JohnHenry.US

Category: JH AfterParty

  • AfterParty 1.5

    Hey everyone, welcome to another AfterParty, I’m your suave and debonair host, let’s chat a bit!

    In my last AP I talked about having been quite “up” mentally for a sustained period, which was nice, but it had sort of leveled off a bit. The day after that dropped. I had a few things hit me that brought me down pretty hard for a bit – primarily, the absolutely undeniable evidence that my long-held (and long-confirmed, but not concretely) suspicions about where so much of the ongoing pressure against me – which dates long before Facebook or this site, back to the late 90s for the most part – was coming from.

    I’d have rather been wrong, frankly, and the ensuing mental conversation really dragged me down for a few days, back in the ol’ depression soup of wondering whether any of this is worth doing in the first place, the usual drill. I was hoping it wouldn’t get that far at all, but as anyone who’s struggled with mental illness will testify you’re not always in as much control as you’d like to believe you are.

    The good news is I’m slowly pulling back up – in the end there’s nothing I can do about any of it anyway, all I can do is keep being me and moving forward as best as possible with the tools I’ve got. I figure if I was gonna be out for “revenge,” that’d be about the best version of it anyway. I’ve written elsewhere about this in more detail, and don’t want to get deeply into again, just offering it out as a way of apologizing for being rather unproductive over the last week, including being a day late on this newsletter.

    On the up side I got the renamed “Morning Message” out with proper video & podcast today, and hopefully my sleep schedule will start working backwards a bit so the whole “morning” thing doesn’t get too ironic. I suspect it will, but right now I’m still in that “I might just get caught up in something an then suddenly realize it’s 3am” mode so I don’t want to make too many promises, but I think I’m on the road back to at least baseline productivity.

    Also dropped a pretty significant Medium article a few days ago. I tripped over a huge botnet/psyop nest on facebook – because they kept shoveling it in front of me so I couldn’t ignore it! – and started trying to ignore it only to find it was EVERYWHERE. Millions of people following hundreds of pages spamming from dozens of websites, etc., all of it either anti-democratic propaganda of some kind or glurgey sappy nostaligia and “aww cute” and ‘WE LUV DA SOJERS’ stuff crafted to catch folks who maybe aren’t caught up on the way the world’s information has shifted in the last ten or twenty years, get ’em following, and then start pushing them a little at a time.

    “The good old days!” That pulls a bunch of people. “When women knew their place and other people weren’t so uppity!” that loses a bunch…but you know the ones who are left are well-primed to be receptive to manipulation through bigotry and ignorance and fear, and we’re off to the races and pretty soon we’re reposting leftist satire as right-wing news and people are falling for it like autumn leaves, working themselves up into a torches-and-pitchforks froth of xenophobia and bitterness, and pretty soon it’s that damned gub’mint and we oughta. So that whole story’s at Medium and needs daylight, it’s an obviously coordinated foreign influence op being given a rocket-fuel boost by our buddy Da Zuck.

    So.

    A few months ago I was living in a hotel room, day to day, all my stuff in bins, no vehicle, no escape, and little hope. Now I’m in a home with a room and a desk and a computer connection and at least a rudimentary work environment. How that happened is another one of those “holy crap, is this my life?” moments that have so famously followed me around over the years.

    I’ve told the story in the past of why I was never a Jack Daniels’ drinker, but it’s been a minute. One night when I was fifteen, I went out with some friends and laid hands on a fifth of jack and a three-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, and proceeded to slam it and chase it and slam it and chase it and slam it and chase it 1985 rock star style until I was absolutely beyond drunk. Only a couple of memories of the night at all – one of tooling down the road in front of Upjohn’s world HQ in my buddy’s Pinto wagon, one of continually trying to unbutton another friend’s shirt, but other than that the night is and has always been a blank.

    Since then I’ve not been able to stand the taste of any kind of whiskey or bourbon or scotch.

    Naturally as tends to happen that group of friends drifted apart, life went on, and so forth, and now I’m living in a hotel just one bare fingernail from falling off the cliff forever. I had at least had the presence of mind to join the chain’s rewards program, so I was building up loyalty points good for rewards like free or discounted room prices.

    It’s like a Tuesday afternoon, and I’m out of money with no sign of any coming in soon. I’d already had a miraculous amount of help – I stayed in that hotel for a month! – and the proverbial well appeared to be dry for the moment.

    I walk down to the hotel office to start the process of cashing in my points, and as I’m standing there talking to the hotel clerk I thought I barely heard someone say my name.

    There’s zero reason for this to happen. Nobody in this place even knows my name except the desk help, and they’ve likely not even noticed it. I glanced around, didn’t see anyone I recognized, and turned back to the clerk, set my arrangements, and started walking out…and I heard my name again.

    I turn around…and it’s the girl whose shirt I’d been trying to take off thirty-seven years ago. Hadn’t seen or talked to her since probably early 1987 at the latest.

    We get to talking, “what are you doing here” “what are YOU doing here” etc. Long story short: she was working on the side because she’s on disability with a terminal cancer diagnosis, stage four in lungs and brain. Super sad. But also, she lives alone and has a spare room and pretty much needs someone to be around to call 911 in case she collapses unexpectedly or something, and heck yeah it’d be a favor to me if you’d move in. Don’t even worry about rent, don’t worry about getting a job or any of the rest of that crap, do what you can, but I just need someone around like right now and it sounds like you’re a perfect candidate.

