Art by ruduraro!
Hello! I’m writing a quick thing to celebrate the public announcement of this two-month-old blog. The quality of an FAQ is proportional to how many of its questions are desired vs. actually asked, so in order to write a bad one, I’ve limited myself to addressing the handful of questions I expect will actually emerge from the discovery that I’ve been running a blog for two months without telling anyone – unless you were a member of Friend Group A. My apologies to Friend Groups B, C, and δ.
WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?
Made a website! It’s called WITH ENTRAILS (or With Entrails if we’re not fucking around). I’ve wanted my own blog – not tied to any particular service – for a very long time, and this is that. You’re probably familiar with my work on Medium, where my work has been hosted since I started writing legible text. It was a perfectly acceptable location that was also sorta insidiously terrible. This made it the most insidious genre of place, since it was just bad enough in a number of ways to hurt my brain without being so bad as to push me into doing this sooner. Even now, it’s trying to inform me in an email that a man named “Sean Goldmann” has “clapped” for my article. Thank you, Sean. But we can’t continue like this.
The result of my extrication is a blogging platform I fully own and control. Best of all, I get to stop calling it a “platform.” It’s a website! Welcome to my website. It’s just for fun. Isn’t that neat?
WILL ANYTHING HAPPEN TO YOUR WORK ON MEDIUM?
Doubt it! I don’t intend to post there again or cross-post anything from here. Other than that, I won’t delete my account or anything attached to it. I’ll post a final article letting my Medium-specific audience – the spiritualists, healthcare workers (you’d be surprised), and AI dipshits* – know about the new spot. After that, it’ll stand as an archive. I have a full backup of everything on there sitting on my hard drive, which should preserve its contents for thousands of years.
*If you’re one of said dipshits, pretend you forgot about the new spot and make yourself scarce. If you’re not sure what it means to “make yourself scarce,” ChatGPT can help you.
That said, if you love anything in particular on there, I’d recommend grabbing it; the website could be sold to dumber venture capitalists at any moment, and if they decide to save a nickel by deleting articles about old MMOs and John Carpenter movies, you may feel too anxious to ask me for a copy even though you totally can. I would do the same thing. In the meantime, learn to escape yourself – it gives me hope that we might both be saved.
It’s worth mentioning that I may upload, gradually, a select number of my favourite articles from Medium here – probably with a postscript that says a little more about the subject, under what circumstance the article was written, and anything that may have happened in the interim. I won’t edit them beyond that, since that would amount to hysterical tinkering. Feel free to suggest any you’d like to see republished! I’ve known folks to have specific favourites they’ve enjoyed reading more than once, which is really cool and pretty surreal. I’ll hook you up!
HOW MUCH MONEY COULD I MAKE BY SELLING ALL THE TEETH IN MY MOUTH?
A great example of a question only a good FAQ would pose. Since this is meant to be a bad one, I will ignore it.
You might be lucky to get somewhere in the ballpark of $200 USD if they’re in great condition and you still have your wisdom teeth. Dental schools are always looking for more teeth. There are other places that are always looking for teeth, but they hold bad company and you may regret working with them. Understand the scope of your own desperation before you make a decision.
WILL YOUR WRITING CHANGE?
I think so, and I’m quite happy about it. I’ve been gradually shifting out of Medium Mode since I started posting here, and the result has been more excitement and satisfaction than I’ve felt in years. For the first time in a very long time, I’ve been consistently proud of my work. It feels funnier, trenchant, and more interesting than what I’ve felt myself to be doing – especially since the beginning of the year, when I charged myself with writing at least one post a month, every month. Until this blog, “at least” was the load-bearer, since I would usually rush something out at the end of the month without much enthusiasm, littering my account with drafts that made my brain hurt and my chest feel sore.
I’d lost the ability to feel good about writing, and I reclaimed it here; if that shows, I’m grateful for the shift. In fact, you’ll see more writing more often! Not counting this, there are already six posts on here amounting to, like, 15,000 words over the course of two months. I’ll still cover the same ground – in fact, I’ll end up covering more topics than I ever did on Medium. When things calm down a bit, I might even start posting things that aren’t articles. Short fiction? Who can say…
(Yeah, probably.)
That should do for now. Spelunk around and let me know what you think!