#i hate substack

[ivan-fyodorovich-k]

I don't want to be a mediocre wannabe internet celebrity

I want like, half a dozen people who are my friends and I show them my stupid stuff and they have stupid stuff and we also do hobbies together and take walks, trips maybe

like the Inklings, I guess

[lilaccatholic]

Man, I feel like every clip I see from Pints with Aquinas lately Matt Fradd is demeaning women. Really sad to see it, I used to love his interviews :/

[see-arcane]

Open question to everyone as I continue to wrestle with being a professional starving creative. I’ve been nudged towards making a Substack a couple times now. I’m hesitant on making a new page for anything due to how little the Official Author Website seems to have mattered in the grand scheme of my teeny scribbling career, but there are a couple pros to consider. The most basic plus is that it could make for a tidier spot to leave my Big Scribbles than just piling them in a scattered Tumblr. But the key part the online 'get passive income!1!!' gurus point out about Substack is the sub(scription) bit. And how it can be a charged subscription.

“It’s an easy way for freelancers to make money!”

With at least $5 charged per month. For weekly-to-monthly updates. From me.

That means scheduled writing that's worthy of wringing more money out of the ‘Everyone is Broke’ website at least once a month. Note, I would not be pulling a Watcher; I’d still be dropping previews for my big WIPs here per usual. But a $ubstack would come with that and other original works each month. Supposing there was more than 2.5 folks out there willing to burn their bucks on that endeavor.

Anyway. Chronic indecision and fretting are attacking so I’m hot potatoing it to you:

[blessyouhawkeye]

what being an english major right now teaches you more than anything is that not everyone can, should, needs, or deserves to have a substack

[redwinesupernova]

"i've been stressing" by january victoria

[inkedwingss]

For the ones joining my new writing-only blog, my baby Substack: I will upload one poem every day for the next 15 days, so expect some e-mails in your inbox! :)

If you have been here for a while, you must know I was in desperate need of a writing-only platform — in fact, if you remember, I even tried a side blog, but that didn't work for me (and the novel is cooking atm). So, for the sake of my peace of mind and my writing, I will upload all the poetry in here to this sparkling, brand-new Substack.

After a few days on that platform, though, I can already tell I'm not going to follow what I perceived to be the pattern. Do I feel like a fish out of the water? Yes. Do I plan to change? No. Is it good for ''marketing''? Nope! But I literally can't force myself into a non-authentic space. It gives me anxiety.

I believe in using the platform instead of letting the platform use me. I'm free. That is unnegotiable. So, I will do my best on my own terms, as many things annoy me about the writing culture of these times we live in and I refuse to wear the halter. Oh, I promise I'll never try to coach you, start mothering you, or try to sell you a "how to write poetry in 5 steps" guide. No hooking titles. I won't join the experts-on-shit FOMO cult to prey on other people's triggers or to feel ''good'' about myself at the expense of others. This type of thing actually creeps me out.

But I do promise we can just resonate and inspire each other by being honest and raw, by having a brave heart so we can keep being kind, and by pursuing truth, beauty and art... How about that? We can enjoy the vibe and cultivate this appreciation of words! We can even chat as writer friends, as reader friends or just as friends friends — and encourage each other through real, second-intention-free presence.

If my writing doesn't touch you, it's fine. If yours doesn't touch me, it's fine. It's not personal, it's not a bad thing. We are all finding our voice. The day you think you know everything, you're dead, so we have to keep searching, moving and growing together! How many times have I needed the words from @cssnder @goodluckclove @hersurvival or @remnantofabrokensoul, and so many others around here (iykyk)? And I'm very grateful for every word and idea you all shared here in this amazing space, helping me to keep going, to break from my shell and lay another brick in the foundations of what I want to create.

That is the beauty of it. Creation demands connection. That is respect and human experience. And I repeat it: sometimes what I create won't touch anyone but me.

Oh, but what if it does!

Well, that being said: I actually do have some crazy ideas for the Substack. At first, the focus was on creating some substantial and self-indulgent content about literature (I like to study). Although I still think that's important, exciting and valid, Poetry is making its way through my inked fingers more and more, demanding space, attention, and voice; so I will not neglect this calling.