    Here’s the kicker. You hear “stage four terminal” and think oh, wow, that’s tragedy, aren’t you worried you’re like, taking advantage or something? Thing is, in terms of health she’s ridiculously fine. She had collapsed back in August and at that time the ER docs gave her like…weeks. I ran into her in March and wouldn’t have known any of that to look at her. Still don’t. And she’s one of those types that’s not gonna just sit around waiting to die just because someone said she was gonna.

    So now I’m living here, helping out around the house, being a friend, and finally being allowed, in good faith, to have the time and space I need to actually work, rather than the series of bad-faith attempts to exploit and leverage my powerlessness in one situation to gain further power over my in the guise of “helping” (but now you owe me). We’re not in any kind of relationship or any of that stuff, but our past history definitely helps overcome the gap between in terms of “knowing each other,” we’re both still the same people just older, so it’s a sort of neat combination of being friends and strangers.

    And that, assembled guests, is the deus ex machina that probably saved me from being on the streets. I had another day and that was it – no money, nowhere to go, no way to get there.

    That is why you’re seeing such a sharp spike in my work lately. Took some weeks to get my head adjusted and out of the horrible farce of existence I’d been in for two and a half years in that damn boarding house, but once that started lifting things started flowing and other than the bump last week really have been ever since.

    I’m still not by any means affluent, but I have a stable roof over my head (she owns the house), and her day gig (which she went back to out of boredom) is in industrial food service so even though I have almost no money I still eat. This is extra bonus because it allows me to focus on putting support from folks like you toward my work, rather than just toward trying to keep my dumb ass alive for another day! It’s still a struggle to keep up just the bills associated with the low level or work I’m doing now – Adobe, Microsoft Office, the autoposter for the websites, various other little bits and pieces. And of course my roommate’s diet is pretty limited so I’m eating a whole lot of chemo patient safe food, but on the bright side I’ve also lost almost forty pounds since I’ve been here, from the last time I weighed in at the doctor when I was at the old place. I was 253 there, I think, and right now I’m around 215. Supposedly 197 is optimal; we’ll see if I get that far and what it looks like.

    So that’s my little story for the week about how life’s going backstage here at JH Central I’m going to go ahead and set this public at the normal Tuesday Noon next week. For now as always my many thanks and unspeakable gratitude for your ongoing support, and keep an eye on the website and other platforms for ongoing new content including the newsletters plus more on the multi-part content I’ve already started and whatever comes up between now and next time!

    Oh, hey. Check out this old song that has absolutely no right being as awesome as it is! You can’t imagine how much this was my favorite song when I was like…three.

    Love y’all, see you soon.

  • AfterParty 1.5 (Advance)

    Hey everyone, welcome to another AfterParty, I’m your suave and debonair host, let’s chat a bit!

    In my last AP I talked about having been quite “up” mentally for a sustained period, which was nice, but it had sort of leveled off a bit. The day after that dropped. I had a few things hit me that brought me down pretty hard for a bit – primarily, the absolutely undeniable evidence that my long-held (and long-confirmed, but not concretely) suspicions about where so much of the ongoing pressure against me – which dates long before Facebook or this site, back to the late 90s for the most part – was coming from.

    I’d have rather been wrong, frankly, and the ensuing mental conversation really dragged me down for a few days, back in the ol’ depression soup of wondering whether any of this is worth doing in the first place, the usual drill. I was hoping it wouldn’t get that far at all, but as anyone who’s struggled with mental illness will testify you’re not always in as much control as you’d like to believe you are.

    The good news is I’m slowly pulling back up – in the end there’s nothing I can do about any of it anyway, all I can do is keep being me and moving forward as best as possible with the tools I’ve got. I figure if I was gonna be out for “revenge,” that’d be about the best version of it anyway. I’ve written elsewhere about this in more detail, and don’t want to get deeply into again, just offering it out as a way of apologizing for being rather unproductive over the last week, including being a day late on this newsletter.

    On the up side I got the renamed “Morning Message” out with proper video & podcast today, and hopefully my sleep schedule will start working backwards a bit so the whole “morning” thing doesn’t get too ironic. I suspect it will, but right now I’m still in that “I might just get caught up in something an then suddenly realize it’s 3am” mode so I don’t want to make too many promises, but I think I’m on the road back to at least baseline productivity.

    Also dropped a pretty significant Medium article a few days ago. I tripped over a huge botnet/psyop nest on facebook – because they kept shoveling it in front of me so I couldn’t ignore it! – and started trying to ignore it only to find it was EVERYWHERE. Millions of people following hundreds of pages spamming from dozens of websites, etc., all of it either anti-democratic propaganda of some kind or glurgey sappy nostaligia and “aww cute” and ‘WE LUV DA SOJERS’ stuff crafted to catch folks who maybe aren’t caught up on the way the world’s information has shifted in the last ten or twenty years, get ’em following, and then start pushing them a little at a time.

    “The good old days!” That pulls a bunch of people. “When women knew their place and other people weren’t so uppity!” that loses a bunch…but you know the ones who are left are well-primed to be receptive to manipulation through bigotry and ignorance and fear, and we’re off to the races and pretty soon we’re reposting leftist satire as right-wing news and people are falling for it like autumn leaves, working themselves up into a torches-and-pitchforks froth of xenophobia and bitterness, and pretty soon it’s that damned gub’mint and we oughta. So that whole story’s at Medium and needs daylight, it’s an obviously coordinated foreign influence op being given a rocket-fuel boost by our buddy Da Zuck.

    So.

