One Foot Out the Door

So, Elon Musk is buying Twitter, and with that action (and the ones folks suspect will follow), he's ushering in a new era for the already troubled/troubling platform. And honestly, given past management, it's just the latest reason for users to flee the site.

But leaving isn't really an option for me, not yet. Or rather, it's an option with more serious costs: The following I've built there and the reach I have has made me a more hirable candidate, has made me more attractive to agents and publishers, and has helped me get small projects I've worked on in front of a large enough audience that even niche things have a chance at success.

That should mean that I don't want you leaving Twitter either, but fuck that. It's a bad site! My own experience that has been a long arc over the last decade. From 2009-2015 or so, it was a place where I was able to bond with peers, engage with an audience, and build solidarity with people during times of trouble and crisis. It was also becoming clear that the platform was going to have issues it was not interested in fixing, especially in 2014 as long-running harassment campaigns coalesced into something new, more organized, and ever-better at dodging moderation.

Over the years that followed, my time there became less social and more professional. It became harder to differentiate good faith disagreement from bad faith attack, and the overall volume of interaction spilled beyond what I could reasonably keep up with. Also, I'd followed so many (perfectly good!) people for professional reasons that my main feed was less of a stream and more of an ocean. So, even though I wasn't planning on leaving Twitter, I did give up using it the way I used to.

And that's me, someone who actually did manage to use Twitter to find opportunity, career, and audience. Year after year, there have been good reasons to leave the site behind. And now that things seem like they might be actually picking up speed in that direction, I realized that the first way of getting myself off the site is to actually try to export some of the reason why I'm on there to begin with: Being able to put thoughts in front of people like you.

So, here's a newsletter. It has the same name as my old blog, Clockwork Worlds, and I think I'm gonna spend some time sliding some of that old content over here and backdating it. (I already did it with one early post just to see if it would work, and it looks like it does). I may even slide that URL over this way.

Importantly: My hope is to use this as an irregular(-but-hopefully-not-too-irregular) blog to talk about thoughts I've had about games, movies, music, etc. and as a newsletter to keep folks up to date with things I'm working on. To do that, you can scroll up to the top and hit subscribe, or you can add the site to your favorites, or you can scroll down and get the RSS link. My plan is not to use this as a marketing email list, but I will be sharing and talking about things I'm working on now and in the future.

(Case in point: Hey, did you know that Friends at the Table is heading into the end of our latest season, a dark fantasy/gothic horror/weird west series called Sangfielle. It's been pretty good, and if you like that sort of thing, start here and give it a try. If giant mechs are more your think, PARTIZAN might be more your speed.)

Beyond all that, I don't know exactly how I'll end up using this, or if I'll turn on subscriptions or anything quite yet. A lot will be determined by how many people subscribe (ghost.io does have fees for larger membership lists), how folks respond, what they want, etc. I will say that as relieving as living in the No Takes Zone has been for the last six months or so, I do miss writing for and engaging with an audience, and if I can figure out how to do that in a more healthy way, I'd love to do it again.

Whether you signed up or not, thanks. Hope y'all have a good week.