I recognize that I haven’t done this in a while. It was only a year and a few weeks ago that I started this particular Substack page, mostly at the start in an effort to keep a presence on Twitter without having to look at Twitter. Now I have no Twitter presence but still a Substack.
The main question I dealt with at the time was more or less what we in the business call the Reverse WUPHF problem- having work coming from too many places at once and trying to consolidate them into one place where people will read it. For all of the faults that their platforms have levied on society, my dormant Facebook page “The Post Hole” and my Twitter page served this purpose well. This Substack seemed to be the best possible non-social media option, but then, of course, I immediately fell into absolute total depression when I briefly moved to Canada in September 2021 (evidenced by my five collective posts made), and my creative output sputtered to the point of near-nothingness.
Regardless, some switch has flipped this summer, and the spigot of creativity (primarily in text - though I’m working on video) has begun to flow again. Here’s what you may have missed:
My Pseudo-Microblogging Return:
I pre-empt that with “Pseudo” because most of the posts I’ve made on this have been quite long. One of the things that using Twitter allowed for me to do for a period of time was that I’d put shorter, less fully-formed ideas into text. Tumblr is superior for this, as I’m not limited to however many characters per post and I’m not constantly terrified of a poorly-phrased idea getting swept up into anything bigger than it needed to be. But, I still value having something in-between the informality of a micro-blogged post and the formality of a post on JoeBush.net, and to remedy this itch, I started a new blog: underneathallcurrents.tumblr.com. Here you’ll see less-structured thoughts, though I’ll admit many of them have proven lengthy. I’ve been posting quite a lot in the last week:
On Redditors: The rhetoric of trash thrown at MLS matches and my annoyance with the sanctimony and veiled racism of Redditors in response to it
On Wanting to Be Here: My interpretation of my experience with the hybrid/blended/from-home/at-the-office work-life balance
On Twitter: Why, having left the platform, the current controversy of its purchase fascinates and excites me.
On The Royals: Regarding my preferred professional baseball team’s current vaccine-related problem and how it reflects on the rot present in the organization
On The Change: Regarding talking to people on the bus
And there are other smaller posts there as well. You might ask - Why didn’t you just put this on your main Tumblr? And I would say that I want this to serve as its own thing and I want the main Tumblr to be where I reblog photos of a duck in a hammock and things of that nature.
So, follow that for shorter, lesser formed thoughts that otherwise wouldn’t find a place on joebush.net. My hope is that some of them become more formed and turn into something larger.
Blog Posts from this week:
June 12th - The ShopGoodwill Soccer Memorabilia Sampler - I examine the recent history of US Soccer through artifacts that ended up on a thrift store website
June 18th - Forgive me but I am about to complain about the final boss of a 20 year-old PS2 game - I complain about the final boss of Bombastic for the PlayStation 2.
That’s about all I have to update you on for the last week! I do have comments turned on here if anyone wants to leave comments, and regardless, thanks so much for reading my work.