    A few months ago I was living in a hotel room, day to day, all my stuff in bins, no vehicle, no escape, and little hope. Now I’m in a home with a room and a desk and a computer connection and at least a rudimentary work environment. How that happened is another one of those “holy crap, is this my life?” moments that have so famously followed me around over the years.

    I’ve told the story in the past of why I was never a Jack Daniels’ drinker, but it’s been a minute. One night when I was fifteen, I went out with some friends and laid hands on a fifth of jack and a three-liter bottle of Mountain Dew, and proceeded to slam it and chase it and slam it and chase it and slam it and chase it 1985 rock star style until I was absolutely beyond drunk. Only a couple of memories of the night at all – one of tooling down the road in front of Upjohn’s world HQ in my buddy’s Pinto wagon, one of continually trying to unbutton another friend’s shirt, but other than that the night is and has always been a blank.

    Since then I’ve not been able to stand the taste of any kind of whiskey or bourbon or scotch.

    Naturally as tends to happen that group of friends drifted apart, life went on, and so forth, and now I’m living in a hotel just one bare fingernail from falling off the cliff forever. I had at least had the presence of mind to join the chain’s rewards program, so I was building up loyalty points good for rewards like free or discounted room prices.

    It’s like a Tuesday afternoon, and I’m out of money with no sign of any coming in soon. I’d already had a miraculous amount of help – I stayed in that hotel for a month! – and the proverbial well appeared to be dry for the moment.

    I walk down to the hotel office to start the process of cashing in my points, and as I’m standing there talking to the hotel clerk I thought I barely heard someone say my name.

    There’s zero reason for this to happen. Nobody in this place even knows my name except the desk help, and they’ve likely not even noticed it. I glanced around, didn’t see anyone I recognized, and turned back to the clerk, set my arrangements, and started walking out…and I heard my name again.

    I turn around…and it’s the girl whose shirt I’d been trying to take off thirty-seven years ago. Hadn’t seen or talked to her since probably early 1987 at the latest.

    We get to talking, “what are you doing here” “what are YOU doing here” etc. Long story short: she was working on the side because she’s on disability with a terminal cancer diagnosis, stage four in lungs and brain. Super sad. But also, she lives alone and has a spare room and pretty much needs someone to be around to call 911 in case she collapses unexpectedly or something, and heck yeah it’d be a favor to me if you’d move in. Don’t even worry about rent, don’t worry about getting a job or any of the rest of that crap, do what you can, but I just need someone around like right now and it sounds like you’re a perfect candidate.

    Here’s the kicker. You hear “stage four terminal” and think oh, wow, that’s tragedy, aren’t you worried you’re like, taking advantage or something? Thing is, in terms of health she’s ridiculously fine. She had collapsed back in August and at that time the ER docs gave her like…weeks. I ran into her in March and wouldn’t have known any of that to look at her. Still don’t. And she’s one of those types that’s not gonna just sit around waiting to die just because someone said she was gonna.

    So now I’m living here, helping out around the house, being a friend, and finally being allowed, in good faith, to have the time and space I need to actually work, rather than the series of bad-faith attempts to exploit and leverage my powerlessness in one situation to gain further power over my in the guise of “helping” (but now you owe me). We’re not in any kind of relationship or any of that stuff, but our past history definitely helps overcome the gap between in terms of “knowing each other,” we’re both still the same people just older, so it’s a sort of neat combination of being friends and strangers.

    And that, assembled guests, is the deus ex machina that probably saved me from being on the streets. I had another day and that was it – no money, nowhere to go, no way to get there.

    That is why you’re seeing such a sharp spike in my work lately. Took some weeks to get my head adjusted and out of the horrible farce of existence I’d been in for two and a half years in that damn boarding house, but once that started lifting things started flowing and other than the bump last week really have been ever since.

    I’m still not by any means affluent, but I have a stable roof over my head (she owns the house), and her day gig (which she went back to out of boredom) is in industrial food service so even though I have almost no money I still eat. This is extra bonus because it allows me to focus on putting support from folks like you toward my work, rather than just toward trying to keep my dumb ass alive for another day! It’s still a struggle to keep up just the bills associated with the low level or work I’m doing now – Adobe, Microsoft Office, the autoposter for the websites, various other little bits and pieces. And of course my roommate’s diet is pretty limited so I’m eating a whole lot of chemo patient safe food, but on the bright side I’ve also lost almost forty pounds since I’ve been here, from the last time I weighed in at the doctor when I was at the old place. I was 253 there, I think, and right now I’m around 215. Supposedly 197 is optimal; we’ll see if I get that far and what it looks like.

    So that’s my little story for the week about how life’s going backstage here at JH Central I’m going to go ahead and set this public at the normal Tuesday Noon next week. For now as always my many thanks and unspeakable gratitude for your ongoing support, and keep an eye on the website and other platforms for ongoing new content including the newsletters plus more on the multi-part content I’ve already started and whatever comes up between now and next time!

    Oh, hey. Check out this old song that has absolutely no right being as awesome as it is! You can’t imagine how much this was my favorite song when I was like…three.

    Love y’all, see you soon.

  • JH AfterParty 1.4

    Hello Patrons and supporters and welcome to another edition of the JH AfterParty, exclusively available to you for one week before being released to the general public!

    Finally started seeing some balance to the unremitting upswing I’ve been on for the last couple of months. Last Thursday was pretty much a no-go for the day, just sat down and everything I picked up to work on my brain just went “mbleh” and refused to chug. So I gave it the day off and Friday was better, weekend okay, yesterday afternoon kinda meh, but still nothing like the major crashes I’ve experienced in less stable, more chaotic living situations in the last few years. Obviously that’s not to say that my depression is the fault of my living situation, but rather that those situations made it more difficult for me to manage. I’m not feeling any impending sense of a giant crash or anything, just learning to manage myself better generally so it’s not always full throttle or dead stop. That’s part of the reason I’m opening up new sections of the site, too – helps me feel less guilty for doing anything that doesn’t potentially generate income if I can use it to generate a little income.

