Year 1 of Scenes with Simon: A Retro and What's Next for 2024
While the official 52nd post isn’t until mid-January, I felt it was a good time check in on this writing experiment: writing a weekly newsletter every week. I’m happy that I set out to do this and happy that I managed to like clockwork complete a newsletter every week for a year! Patting myself on the back for this one. :)
It started mostly because I wanted to write more and just generally wanted to avoid what social media had become. A desire to carve my own space.
I’ll cover the following:
State of the Newsletter
Most Popular Posts of 2023
Predominant Themes of 2023
Goals for 2024 and What’s Next
State of the Newsletter
Stats! Graphs! Let’s go.
Roughly 1+ subscriber a day. It’s slow. I had anticipated larger readership because my old email list (that I didn’t port to this newsletter) still has over 1000+ subscribers in it. 6 Paid Subscribers is nice, considering that it’s a pure patronage tier. I sincerely appreciate you all that are paying extra per month out of sincere support of my writing. Max was 7 during the year.
Slow, consistent growth in views here too.
Sources is as above. Nothing too unexpected to be honest. Kiwi Stand is a great Hacker News-esque clone run by cool people. Check it out!
An important reason why I moved back to Substack from Ghost was to see how Substack helped in referrals and recommendations.
This was the key metric to consider. 10% is pretty decent. But of 390 subscribers, it’s questionable whether this is all it is chalked up to be. I would love to see this on a longer timescale and larger scope (as I get there).
I originally moved away from Substack because of my unease in what people Substack was willingly platforming.
’s take has been the most likeminded for me. Unlike other platforms, it’s easy to avoid the nazis on here. But this quote nails it. I have a choice to support certain platforms for whatever reason I wish and this is one of them.I dislike McKenzie’s apologia for Substack’s policy and for Richard Hanania because it has a sort of detached, sociopathic philosophy popular with techbrahs that all differences of opinion are equal — that a dispute over whether black people are human is like a dispute over the best programming language or whether Rocky Road is the best ice cream. This, too, is a value judgment. It’s not one I share.
A factor in this, is finding time to move all over again. It’s not straightforward. If I do move, I’ve heard good things about Buttondown. OR, I should just go back to using email as the distro mechanism and write on my own blog again. I don’t know the answer to this and will continue to think about how I want to do it.
Most Popular Posts of 2023
These are defined by views and likes afaik.
NFTs Can’t Die. - 1266 views
In the midst of peak NFTs-are-dead media rounds, I wrote about how/why NFTs are a unique distribution mechanism because of the ledger recording the history of the objects. This provenance will become more important as time goes on and more projects will surface this underlying history as a part of the experience of the digital object. It’s surrounded by context and over time it will become a predominant value proposition of NFTs.
The Inevitable Narrative Oozification of Expanded Media Universes - 701 views
Taking cues from Venkatesh’s definition of protocol oozification, I applied it to what we see in large-scale narrative media (like Star Wars). Over time, the story world becomes ossified in order to tell more stories and it brings forth certain benefits and disadvantages. It’s why some expanded media franchises can feel stale if this natural process is not approached properly.
Inside Andreessen's Techno-Optimism Manifesto: NPC Meme as Ideology - 788 views
I’m an optimist and a technologist, but a singular view of technology can narrow one’s view to seeing many processes as worth destroying with technology. Sometimes a conversation is the point, and it might seem slow and bureaucratic, because like a dance, it’s supposed to take time in oder to nurture relationships and thus induce legitimacy. Seeing others as just being NPCs: blind to the unmitigated wonders of technology at all costs, and that they should just be convinced of these truths is a toxic ideology that adds otherism where it’s not needed. The manifesto would be better if it wasn’t so dismissive of broader humanity.
Token-Curated Registries in 2023 and A Problem With Price Signals - 696 views
A lot of people care about what I write because of my history in writing about information curation and crypto-economics. These topics continuously come up in different ways since they were first popularised in 2017. I wrote about how my opinion and perspective has changed on these ideas. It’s still really cool and interesting to see the experiments.
Retreating to Digital Villages From The Algorithmic Scenes - 511 views
We took a lot for granted in terms of how certain web platforms created scenes and how much at their behest we were. We lament the loss of certain communities due to Twitter’s decline. In the midst of this change, creators are finding themselves a bit lost and we need to focus on creating diversity and sustainable digital villages instead of being beholden to the algorithm.
