SATURDAY HOUSEKEEPING and Monday meetup news.
News for subscribers! Relevant and interesting news! (Seriously, open this.)
Hello, lovers. It has been QUITE a week here at Penny Towers, as you might imagine.
I hope you’ll forgive the lack of updates. And I hope that wherever you are you’re having the sort of weekend you hoped. I’m writing this from a Turkish cafe on Holloway Road, because I’m knackered and menemen is the food of some unspecified deity, and the smell of roast lamb and cigarette smoke and the taste of coffee made with hot UHT milk and the sound of pre-teens arguing with their baby cousins is a special sort of aesthetic that means London, and home.
Anyway, this is a brief housekeeping post for everyone- and particularly for those of you who have been generous enough to become paid subscribers already. It comes in two parts:
NEW SUBSCRIPTION FEE.
Book chat/meet-ups!
The Substack of it all…
NEW SUBSCRIPTION FEE!
You may or may not have noticed that the price of subscribing to this blog has recently gone down. I’d been waiting to do this for a while, because I was aware that the price point was too much for a lot of my former Patrons - and I'd made the mistake of basing it on the mean average, rather than on the median. Whoops.
The reason I didn’t change it weeks ago is that many of you had already subscribed at the higher rate, and I didn’t want anyone to be ‘punished’ for being an early subscriber.
So. I’ve been in discussions with Substack, who are still ironing out the kinks (ahem) of their own service, and after a number of weeks, I am happy to announce that YOUR SUBSCRIPTIONS WILL BE GOING DOWN, TOO.
Yes! That’s right! You don’t have to do anything at all! It’ll take a little while to transfer everyone, but your next bill will be at the new lower rate- so that it’s fair. I thought that was pretty important.
If you still want to pay more, you can manually adjust your subscription after that change is made - but no pressure.
I hope this is welcome news.
BOOK CHATS/MEET UPS!
Again, as you may have noticed, the launch of my new book took a…bit of a turn. Again, stay tuned for the actual post about that. I had intended to spent part of the week planning a series of joyous book events with you guys, rather than dealing with a firehose of boring controversy and ritual media humiliation and all the concomitant figurative and literal headaches.
But- I still want to do Book Meet Ups. And one I thought might be quite fun is if we had a Valentine’s Meetup, where we talk about love and gender and capitalism and the possibility of romance. If you’ve had time to read the chapter on Love in the book, even better; if not, not to worry. This will be Monday the 14th at 5pm, GMT-and we’ll chat for an hour. I’ll post the link nearer to the time on the paid-subscriber list. Feel free to bring a date.
When we’ve seen how that works, I’ll nail down the next dates! Mark your calendars and stay tuned for the link…
THE SUBSTACK OF IT ALL
You may have seen that Substack recently doubled down on its policy of not actually enforcing its own policies around hate speech. I consider this a poor decision compounded by a set of worse explanations. I’m sticking with the platform, for now, for all the reasons I laid out in my first ever post. But I don’t condone the decision, and I find the attempt to mouth the rhetoric of enlightenment liberalism in service of a commercial decision pretty damn disappointing.
I’ve much more to say about the entire free-speech-marketplace-of-ideas intellectual failsoup, and that’s coming up, too. Essentially, I think the entire approach is wrongheaded, because you can’t cram 21st century communications technology into 18th-century notional sociodemocratic infrastructure and expect it to deliver any species of freedom.
But that’s another story for another time.
Xx
I bought the book!
Thanks for reducing the subscription fee. :)
And the book meetups are a lovely idea! Too bad some of us are still working at 5pm. :( Will listen out for future dates...