    Got some stuff done over the weekend as well – the Substack newsletter of course, and a new Medium article about media disinformation, plus other bits of content and the new “Morning Me” newsletter. I’ve started that off being just a “hey it’s morning time here’s me” thing, but I’m now starting to morph it into more of a “here’s a news item or two and a few of my thoughts about it to get your day rolling with your brain engaged” groove, as I’m getting the routine tightened down and everything in place to make it a true production process much as I’ve done with this newsletter over the last four weeks.

    I know it’s tedious to watch sometimes, but hopefully at least a few people are actually interested in how I do all this and my thoughts in process. All of this back-end and infrastructure and template work is designed to make production smooth and efficient, so I don’t find myself suddenly overwhelmed trying to produce six newsletters, five video episodes, five podcast episodes, plus actual content every week.

    Oh, yeah. As of yesterday I’ve started doing the “Morning Me” as a video and podcast series in addition to the “print” version. That’ll be an ongoing thing. I’m considering doing the same with this but haven’t had time to look properly in to doing it with the supporter preview functionality protected – again, an issue that seems pretty petty and meaningless in this context but will be far easier to solve now than later down the road when it’s standing in the way of “real” content going out. But as of yesterday you can get your “Morning Me” as a video cast on my YouTube channel and as an audio podcast through any of the links on my site – it’ll still show up as “In My Room” in some players, for now – I will have to create an entire new infrastructure to properly handle podcasting again but this’ll get it out of the gate for now. There’s also be a download link on each newsletter so you can just snag the MP3 and listen to it however you want.

    I laughed way too hard at this:

    It’s an irrational function because it still runs on fossil fuels.

    That project management software (ProjeQtOr) that I mentioned last week has been working out really well, easily the best free solution I’ve ever found in terms of working the way I work and helping me stay organized and on task, plus I’m losing fewer ideas because when I have one I can just open a ticket and then it’s there and eventually I’ll remember it and get back to it. That’s part of what’s empowering these multi-part series I’m doing like the gaming history and national debt pieces – I can plan them better and it gives me time to think of things like NOT writing them all as a single enormous article because hardly anyone reads those anymore. Haven’t had time to look into a “public” facing reporting tool for supporters yet, but it’s on the agenda.

    Contributions are unfortunately way down, but that’s to be expected with no multimedia work going out. I’ve got a couple of pitch videos sketched out and some other stuff that’ll help that. Just reminds me how grateful I am to those of you who have been and/or are pitching in on the support; even though I’m in a much better place, I’m still way behind where I need to be to get this whole thing set up properly – right now I’m not even keeping up with my few basic bills, to say nothing of trying to help out the friend who’s putting me up and adding a ton of empowerment to all of this by doing so, and there’s a laundry list of expenses from gear to food to business licensing and taxes that needs handled.

    The way that happens is with your support and that of other folks like you who are committed to doing what you can to help nudge the battleship Humanity a quarter-degree or so in a more sane and sustainable direction. Please do keep your eyes peeled for an upcoming short video that will be framed specifically as a tool for those of you who have been supportive to reach out with and help add to that so we can get out of “hanging on” mode and get on with climbing upward, I should have that by the end of the week. We’ve been on a slow build. My end has picked up considerably in the last month and will continue to do so. Now it’s just a question of getting it out there so people can see it.

    And as I’m writing this I’m having dozens of notions of things I need to do fly through my head, so let me wrap it up and get back to work!

  • JH AfterParty 1.3

    How about a wall of text with no headings this week?

    Hey everyone and welcome to another JH AfterParty, I am of course your sartorially exquisite and finely honed host John Henry, let’s take a look at what’s up inside my world this week!

    The ongoing high-octane energy period continues. I have to admit this is kind of shaky ground for me, because this definitely isn’t an artifact of my mental illness (which it often is when I’m “up” like this – it’s called “manic depression” for a reason). I’ve been steady and strong for weeks now, and there’s no end in sight. My mind is sharper, my productivity is through the roof, and I’m literally hitting personal, internal goals that I’ve been picking at for twenty years or more.

    The implementation of ProjeQtOr project management software on a subdomain of JHUS is a great example of this. I’ve literally been playing with project management software trying to find something that would work for me and the way I do things AND not cost an arm and a leg or require an MCS for thirty years.

    Like Microsoft Project is pretty perfect – would be a better solution than this in fact – but it costs hundreds of dollars a year to maintain and unlike Adobe Creative Cloud (which also costs hundreds of dollars a year to maintain) it doesn’t produce an easily tangible result for the “customer,” which in my case is you in spite of my long-standing loathing for the idea that I am a “product” or the things I do are “commodities” or “services” to be “consumed.”

    Regardless of my own self-serving philosophizing, in the end people are giving me money because I do certain things, and that amounts to a customer service relationship. This isn’t a new idea to me, it’s just one I’ve always been loathe to speak out loud because it feels like I’m turning myself into a new gadget from Ron Popeil. I don’t like thinking and talking in corporate-speak and MBA terminology. I know the language, in fact I’m pretty fluent in it beyond not keeping up with the lastest stupid buzzwords for someone’s half-assed attempt at actually doing the things some of us have been doing and telling everyone else you should be for centuries.

