Hi friends,

I’m travelling over the next few days, so this is a shorter one than usual. It’s more of a creativity-focused newsletter, rather than neurodiversity. If that’s not your bag, no worries, see you next week!

I’ve been talking a lot of smack about Substack lately (Subsmack). Believe me, I’d love for the platform to be better, but ultimately what can we expect from a tech company looking to make a profit? I’ve decided that in the long term, Substack isn’t for me (I won’t go into the reasons here, message me if you’re interested to know!)

I’ve been chronically online since I was about 12. My content has lived everywhere from MySpace to Live Journal, Blogger to BlogSpot, Tumblr to Twitter. I’ve also had websites in the past, including a Piczo account I had as a teen with a background made up of sparkly gifs which took an age to load.

We’ve all had enough internet by now to know that platforms don’t last forever. ‘Link rot’, where hyperlinks no longer link to the original webpage after a period of time, is real. Roughly 25% of web pages created between 2013 and 2023 are now inaccessible. A moment please to remember the MySpace I made at 14 for my ‘comedy’ videos. May it rest in peace, and may I rest in peace safe in the knowledge that no one can ever see those awful sketches again.

MySpace is an excellent example of content disappearing without the creator being able to do anything about it. It shows that creators can’t trust that platforms are always going to be there for them. Substack could literally close tomorrow and if I haven’t backed stuff up properly, I could lose my content and subscriber list.

Nothing is foolproof, but it seems that a good course of action would be to make your own little slice of the internet. A place to keep your content. Somewhere people can always find you.

This is why I have created a website.

www.renriley.co.uk

It is in its infancy. There’s hardly anything on it, but it’s mine.

It’s a simple place for me to explain who I am and add links to my Etsy shop, newsletter and Patreon membership.

In time, the aspiration would be to no longer use Substack’s newsletter feature, and instead send newsletters through this website or another platform I subscribe to. That isn’t financially viable right now, but hopefully one day I can achieve it. For now, I’ll still send newsletters using Substack.

In the meantime, I’ve made another big change.

My Wavy Thoughts weekly archive is now free for everyone to view on my Patreon. That’s over 60 newsletters that used to be behind a paywall. As I’ve been selling my zines, I’ve realised people can support me in other ways than just membership. There’s still the option to support me on Patreon, including a tier that gets you access to extra newsletters, but the weekly newsletters are back to being free to access. I feel more comfortable having everything on Patreon for now - they seem like the best of a bad bunch.

Eventually, my website will hold my entire archive of newsletters - it’ll just take time to make that happen (I have to manually copy and paste each one!). I want it to be my creative hub. Maybe one day I can work out how to sell stuff from there, but for now that feels a bit above my level of competency!

I’d love for you to have a quick gander at the new website and let me know your thoughts and suggestions. I’m very excited, this feels like the start of something lovely.

Take it easy,

Ren