Some Newsletter News

Man, August has not been a lot of fun.

I hate being dependent on technology, but the truth is we’ve all handed over aspects of our lives to it. How much you hand over is something you can try to control, but when something that you depend on completely collapses, it can send your entire world out of orbit, and that’s exactly what happened to me. I’ve written here about my Plex server, and I know many of you still don’t know exactly what that is. It can be very confusing for someone who doesn’t use the app. If you download the app right now and set it up, you’ll be able to watch movies that Plex streams for free, and like other services like Tubi, they find ways to make you and your data the actual product.

I don’t use Plex like that at all. I have all of their stuff completely disabled. Instead, I use it to watch my own personal library of movies. These are films that I own that I have transferred to a digital format, and that I store on a series of hard drives. Those hard drives are loaded into a NAS server, a little silver box that hooks directly into the router in my house, and I use Plex to access those hard drives. As of early July, I had about 13,800 movies and 350 different TV series stored on my servers, and I had reached capacity. I had to buy a new hard drive and a new NAS server, since my original only had two slots for drives. The new one had four, and I made the brilliant decision to install the new drive, then move the other two over to the new machine, giving myself one open slot I could use later. Brilliant, as I said, except for the fact that it was incredibly stupid of me. You’re not supposed to move the drives after you’ve used them. I should have just set up the new drive and then left three open slots that I could add later. Instead, I am now faced with one recovered drive, one new drive, and one drive that still seems to be full of data but that nothing can read anymore.

It’s not the end of the world. Even if I lost everything, I’d just have to start over. I need this tool. I’ve become too used to it now. I use my Plex server all day every day. I use it to research my podcast The Hip Pocket, and my co-hosts use it to prepare for the show as well. I use it to write The Last ‘80s Newsletter (You’ll Ever Need), keeping playlists that help me organize each month’s reviews. I spent almost six years organizing over 3000 films from the ‘80s, creating arguably one of the most complete archives of ‘80s theatrically released American films anywhere, and now I’m looking at rebuilding at least half of that collection. In many cases, I’ve packed away the original physical media in binders and boxes because I have the digital copy, and it’s going to be a process of dragging everything out and finding it again. Some of those transfers were done by other people who had a particular piece of obscure physical media, who offered up an archival copy for the project. I had a whole network of people step up to help me, and I hope some of that same support will be there as I rebuild things.

There was a time when I would have been absolutely shattered by all of this. It’s not going to be cheap to do all of this, but it also doesn’t have to take place overnight. I’ll do this in a targeted, intentional way, taking my time and doing it right. I had to pay for two weeks of technical support, and while it was well worth it, that is not cheap. I’m at the point where I have enough stuff on the server to record the rest of this season’s Hip Pocket episodes and write the ‘80s newsletter all the way through the end of the year at least. I’m also at the point where, 55 years into my time on this planet, I am medicated and in therapy, and let me tell you… it fucking helped. I’m trying to be fairly open about this because I’ve seen real results in my personal life. I’ve resisted doing these two things together for most of my life for reasons that seem very, very stupid in hindsight. I think part of it is growing up when I did and watching things like One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest at a formative age. I think part of it was fear about interfering with the creative process. None of that matters now, and as a result, this crisis has been frustrating, but not overwhelming.

When something is this chaotic, I need everything else in my life to be stable so that I can focus. So of course, now’s the moment I’d like to announce that I am going to be moving this newsletter (as well as The Last ‘80s Newsletter) from Substack to Ghost very soon. I am currently learning how to use the Ghost platform and talking to their concierge service about how we migrate everything. I have no idea what impact moving to Ghost is going to have on me financially or creatively, and that's scary. But staying on Substack is no longer an option, and so it's time to do the scary thing.

I'm going to see this as an opportunity. That's what you have to do with obstacles. It would be easy to just be frustrated nonstop about this situation, but that wouldn't resolve anything. Instead, I'd like to use this moment to redefine things here, and to try to set up some expectations for what Formerly Dangerous 2.0 looks like.

For one thing, that's my overall publishing company name, not just the name of a single publication. The Hip Pocket is a Formerly Dangerous production, just like The Last '80s Newsletter (You'll Ever Need) is. Everything's under one broad banner, and I'm going to be consolidating and streamlining things. That means I'm going to be figuring out how the payment structure works, and there will be some changes. I never once raised my price the entire time I’ve been at Substack and that was, in hindsight, a mistake. My costs went up over time, and I think I was offering things at a pretty hefty discount to start with. I want to be realistic about the amount of content you're getting and the amount of effort that goes into producing it.

