#1 Welcome to the Best Album Brackets! (repost from Substack)
(Hey 2024 folks! This is a repost of the first entry in the Best Album Brackets newsletter from the defunct Substack site. I’m doing this so I have an archive; I hate to throw stuff away. The text is pretty much identical, but I’ve added a few additional notes here and there.)
Hello! If you’re reading this on or around October 13th, 2023 (Friday the 13th! Oooooh spooky!), then you have probably come here from Twitter, and you know why you’re here. If it’s been months or even years after that date, or if you got this because you’re subscribed to Against the ‘70s, then you may not know what’s up. Here’s what’s up.
My name is Kent M. Beeson, and I am the proprietor of Against the ‘70s, the newsletter that is hosting this sub-newsletter. Against the ‘70s is about mixing ‘70s cinema and modern ttrpgs; this Best Album Brackets sub-newsletter is about running tournament brackets for albums of various years. (You can see some of the tournaments in the pic above.) They have nothing to do with each other, and their pairing is a marriage of convenience for me, and probably me only. [ETA 12/29/23: Against the ‘70s is moving off of Substack and will now be its own site. It is located here.]
Since 2015, I had been running these tournaments from bestalbum95 on Twitter. We pick a year, pick 128 albums from that year, and then run them through a bracket using Twitter’s polling system to determine match winners. Twitter, which for excruciatingly stupid reasons isn’t called that anymore, has become an awful place that a lot of people, myself and my followers included. We needed to abandon it and find another place. That place, for the time being, is here. [ETA 12/29/23: Here, at the time, meaning Substack, here now meaning Buttondown.]
This is not intended to become a permanent home for the Best Album Brackets. I am, in essence, waiting here until another social media platform becomes big, stable, and popular enough to be The New Place. Oh, and it has to have a polling function. (I will say right now that my preferred New Place is Bluesky; all it really needs is built-in polls.) I know that some people would prefer not to deal with Substack, for reasons related to Twitter’s downfall; understand that I get it. [ETA 12/29/23: Make that "get it" x 2.] I’m actually thinking of moving Against the ‘70s to a regular website/blog. [ETA 12/29/23: Again, it’s happening.] That said, Substack, of all the newsletters I’ve looked at, has the best social media elements, and social media, for good or ill, is the energy that makes the tournaments run. [ETA 12/29/23: I still believe Substack is the best social newsletter for people like me who just want to write n’ post; Buttondown is very noodly. Unfortunately, the people running Substack are fuckheads.] Substack allows comments on each of the posts, and there’s the Twitter-like Notes capability. It also has polls. What I’m saying up front is that, if no other social media platforms steps up their game within a reasonable amount of time, then I may have to run the next (and future) tournaments from this space. That’s not ideal, but it might end up being the best course of action for the time being. [ETA 12/29/23: I will likely be running the polls here on Buttondown, using their “Survey” option, but that may change.]
So what’s the plan? Right now, with the Best Album of the Nineties tournament about to wrap up (on October 21, 2023), I will begin setting up the next tournament, the Best Album of the year 2000. I’ll open up the nomination phase soon [ETA 12/29/23: look for it January 1st 2024], and I would like to send out a short email each week, talking about albums that might worth nominating. As for the actual start date? That’s TBA, honestly. Despite all the work I’ll be doing for it in the meantime, I traditionally need a break between tournaments. I think we may be looking at, at least, a three month break before I even begin to talk about a start date. That’s a long time, but I hope this newsletter (and the possibility of a social hub it affords) will ease the wait.
A huge thank you to everyone who followed me on bestalbum95 and made these tournaments what they are. I hope you can follow me into this next phase. Please don’t make go alone! It’s Friday the 13th!