I started a newsletter

No, I don’t know why. But I can explain how I got here:

1. I decided I wanted to move away from Gmail for [reasons]
2. I began searching for other email services
3. I initially settled on Outlook.com because I already had a subscription to Office Microsoft 365, anyway
4. Outlook.com is mostly fine but doesn’t really do anything new with email, and the UI is bland and boring. I began looking again.
5. I settled on trying out HEY email. Yes, they like you to spell it all shouty like that. HEY got me a new email address and I like the way it looks. It does a few things differently and while I’m not yet convinced I’ll stay with it long term, it’s a fine second email service for me to play around with.
6. HEY offers something called HEY World, which lets you write an email that gets posted to your own custom mini-blog. Mine is here: https://world.hey.com/stan.james
7. Two friends humored me and subscribed, but the whole thing is pretty basic. But it gave me a taste of something different, and eventually I wanted more.
8. Today is also the day that Austin Kleon moved his weekly newsletter to Substack. I read several other Substack-hosted newsletters and began mulling moving my random thoughts from HEY World to Substack, where I can experiment and be weird on the internet.

Which brings me to my Substack newsletter, cleverly titled Stan’s Random Newsletter. You can see it here: https://stanjames.substack.com/ (I also have a handy link on the right sidebar of this blog.)

Can I just keep posting random nonsense here on my blog? Yes! Will I continue doing so? Yes! So why use Substack? Because there’s something about a newsletter that’s different, even if it’s simply the convenience of sending the random thoughts directly to someone via email. If they like the random thoughts, they can get more without doing anything. No websites to remember, no fuss, no muss (what is muss, anyway?)

I have no idea how long I’ll keep this up or what will come of it, but I’ll play around with it for a while and see where it goes. I’ll start by padding it out with some of my HEY World posts, because a smart author knows how to utilize existing resources. Or something.