Programming Note: Substack Move

Quick and rare programming note: This site will be switching to Substack soon. Burning questions answered below.

1. Just what the world needs—another Substack. Why are you such a sellout?

Pretty simple: I liked the independence of working with Ghost (and still recommend it to anyone interested in setting up a website). The two main drawbacks remain that I don’t really have the time or the skill to make use of its full capabilities, and it is simply much harder to attract readership to a separate website lately. Substack’s platform fosters a lot of cross-pollination, and other writers and podcasters I already interact with tend to use it. This is compounded by the fact that X/Twitter, which was formerly a great place to find wider exposure, adopted the (extremely stupid) new policy of deboosting outside links.

Furthermore, as X becomes increasingly hostile to intelligent discussion, and Bluesky still remains kind of a mental asylum, I’m hoping Substack might allow for more thoughtful exchanges with both readers and other writers. To that end, I will be opening up comments and looking to engage more all around, and I do look forward to hearing from you all there.

2. I thought you were above whoring yourself out like this?

I’m not actually. But more to the point, while there is a prevalent degree of self-promotion these days that is simply unseemly (I won’t name names), it’s generally nice to have More Readers. I mostly enjoy greater engagement, which means a wider range of responses to what I write and occasionally more ideas about what to write. Plus, I like the kind of writing I’m able to do here, and the more money I make writing with Strange Frequencies, the greater the incentive to keep doing so rather than selling my essays to outside publications.

3. Does it matter for anyone else?

It honestly shouldn’t. Everything will be ported over to the new site, including subscriptions, and the next email you receive will come from there. Even the name won't change. You are free to opt-out/unsubscribe/etc. at that point, but I certainly hope you won’t, and again there shouldn’t otherwise be any major differences.

I’ll do a brief introductory post once I move. Otherwise, it should look and feel similar, and the writing will generally remain the same, which is either a good thing or a bad thing depending on your view. In the meantime, you can find the soft-launch here, which provisionally includes all of the same posts.