Substack Notes: it's Twitter without all the awfulness
(This is also not the Wednesday post)
I know. I haven’t done the mid-week (let’s start calling it) post. I have excuses. Sort of. A friend came to visit I haven’t seen in years and brought her five kids. We can pretty easily accommodate two or three guests at a time, if they’re chummy, but three adults and five kids under eleven was QUITE the experience. Boisterous, one might call it.
We took a little trip over to Sacro Speco, a local ancient Franciscan monastery, founded by St. Francis himself, and it was pretty great. The day was beautiful, sunny and cool, the kids had a splendid time running all over the place - they’re the kind of kids who know how to have fun with sticks. The woods were all abloom with anemones, cyclamen and all manner of pretty things, the trees were dressed in earliest spring green frothery, and the swifts had just returned and spent the time wheeling and screeching over our heads.
I had fun but I don’t think I’ve been in the same room with that many kids at once since I was in elementary school myself. They loaded up the van and carried on to Florence this morning, and I thought, Oh good! I can finish writing that blog post. Then I fell into an exhausted semi-coma. Sigh.
So, it’s ten to nine now, and I have to look at the screen with one eye closed because I’m too tired to focus both at the same time, and I’m resigning myself to turning out the Friday, not the Wednesday, post. Oh well. Never mind.
So, I’ll just pop a note in saying that since last Sunday it seems Substack has come up with a new thing that I thought I’d try out and I kind of like it. They’re calling it Substack Notes, and it seems to work the same way as Twitter in general, but is free of all the things that make Twitter into a kind of hellscape. It’s just people with Substack blogs and I guess people who have signed up to read them:
I think for now you can only post links and photos and do short posts. I haven’t read the full blurb yet, but if I’m thinking of cutting back on the sharpness of the short-replies - and, let’s face it, my habit of picking fights with random strangers for kicks - it seems like a good alternative to share links, short posts, quotes, photos etc. I plan to use it for things that don’t fit in the newsletter, like work-in-progress or quick questions. Maybe we’ll have polls and things there, since Elon the Great has decided that only paying Twitter people can use things like that.
So if it turns out to be fun, I might switch.
How to join
Head to substack.com/notes or find the “Notes” tab in the Substack app. As a subscriber to World of Hilarity, you’ll automatically see my notes. Feel free to like, reply, or share them around!
Apparently you don’t have to have a Substack yourself to post notes either. So maybe try it.
If you encounter any issues, you can always refer to the Notes FAQ for assistance.