One of the few uncovered sections of Bowker Creek, one of the dead rivers of Greater Victoria like the Walbrook. This section runs between Cadboro Bay Rd and Bee St
I have no blog post today, just one scheduled and three almost complete. My review of the “Matthew Amt” kopis from Deepeeka in India is complete except for editing and photography (I need a sunny day with no day job). I have a post about Google declaring war on the web, and why now is an excellent time to disconnect from centralized American services. And because it is income-tax and rebalancing season, I have two posts on personal finance: one offering two cheers for dividend stocks, and the other on the performance of an actual index portfolio over thirteen years. Instead of finishing this post I attended a Victoria Civic Orchestra concert at Oak Bay High on Saturday, then picked up a preorder copy of Greeley’s Almighty Dollar at Munro’s and checked the posters for events along Government Street.
Easton Greenhouse in the Uk, Creative Commons Source: Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 license.
Since 2017, the blogging platform Substack has been running the playbook “borrow lots of money, and spend it to pay people to post on your site, causing it to grow and your site to seem big and important.” The web boom of the 2000s was funded by Google which needed to give people reasons to make Google searches, see Google ads, and be surveilled by Google Analytics. In 2021 Substack spent $3 in advances to bloggers for every $1 they earned from those blogs. In the past this has always ended in tears, and the people who run and fund the site have shady ideas and ugly politics. You can find many people talking about specific Substack bloggers, their ideas, and whether Substack should host them.1 Not as many people talk about how the site as a whole is weird in a way which feels normal to wealthy and influential people in New York City and Southern California.
Well, on Canada Day I was attending “As You Like It” at Craigdarroch Castle but lets not be too literal!
The blessing and curse of being a writer in the 21st century is that there are endless places to publish things. Whereas in the 20th century you needed to petition the few businesses which owned the kinds of presses that could make a few hundred thousand copies of a paperback to get your writing in stores, today everyone has a printing press in their pocket. This has been catastrophic for the ability to get paid for writing, but rather nice for the ability to get paid for a comic strip. There are so many options, each with advantages and disadvantages, that Jane Friedman felt it necessary to write an essay on the major paths to book publishing.
