First days...

A Feburary Retrospective

The march of time, ‘February fill dyke black or white’ is over, and here in Blighty, March marches in like a lamb, which isn’t great news as, according to English countryside lore, it will go out like a lion.

So what can I say about my first couple of weeks on Substack?

I blame S. E. Grosskopf for pulling me in, not that I came kicking and screaming, rather I dropped in to take a look and thought, okay, why not.

Of course, I’m familiar with Substack. I even remember hearing about the addition of a Twitter-now-called-X-like feed, in addition to the longstanding article-subscription model.

Once upon a time, I could be counted on to be an early adopter of the latest online dooberry. In the early years of this century, I made a point of registering my preferred handles when a new social network landed, and I’d generally give it a go. By the 20-teens, I became a little disenchanted.

Reluctantly active on Facebook, I suppose, is part of the story; using my real name on the internet for a kid who logged on with MSN via Windows95 in 1994 felt very counterintuitive; this is the internet, after all.

My favourite network committed suicide. StumbleUpon killed creator blogs, tried to become Twitter, and told us to go to Tumblr. The magic was the core group of curious creators who shared cool pages—once they left, it became a platform for sales pitches. Reddit never clicked for me either.

Paradoxically, Twitter introduced longer posts, and now, as X is perhaps as removed from the micro-blogging site concept as you can get, what’s left is the stream of posts, which cascade like a fruit machine’s cherries, and so on, rewarding its users with a similar dopamine hit. It still feels very impersonal, a choppy ocean, and as vast and as a broad.

I’ve made some new friends, like Li Mitchell, in the last couple of weeks. Moreover, so far, there is a sense of community within my chosen subtopics, which corrals users by preferences. In this way, I’m reminded of the early days of the web with bulletin board services, and the first web 2.0 sites, like MySpace, that morphed into social networks.

In terms of what I can do with Substack, I’m still learning what all the buttons do.

I’ve got a vault full of flash fiction stories—some dark, some strange, some silly. All of these are inspired to some degree by my dreams; I have been journaling since 2023. The first ones will land here as free reads soon. If you like bite-sized tales with a twist, hit subscribe so you don’t miss them.