my monthly newsletter
My newsletter is sent out on the first of every month.
Introducing Showroom
My new project and manifesto
Whenever I come to someone with an unspecified anxiety or ennui, I will inevitably be told to go for walk. The exact goal of the walk is unknown, but it's purpose will often be revealed to you. Maybe stepping into the winter sun reveals that you've been cooped up all day, and you just needed some fresh air. Maybe smelling the bread from a closing-up bakery reveals that you haven't eaten anything since breakfast. Maybe it's not until you get home that you realise how tired you are, and you go straight to bed.
Like a walk, I tend to start projects without knowing the exact goal. Last August, I committed to writing one newsletter and one essay a month. All I knew for certain was that I wanted to write more, which I did. An inexact count of every essay and newsletter from the past year comes out to 36,000 words, or about 3,200 a month. My goal wasn't just to write, writing is like walking, and the most fruitful walks always seem to happen when you get a little lost. After this long detour of a project, I've figured out its purpose.
I'd like to introduce to Showroom. Narrowly, Showroom is an email service. But I have the desire to make it something more. As I've taken web design more seriously over the past year, I've spent a long time thinking about the web. The web is in a bit of a sorry state: the information super highway has been demolished and in its place a few walled-off gated communities—Instagram, Substack, Twitter—have sprung up. I'd like Showroom to push back on that.
Part of me wants to return to the pre-social-media era of the internet. I made my friend Jack a Web 1.0 blog to document his time in Spain, and it's been so lovely to keep up with his life without needing Instagram. But the website I made for him—let's just say it's simplistic. Jack tells me he likes the stark minimalism of it—that it helps him stay focused on writing—but it's not like I gave him another option.
Beyond the shoddiness of the website I made him, the one real pain point has been how inaccessible a blog can be. Jack would often need to re-share his blog posts on Instagram, which kind of defeats the whole purpose. Lot's of people have tried to solve this exact problem: _how do you replicate the socialness of social media, without making people crazy? _I've spent some time with the alternatives:
- PI.FYI,_ _is a fun little social medium, but as such suffers greatly from the network effect. The point of social media is the interconnectedness, but that's quite hard to derive from an indie social media. It also seems to lack purpose. Why use pi.fyi when Twitter has more people?
- Substack,_ _is a very successful writing platform, but it seems to suffer the same fate of successful social media by making people crazy as they chase algorithmic popularity.
- _Neocities__, _is a Web 1.0 revival platform, providing the thinnest layer of social media necessary to create a community of like-minded computer nerds. There really isn't that much to it beyond hosting HTML. That could could be seen as a boon, but actually looking at the sites, there seems to be a lot of pages that look very interesting, but don't seem very well used.
I will concede that my optimism is probably naive, but I am not naive enough to think that Showroom can solve any of these issues. But the ideology behind it runs deep. Showroom is open source, all posts are accessible via an API, and I'd like to allow users to write their own CSS and JavaScript to personalise their "room" as much as they'd like.
As it stands right now, _Showroom _is just an email service. If it stays that way, and I remind its only user, I will be content. But I have hope that it could become something slightly bigger.
I am beginning the very-closed beta right now, with only me on the platform. I will begin to open up accounts for some friends and others interested in the service. Once bugs are ironed out, I will fully open Showroom to the public.
Pricing
Monetisation is a always thorny topic. The default method of monetisation is advertisements and selling user data. I would rather not do either, so what are my realistic alternatives?
When I was discussing this project with a friend, he brought up the YouTuber Jreg, who offers an almost unbelievable $500 a month tier on his Patreon. The main perk of this tiear is four one-hour calls a month where Jreg will aid in your "ARTISTIC ENDEAVOURS". Beyond mentoring, he will "talk about your GOALS and set you DEADLINES along with PUNISHMENTS and REWARDS for meeting those deadlines."
Some of that huge price tag is just the high labour costs of a semi-successful YouTuber. But the price is surely inflated to ensure that you cannot ignore the cost. You, as a creator, have to actually create something, otherwise you would be wasting your money.
I'm tempted to make Showroom free, but I want people to actually use it. Even if the service cost $1, it would just be a bit too easy to forget about the dollar coin falling out of your wallet every month. I'm almost certain that if the buy-in was $500 a month, everyone who bought the service would use it. But of course, I think I would struggle to get anyone to buy-in.
So _Showroom _will cost somewhere between $2 and $500 dollars.
I'm excited for it's launch.
How this email finds you.
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I haven't quite figured out how I'm going to do images, so I created some ASCII art instead.
What else is new?
Since exams ended this month, Showroom has been taking up almost all of my time, but I've still had some capacity to work on other projects.
Live Coders Naarm
My little community of livecoders finally has a name: Live Coders Naarm. The name has also meant we can finally buy a domain name, and I had the chance of making the website. If you've seen any other website I've designed, you could probably tell that I made naarm.lc. I'll be breaking down how I made it at this month's meetup, so please come along. If you're curious about the practice of coding to create art and music, please come join our Discord server.
Rust
_Showroom _was written in a programming language called Rust. That very well might mean nothing to you, but if it does, I hope we can agree on how cool that is. The source code is available on my Github. The stack I am using is weird, but one I think others could use, so I'm planning on making a proper technical breakdown.
Crosswords
13 June – 14x14 Themeless – Saturday Quiz Time
Really cute little themeless. My clue for 10 down was originally, "Tied up soccer score in the second half, perhaps", but I like what replaced it more.
Corpus Magazine
I had the oppurtunity to design the magazine cover for a new student publication at Melbourne University, Corpus. It's a magazine for Med Students, which I was looped into by a dear friend/med student who has appeared in this newsletter before.
Unfortunately, as I discussed above I haven't figured out images yet, so you'll have to visit this link if you'd like to see what I made.
What I've been listening to
Star Moles – Highway to Hell
I have previously compared Cameron Winter's writing to a madman's rambling graffiti, and Star Moles' album scratches the same madwoman itch for me. It also makes me appreciate that Cameron Winter may have some unearned profundity from his booming male voice, which isn't afforded to a female signer. Indeed, the first word that came to mind when listening was "twee". Postulations on gender aside, I think this album is very good. Thank you Ollie for the recommendation.
I will fight without grace for as long as I live
And the shopkeepers call me timid
And the people who know what to say
Say I look like someone on vacation
But I just checked out of today, today– Star Moles, Halo
Jane Remover – Summer Fling
I have a hard time separating my hobbies from my work, because a some of my pursuits that started as hobbies have begun paying. I think being a DJ is so much fun, but it is my one pursuit that will stay firmly in the hobby column. I deejayed a house party in June, and I told the host I wanted to "commit musical terrorism." While I couldn't contain my laughter as a mixed in fUnlistenable's remix of House featuring John Cale, I did succumb to the crowd and didn't blow up the dance floor as I had promised.
I ended the set with a song from Jane Remover's alter ego mixtape, _status update music. _The final track is an inexplicable cover of the inexplicable 2013 Willow Smith song, Summer Fling. I don't exactly know why Willow is British in this song, but it's kind of fun, and Jane's remix goes ridiculous. Of course, no one knew the song but it's just so euphoric it didn't really matter, the people loved it.
Thanks for reading
Expect next month's edition with less delay.