    Watch the whole progression of the “Six Sigma” thing for an example. It doesn’t really mean anything at all other than “I’ve got a decent enough handle on how to do things that I can pass a little test and get a certificate that will make all the HR drones think I’m smart.” It’s just a big fancy bunch of marketable nonsense that comes down to “maximize production efficiency whenever possible.”

    Cultivate the ability – and make it a habit! – to avoid rushing, to the greatest extent you possibly can. When you’re rushing, you’re not thinking.

    – jh

    Much like “common core math,” in the end it represents an attempt by someone who doesn’t “get it” to communicate “it” to other people who “don’t get it,” while entirely locking out everyone who does “get it” from the conversation because the person who appears to “get it” gets paid so we’re back to the manifest individual tumors of the cancers of competition and capitalism.

    Common core math is an attempt to teach neurotypical people how geniuses math, predicated on the notion that if you do it like a genius, you’ll get genius results. It, and nearly every such endeavor, overlooks the part about you have to be a genius to understand how it works, and most of us aren’t geniuses.

    Six Sigma and pretty much every other trendy corporate buzzword is the same thing; it’s how someone figured out a way to package a good idea so people who are consistently averse to good ideas will accept it. Problem is in order to do that, half the time you have to compromise the idea until it’s no longer good.

    This circles back to my problem with project management and self management and software. I’ve seen it in plenty of other places, too, it’s not just me – you can get so caught up in the metastructure of what you’re doing that you forget to actually do the thing you set out to do.

    For instance about twenty-five years ago when I first started building websites, I started putting together a little section of my Geocities page for gaming…and then ended up in the weeds creating all the structure for the content until I got bored with it and never created the content. Now here I am a quarter-century later finally following through on it.

    I’m not talking about things that just don’t pan out like the Musk For A Minute project – that was a good solid swing and an unfortunate miss and that happens in life, it’s not even a “failure,” just didn’t go where I hoped it would. I’m talking about things where you start off thinking you’re going to arrange your music collection and end up building a database where you can keep notes, track lists, ID3 or other metainfo, and write an article for every single one of your 60K+ MP3s…and then when the database is done you do about twelve entries and find something else that attracts your attention and your energy and suddenly a good idea is abandoned and three years later you go “ohshit, I was gonna….rawr.”

    Meanwhile you’ve forgotten all about actually organizing your music collection.

    That is the kind of bad habit I’m breaking in myself right now, and for some reason it’s important to me to express how it really is the same problem as the compromise problem above (and the other one below). You get so wrapped up in trying to find ways to make the truth palatable to people who are violently opposed to hearing it (or in some extreme cases straight out incapable of processing it), you forget that the job is “tell the truth,” not “make it comfortable,” and pretty soon you’re not telling the truth at all anymore. You get so wrapped up in trying to find ways to make the process more efficient that you forget it has to actually be a working process and at some point you need to engage in it.

    See e.g. the entire “critical race theory” argument, whereby cowardly bigots insist that because the truth of how horrible white people in the US have been to people of color historically is not comfortable to white people, that truth should not be spoken at all.

    All three of those examples of broken thinking are rooted around the same fundamental (and dysfunctional) thought pattern, and you can probably tell by my rambling I’m having a little trouble nailing down precise verbiage for it. I know it’s not just a me thing, because there are those examples above. I just can’t find a common, readily understood phrase to describe it that does the concept proper service. I think the closest I ever came was something I said once that got memed and I’ve long since lost track of: People will happily pay $10 for a sideshow just to prove they didn’t get taken in by the $5 circus.

    Point is I’m in a really amazing place in my life right now, things are happening like crazy and moving ahead in big ways. All that stuff I was “gonna” over the years, I’m finally doing, and it feels really wonderful. (Okay, not all…but a lot more than I ever have at once before.)

    I wouldn’t be here without all of your help, and I wouldn’t be able to contemplate moving forward without knowing you all are here, and I appreciate you far more individually and constantly than you probably think…especially because interpersonal communication and followups like sending “thank you” notes when someone chucks me fifty bucks on PayPal tend to be first and foremost among those things that get lost in the dust when I’ve got other stuff happening.

    That’s part of the whole reason I’m doing this newsletter; to find SOME way to show folks that I’m thinking of you and that I never forget “who I’m working for,” without stepping over a big bright line I have where I think it’s pretty gross to lock information that everybody really needs behind a paywall so only people who can afford it, get it. That’s kind of one of the big problems I’m trying to solve, right – the whole inequity of access to critical needs, systems, and information. I can hardly be a credible agent of change in that regard if I refuse to risk letting go of the tactic myself because I’m afraid I won’t be able to eat or pay rent. Someone’s got to take that risk, and I happen to be pretty well geared to minimize the impact of it in a lot of ways that most people aren’t, so here I am.

    Anyway…I was going to say “I digress” but this entire newsletter is supposed to be a digression of sorts so I won’t. I will say that I’ve got a lot of great new content up at the site, much more coming, some really fantastic things happening in terms of my mental health and overall state of being, and I’m now in my groove and doing what I came here to do.

    And I’m all outta bubblegum πŸ˜‰

    See y’all next week, please don’t forget those engagements! Some of y’all have been hearing me talk about “when I get to this point, it’s gonna be time to get serious about all of this for folks in the liking and sharing and commenting and subscribing and telling others department” for a decade or more.

