UPDATE: 2024-01-23 Why am I still hanging here? Shameless self-interest. Although I stay commercially pure by not monetizing here, I am still in rehab on the wonderful engagement opportunity still available until the X-tide arrives. The hope that someone will peek at my content at my new home — The Oracle of Technocrat for engagement even if not enough to keep a roof up is the same as Odysseus’ excuse
The belly’s a shameless dog, there’s nothing worse.
Always insisting, pressing, it never lets us forget –
destroyed as I am, my heart racked with sadness,
sick with anguish, still it keeps demanding,
‘Eat, drink!’ It blots out all the memory
of my pain, commanding, ‘Fill me up!’
(Poor, poor, pitiful me.)
I'm migrating to ghost.io platform, following the lead of Platformer, who discussed their reasons this week. Jonathan Katz is also leaving. It’s a flip-flop from my thoughts earlier. In the year I’ve been here, I’ve only one across one troll and nothing alarming. There’s been some good writing and good conversations. I haven’t seen the fascist-adjacent brown shirts rioting.
But the direction is not good. I left Twitter the day Musk bought it because it was pretty clear how his tolerance for extremism would transform it. I called that one right, but it was a gimme. The trajectory of substack.com isn’t so easy to game out. It might be neighborhoods of broken windows, grafitti, abandoned buildings here and there around the edges. Distasteful but avoidable. But it might also get nasty and when it does the transformation could be rapid. No thanks.
Here’s my pitch for me at the new digs:
whoami (cute Unix joke)
I'm Richard Careaga, a Seattle-area Boomer in search of new audiences. Too many interests, too little focus has made for too little engagement.
But who are you?
Curious
Knock-knock
So this is the spaghetti wall. See if anything sticks. I post, you scan, something catches your eye that you would like to see more of, say so!
What then?
When some critical mass is reached, I'll spin off that topic to a separate stream.
What to expect
What you will see in early days is a mix of new, topical and recycled posts from my stash. There is a near-zero chance you find everything interesting, but if you see something that is, subscribe. Come for the variety and follow the spin-offs for focus.
We the People: why there's more to it than just this year's voters
Global Speak: it's all about communicating
Sweet Dreams and Flying Machines: What happens if the internet of things blows a hole in your flight
The Spring Ball of the Full Moon: Shorty fiction
Woulda Coulda Shoulda: Poetic memoir
What next
Subscribe. There, not here. It's free and always will be. Sites growing out of your feedback might be paid, depending. Depending on what, I don't even know yet. Maybe there will be a Founder Tier for initial subscribers to spinoffs who will get a special deal. I don’t know. Talk to me.
Two for five and a your still a starter!