The Joy Factory Returns Before We're Swallowed by the Void
Today Has Been Weird...
Welp. Today has been a bit…weird. If you decided to take Saturday off for social media activity, you might have missed that Twitter fell off a cliff today. Depending on which news you accept (and which is actually true), this might be because Mr. Diamond Mine set up absurd rate limits which shut down almost everyone’s access to the platform OR because setting up those rate limits was done so poorly that it accidentally DDOSed the entirety of Twitter OR because Mr. Diamond Mine forgot to pay his Google Cloud bills and didn’t move Twitter’s infrastructure somewhere else OR because of any of the other theories floating around on Reddit threads like this one.
At least part of this is true, as evidenced by this bit from CNN:
Whatever the reason, Twitter became entirely unusable today for almost anyone I interact with elsewhere. The result has been both part hilarious (an utterly boneheaded move) and part sad (a lot of writerly folks still have not found a suitable replacement for the business). I’ve felt both directions on this in part because a lot of things I do for funsies rely on being able to reach people, and that has become increasingly harder to do as the mechanisms for reach require more time, more money, or both.
And so today turned into one of those “well, I gotta do something” days. I don’t know if Twitter is going to officially die this year. It might. It might last until next year or become increasingly less stable or usable as time goes on. Or it might limp along just fine. Either way, there’s no logic in putting most of my eggs in that basket when there are a lot of other lovely little baskets that have cushy little egg slots!
Which brings me to the point of this newsletter post after many MANY months of silence on The Joy Factory project. I’ve been meaning to do something new with this for a while now, and this day became a perfect kick in the toosh to start that process. So here I am trying to put some of my eggs in a different basket.
What does that mean for The Joy Factory? A few things:
I’m going to start posting newsletters again. You’re welcome to stick around, tell your friends, suggest topics, and so on!
It’s not going to look like the old The Joy Factory, which was a weekly thing with multiple sections (book recs, reading lists, movie lists, entire articles, rundowns of all the things I found that were cool, etc.). It’s just a bit too much, and I want to do something more sustainable.
This thing will probably follow in the line of other newsletters: weekly or biweekly short articles on some thing I find interesting or fun or joyful or exciting. SF/F/H will continue to be my focus, and I’m sure I’ll figure out some specific feature types to stick in here on rotation. The goal will stay the same: more joy and less misery. Some ideas that I plan to explore: more commentary and analysis, a review here or there, thoughts on SF/F/H academia, insights into my academic projects (I’m working on a book), responses to other folks, and so on.
All of this is going to start small and sustainable. I know myself: I tend to take on too much, get burnt out, and then stop. So when I start things, I need to start very small. Thus, The Joy Factory in newsletter form will stay small. In the long run, that’s also a good thing for you because nobody wants to read mountains of newsletters from anyone...
So, I’m spreading my eggs out into more baskets: this newsletter, Patreon, and other social sites. I hope you’ll join me, share your thoughts, and share my things with others.
Let’s have some fun while we still can :D.
—Shaun