Just a brief comment after a weekend of noticing a lot of weird stuff in my Substack feed. Until fairly recently Substack was a thing I subscribed to a few blogs, mostly political commentary, and out of the blue I accidentally discovered a gaming Substack or two, then by way of Substack's "referral" process where you can get free subs to other similar blogs I suddenly had a ton of gaming Substacks in my feed, which was honestly nice. I could never find a way to parse out Substack easily in the past; it seems like you have to sort of find a thing, then move within its circle to find other like things.
All that is to say that Substack seems like an awkward place to find stuff randomly or that is otherwise low profile or special and niche in design. But somehow, all of a sudden, I have a lot of it. The downside is I think a lot of it is sort of tonally related to what other Substacks subscribe to, or something, because a disproportionate amount of the stuff in my feed seems to boil down to one of four types:
1. Stacker complaining about how no one can find him on Substack so he's leaving;
2. Stacker who really, really hates Shadowdark and thinks everyone who likes it is a malicious crisis actor (or insert OSE or whatever system in place of Shadowdark) out to get him;
3. Endless, unending solo journaling Stacks that at no point bother to explain how to solo game like this, or how it is different from simply engaging in a creative writing process;
4. Finally, the gatekeepers! I found where the gaming gatekeepers all went, and it is on Substack. There are some really vitriolic people over there.
Anyway, this surprised me as over the last several years the much quieter but consistent realm of Blogspot and associated other blog sites have calmed down and been quietly doing our thing, which is just enjoying games and not being toxic. Amazing!
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