"Lust at first sight": books from the library

Hello!

Welcome back to Emmeline's Letters.

I am back in your inbox today because I have made something new, which is a YouTube video. I realise that most of my newsletters updates from the past two months have been links to YouTube videos.

Sorry if you signed up for written articles and have been disappointed! The good news is I put closed captions on this one for accessibility and people who don't want to be arseholes in public places (linked article is actually about systemic causes of what we perceive as individual arseholery). So if you really want something written, you could read the transcript!

Here is the video (more updates below the video):

Summer hibernation

It's almost the end of February and I feel like I have been in hibernation for most of summer. I realised this is how I feel every summer, except that normally I just try to push through and fail, getting angry with myself for not being able to function like a machine the whole year around without regard to fluctuating demands and changing seasons.

In fact where I live the seasons we use make no sense. Because they are a colonial imposition on a landscape that does not accommodate them. We are at the end of what we call summer, so logically, the hot weather should be wrapping up. But as usual, February is the hottest month.

I have tried to learn about the Indigenous seasons used by the true owners of the land where I live, but it's not really something that can be done individually. That's kind of not the point. It's still worth looking into though. Do you know the real seasons of the land where you live? Or do the English seasons make sense to your local area?

Subst@ck*

I have a new newsletter platform: Ghost. You might be able to tell from the formatting.

For about two months, I went on such a deep dive obsessive wormhole about the ethics of continuing to use subst@ck, tied myself up in ethical knots and read dozens of articles. For my own newsletter, there was very little at stake, with fewer than 50 subscribers, and I hadn't even turned on a paid subscriber option yet.

But I was so keen to be of service to other people who were struggling with what to do, ethically. I really, really wanted to write an article nutting it out for people. But then I just couldn't wrangle much at all onto a page.

Who did I think I was, anyway, thinking I could do people's internal ethical work for them in one grand theory of whether you should leave a platform?

It's like Michael and Peter say on my favourite podcast – the reason self-help books aren't ultimately that helpful is because the real answer is usually: "It depends".

I am glad I was able to support a friend of mine with their dilemma on whether to leave the platform.

If you are struggling with this question, just reply to this email and we can talk about it. I would love to help you out. And I'm not invested in a specific outcome (eg: you leaving).

Frequency of emails from me

Having an unplanned summer break gave me a chance to reflect, and I realised that writing to you on a schedule isn't going to work for me.

I would rather contact you less often, when I have something I really want to share, than pepper you with sub-par content for the sake of 'consistency'. We all have enough noise in our lives and I don't want to add to it.

Conventional wisdom says that you need to post at least once a week to build an audience, but I'm not trying to win at capitalism with this newsletter. I'm not even trying to convert it into a consistent income source (although I will probably turn on paid subscriptions at some point for some extra perks).

*I am spelling this word in a funny way to avoid contributing to this company being in the discourse in a computer-recognised way. (When I have worked out how to use markdown I will have more user-friendly footnotes, but for now this old-fashioned way is going to have to do.)