Things I dislike about Substack

  • The primary mode of communication is email, but Substack does everything it can to get you out of the open ecosystem of email and into their closed ecosystem of their web reader and app.
  • The declared intention is to get more people reading longform writing, but Substack bombards you with constant suggestions to subscribe to new publications and to follow new people, rarely leaving you to just read.
  • Although Substack tracks how and when every person opens every email, it doesn’t mark a post as read in the web reader after having read its email. This essentially creates a duplicate inbox just for Substack subscriptions.
  • It’s very unclear how and why “subscribe” and “follow” are different.
  • Subscribing and unsubscribing to a publication in the web reader does not function like a feed reader; instead, only posts from after the point of subscribing are added to the inbox, and they remain even after unsubscribing.
  • There appears to be no way to delete a post from the web reader. The only option is to archive. Once a post finds its way into your web reader it’s there forever.
  • Nazis.
  • Navigating to /subscribe provides no way to navigate away, only to start a paid subscription.
  • By default, no email confirmation is required for subscribing an email to a publication.

ZZ Top are playing within earshot. Today and tomorrow. 18 inscrutable pages of “Contingent Cubism.” Read about the Greenland shark, which is estimated to live up to 500 years. I need to dedicate more time to learning Godot Engine. I need to stop checking my Substack stats.

I am collecting and tagging my Mark Zuckerberg fiction on Substack.

Pigeon Poop / The Forest’s Clean Air: open.substack.com/pub/black…

Submitted the treatment for the monster movie to the producers/director. 34 pages all told. It should be an easy step to go to draft. Had a peanut butter brownie as a treat. Now to decide on the next Black Marlin post and read this “Contingent Cubism” essay. 📝

I’ve finished a key stage of the monster movie script. Breaking the story. It should all be easier from now. I bought myself a glazed donut for a job well done. 📝

Took a free coffee from the pay-it-forward board at the café. Scratched down some ideas for Black Marlin. Made some minor progress on the monster movie script. Unexplained aches and nausea. Came home early and slept while the sun set. Watched the Black Mirror episode “Eulogy” which is devastating.

Roadworks made me run for a train that was late anyway. Downed the usual long black before art theory class. Feminism with a whiff of 1970s essentialism. A few hours to kill reading about Bill Henson before a birthday dinner with Jackson. Sushi and sake. Turkish cake and espressos.

Labour Day. I endured the labour of attaining Inbox Zero.

On the release of OpenSSH 10.0:

 * This release removes support for the weak DSA signature
   algorithm, completing the deprecation process that began in
   2015 (when DSA was disabled by default) and repeatedly warned
   over the last 12 months.

Ten years. Code moves slowly.

I never thought it would be so simple to make a social network wholesome, as Micro.blog has done, just by removing the quantification of followers and likes. I can’t see if anyone is following me, and neither can anyone else. Bliss.

Only one Bandcamp Friday buy. A dream collaboration of Aho Ssan & Resina: 🎵

Watched the election at a neighbour’s house. Ate butter chicken and sticky date pudding. Drank wine and coffee. Labor took a handsome victory with a swing in some seats of up to 15%. Cherry on top was Dutton losing his seat. Disappointing to see the Greens lose their two.

Analogous: open.substack.com/pub/black…

First public screening of Space/Time. Amazing to see friends up on the big screen.

Auto-generated description: A black-and-white photo of people seated in a theater in front of a large screen showing a poster for the film Space/Time.

When I made an only fans, my brain chemistry changed irrevocably. My jaw and my soul grew slack, there was absolutely no pleasure left in anything and all of my cheap belongings languished around me, shedding microplastics that filled the air and absorbed into my body. I missed New York City with its real people. My friends and lovers. In the clutches of my algorithms, my mind felt like a hunk of pink taffy being pulled and folded by a gyrating steel machine. Most days the unrelenting nausea prevented me from doing anything to help myself, so I just inserted my loose and worn-out brain into the metal claws and let them work it for several hours.

– Lizzy Borden

In participating in Micro.blog I’ve come to realise just how much of my social media interaction has been through lazy Like button pressing (which Micro.blog does not feature). Some of my energy ought to be redirected here.

I think a key to maintaining my online mental hygiene is to severely limit the amount of push communication in favour of pull communication. Substack and email subscriptions make me feel overwhelmed. RSS, Micro.blog and IRC are enjoyable and wholesome.

For about a year now I’ve been involved in a screenwriting project under NDA. I need a good designation for this project that isolates it without divulging any privileged information. It has a good title, so “untitled ____ movie” would be misrepresentative. Maybe just “monster movie.” 📝