After all, one of the things I have started to emphasize here and that I will continue to proudly explain is that everything I publish or produce is 100% human-generated. There is no AI used in any step of the production of my work, and there never will be. I support human art, and that's exactly what you will get from me. That means human effort and human time is involved, and those things have a certain value that I need to build into the way this newsletter is priced.

I'm not sure when the exact changeover is going to happen, but I'm going to try to make it a seamless experience for everyone currently subscribed. I will be giving you updates in the days leading up to the actual switchover, and in the meantime, I want you to know that I take your concerns as readers seriously. I had any number of reasons to try to stay on Substack, but those don’t really matter. In the end, they have made choices as a platform that I find despicable and the only response that matters is ending my economic relationship with them completely.

If you’re not sure what all of this is about, I’ll get into it with the newsletter that actually marks the change from Substack to Ghost, and for those who do know what it’s about, I’m sorry it has taken me this long to react. Part of my concern is that I’m going to have to keep moving my newsletters because we clearly have a goddamn Nazi problem in this country and in our culture right now, and I’m not going to close my eyes and hold my nose and just pretend Substack’s position is all about free speech. For right now, I’m focused on getting back to the business of writing for you guys without all these frustrations and annoyances. There are so many things I’d rather talk about and think about.

For example, I caught another car.

It’s been a little while since I wrote a piece about catching the car. For those who didn’t read it, it’s a reference to the question about what a dog would do if it caught a car it was chasing. A couple of years ago, I walked into an opportunity that still blows my mind, even after all of the development we’ve done so far. It was the kind of thing I’d been trying to make happen my whole life, and it all fell together in a way that felt kind of magical. I love what this project is, and I am so grateful for the chance to work on it. I have faith we’re going to get it right, and when we do and I can finally tell you about it, you’ll understand exactly why it’s important to me.

Recently, I got an email from someone I’d never met before, and they asked if I would like to speak sometime. I ended up on a studio lot about two weeks later and had a great first meeting with someone. That led to a meeting with someone else, an old friend who I hadn’t seen in a while, and suddenly, here I am, jaws locked on a new bumper, and again… I can’t believe it. Like everyone, I have creative dreams I try to keep at a certain realistic level, and then I have those crazy pie-in-the-sky no-one’s-going-to-let-me-do-this kind of creative dreams where I find the right executive to help my buy my favorite book series and turn it into a TV show or to let me direct one of the three or four ready-to-go scripts I have in my arsenal. So far, while I’ve had several people I worked with who I consider serious-minded and very capable, I’ve never really had the perfect combination of support and muscle in the feature film world.

That might have just changed.

It is thrilling to consider the possibilities that result from these meetings. No one has signed any papers yet, but I have had several follow-up conversations that have clarified just how excited everyone is and how much we’re all looking forward to taking the next step together, and I’ve done this for a long enough time to know when something’s real and when something’s not. This is one of my favorite moments in the process, when the potential is limitless and you can just dream as big as possible.

I’m going to make everything else I publish here at Substack free until the jump to Ghost. I don’t want anyone else sending Substack any new money. I’m going to use the next few weeks to get the new version of the site organized, and I’m going to write a few things that will be ready for launch over there. In the meantime, I’ll put out a new ‘80s Roulette on Monday, and next Friday, get ready for the return of The Hip Pocket with our third season premiere. Our guest is Nick Wiger, one of the creators and hosts of Doughboys, one of my favorite podcasts, and he brought a great line-up of movies that, shockingly, did not include Auto Focus. We’ve been recording for a little while now, and we’ve got so many great conversations to play for you in September. I’m prepping the first July 1985 issue finally, and it feels like one of the most important issues so far just in terms of trying to find a new way to talk about a classic that has been endlessly discussed for decades now.

I hope this transition is painless. I want to talk about James Gunn’s Superman and Zach Creggers’ Weapons and how cool I think Alien Earth is (I mean, holy shit) and how surprised I was by K-Pop Demon Hunters and any number of other things. And I will. But those are things to talk about once we’ve sorted all of this out. I think we’re looking at three weeks or so before we throw the actual switches behind the scenes, and until then, I’m going to try to keep you guys involved so you know what’s up.

I appreciate all of your support here at Substack, and I look forward to building something even cooler with you when we finally leave this place behind.