Welcome to Hell World
Luke O'Neil's totally normal newsletter thing (?)
I’ve decided to throw my large hat into the email newsletter thing for some reason. Well, for a couple of reasons:
1) Facebook has become an increasingly confounding and unreliable platform for writers to share their work, and as much as I’m still surprised to see it, there appear to be a non-zero number of people out there who are interested in regularly reading my bullshit. So one aspect of this email newsletter will be compiling my work published elsewhere in any given week in a handy to delete email that you never look at. Here’s a piece on my colleague Judd Legum’s decision to start a newsletter of his own like this from Wired.
2) Many of you are not on Twitter, which is where I tend to share most of my quicker reactions to the news and jokes that will get me fired from jobs I don’t actually have, so in theory this will also serve as a means of bringing those of you without internet brain damage into the soggy trenches of my poison mind cavern with Twitter-like thoughts of the news of the day.
It is very hard being a straight white man seeing various rude posts about me occasionally and in no other facet of my life being inconvenienced
August 2, 20183) Depending on how things go, this should also develop into a platform for me to publish original essays and interviews. It won’t all be dispatches of misery and woe from Hell World either. Sometimes things are nice and I will gladly say so. Here’s a nice band. Here’s a nice TV show. Here’s a picture of a nice piece of fruit. Probably not that last one but who knows.
4) I could use a little extra money! It’s no secret, or it shouldn’t be, that trying to make a living in the rapidly imploding world of journalism and online media is becoming harder every year, as publications fold, or greedy, wealth-hoarding pay pigs buy off otherwise solvent publications and grind them into dust, extracting all of the marrow from their bones and discarding the remains into the giant invisible toilet known as the Economy. If all goes well I’ll be humbly asking you to toss a few bucks into the pot to access this newsletter. Some of you will do this, some of you will not, but it would be nice if you did! Maybe $2-5 a month? I slave over a hot internet all day for you nice folks that seems reasonable to ask. And if it doesn’t work we’ll all just pretend this never happened. Not my problem in any case.
5) Some other cool writers we all like and know have started using this particular service, whomst you may gaze upon below.
Daniel Mallory Ortberg’s The Shatner Chatner
Helena Fitzgerald’s Griefbacon
Bill Bishop’s Sinocism
Kelly Dwyer’s The Second Arrangement
Judd Legum’s Popular Information