Hello friends, long time no see.
This is a return - of sorts.
I am going to start sending recs again - but over at a different platform. This means you will have to re-subscribe to be able to receive them, which you can do here.
Why am I doing this?
One problem with LOCKDOWNTIME was that it sort of ended up taking over from my blog, __underscore, which is where I wanted to focus my writing. This was fine when I had unlimited free time at the beginning of lockdown, but when I went back to work in June, and had find a new job so that when my contract ended I wasn’t unemployed, sending recs on a frequent basis was not only very difficult, but also detracted from the more in-depth writing on my blog which is what I actually wanted to focus on.
The solution to this, which I have now finally reached after some technical re-jigging, was to merge the blog and the newsletter. So now, instead of a newsletter and a blog as separate entities, I have a newsletter which sends out blog posts when they’re published and recs whenever I feel like it.
This is why I’ve had to switch platforms over to TinyLetter, as it allows this kind of functionality. This is pretty annoying because I like Substack much more as a platform, but it was important for me to have the blog and the recs newsletter as one integrated entity. Maybe I’ll return to Substack some time for a more conceptually focused newsletter, in the vein of Huw Lemmey’s superb new newsletter of essays about Frasier episodes.
The new recs newsletter is probably not going to be as frequent as LOCKDOWNTIME; I’m only going to send out stuff when I find something good/ feel like it. The vibe will be a lot more low-key and less structured than this newsletter. (That might actually mean I end up posting more.)
>>> You can sign up to the NEW recs newsletter here. <<<<
>>> You can read my blog, __underscore, here. <<<
Take care, friends, and hopefully see you over at the other newsletter…
Jake xx