What about the future? I don’t know. Paid subscriptions for specific academic literature content? Prophetic, devotional newsletters?Generating debates on books for the community? Just poetry that you can read for free and not engage at all because I can be quite antisocial at times? Digging around some old ancient advice on writing? None of the above? Anything is possible, really. For now, I will slow down and avoid contributing to the hamster wheel of modern despair for the speed of light living and likes.

For now, poetry, please.

And tea. Lots of tea, because it's raining.

The grass looks so green!

[njbice]

I think I have a couple of people who do consistently follow me here and not anywhere else so I just want to say that if this AI deal thing happens and if there isn't a way to opt out I will be taking my art down from Tumblr and probably leaving, which is kind of unthinkable because I've been here since like 2012 but I just can't be okay with that.

So anyways in case that happens if you'd like to keep seeing my art please sign up for my newsletter: https://njbice.substack.com/

You can also follow me on Instagram but fuck those guys too (it's also @ njbice).

[littlecornerinbrooklyn]

Sidenote: audiences have been absolutely wild lately?? So many hecklers and people who need to REACT to every joke. Babes, just laugh!!! Also, laugh instead of clapping we are not at a Ted Talk get used to laughing out loud you are in an audience it’s an active thing to participate in?? I think comedians need to get a lot more comfortable kicking people out or shutting people down harshly and figuring out how to recover because it makes me so tense as an audience member when hecklers are left unchecked. Sometimes they’re not even saying mean shit they’re just making the entire show about them and then the audience gets groany because they’re literally…ruining the show. And they may be having fun and when they get engagement from the comic rather than rebuke it reinforces the behavior did we learn nothing from Pavlov?! The shit coming out this week about people watching YouTube while in the movie theater for Oppenheimer and the girls who thought it would be so funny to play fart sounds throughout an entire screening of Barbie. We gotta reconstruct the social contract and quick and there needs to be some bold text about filming people in public like I need platforms to be held accountable and also I need them to implement a “subject of this video did not consent to be in it” option in their report system!! And also the more algorithms reward “controversial” behavior the more people will engage in it. And Covid broke everyone’s brains a little bit and we in NO WAY need to “bring back bullying” but I think that’s often just a poorly worded plea of "we used to have well-established boundaries about performing certain behaviors in public spaces and that kept a lot of people from being blatant assholes" and I agree with that!

[hisiggy]

I sit on my brand new bed and dream about ways to kill myself something I know I’ll never do or at least in this moment in time I know I won’t . Right now I have a body that works which I am so lucky for but being grateful is for optimists and I am nothing of the sort . I have this endless need to be needed

I sit in  my school full of spoiled kids from Brooklyn who haven’t experienced a thing in their life ( at least I think so ) they are mostly incredibly boring and far too optimistic for my liking. I love to hate, it brings me joy unimaginable to piss someone off for reasons that truly don’t matter. It is a joy that cannot be replicated and to watch their reaction of squirming and delusions is like a reality show where you only get the best parts.  My brain is turning into rot . I say these things to anyone and feel like I should be locked up in a cave I’m crazy I think or at least that’s what these kids tell me I become it for them something like an art piece too real that I can’t detect it. I’m only like that around people I feel no need to impress because they’ve already made up their mind about me .

People have always hated me but never for anything real always for something such as becoming this cartoon character that I feel I must become . I hate silence there’s something about dead air full of teenagers who think they’re better than you that makes me want to give them something they don’t want : a problem . I’m crazy , I admit to it most of the time but I don’t think anyone understands the scope. I got sent away for it and the scary thing is I think it made me worse . I had normal depression but I was so dumb . In mental hospital is where I learned the fastest way to kill yourself is to cut yourself. Hot dog style not hamburger. I saw kids getting taken away and kids beaten the shit out of them by full grown adults .

I’m a problem my existence is something I  want to understand but never I will. I sat in my bed last night watching alien workshop skate videos listening to drumless rappers who are able to put their pain to art . Sometimes I feel I only put my pain into pain. I feel stupid I so desperately need human connection to feel the warmth that I think everyone feels. I fall in love with people seconds and years after meeting them and fantasize but often give up knowing that love is something that feels impossible at the moment. They say life will get better and I think that’s true for a lot of my people but not for me the circuits in my brain don’t work unless my 100 dollars of medication are on I vision a gun shooting me  directly in mouth and I swallow the bullet and scream for help but there’s nothing I can do I love life I hate it . PLEASE  KILL  ME . xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo

kathy acker used to write and masturbate I often think about the inclinations of masturbation like the men these days are doing we are all always rotting so is are brain . Jack skelly follows me on instagram and lives on my bookshelf I had to cut the lines out of my college essay about being too high and reading his book in Tompkins square park . I become normal under the influence almost as if it has the reverse effects no one should ever let me ramble but they do and I love them for it . I often think how stupid my problems are and I think that is the most helpfull thing I can do . I think about the kids getting their lives ripped apart  in Palestine at the moment and they are still able to smile at least a fake one and I am not. I’m so prententious

