The 200th Post

Still swimming in shark-infested waters.

Well, well, well… here we are again.

As I detailed in my 100th Post post just two months ago…

My first post here was on August 16th. It was a sudden whim, much like setting up this Substack. My second post wasn’t for another month, on September 20th (Earth, Wind, and Fire Day Eve), after I had sat with the idea of this thing for a while. My first “real” post was just four days later, which you can find in The Archives, down near the bottom. And now, nearly seventeen weeks later, here we are. 200 posts… 192 reviews, 4 short stories, 3 posts about the site itself, and now this one.

All in such a short time too…

I totally agree, Spider-man. I totally agree.

That’s definitely a lot of content in such a short period. But to be fair, my content generation was bolstered by my transferring of a bunch of existing reviews from my Instagram page, which is still an on-going project, but it is also a well that is about to run dry.

So what happens then?

Well… the reviews will continue, of course, albeit at a slower pace, which will probably be a relief to my TWENTY-EIGHT subscribers’ inboxes.

Twenty-eight.

Also, the holiday-released films and the award season films are pretty much all streaming now, which is good for me, because I don’’t go to movie theatres anymore, as COVID isn’t over, and only a great fool would trust the best mask to hold up to two hours of sitting in that rank and rancid stew of other people’s infectious mouth-fog.

So, I’ll be busy catching up on watching all of those.

Plus, I’ve still got the same small stack of physical media sitting under my TV, films I love and intend to rewatch… the new Planet of the Apes movies, Attack the Block, Top Knot Detective, One Cut of the Dead, World’s End, Children of Men, Spider-man: Into the Spiderverse, Pig, Green Knight, Miller’s Crossing, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.

When I rewatch them… eventually… I’ll post a review.

Additionally, there are five more short stories coming. I originally had a very casual schedule of posting a story every twenty-three reviews, but these five short stories are not as ready for Primetime as my first four were, so it’s going to take a little longer to get them to a place where I’m comfortable with posting them. Not that much longer, but y’know… longer. The first one of the five is almost ready, so that will be up soon-ish, and the rest of them will come as they come.

Eventually, I’ll have a total of nine short stories posted here. In the Old World, that amount was enough for a short story collection…

Once that’s all done, I’m planning on posting the first chapters from some of my old/abandoned projects too. There’s less concern in general about presentation here. These are dead universes, after all, nothing but bone and ash, with little chance of me ever setting foot back in that world, so I’ll dig those dusty files out of cold storage in the far back of the hard drive, give them the ol’ Once Over, top and tail, and then post them here.

I’m still planning on posting some of my WIP too, at least the first three chapters, for a start. At which time, hopefully, I’ll be much farther along in the rest of the draft too. I’ve had some good think-sessions about what lies ahead in the story lately, so I’m still feeling good there, especially now that this Substack project of mine is exiting its set-up phase and heading straight into its continual existence phase. This downshift will free me up to work more on my WIP, with the fingers-crossed goal of having a fully completed first draft by the end of this year.

So, all of that shit is actually going pretty great!

Which of course means that Substack has decided to seize the opportunity to make a problem of itself…

In December, the sadly typical other shoe finally dropped here, when the dipshit douchebag Tech-bro “Free Speech Absolutist” Fuck-knuckles that founded this site revealed that they don’t have any issue with providing a platform for Nazis and Hate Speech, especially when it can be monetized and they receive a cut.

In December, Marisa Kabas started the ball rolling, bringing a lot attention to the situation with her Substackers Against Nazis open letter to Substack’s founders, Chris Best, Jairaj Sethi, and Hamish McKenzie. Hundreds of Substackers and Publications soon signed on to the letter in agreement. Author of the Handmaid’s Tale, Margaret Atwood summed up the issue:

“No, Substack: You can’t have both the dystopian nightmare and “Flopsy Bunny’s Very Busy Day.” You can’t have both the terms of service you have spelled out and a bunch of individial publishers who violate those terms of service. One or the other has got to go, and hiding under the sofa and pretending it isn’t happening will not make your dilemma go away. Nor will some laudable rhetoric about free speech – not when you yourselves have clearly stated that not everything is allowable, including threats of “violence” and “physical harm” to “protected classes.””

The Substack Founders initially tried to downplay the whole issue, which is the usual course of action when it comes to the cowardly and the complicit.

Casey Newton and Zoe Schiffer write Platformer, a kind of tech and social media guide. It was at one time one of Substack’s biggest publications… at one time. But at the time, they added this to the discussion:

“Every platform hosts its share of racists, white nationalists, and other noxious personalities. In some very real sense, there is no escaping them online. But there ought to be ways to see them less; to recommend them less; to fund them less. Other platforms have realized this as they’ve grown up. Here’s hoping Substack does the same.”

However, Substackers like S Peter Davis could already tell which way the wind was going to be blowing:

“Of all the platforms that have attempted the free speech absolutist project in search of a political emulsion, every one of them has gone one of two ways eventually: They have ultimately embraced content moderation, or they have become homogeneously radical right-wing websites.”

Mike Masnick of Techdirt echoed this when he added:

“If you’re not going to moderate, and you don’t care that the biggest draws on your platform are pure nonsense peddlers preying on the most gullible people to get their subscriptions, fucking own it, Chris.

