I hope you all had a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year’s, disinterested Super Bowl, morbid Ash Wednesday, buzzed Saint Patrick’s Day, copyright-compliant tournament-of-basketball-teams, salvific Easter, and are currently enjoying this whimsical April Fools Day! A lot of time has passed, since last I published here. A lot of time for me to reset and re-imagine this blog.
You see, before I continued writing here, I wanted to have a clear theme and a better look.
I would like to say that I spent the overwhelming majority of this period away focused on brainstorming for Cool Story, George. Doing things like wistfully gazing out the window, one hand thoughtfully placed on my chin, as I pondered the essence of my writing. Late nights at a typewriter, sipping scotch, and crumpling up pages of draft About pages, while muttering things like , “No, no, that just won’t do.”
In reality, I don’t have that kind of time. And so instead, I pursued inspiration and direction by leveraging modern technology! I fed the entire archive of what I’ve written into a word cloud generator. This would provide a concise, useful intuitive visual representation of my past year of writing. It highlights trends and themes, useful for identifying my strengths and focus, to help with choosing a brand. Here are the results of the word cloud generator:
According to the word cloud, my Substack should be called, “I’m Like, One Can Just… Chromebook,” and it should be about articles, posts, Christmas, and things.
So, like, that was just not really useful, actually (shoot, I’m doing it again).
The word cloud failed me. I suppose another path I could have explored was feeding the archive to an LLM AI, and asking that for insights. There are around 100,000 Substack articles published daily about how to use AI tools for such purposes. That’s a bit overwhelming - I can’t keep up, so why bother?
I’m left to just go with my gut. Here’s what I’ve decided to do:
Going to keep the name: Cool Story, George.
I’ve changed the font, and the color scheme is all grayscale now (if you actually go to the site, and don’t just read the emails).
Theme is now, simply, humor. Have I gone from too niche (Chromebooks) to too vague? Time will tell.
I made a free logo (above).
I re-did my About page and Welcome email.
Cadence is monthly from now on. This is the April issue.
Them’s the changes. I’ve got a few article drafts almost ready to go, so I’ve got a fighting chance of holding the monthly cadence for the year. I’m posting this on April 1st so that it is unclear whether I’m serious, and I therefore can never be held accountable.
If anyone out there has feedback/suggestions on any of my branding/strategic decisions, I want to hear it. Otherwise, no complaining!
Please enjoy my refreshed About page below, and have a great April!
About Page
Why subscribe?
I'm a successful humor columnist with works published on a popular meme page. I can't mention the name of the meme page, because I ghost-wrote both the articles and sold the rights for $25 apiece. That was my entire 2023 writing revenue, and I simply cannot afford to put that in jeopardy in any way, so I’m not going to risk some sort of legal dispute by taking credit for them here. But the articles were hilarious.
Aside from my impressive credentials as a published humorist, you should subscribe because this Substack is going places. Maybe someday when I’m famous, I’ll remember that you were an early subscriber. In that case, when you mail me a photo or a hat, or something else to sign, I will return it with not only my signature, but also a personalized note that will increase its collector’s value beyond the price we negotiated beforehand.
Perhaps even, when subscriptions go to $5 a month, I’ll give you a coupon code for a free month, remembering with gratitude, your early support.
Join the crew
I’m on the march to 100 subscribers, at which point I will do two things, as mandated by Substack law:
I will write an article about how I successfully acquired 100 subscribers, and how you can too.
I will allow optional paid subscriptions. I’m not saying content will be pay-walled; I will merely graciously allow people to give me money, should they so choose.
Ask your friends to subscribe too, so that we can all read the 100 subs success story article, and everyone may then commence to throw money at me via paid subscriptions. The sooner this happens, the better.