Season 3, Issue 25: 🐦👻

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1. The Week That Was

Yay.Boo continued to have our heart, but not as many of our hours this week. There have been some lovely tweaks and touches as it continues rolling toward a lovely settling place – a very nice first version that we can share more widely in order to see how the Internet world reacts.

A larger chunk of our time went toward Letterbird, which is getting excitingly close to launching as a good and proper product! The team has learned a lot about the modern state of subscription billing, and we have some PRO features to go along with that soon-to-be-unleashed, credit-card-accepting payment form.

We scanned over 100 prints this week!

The Guestbook printer keeps on printing! (Thankfully at a more reasonable rate this week.) With printing comes scanning and posting and you should just bathe in the gloriousness of the guestbook gallery on a Friday. Thank you for your drawings!

2. Do You Blog?

As Good Enough properly got real this year, we’ve all had to learn or relearn how to write publicly on a blog (and newsletter!). It feels like a thing that was so common (online) twenty years ago, and is so uncommon now. Yes, I know it wasn’t actually common (everywhere) twenty years ago, and it’s actually more common now. Yet these days blogs are not as common of places to visit (in relation to the whole of Internet traffic). These relative terms are probably even more painful to read than they were to write.

Do you blog? Would you blog privately amongst a group of friends? Do you ever find yourself crafting an x-tweet and get frustrated trying to chop it down to the right number of characters? Or do you just journal quietly to yourself? Do you do it all? Do you not do it for a very specific reason?

The messages I receive from Micro.blog and Mastodon and my RSS feeds are that everyone is retreating back to their own sites and/or their own domains. Everyone is remembering fondly that twenty-years-ago life. Everyone wants to get away from the algorithm and read the weekly musings of the everyday people. Everyone wants to recapture that feeling of discovery when they find some blogger who just gets them. Everyone wants to write some missives to the world, fishing for kindred spirits.

I believe that I’m in an echo chamber. I wonder if that chamber extends to readers of this newsletter? I wonder if that chamber is small or maybe rather big? I wonder.

If you have any thoughts, please reply to this newsletter and share ‘em! —Barry

3. I’m feeling crabby.

Suburban America goes absolutely crazy for Halloween these days. Every yard in our neighborhood is full of giant, inflatable pumpkins, spiders, and Tim Burton monsters. And oh, the skeletons! If you had told me 10 years ago that I could have made a killing selling 12 ft tall light-up lawn skeletons, I would have laughed in your face. Where do people store these things!?

Our yard isn’t adding much to the ambiance around here, but we are planning to do it up with a group costume. It’s the first Halloween where my daughter has a solid understanding of the concept and I am here for it. At her insistence, the Filler family will be dressing up as characters from Moana: “I am Moana. Mommy is Maui. Vinny is Hei Hei. Daddy is Tamatoa.”

Tamatoa is a giant crab with an eye for the finer things, so we decided it justified something of a splurge on the actual costume. I gotta say: this purchase appears to have been 100% worth it. It’s super fun, good quality, a nice likeness, and she absolutely, completely believes I am going to scoop her up and dangle her over my mouth for a midday snack.

It does make typing hard, though. —Patrick

4. In Conclusion

We are quite excited by what’s to come in November. We will be refreshing our knowledge on accepting payments and (hopefully) talking with customers. We will be learning more about getting the word out there for these products. And we have some more ideas and experiments that we’ll start working on to keep this year Cosmic until the end.

Stay human, friends.