new year, same me, and a little overhaul

A quick update on some developments for this newsletter.

With the new year dropping into our laps like a sack of flaming, radioactive fertilizer, I got some very useful advice and some compelling data to make a few changes over the next few months. Nothing major or even all that notable for readers, but a pretty significant one for me, which is kind of the problem, actually. Let me explain.

It’s probably not going to surprise you that people on the web hate brands and what looks like brands trying to connect with them or win them over. Brands don’t tell you what’s on their mind. They’re trying to sell you something. They don’t feel honest or authentic because, well, they can’t be. They’re not allowed.

And one of the biggest mistakes I’ve been making over the last few years is acting more like a brand than myself on social media. At the start of my blogging, with the now defunct World of Weird Things, it was very obvious that I was just one guy who was commenting on things in my area of expertise, or on which I had opinions that I just couldn’t keep to myself. That’s never changed.

What has changed is that between hiatuses and the communication style I ended up following online created greater and greater disconnects between what people knew was a page for my blogging and me. I focused on brand consistency rather than my identity, and just by sheer accident set up a perfect experiment to show me that just by sharing everything this newsletter was doing under my personal accounts instead of accounts branded as the newsletter increased traffic tenfold.

But there are two downsides to trying to pull everything back into one identity. Well, three, but I can’t go back and retroactively backfill every personal account with every link, so it doesn’t count.

The first problem is that I want to — and often do — refer to my previous work either to add detail and context, or show how the discussion evolved, but that work is now sprawling across three domains because until recently, it was an alien thought to me that people recognized or wanted to engage with “Greg Fish” more than something called the “Cyberpunk Survival Guide” or “World of Weird Things” given the state of social media today. (Don’t laugh.) But, again, the numbers don’t lie.

The second is that these domains cost money, as does hosting for the OG WP, and since I don’t use this venture to shill for supplements, promote affiliate links, or sell courses, but just try to share, entertain, and engage, my cash flow for this isn’t just zero, it’s negative.

To be fully transparent, I ended up spending $700 a year and only made any cash from this over the first few years of my blogging thanks to syndication deals. So, my solution is kinda simple and obvious. Reconsolidate.

Now, this newsletter will still be called the Cyberpunk Survival Guide. It will still focus on bleeding edge technology, tech culture, and transhumanism. I’m just importing a lot of my other content back under this roof, given that probably about two thirds of it also fits under similar criteria, just with a lot more space stuff.

This will be a multi-step process for reasons I’ll explain when I can tone my swearing down not to have to restrict my audience settings on YouTube, but I already started by importing all the good stuff from the newsletter edition of WoWT here. Sadly, all the engagement and comments had to be lost in the process, but that can’t be helped.

Original WoWT will come over eventually, but I’ll need some time and to save up a bit of extra cash to do it right. My hope is to tackle that project in a few months and have the origins of each article clearly marked and all the internal links properly reconciled to minimize redirects.

Meanwhile, the links to all my socials and videos on the about page were updated, as well as the handles, so you can now find me using my name or by typing “neutronfish” on pretty much any platform now. Facebook and Instagram are proving difficult, which is another weird and infuriating story, but I will figure it out soon.

So, if you’re a subscriber, thanks so much for your support and stay tuned. If you’re a casual reader who just came across this, I encourage you to poke around, see if you like what you read, and want to tune in as well. More changes are coming, and I really think they’ll be for the better.