cosmos today. I miss you so much, buddy.
Tonight, a friend walked me around their space, showing me the works of art left to her. A precious, sweet remembrance of a dear friend.
Tomorrow, I drive to upstate New York to visit an aunt in the hospital. She’s not an artist by definition, but she made people laugh and smile. What else is art but joy?
Remember the laughter, the smiles, the experences along the way. Celebrate the sunset, the dinner together, the conversations that flow like music into the evening.
People want proof because they don’t want risk.
When I dare suggest that maybe we can exist without social media, or musicians can take their music off streaming platforms, I basically hear this: “give me 25 examples of people doing it that are successful.”
As in, prove that other people have done it and maybe I’ll entertain the idea.
And really, eh, I’m not trying to convince anyone. If you wanna use something, use it. I ain’t your dad.
But if using a particular product or service pains you, if it’s triggering, it’s harmful to your mental health, or your sobriety, ummm… yeah, I think it’s okay to entertain the idea of not using that particular product.
If you’re a recovering addict, it’s okay if you don’t wanna play in bars.
Hell, if you just hate the bar scene, I’d say it’s okay to not play in bars.
Going first, without evidence, is hard. Which is maybe why so few do it.
We’re definitely in between seasons here in PA. Yesterday it was 75F, then on my morning walk it’s in the low 40s. I don’t know if it’s just getting older, or being more in tune with my feelings, but it’s taken me for a ride this year.
I haven’t written as much. I eased up on booking so many Zoom call interviews. Sent less newsletters.
Trying to put my energy into the bigger things (like a Zoom class I hosted this week where we built HTML pages from plain text files and uploaded them to a web host), and then conserve energy in other places, like this constant nag of publishing.
Seth Godin publishes everyday. Gary Vee posts 900 times a day. It’s like you have to pick one or other, and days off aren’t encouraged.
A friend said they feel like they have to have a monthly offering or else they’ll go broke.
It doesn’t help that gas is nearing $4/gallon here. Or that just 50 years ago people could work regular jobs and buy a house, and now lawyers and people with degrees and “grown up” jobs can’t seem to make it work.
This is America.
On Break Up 💔 With Social Media Day on Valentines Day, I deleted the YouTube and Substack apps. I reinstalled the YouTube app one day, lost about 20 minutes to scrolling through Shorts, deleted it again, and have seriously kept the phone plugged in and out of sight most of the time since.
I work from home, don’t drive much, and I answer emails and Slack and Asana stuff when I’m at my computer. Sure, I use my laptop quite a bit, but cutting three hours of iPhone time from my life has felt great.
I spent so much time on the Substack app just “keeping up.” Joining in with conversations, replying, replying to replies, managing DMs, sharing articles I liked. Seriously added up to over an hour a day, easily.
Getting back 7+ hours per week means I can write more. Or repurpose a bunch of the video and audio I’m already making every week. Processing and reflecting on all the calls and interviews I do with people every day.
That’s the work I should be doing, instead of dealing with 100 little pebbles of “engagement” per day on the Substack app.
Sublte nod to Manuel Moreale, saying:
I still have not consumed content on the phone, three weeks in. That’s awesome, and I want that to stay that way.
That was the killer for me, too – video. Making coffee, put on a YouTube video. Scroll the YouTube shorts. Warming up coffee? Repeat. Eating lunch? Catch up the latest Colbert zingers.
A solid week without all that? Just under 20 minutes of screen time per day? Yeah, I wanna keep this going.
This from “The only taboo left is copyright infringement,” from Garbage Day:
The culture that feels the most dangerous, and, thus, exciting to young people, will be what you can’t see online. And the most dangerous thing for platforms is not racist garbage. It’s unmonetizeable content. The “metric” that will matter most going forward will not be the numbers at the bottom of a post or video, but the human beings in a room that left their house to experience something.
I’m sure people nearing 50 in prior generations kept fighting for drive in movie theaters, and muscle cars, late night diners – but that’s gone, only to be unearthed like dinosaur bones. I can’t remember the last time I even saw a photo of a drive in movie theater, a muscle car, or the late night diner scene, you know?
That’s just from the 1950s to 2025, that’s 75 years. Give it another 25 years and the fond memories of MTV, corded phones, and VCRs will be long forgotten.
It was in 1971 Gil Scott-Heron told us “The revolution will not be televised.”
The revolution will not be televised
Will not be televised
Will not be televised
Will not be televised
The revolution will be no re-run, brothers
The revolution will be live
Perhaps the revolution will not be online, it will be live.
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.
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.
I love this so much:
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.
From Matt Webb of Interconnected.