    Well, now I’m at this point. It’s time. Damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

    Talk soon and don’t forget to subscribe to the Substack! (There’s a form in the sidebar if you’re reading this at JohnHenry.US. It’s below the content on vertical screens.) That’s the one way you know for sure you’re aware of everything I publish and create, and that’s the best way to know what you like and prefer to share and engage with πŸ™‚

    OH! I almost forgot I’m doing an irregular-but-daily-ish new thing called “The Morning Me,” you should check that out (I’ll get a node page up for it soon) and also know ahead of time that there’s probably going to be something similar about the rest of the world coming along Real Soon Nowβ„’. And yes, rich media is on the horizon.

  • JH AfterParty 1.2

    Thank you!

    Hey everyone, thanks again for being part of the ride and welcome to the second official edition of the JH AfterParty. As always with the AfterParty, it goes out to Patrons and other contributors a week before everyone else gets it, generally around noon on Tuesdays (at least for now). The public edition is scheduled ahead of time and will always drop at noon eastern a week after the previous one, and the whole mess is published simultaneously on my Patreon and on JohnHenry.US! (The edition on the website tends to be a bit prettier due to limitations of the rich text editor at Patreon.)

    It has been a heck of a week in terms of getting things done. Since the “launch” issue of AfterParty last Friday, I put up a couple of articles plus did a ton of work building and creating content on the newly-built section of my site devoted to gaming, which has long been a passion of mine that I’ve wanted to write and create content around, but have never really sat down and taken a serious run at it. There’ll be a comprehensive rundown of all that stuff in the Saturday Substack, but between that and the new article about gun violence alone there’s a couple of hours’ worth of well-spent time waiting for you over at JohnHenry.US if you get the urge to just pop over and check it out.

    All of that and everything else I do is possible only because of your support, so thank you!

    Looking Ahead Through Blurred Lenses

    I had this notion of creating a short – 60 seconds or less – ad video that’s intended to be used by “you,” Constant Reader, to introduce me to the part of the world you have contact with and I don’t.

    This is one of those rare things where I’m thinking pretty much in straight-up marketing terms. When it’s necessary I sort of have a little consultant in my head that I allow to run his mouth in small doses and look at me and my work as a product and service and object to be distributed and communicated. According to him, it would be really effective to reach out with a short vid pointing directly to past support and largely intended to be shared by you folks who have been behind me and watching me go through all this mess for the last harumharum years.

    Basically it’s an ethical and righteous way of leveraging social proof. Like these clowns that go buy 200K fake followers from an agency right out of the gate so you see them and think “well, obviously with that many people behind it there must be something worthwhile there.” It’s a known human “thing” to do that, and nearly everyone in any kind of marketing space leverages that with the artificial appearance of this support (called “social proof”) to build “real” support.

    I think that’s crooked as hell and reduces discourse and platform access to another dollar chase, and the dollar chase is exactly the disease I’m trying to vaccinate us all against. Unfortunately we live in a world that runs on money, and while we can fight to change that all day long it’s still the present reality and we have to work within it to some degree or we don’t work at all.

    Consequently I need to lean in a bit harder on the whole marketing thing even though I absolutely HATE it. I’ve often said that I’m a proud graduate of the Bill Hicks school of marketing and advertising…

    Planting seeds. It’s Hicks, again if I gotta tell you the audio’s NSFW I’m not sure how you found me in the first place…

    But the reality is that you good folks are all out there. There are dozens of names I could think of without looking, should I take the mind, that I know I’ve been seeing in and out of my comment section for many years. You all have an ownership piece of all of this work whether because you’ve put literal cash into it or because of the time and energy you put in reading and watching and liking and sharing and commenting, and I feel like growing the support base is as much a validation of your support as it is of my work.

    I want to give you a way to say straight up “hey I’ve been watching this cat fight like hell through some unimaginable garbage that’s been thrown at him over the years, he keeps on going and keeps on kicking out this really good work, I support him and I think you should too.” Everybody loves an underdog, everybody loves a comeback, (especially when it’s against the odds with righteous cause), everybody loves a story of a powerless individual triumphing against the malignancy of power arrayed against their desire to simply live freely. Everybody wants to be part of that.

    We just gotta let ’em know I’m out here, and I’m unfortunately “that asshole” who refuses to cheat the system by buying artificial appearances of social approval to “sell” myself emotionally to people by unethically bypassing their critical thinking. That means I’ve got to work a thousand times as hard to magnify and enhance the legitimate social approval I do have. It means eventually I’ll buy advertising on various platforms that I’d rather not exist at all, because those platforms have a monopoly on information gatekeeping and if you don’t pay them, your information doesn’t get in front of people’s eyeballs.

    Mostly it means I need to work harder to give you the voice to spread the word, so I’ll be doing that Real Soonβ„’. Clearly the word needs to be there, to be spread, so I’m balancing the need for creating these kinds of overt marketing materials with the need to create quality original content that speaks for itself and doesn’t require a bunch of carnival barking or sales pitching.

    Obviously the idea is very rough at present and I’m not 100% sure how quickly that will be done, so that’s about all I’ll say about it for now, but obviously I’m always interested in your feedback and thoughts on stuff like this.

    In My Head

    Life is incredibly positive right now. Not perfect by any means, there remain challenges even beyond trying to pay for my existence, but I’m working at a speed and level of quality that I haven’t touched in years, and I’m super excited about it. Things I’ve struggled with mentally for a long time because of ongoing stress and anxiety about the stability of my living situation or other pressures related thereto, I’m finally breaking through on and getting settled in properly the way I’ve been fighting to in some ways for most of my life.

