January 28, 2022

Reviving Theoretiquette

Hello cherished subscriber!!

Remember when I started my little newsletter two years ago? Of course you don’t, it’s been nearly two year, or, emotionally, a century. You might be about to scroll down right now to find the unsubscribe button because you have no idea how you ended up on this mailing list. But I assure you, you intentionally subscribed to this. I can say so, because I frankly don’t have the energy nor the spare cash to be out there trying to buy mailing lists.¹

When you signed up for this newsletter, it was a satirical advice column. I enjoyed it, but, as I kind of figured would happen, I didn’t get a lot of questions to answer and I didn’t feel like making up fake questions. So, it just kind of petered out and died after six months. Though not before I got to write about my favorite subject: Daylight Savings Time. You can pursue the meager archives here.

The pandemic has been hard for all of us, and impacted us in many different, ways. One impact I experienced was a lot of difficulty around writing. Which is a problem, as I am a writer. My manuscript, which I’d been working on since 2017, completely stalled out. New ideas were thin on the ground. And nearly every time I sat down to write, I found my brain turned into the static snow of an old TV tune to an empty station. I did manage to get a little writing done, which turned into two publications: at Hobart Pulp and McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. It’s the second one that will explain somewhat why you are receiving an email from my long-dormant newsletter.

See, one way I’ve coped with the pandemic is by making spreadsheets. Really, really random spreadsheets. I like to cruise around Wikipedia and find random data to scrape and analyze meaninglessly. The more useless, the better. Sometimes I keep it to myself, sometimes I use it as fodder for a little tweet or two, but generally, it’s not amounted to anything more than a little toying around in Google Sheets on a Sunday morning. But what if, go with me here, I started subjecting you all to my dumb spreadsheet analytics? So, that’s where we’re going.

I’m not renaming the newsletter, at least not yet, mainly because I paid $20 to get a logo design. But I am pivoting this newsletter toward one of my favorite hobbies, after Lego building and re-watching the same three TV shows endlessly. I’ve already planned the first few newsletters, so I can tell you that we’ll be looking at what makes Pixar so successful², the Bachelor franchise, and indices of economic “freedom” in the coming weeks or months (I haven’t decided how frequently I’m going to send these out). So if getting somewhat absurd analysis of these items and similar subjects sounds uninteresting, I just want to give you the opportunity to opt-out before they start popping into your inbox. You can unsubscribe by clicking the button at the bottom of this email. If, however, you want to read my data analysis³ going forward and you’re already a subscriber, no action is necessary, they will magically⁴ appear in your inbox in the near future. If you don’t already and want to subscribe, you can do so here.

For what it’s worth, I do hope you’ll stick around!