Say it. Say that you’re the Nazi bar and you’re proud of it.”

Once the bad press for their open support of Nazis and Hate Speech got too big for them to ignore—interrupting their “Nerd Wet Dreams come true” lifestyle of wearing hoodies and sport coats to floor seats at Basketball games, and driving their ugly high-performance Italian sports cars through stop-and-go traffic to basic-ass clubs blinded by strobes and overwhelmed by deafening techno beats, all so that they could overpay for bottle service and companionship like the terminally uncool, cowardly uber-nerd, fascist-enabling dipshits they are—they made a performative half-ass gesture towards addressing the problem, which is all you can ever reasonably expect from people who are completely incapable of giving a shit, because they just don’t fucking care at all…

For some, like Talia Levin, this meant that there was only one option left:

“I must admit that there's a fair amount of anger and resentment that comes along with this decision—anger at feckless rich crypto-fascists like Hamish McKenzie of Substack, and his many Silicon Valley peers, who all seem to subscribe to the notion that race-based hatred is just a simple quirk of the marketplace of ideas.”

This is all an incredibly disappointing turn of events, but it’s also one that is sadly all too typical now.

Sadly typical, as there are only ever two types of “free speech absolutists.” One, the bigots who want to be freely and loudly bigoted whenever they want to, and without any consequences, and two, the stupid idiots. Sadly typical, as it is the much-beloved and common position of the wealthy and the privileged, who don’t care, because they don’t have to, and also because, they simply don’t care. Sadly typical. Especially now, especially in America, especially in White Christian America, and most especially in the small towns and suburbs.

Sadly fucking typical.

Then, as the shitty cheery atop this shitty sundae, it came out that the “Anti-Substackers Against Nazis Open Letter,” as it came to be known, something that was originally touted as a grassroots effort, and also something that the Substack founders referenced in their initial attempts to downplay the burgeoning outcry over the issue, was actually something that was directly orchestrated by them, in collusion with an eager army of bootlickers and Centrists, with the ready help of some well-known White Supremacist talking head bigots.

An ultimately unsurprising reveal, and also, again… sadly typical these days.

People are leaving Substack now, Subscribers and big names publications with big subscriber lists alike, scattering like dandelion fluff on the breeze to a myriad of other platforms, in much the same way a lot of us did when the King of the Dunning Kruger, the half-wit nerd-son from the land of Privilege and Parental Support, the doughy-faced Emperor Super Bigot Charlatan Dipshit himself, Elon Musk, bought Twitter.

So where does that leave me?

At this point, I’m feeling resigned and defeated. I just want one fucking place… one fucking place, where I can put up my stupid little blogs and bullshit without the Nazis and bigot favorite sons of White Christian America coming in and shitting all over the place. I’d love to not have to think about them everyday, all the time, everywhere. The fact that this is apparently too much to ask any more is really fucked up and miserable.

I hate it.

I hate the position that Substack has now put me in, not just because it’s generally shitty, but also because it’s yet another intrusive reminder added to the pile that this is simply the reality of life in America now… there’s an out-of-control nazi problem here, as the Masks of Civility that White America once wore religiously are now irrevocably tossed aside, and it’s ruining everything, and there’s no way to stop it.

So, the short answer is, I don’t know what I’m going to do yet.

Admittedly, I might not do anything at all. For the moment, I’m mostly just waiting to see which Substack alternative is going to be the best fit for me, and also, which one is least likely to repeat this situation.

All while being fully aware that such a place may not exist.

So, yeah, I may do nothing, because… why fucking bother? The same shit is going to happen at the next place, because This is America. Also, does anyone really care if I do anything? Probably not, I have twenty-eight subscribers, plus a few more regular readers on top of that, so I’m not even a rat in this rotten house’s walls, I’m just some crumbs… but this all bugs me nonetheless, of course it does. Like I’ve said, I’d love to have just one small part of my life that isn’t impacted by these kinds of decisions, all because White America had decided that it generally doesn’t care who it is that puts them first in line, just as long as they are first in line.

I mean, it’s one thing to know that there are Nazis here.

I can deal with that. I have to, as someone who is considered a person of color in America (even though I’m mostly white and was raised white), because that’s what it means to live cheek to jowl with White America. It’s like having to occasionally spend time with relatives who don’t have cable or a WiFi signal, and being forced to listen to them as they go on and oh-so reasonably on about how “uppity” Kamala Harris is. The constant “white noise” of racism in this country, in the regular daily conversations of “good” white people volunteering to “share their opinions,” is a constant background dirge. I can deal with that in the same way I do with movies by problematic actors, directors, or writers, by just not listening to the commentary tracks. As long as I do that, I’m not forced to confront the fact that they’re at best a bunch dim bulb nitwit Centrists with political views they cultivated while being super-high and suffering from a mild case of sunstroke on the deck of some billionaire’s yacht.

But it’s another thing entirely when these people not only refuse to stop constantly demonstrating to you who they are, but also that they’re proud of being this way, and that because of that, they’re not going to quit being this way either, which is what the Substack founders have done.

So, I don’t fucking know…

I guess we’ll see where we are in another 100 posts.