Housekeeping

The state of Danger Post

Since I’ve recently broken 150 free subscribers, I thought it was time for a brief housekeeping post.

I’m still working the bugs out of what I post here and how frequently. So far I’ve been shooting for about a post a week or so, and I think I’ve been generally hitting that target. I’m consciously trying to mix up the political stuff with stories and anecdotes, since I think my political takes are generally less interesting than my personal experience of having multiple fingers in a bunch of very different worlds. I also don’t want potential readers to be turned off by a wall of scorching hot takes. Substack does support a tagging feature, so ideally I’ll be able to sort my posts by topic and allow people to choose which side of me they’d prefer to focus on, the trick for me is implementing that without breaking my site in the process.

I’m also trying to refine my style. I was way better at the long form stuff when I was younger, but years of forum arguing have worn me down and optimized my writing for maximum brevity and minimum attack surfaces, which is great if you’re a professional reply guy but not so helpful if you’re trying to write stand alone pieces. If you’ve encountered me through Notes, you’ve probably noticed this particular specialization. I’m really shooting for a sweet spot length wise where I can make points and tell stories that are too long to be notes without padding them out to essay length, I’ve found my own attention span increasingly struggling with lengthier heavily annotated pieces even when I find the subject interesting, and figured other people might be in a similar boat.

Since I’ve gotten some comments on it, the cartoon version of me that I’ve been using to illustrate my pieces has a slightly funny origin story. My very blue collar job requires me to take verification photos when I clock in and out, and as a result I have a huge library of headshots cached on my phone, ready to feed into the AI for reference. So that’s actually what I look like, although it does make my hair and beard a little darker than they really are. I’m trying to avoid the whole AI slop thing with the illustrations, I suck at photography and enjoy trying to come up with funny visual metaphors for my topics, so hopefully I can keep them on the correct side of cringe. No promises.

Anyway, thank you to everyone who has subscribed so far, it’s been extremely gratifying to see that there’s some interest in my thoughts out there. I’ve got some good stuff in the pipeline, it’s just a matter of wrangling my attention span and making sure I’m not rewriting something Scott Alexander observed a decade ago (that guy is to political bloggers what The Simpsons are to adult animation).

Thanks again for reading, and if you have any feedback about what you’d like to see more or less of here feel free to drop me a message,

Keese