#ariana grande #diva #photo shoot

I want to die I’m reading a book and I enjoy it. it’s written by Lena Dunham’s best friend does that make me not cool does that make me one of the bushwick fagotts who think their all that and move here from Ohio . I imagine myself in 30 years living in my car somewhere in the middle of nowhere smoking packs of cigarettes with all my money spent on odd vhs tapes and records and Ephrema that no one else seems to care about I hate New York and what’s its becoming I sat and listened to navy blue looking at clips of New York from when I was a kid and crying it wasn’t as good as it feels I was just a kid I still am I got kicked of my statistics class for not talking yet everyone always wants that to happen i never shut up I envision my self slamming my head into a door and blood trickling down until I drop I used to be scared of these thoughts but I’m not anymore they are almost like a sadistic lullaby , that at some point this will all stop

I’m scared pls don’t admit me back into belluve it’s not fun drugs are funny till they’re not and it’s all fun and games till you get fat and everyone’s skinny I want eating disorder that makes me skinny is that bad to say everyone’s too pc and I hate it not because I’m someone who wants to go on rants about people who don’t deserve it but It leaves no room for emotions the emotions you won’t say I remember watching the videos of the people falling out of the building during 9/11 in the sixth grade I think it plays on a loop in my head PLEASE KILL ME. Ok bye  bye pls don’t read this even though I’ll post for the world to see  “goodbye horses im crying over you”- q Lazzarus everything fades I hope I do too plz don’t help me I’m feeling better now the meds are kicking in thank god for scientists kill the politicians and to all goodnight . My crush is Stevie buscemi and Ronald McDonald is my savior I love you Lindsay Lohan but that’s a story for another day FUCK YOU. And the credits role

from my substack pls read

[doomsdayprophetofficial]

can One of u follow my substack so i have 10 subscribers and it says all of my intro tasks are complete :/ u dont even have to read my shit i dont care

http://doomsdayprophet.substack.com

[violet-and-honey]

Just a girl and her completely unusable apps she's emotionally attached to

[senruthmartinsbob]

You hate hasan piker cus ur a nazi. I hate him cus hes just some guy.

[kingofmyborrowedheart]

Absolutely fucking sick and tired of the insurance company making the process of getting my daily prescriptions a Herculean task.

[cherryblossomshadow]

The Employer-Based Social Safety Is a Disaster. We Can End It.

Hamilton Nolan

Companies can do math … Classic defined benefit pensions are the single most costly benefit that employers traditionally provided, when you add up their total cost over the lifetime of workers. So, for more than 40 years, unionized companies have been absolutely cutthroat at the bargaining table in their determination to shift their workers into 401(k)s. Over the decades, in the private sector, pension after pension has fallen, each a lost battle in an economic war.

Even the man who invented the 401(k) now acknowledges that this process has been a financial catastrophe for workers.

.

I am not bringing this up just to bemoan the fact that companies are greedy. Yes, companies are greedy, but that is because they are in essence machines programmed to maximize profits, so cursing them for being greedy is like yelling at a beaver for making a dam. That is what they do.

What the fuck are we doing? This is all very dumb.

If America were a rational nation we would have sat down after WW2 and said, “Well, we rule the world and we are about to be so, so rich, we’d better just pass a sensible piece of legislation providing for health care and retirement and child care and other basic necessities for all, like a normal and reasonable country.” Of course we did not do that. Instead, deep in Cold War psychosis, we evolved our way into a system that provided health insurance for most people from the employers, which may be a crazy way to do it but is definitely NOT COMMUNIST. Then later we kind of grafted on Medicare to try to plug the hole for people left out of this system. The evolution of employer-provided benefits has continued for generations. But our original sin was allowing ourselves to be drawn into this plainly inferior system in the first place.

