Our First Winery Collab! Kirara the Wine and Comics Cat Mascot! Also, Substack Notes!

Marvel Cinematic Universe Trivia Night! This Friday, April 14th @ 7pm PT @ The Blending Lab in Los Angeles!

We are VERY excited for this evening of trivia! 25 MCU questions (film and tv shows both!) plus a Final Jeopardy-style bet-it-all question at the end. Winner takes home a free bottle of wine, baby!

This event is live and in person, alas, so only Los Angeles area folks will be able to attend. Though hint, hint, we might be doing an online version of this in the near future, too ;)

And Kirara (KEE-la-la), the official Wine and Comics Cat mascot will be joining us, due to a twist of fate. AKA an exterminator is treating my apartment that afternoon so kitty and myself have to make ourselves scarce for 6 hours, meaning…kitty’s going to his first bar! Here he is sober. Yeah, he’s gonna have fun.

Substack Notes

We’re all pretty excited about this. For those who somehow haven’t heard about this new-fangled addition to the Substack community: “Notes” is substack’s answer to Twitter. It’s plainly modeled in look and function directly off Twitter (reposts/shares are even called “Restacks”). But it differs in…actually, I can’t yet tell how it differs.

But it’s NEW. It’s FRESH and toxicity hasn’t had time to settle in and fester. Theoretically, because so much of Substack interaction is based on writers we follow and enjoy hearing from, Notes will continue this trend, keeping your networks and feeds on topic and at least somewhat curated via whose newsletters you choose to follow.

And that’s the biggie here: to follow folks on Notes, you have to SUBSCRIBE to their Substack! Not subscribing doesn’t mean you’ll never see anything from these people, but there doesn’t seem to be any passive “following” of writers here. If you want to do that, you’re also going to get their Substack newsletters every time they post. That’s going to curb the endless lists of followers and followings that usually happen of social media. Here in Notes, we’re going to be much, much more selective.

So Notes doesn’t seem to be about every single poster following 1000’s and gaining 1000’s of followers. Growing a subscription list is definitely a point - and many writers will be big enough to gain 1000’s. But most of us will be gaining a handful here, a handful there. And being awfully careful about who we follow ourselves. This caution may not exist right now at the beginning, I get the feeling our bad behaviors from Twitter, IG, and FB will carry over here, initially. But ain’t no one got time for dozens let alone hundreds let alone thousands of newsletters hitting their inboxes.

So Notes is going to be about baby steps. It’s going to be about curation and selection and more considered approaches to networking.

And these are all very good things. The franticness, the desperation of social media is a significant part of what makes it devolve into toxicity. If we want something different, we have to behave differently, and treat the space differently.

I hope we can do it. I think we can. Worst case scenario: most soon realize how limited Notes is as an immediate Twitter replacement/fix, and stop using it. But then those left will be those willing to put in the work, slow ‘n steady.