Just The Basic Facts — Changes to Site & Newsletter

Relax
I'll need some information first
Just the basic facts
Can you show me where it hurts?

(Pink Floyd, Comfortably Numb; The Wall, 1979)

Tomorrow, I'll publish the whole soul-searching story in prose and video. For now, just the raw details because some changes have already taken place, some are happening as soon and this is published, and some are ongoing.

1. I've redesigned the website in just about total. Same look and feel, way different under the hood. The basic idea is that I thinned it down and simplified it a good 70%. It's more like my classic motorbike featured in the header: everything you need, nothing you don't.

2. I'm discontinuing the new newsletter offshoot, The Swagger, as of this post. The newsletter will now be run from here and run the same way...the post will be featured in total in email (not just notices), so subscribers and readers have more options in how they wish to read. Email is cool again. Get with the program.

3. After publication of this post, two things happen with subscribers to The Swagger.
... a. Paid premium subscribers there will be given complimentary memberships here for an appropriate length of time.
... b. Subscribers there will be imported here, and they will receive an email alerting them to that so if they don't want, they can immediately 1-click unsubscribe.

4. In general, I publish whatever I have the urge to write or capture on video, whenever. In practical, I'm reducing quantity while aiming to increase quality. My gut feel is that's an average of 2 posts per week, sometimes 3. The other aim is to have publication happen whenever in the Tuesday through Thursday window, my time (Bangkok; 12 hrs in advance of NYC).

5. My aim for the style reflects what you now see on the home page. Storyform. Mostly. Sometimes you can't avoid being sciency, but I typically do that in more of a narrative fashion anyway. Maybe that's why my "science" posts actually get read, while so many others are just good sleeping aids. Hey, shit is what it is.

... By way of a little teaser for the story in writing and video coming up tomorrow, the reflection has basically amounted to this: stop expecting standing ovations, fame, and fortune for just doing your damn job.

We're awash in it now, in this fix-your-shit society. It's like a big shell-con game. It's fine to hold up examples of those who overcome (whatever) for inspiration to the still shackled. It goes off the rails when fixing your shit is something to aspire to as greatness in itself. It becomes caricaturist—like getting hooked on heroin just so you can get off it to get the bows.

You fix your shit because...

1. It's your damn job. Do that, now you're at human baseline, nothing more

2. The reward is merely the same unencumbered freedom and opportunity you could have enjoyed before you fucked it all up

3. Whatever you do now beyond baseline, owing to your newfound freedom, stands on their own as accomplishments and could have been done sooner if you hadn't been fucked up for so long. Keep that perspective, and in no way is your newfound success caused by your past fuckups. You managed to get your shit together and attain some measure of greatness in spite of the fuckups.

That's all one part of it and the other is how it plays out in marketing for membership—"marketing" being, in many ways (but not all) a euphemism for professional liar with unwarranted trappings of respectability. I'll get into that as well. Tomorrow.

Until then...