    This newsletter is one small example of that, and I think I’ve discussed enough others that there’s no need to re-enumerate them here. I’m more organized, more focused, more productive with my work time, generally in a better mood. I’ve even lost about a tenth of my body weight in the last couple of months, which is a good thing – it’s because my diet isn’t mostly pasta, sugar, and salt anymore. I have more energy when I’m awake, and I feel more stable than I have since I was working at Musician’s Friend…more so, because I’m not relying on my ability to not piss off some yuppie.

    I’m probably in the best space mentally and intellectually that I’ve been in…at least a decade, maybe two, maybe ever if I take everything into account. By no means does that means life is easy, obviously I’m still scrambling for forward momentum and financial stability, or steady income of any sort that I can count on beyond the $105/month in pledges that goes through Patreon right now for that matter – but boyohboy does that $105 – or really about 97 after fees – make a difference!

    If I just had 18 more people pitching in $50 a month, that would be $1k/m. That’s easily survival money in my present situation. That plus an occasional large contribution or a whole lot of other small ones, and I can start doing things like replacing this computer, which has now officially aged out of useful life for my purposes as a primary machine because it’s so old it can’t run Windows 11 and MS has announced they’re not issuing any more updates for Windows 10 beyond critical security patches.

    That means that OS is at end of life and it’s the most modern one I can run and still use any of my tools to speak of. That also means my tools are evolving beyond my current hardware’s ability to even upgrade to with the same motherboard and cpu architecture (i7-3700 I think, so i7 yay but third gen; it’s twelfth-gen now plus they’re up to i10 or so. It’ll make a great file server for years to come but as a production box its breathing its last.). I think I’m going to work up some kind of targeted fundraiser specifically for that, maybe two thousand dollars. From what I can see that’s about where the current “sweet spot” is between paying too much for the most modern tech and getting tech that will age out too fast to be worth what they’re asking for it.

    Plus the market is so screwy right now you’ll still pay two grand for a box that has 4.5K worth of components in it if you tried to build it yourself, largely because of the price of video cards and how much cheaper they are for fabricators buying them to put in computers than for tech bros buying them to mine crypto. Some of that’s changing and shifting now that crypto has basically fallen apart, but I don’t expect to go back to the days of building it cheaper than you can buy it, except at the very high end of the price ranges, for at least another five, maybe ten years, if at all.

    My last guess has lasted me ten years with nothing but video upgrades, so yeah. I’ll be all right, just need the funding. Should make for a step up in video quality too, especially when I also upgrade my webcam and ultimately invest in a solid 4K or (better) 8K portable.

    I note that it’s about noon-thirty my time right now, which means in theory I should’ve had this out half an hour ago. I’m gonna shut up for now and get back on the rest of my work. Hopefully as things including my mental health progress, I’ll get to the point where I’ve got this newsletter done by Monday night, and I can just schedule it to drop regularly at noon on Tuesdays for the “Advance” edition at the same time the “Public” edition from the prior week goes public. That said, I also don’t want them to drop on top of each other, so I’ll probably aim for a little earlier, say 9am, on Tuesdays for the Advance and then noon for the Public.

    Edition 1.1 will be public at noon eastern, this Friday.

    Let me get back on it, there’s still about a day’s work I want to get wrapped on this gaming subsection, then get at least one and probably two bits of “serious” writing and content done, then I get to start doing the same thing I’m doing now with gaming, but with music which is a whooooooole different game. In spite of appearances, I remain first and foremost a musician, and I’m getting awfully long in the tooth to keep all that knowledge to myself too. Plus…yeah. Let me get on or I’ll stay here talking until I starve to death.

    Love y’all, see ya soon!
    -jh

  • JH Afterparty, Vol 1. Issue 1

    It’s Go Time!

    Hi everyone and welcome to the first official edition of the JH AfterParty newsletter! This will be my “supporter-Patron perk” content, or at least part of it: Patrons and people who support or have supported my work financially get to read this when it’s released, and everyone else will be able to see it in a week.

    Lots of exciting stuff to talk about here, so let’s get right to it!

    First, as should be obvious if you’re reading this on my site, I’ve implemented a proper authentication system on JohnHenry.US now, so that supporters who contribute via methods other than Patreon will be able to get their (admittedly nominal, at present anyway) “perks” as supporters.

    Right now this comes primarily in the form of posts/newsletters/content just like this one.

    The habit I’m striving for with this is “every Tuesday.” So every Tuesday (ostensibly!) I’m going to write a sort of “backstage diary” type of post where things are more casual, less go-go-go and bullet pointed, and more this is what I’ve been thinking about and doing lately.

    Also a place for some of my more personal musings and ramblings, for instance I think this would be the right place to tell the whole story of this old friend who deus ex machina’d out of nowhere and gave me exactly the things I was missing to turn everything around – basically the time and space to work that I’ve been promised multiple times in the past and always ended up getting “not so much” and conditions and hurry up and hey when you gonna get a job.

    All that sort of personal rambly stuff that has often taken place on my Facebook page will be shifting in to these newsletters, too – I figure most of the folks who would care to read stuff like that are already supporters anyway πŸ™‚

    (Sidebar: if you are a past supporter but have never had an account here, get with me via the contact form and we’ll get you set up properly.)

    Now that I have the proper infrastructure in place, my weekly casual newsletters that I’ve been referring to as my “patron previews” and will now be known as “JH AfterParty” (see below) will also be posted here under the same “conditions” – they’re only visible to logged in users who have supported my work somehow for the first week after publication, then they’re public-access. Folks who just create accounts so they can access the forums are in a different group and will have the same access as the general public; the posts will be available to them a week after they’re available to supporters, both here and on Patreon.