Predominant Themes of 2023
Generative AI
2023’s story has undoubtedly been one of the rise of generative AI. As a creator (musician, artist, writer), a technologist, and having a keen interest in IP/Copyright Law it’s been truly interesting.
Here’s some of those articles:
The Many-Fingered Conundrums on Detecting & Banning AI
So Long, and Thanks for All the Training Data
The AI Backrooms of Literature
You Can't Automate Authenticity (probably my favourite newsletter of the year and one I link back to the most)
Specificity, Vibes, and The Complexity Limit of AI Creativity
Belonging and Understanding Through Context, AI Art, & Modern Art Critique (another top 3 favourite article of this year for me)
AI, Process Art, and Aftermovies
A core belief from a year of writing on this is still that even though generative AI will increasingly become more potent and powerful, the job a creator is most responsible for is imbuing what they do with authenticity and meaning. You can’t shortcut that. In the era of abundant media, the why becomes so much more important. I’m less concerned that it will take away existing creative roles (how it’s done might change), and moreso that existing creators need to contend with a new type of media (generative worlds), and the reality that mega IP will benefit immensely from this due to expansive fan-fiction (as we’ve seen with viral Harry Potter Balenciaga variations of). It’s not your story competing with a longer long tail, it’s that fans will want more Star Wars and Harry Potter of their own making. It’s a new form of entertainment.
Storytelling and Creativity
I’m spending most of my time writing these days, including writing and production fiction. I think about storytelling and creativity a lot. Here’s some of my favourite posts on this in 2023.
Storytelling Entropy & Fandoms
Seeing SCP as a Narrative Protocol
A 3 Year Retro On My Self-Published Debut Novel
Why We Like Pirates: On the Depth and Breadth of Boat Stories
Let Readers Choose Their Format
In the Pursuit of Creative Perfection, When Is It Enough?
On Luck, Love, and a Viral Time-Travel Romance With Bigolas Dickolas
Tending The Gardens of Creativity
Wrestling with Genres and the Communities Inside Them
Traditional Publishing vs Self-Publishing. It's Context Turtles All The Way Down
So much to learn still! I’m currently working on a new novel and really enjoying the process again.
Urbanism and Economics
Cities always tell so many interesting stories. There’s so much to explore!
Walkable Blockchains: Metaphors Between Blockchains And Urbanism
Undefined Neighbourhoods and the Power of Naming Things
The Hidden Magic In Our Built Environment
The Prisoner's Dilemma of USA Restaurant Fees
A Deep Protocolization of Mutual Credit
From Home Owners Associations to Gravity Wells
Personal Life
Interspersed through all of the above, I wrote more about some of my personal life experiences: on getting married, running, and how time changes how we approach things.
Running My 1st Half Marathon alongside The Passing of the Dragon
Star Wars Celebration as a Fan, with Family, and as a Writer
Goals for 2024 and What’s Next!
I’ve introspected on the newsletter throughout the year. In general, it takes a day (and sometimes more) to write this every week. I usually start on Friday, catching up on reading/content that I saved up during the week and then writing into Friday and Saturday. This is all dependent on the fact that I have this time to do this. For now, I have. But, the future might bring forth larger creative commitments OR be replaced with other personal life commitments (potentially becoming a parent).
For now, I still enjoy doing it, creating this catalogue of my ideas and thinking over time and sharing the cool things I find. That being said, I suspect that if I ever choose to downscale this due to other time commitments, it will still continue, but likely just focus on the articles each week (and not the bonus content).
Another alternative was to generally drop the bonus content section and just write more regularly with more content getting their own titles. eg, twice a week with only a leading article and nothing else. Would definitely be more contained and succinct.
I have considered splitting the newsletter into multiple topical newsletters, but for now I see it more as a scratchpad for myself vs wanting to build a specific topical vertical over time (eg only focused on crypto or only focused on storytelling).
Anyway, these options are always available further down the line. For now, my core focus on 2024 is to continue with this newsletter as-is, perhaps with a more refined focus on authenticity. The more the world might become full of abundant creations, a tilt towards authenticity will continue. So, I want to also use this newsletter to talk about more personal things. The work I’m doing. My personal life. And so on.
Enjoy the last sunset of 2023! I’ll see you in a week, back to regularly scheduled programming.
Cheers,
Simon