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THE STRANGE · NOV 7
The Roadside Places Nobody Plans Around Are Going Away
Rest stops and motels look like filler on the way somewhere else. Two pieces on vanishing Western rest areas and life inside a motel show what we lose when they go.
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Every platform you build on is an extraction machine.
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Email in, letter out, none of that funnel bullshit in between.
// in this issue
THE STRANGE · NOV 6
What Does a Big Institution Do to the People Inside It?
A retired Army lieutenant colonel says institutions get hurt when the rules for advancement change. Here is what anyone inside a big organization can take from that.
OWNERSHIP · NOV 5
Owning Your Email List Instead of Renting It: What It Costs and the Smallest Version Worth Doing
A blogger left Substack because it has no API. What self-hosting a newsletter costs, what you get back, and the smallest setup an independent creator can run.
OWNERSHIP · NOV 1
What to Post Instead of Inspirational Quotes (and Why They Fail)
Quote cards say nothing about you or your work. What to post instead: failures, templates, real numbers, tool reviews, and a four-question test.
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somebody else broke the story, we say what it costs a one-person shop
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// the river
all 15 →- J.D. Forrest on Medium Everybody’s Building an Audience. Almost Nobody’s Building a Reader.
- J.D. Forrest on Medium Taste Is the Last Thing They Can’t Automate.
- J.D. Forrest on Medium Refusing to Learn AI Is a Luxury Your Competitors Hope You Can Afford.
- J.D. Forrest on Medium You Don’t Own Your Audience. You’re Renting It.
- Niche of One The Roadside Places Nobody Plans Around Are Going Away
- Thomas Icom - "Ticom" Computer Stuff
Skip the AI panic and the AI hype. How independent creators can use AI tools for grunt work, avoid platform lock-in, and keep a way out when prices change.
Most readers never reach the end of a long page. How to pick one point, cut everything else, and know when a long piece is still the right call.
What Jung's shadow and projection mean when someone is yelling at you, what to say, and when the attacker is simply right. Plus a pot of basil.
A phone-free hour a day, a few settings, and one dark day a month. How to take your attention back from your phone without turning into a hermit.
Owning tapes, records, books and film versus renting everything. What a subscription gets you, what it can take back, and how to build a shelf that lasts.
Told to niche down but you care about ten things? Here is what narrow-focus advice gets right, where it fails, and how to build around a lens instead.
No posts match that.
The wiring, the reasoning, the parts that didn't hold. Nothing here is a highlight reel. One operator building in public, one post at a time, instead of waiting until it's clean enough to sell a course about.
Nothing Worth Taking Into Account
Hokusai's verdict on his own first seventy years of work, why the old stuff is your warm-up, a $7 format for saying it in 300 words and a guide to cutting the clutter.
The Guard Booth Was Empty Since June
A screen built to stop drainer links, doxxing and threats let everything through since it shipped. A probe found it, the week the building got a working front door.
- THE LEAD // Since June, the Guard Booth Was Empty
- THE SECOND // The Fix for the Guard Booth Did Nothing, the First Time
- THE THIRD // The Building Got a Front Door the Same Week
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Email your list the draft you almost deleted. The one that scares you is the one that lands.
Everything in here comes across an omniversal connection, and that line does not hold still. A thing true in this edition may read another way in the next. We do not call that an error. We call it the bleed, and we file what comes through.
Correction: Last week we reported the algorithm was missing. It was not missing. It was never yours to lose. We regret implying it owed you anything.
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Frequently asked questions
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