    I do plan to continue duplicating the work at both JHUS and Patreon, though; there are people who are Patrons first and JH fans second, and I want to make sure they’re getting their due. Plus it helps the whole *shudder* marketing situation on that platform, by way of the same folks.

    Oh crap, I’m a rock star.

    Part of this comes from an unfortunate reality I’m facing: I’m going to have to stop being quite so accessible. The scope and volume of noise arrayed against me is just deranges, with obsessed twits crossing over into people who have jacked me around and got caught and cut off crossing over into plain old psychos crossing over into all those various forces of capitalism and grift that have plagued my online presence for so long now.

    It’s sad, but a lot of that over the years has taken the form of bad-faith “friends” and people playing on my various buttons to get close so they could use me or ingratiate themselves – and this is a problem that goes all the way back to my childhood, mind you, because of who and what I am – and it’s come to the point where I just don’t trust any private communication from people I don’t know anymore (or from a lot of people I do).

    Consequently I’m sort of shutting off most of the DM capabilities on my social media or heavily restricting it to a closely vetted list of friends when I can. I will instead have a contact form at JohnHenry.US (actually do now); if you’ve got something to say but you’re so worried about it being a problem for you that you’re afraid of leaving footprints behind with your message (like the network information that’s routinely collected by every website you visit), I don’t care to hear from you anyway to be honest.

    The hardest part of this is how many people who started out as readers have become friends over the years, and by no means am I shutting those people out en masse or going all Greta Garbo on everyone. I hope to continue developing new friendships and relationships from an expanding readership/fan base over time. But leaving myself wide open just invites too many bad actors to waste too much of my time and energy, and yours, so I’m closing some things off and “funneling” others, which also helps me manage my time more efficiently and effectively in terms of organization.

    I anticipate that, over time, the forum at JHUS will grow to supplant the greater part of the “community” aspect of my social media platforms, and from that perspective unfortunately I’m going to start looking a whole lot more like the standard-issue in terms of presentation. Hopefully I’m picking up the things that work without the things that don’t or that I feel fundamentally compromise the work when I start worrying more about advertising and marketing than about creating quality original content.

    As I was writing this I decided to name this newsletter the “JH AfterParty.” The afterparty is where friends of the band hang out after the show, and everyone else hears about it a week later, so the whole thing ties nicely thematically. Especially since I plan to run it on Tuesday afternoons and that’s usually about when I’d be waking up from an afterparty from a really solid Saturday night gig back in the day πŸ˜‰

    Keeping up & wrapping up

    I don’t want to duplicate work so in terms of raw, “this is what I did here’s the links and what it was all about” stuff please please PLEASE do get subscribed to my weekly Substack digest. (There’s also a signup form in the sidebar of JohnHenry.US). Every Saturday I publish a digest of the prior week’s work that includes links to new content and ongoing discussion of non-content work as well. That’s the very best way for anyone, regardless of whether or how they’re supporting my work, to keep up with what I’m doing. Please don’t forget to share those links around and all that other stuff; more than anything else, engagement is absolute king, and now that it finally seems like I’m firmly headed in the right direction it’s more important than ever.

    As I’m writing this message I’m bouncing back and forth between other tasks, including other content work plus putting together tomorrow’s newsletter. Let’s talk quickly about what you should expect to see upcoming, and I’ll get out of your hair.

    person wearing mask holding cocktail shaker
    Ain’t no party like a JH AfterParty cuz a WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!? Photo by Thiago Miranda on Pexels.com

    I’ve just about finished adding/changing/tuning up the back end of JohnHenry.US. I have a column 95% finished for WeAntiFascists.Com, but I want to go through the same process with that site before I publish (some of that is also already done). Then I’ll do it again with Custode.Org, in preparation to get a whole bunch of things rolling there that I’m not prepared to discuss in any greater detail than “a whole bunch of things.”

    As part of the whole membership thing I was discussing at the top of the newsletter, I’ve also gone through and rearranged/simplified the user groups and permissions on the site. As of right now either you’re a “supporter” or a “subscriber.” Subscriber is the default group you’re in when you register with the site, and allows for things like posting to the forum. “Supporter” is the group you’re in if you contribute financial support; that’s the group that will see this newsletter when it’s published rather than a week later.

    Those of you who are already registered supporters right now are also part of the Legacy user group, which is mostly just for my own internal record-keeping mostly to ensure I’m staying in touch with you about any sorts of new offers or perks or whatever become available to supporters going forward, which those folks should by rights qualify for retroactively as most of them are among the group of people who has been keeping me and my work alive the last few years.

    These changes may make some things funky on your end that I can’t see from here. If so, let me know via the contact form. Note that if you’re logged in you have access to a higher-priority contact form, which you’ll find in the site navigation menu (It’s under “Forums & Account”)! You can also contact me directly through DM at Patreon if you’re a Patron.

    Fun fact: what’s actually going to happen is I’m creating this post twice. Once that will post now and is visible only to subscribers, and the other that will post in a week and be visible to everyone. This replicates the functionality of Patreon without having to get too crazy. Plus then if I get a little chaotic or whatever and “forget” to shut off the original, it’ll still be in place and ultimately I’ll just add a 301 redirect to the non-paywalled version of the article so all the traffic goes to that one, and then this actual post goes byebye.

    I’m gonna wrap it up and get out of here, get this posted, and see what else I can get done before I try to wrap up and have a bit of a weekend.