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Not to get super technical here but, because private companies are constantly trying to maximize profits, they have an ENORMOUS and NEVER-ENDING incentive to chip away at the cost of employee benefits. So it is unsurprising that, over time, such benefits will be jettisoned by employers at the first possible opportunity. I know I am speaking in generalities here, but this pretty much captures the trap we have gotten into: 1) Tie necessary life-sustaining benefits to employment, rather than building a universal public government-funded safety net. 2) Erode the unions which are the only force that prevent companies from engaging in a race to the bottom on the quality of these benefits. 3) The benefits go away and people die. In a mature and serious country, “workplace benefits” would be things like, you know, “a variety of free bagels.” Not stuff like “your health insurance” or “your ability to avoid poverty in your old age.” Remarkably stupid system. Really idiotic.

.

The “gig economy” is, in aggregate, an attempt by capital to build a system of employment with no employees. Companies have realized that if you can turn every full-time employee into an independent contractor and every job into a gig, then you can escape the responsibility of paying benefits (and enjoy a work force that is legally unable to unionize). The gig economy is the arbitraging away of the employer-based social safety net. The savings go to the investment class. The model, as you can see, expands to the entire economy, sucking in not just Uber drivers but also adjunct professors. The root cause of this is that we have created an enormous financial incentive for companies to get out of playing the role of Real Employer, which comes with a host of demands for employee benefits. The people who designed this system should have seen this all coming. If they did, they didn’t care.

.

You can write books on this topic, of course, and many people have. (One I read recently is “Over Work” by Brigid Schulte, an interesting exploration of various often stymied attempts to make workplace benefits more humane.)

.

Today, all I want to do is point out the fact that there is an escape route from all of this. This is an issue that presents the opportunity to create a natural alliance of convenience between business and workers. Not because business “cares” about human quality of life, but because business cares about itself.

.

If you open an ice cream shop, you want to sell ice cream. Do you want to be a health insurance provider? No. Do you want to be a life insurance provider? No. Do you want to be a retirement investment account provider? No. You want to be an ice cream provider. The absurd burden of making businesses into benefit providers weighs most heavily on small businesses, which are forced to pay to outsource this stuff to large firms. The system is predatory and confusing for employers and employees alike. Unfortunately, the logic of capitalism is simply for employers to try to escape their obligations to provide benefits, which leaves employees with nothing.

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What needs to change is simply the calculation that employers make about what the path of least resistance is for their own operations. The rise of the gig economy is what happens when employers believe that their best option is just to pretend like none of this is their problem. Yet it is—in the long run, employers need a stable society that creates healthy working people who can survive and are not so desperate that they steal from their employer and also chop up the CEO and throw him in a river.

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Employer-based health insurance, a system hated by everyone that benefits nobody except health insurance companies, is probably the single most obvious issue upon which the AFL-CIO and the Chamber of Commerce should be on the same side. Business should be demanding Medicare For All as loudly as Bernie Sanders is! They don’t want to deal with this shit either! All of this is, by definition, a distraction from an employer’s core business, and a financial burden. The same goes for providing retirement benefits to workers. Adequate public health care and adequate Social Security that obviates the need for private health insurance and private retirement plans would be great for American business. It would leave them to just do the thing that they are in business to do.

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I don’t want to sound like a naive moron here. In order for the business world writ large to come to this conclusion, the first thing we must do is to close off the easier possibility they now prefer, which is to escape their responsibilities altogether through subcontracting and pushing full time jobs off their books, or whittling down benefit costs to the smallest possible number by eradicating union power. That means that we need to regulate the gig economy out of existence, at least in the sense of requiring gig economy companies to treat their workers like employees rather than independent contractors.

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Building a public safety net would mean more taxes for businesses.

But a government system would be more efficient, meaning the long term cost would be lower, and

employers would also get the invaluable gift of never having to think about this shit again.

Providing a necessary social safety net to all citizens is properly the role of the state, not of private business. The very idea of outsourcing this role to private employers is plainly ludicrous.

[sweetings]

why do people make fun for using the ‘😂🤣’???? as much as i like using the ‘😭’ emoji, sometimes the situation doesn’t call for it. sometimes the joke really is tears-down-the-face-funny but not enough to SOB! i’m sick of emojis. maybe it’s time to revert back to my roots. i’m concluding all my posts with those smileys they had in old-school chatrooms.