so when did I go on hiatus? last may? idk anymore. the past few years (5 years really), pandemic aside, have been ROUGH. I’ve had some really shitty full-time jobs in tech and design (like, actually traumatic), and some mixed experiences with trying to price my work as a freelancer in a way that could be sustainable. it wasn’t!
I also had some aspiration that this publication could be monetized in a way that felt ok in terms of what I wanted it to be as a community and was sustainable in terms of the cost of labor, hosting, etc. it didn’t work! it’s pretty expensive to run an independent site, and it feels bad to ask people for money for what I always wanted to be a free community resource. I’m grateful to all of you who have donated over the years, but it’s not really a sustainable model and always felt weird.
on top of all that, I just don’t like being on large swathes of the internet anymore. twitter is a garbage fire, and instagram is, at best, a constant whack-a-mole to try and see the actually cool things that people I actually like are making and doing amidst all the various kinds of toxicity there.
these days, I’m in a new full-time role that is actually well-paid and interesting and yet just a job where I have to get things done and there’s not a lot of toxic positivity or “mission” or whatever. it’s rare in tech! and it also means that I don’t have to give a fuck about trying to make any money back on this project in order to afford hosting costs and whatever. so I feel like I can finally start to actually put some love back into this publication. all paid subscriptions are now paused, and all content on the site is now fully public.
money aside, I have been trying to figure out how to get around the fact that I literally don’t want to be on the internet anymore. the best I can figure is that this publication needs to be a lot smaller in scope, and will just have to scale organically. I am not gonna scour the social networks for cool shit to share with you, nor will I be sharing new posts anywhere except to the people who are on the mailing list and in the discord. I probably won’t post every week for a while, and definitely not on the same day of the week. if you have something to share, you can email me, or post in the discord. there’s also a new calendar page where you can submit events or check out what’s coming up between issues of the newsletter.
I’m still figuring out the cadence of how this can work, but I missed u all, and I’m finally in a personal space where I feel like I can be present again. stay tuned.
