An Update on Great Stuff
Reflections on five months of writing, growing pains, and what I’ve got planned.
TL;DR: I missed a bunch of issues for various reasons, and have some exciting changes planned.
Hey everyone!
Let me start by addressing the elephant in the room: I have not abandoned the newsletter. In fact, quite the opposite. I have big plans. I haven’t written a post here since February 4, which in pandemic terms was—checks calendar—1 million years ago, so I can certainly understand some of the confused messages I received over the past month.
I’m not really sure why I missed so many issues. It was some combination of inertia, not reading enough books to write about something interesting, and feeling like I’d chosen too restrictive a niche for Great Stuff. (Sometimes I want to write about stuff other than “human interactions, design, and productivity.”) I can’t say I didn’t expect some growing pains with the newsletter when I started it.
A few days ago, I turned 19; I thought it’d be nice to kick 19 off with some momentum. So let’s talk about the future of Great Stuff.
Firstly, the name. “Great Stuff” was always a placeholder for something else. There’s also an existing, similarly titled newsletter about investing, so I’m probably never gonna be the #1 hit on Google. Not that that’s very important to me—I just write this for fun—but it’s a possibility I’d like to preserve. I thought of a few alternatives:
Mind Palace, like Sherlock’s mind palace from Sherlock: Too gaudy, my dad said it reminds him of extravagantly named attractions on the Atlantic City boardwalk.
Mindstuff: I like this one, but again, I don’t want to pigeonhole myself to discussions of the mind.
Kabir’s Newsletter: This is probably my favorite. Not very imaginative, but it gives me the most latitude to write about what I want.
I also designed some logos to go along with these names, but I think they’re a little too serious right now. I’m probably going to add some more elements to them that lighten up the mood a little:
Strictly speaking, the frames labeled Chicken Head Light and Chicken Head Dark are supposed to be a person with enlightenment-type brainwaves. But the resemblance is hard to unsee. Also, MS (for Mindstuff) is also a disease, which doesn’t make for the most pleasant associations.
Secondly, beyond these changes, I also want to be able to write about my programming projects somewhere. I spend a lot of time building things, but that isn’t really represented in my writing. To be honest, I’m a little scared that writing about anything that’s vaguely math-y or programming-related will result in folks who follow this newsletter fleeing in agony.
I’ve thought about splitting my content between Great Stuff and the blog on my website. This is probably what I’m going to do, but I first need to set up a mailing system for my blog so that people can get the latest posts in their inbox. (I don’t want the main blog on Substack for various reasons; chiefly, it’s because it’s not written like a newsletter.) One of my Twitter mutuals has a really cool blog setup with an embedded subscribe form, and that’s likely the direction I’m going to take. He seems to be using Buttondown, which I’ve heard excellent things about. But I’ll probably end up using Rucksack, my hand-rolled newsletter/mailing list platform; there’s a certain coolness in using something you built yourself. Here’s a sneak preview of what it looks like:
Anyway. This post is me signaling my intent to put more time into Great Stuff (or whatever it’s going to be called). Thank you for reading if you got this far, and see you next Wednesday!