2024-January Musings
Blood, sweat, and excuses.
Hello Subscriber (yes, you):
This being the very first edition of the newsletter, I'm going to keep it short and sweet. See below why.
Nostalgia Ain't What It Used To Be
I was going to write about how there seems to be a movement to reinvigorate blogs, as a means of expression, outreach, and (to a lesser extent) for marketing, amongst the creative community. Some never stopped updating them of course, but others (like myself) found them falling by the wayside, replaced by other alternatives (Twitter, Facebook, etc). With the Enshittification (American Dialect Society's Word of the Year 2023 btw) well-and-truly upon us, those alternatives have proven less effective and/or less palatable than they once were.
There are alternative alternatives, like the Fediverse suite (Mastodon, PixelFed, etc). While I love them, others have found them far from satisfactory. They require too much time and need a different skill set. It takes a lot of effort to manually create and maintain a community. There's no algorithm to do all the heavily lifting. You can't fire-and-forget your broadcast message and expect the masses to extol your genius. Several celebs have learnt this lesson the hard way.
As I said, I was going to write about all that, then I watched this Adam Neely's video. It sums up the malaise that the Enshittification has created, and why we're seeing the abandonment of certain platforms and a return to others.
Time will tell whether it is a long-term trend or just a blip.
Stroke This!
My work in the later part of this month (including this newsletter) has been hampered due to my main working machine suffering a stroke. The machine wasn't quite pining for the fnords (being almost usable) but it certainly inhibited my ability to write. As a result, I'm going to need a couple more weeks on my current screenplay, as well as a short story I've nearly finished (which features Miri from the Preludes fanfic I posted recently). It's all sorted now, though.
It's only the end of January, and I'm already about two weeks behind on the schedule!
News
This caught my eye, so I thought I'd share:
Controversy brewing over voting in the 2023 Hugo Awards
Even The Guardian has written a piece about it.
Writing Tools
Wordhippo - Online thesaurus and word tools - I use this every day.
Feedbro - Browser-based syndication feed reader
More inanity available at https://skribeworks.com