The Sub: a tale of paywalls
I’ve read what the CEO of Substack had to say about free speech. It’s putrid. I’d like it if freedom also had “hate speech” built into restrictions on others who might like a word, its place in violence, its violence itself, and therefore also unacceptable to Substack.
These places trade on aggregation. (If not agression.) The writers and “content producers” wash one way and audiences have limited views of what’s the up-to-the-minute spot for the good stuff. So I get it, there is no site if people are sloshing away from it. There is also no site if your Ponzi-style marketing, which essentially works because it works, gets brown shi(r)t rubbed all over it.
For the moment I’m testing this out. All the owners are sucking orange Jellybaby right now. The taste will soon become obvious. (Junket.) I’m wading into this form of self-publishing—which seems to be what it is—as I might getting my books on Amazon via their platform, or handing out poems on the street corner, which is what my son has recommended to me. It’s a square where racists have walked, as they defile wherever they go. On other platforms there is active suppression of reality.
I’ll give this one a go for the moment, and look into it further. I’m staying here. Not quite hosting in my own shed, just looking up—
Coffee Love Hearts as an Epiphenomenon
My partner in life was born on Valentines Day. It makes it ridiculous to eat out. We have both worked hospo venues on VD and have a heathy disrespect for the other customers on such days anyway. Sheer volume, though, does something. Like wartime surgeons I imagine from ER, the baristas at places like Jackson Dodds in Gilbert Road—Preston, I think it is—work as slowly as they can given the gazillions of coffee hangry cyclists and parents and cyclist parents roaming Melbs like locusts in Lycra, which alliteration I can’t even say on Sunday mornings.
It was at Jackson Dodds the young blokes (they are always young blokes but more on that later) first pored the pour in a way until then I had been impatient with in my professional life. I had seen such pouring as at best a performative swirl and the patterns made as flourishes of a one (bloke) who has so much juice they can tie the cafe latté foam with their tongue, as it were, whose Italianate job title came down to “Gaggia Jockey”. What the Jackson Dodds crew revealed to me, defiant of the red eyes and outstretched hands of mums murmuring macchiato and dads droning doppio, defiant of my own OCD chore timing and prediabetic hangover, it must be admitted, what they personified lord love their drifted soul patches and mullets, was love.
Now, read on (with cute pics), free as a bird.
https://dunningkrugerdancemirror.substack.com/p/coffee-love-hearts-as-an-epiphenomenon