This Week's Work, Apr 29-May 6 2023
Boy it’s been a really good week over here at JH central, lots of great stuff happening including some awesome content, new website features, and a lot more. Let’s get right in to it.
Money
Monthly goal: 2.2%
Capital improvement fund (savings over monthly goal): $0
You can find all the ways to pitch in at https://johnhenry.us/money
Going forward this information will be at the top of every “TWW” newsletter. I have a lot of writing to do about my current situation, but the important TLDR point is that I’m no longer engaging in panic fundraising and “omg I’m going to die.” This does not mean my financial situation has improved. It just means that I can put income toward growth now instead of panic, last-minute, poverty-stricken waste spending just to keep a roof over my head one night at a time or get one fast food meal a day.
I’ll be writing a great deal more about the whole situation, the extraordinarily unlikely deus ex machina scenario that put me in stable housing completely out of the blue, and how I’m using that stroke of good fortune to finally move seriously forward. There’s a lot to unpack there and it’s an interesting story, but the key is that I’m not suddenly affluent. I still have no income and I’m still building a media production company and doing all the work I’ve been doing, just more of it at higher quality because I’m finally in an environment where I can focus on the work.
This means I super-duper need for those of you who do contribute to not wait until you hear me saying I’m gonna be dead without it, because I’m not going to be saying that anymore but that doesn’t mean I suddenly don’t need income. It just means now I can spend it on growth rather than just barely sustaining. The new central hub for support options is at https://johnhenry.us/money and links are posted regularly to social media. Please pitch in if you can; it’s hard enough out here when you’re NOT dismantling autocracy and totalitarianism brick by brick. When you are, it’s almost impossible. I’m doing everything I’m able; “what I’m able” improves considerably with your support. (And no, every newsletter won’t start off with four paragraphs of fundraising discussion!)
Content Work
Medium
“The great irony in journalism is that it's their job to keep us informed about this but they're almost entirely owned and controlled by the very same profit interests and capitalist endeavor that are close to the root source of the problem.” - from “An Open Letter To ‘The Media” at Medium
JohnHenry.US
“You’re an exception. Own it. Expect that you will be the exception, but only when it is as inconvenient as possible to you, and never when you could really use a little magic.” - Discussing what being “exceptional” means, including a sidebar story about what happened to that little kid in the news who was gonna skip 4 grades and start taking college courses in 8th grade. “Taking Exception” at JohnHenry.US
“JH AfterParty” - This is my “other” newsletter, which is released weekly on Tuesdays for site-registered supporters and patrons only, and visible to everyone else a week later. There were a couple of prototype newsletters that went out just to Patreon, but this will appear both at Patreon and JohnHenry.US weekly, with summaries posted to social media. If you’re a Patron or supporter and you don’t yet have an account at JohnHenry.US, go ahead and roll one up *using the same e-mail address you used to contribute*, hit me through the contact form at JohnHenry.US (linked from the front page), and I’ll get an account set up for you. (Everyone who contributes should be automatically given access to this; it’s not an e-mail, just a regularly posted column at Patreon and my site that’s only visible to supporters for the first week.)
You don’t need to “sign up” for this, it’s just something supporters have advance access to, if they want it, and to take advantage of that you’ll need to be logged in either through Patreon (if that’s how you contributed) or JohnHenry.US (for both Patrons and other supporters).
NB: This is where a lot of my more “personal” content - updates about my offline life, reflections on my mental illnesses, general state of mind updates and “how I’m doing,” will be going forward. A lot of that stuff has traditionally ended up being just social media posts, but in I’m pulling back a bit from social media to focus more on content creation, and increasingly my audience is spread across many platforms. In combination with losing nearly 200K followers when Facebook shut down “I Loved To Wake Up In The Morning When Barack Obama Was President” unilaterally and without warning last October, the “glue” that’s had me stuck mostly to Facebook is not nearly as “sticky” as it once was. There’s a good chance that a lot of the material that you’ll eventually see in a book, will start off being short passages in these posts.“JH Backstage” - onsite forum at JohnHenry.US. Not yet officially launched, but the bare bones are there. With social media in flux and somewhat collapsing in on itself, I wanted to put a tool in place that would help preserve the community we’ve built up over the last dozen years or so via social media. Registration is required, payment is not. Not much going on there at the moment but it will expand over time.
Non-Content Work
A ton of work complete this week, including:
migration from Yoast SEO to Rank Math SEO tools at JHUS. I’ll write in detail about this later.
re-implementation of IKSMenu Pro for navigation menu at JHUS. This is a tool I bought a few years ago, and though I wasn’t able to keep the license up, the existing implementation works fine without upgrading. I tried a few other tools like Max Menu, and none of them do the simple job that IKS does. Definitely on the list of things I’d like to be paying for.
testing and ditching a couple of dozen other tools for various purposes
implementing an auto-poster for Mastodon, which the very excellent tool I use by default, Blog2Social (another ongoing investment in growth), does not yet include in their network distribution.
Got a bunch of content loaded into the B2S autoposter to keep curated stuff, fundraising pitches, etc. rolling on an ongoing basis, ensuring that you good folks get every chance to see old and new content and explore everything else on the website and the platforms where you may not be.
First ever official “blue check” on social media is pending, no I didn’t pay for it, will reveal details when it happens (and in the next TWW newsletter!)
Getting much more “plugged in” to alternate platforms given the clear reality that we’re just going to let Elon kill Twitter and that platform’s viable utility is likely to be null-to-negligible by the end of the year. I’ll have a post/page up on JHUS soon that links all my socials and other platforms (including SubStack!)
Not doing much video work right now, partly because I’m focusing on other work and partly because paying for my Adobe subscription costs money and I don’t have money coming in very much. You know what to do about that if you can…and if you can’t don’t forget that liking and sharing is free!
Should have new content out and most of the back-end work done at WeAntiFascists.Com by the next newsletter. Hoping to start original exclusive content at Custode within the next 7 weeks or so.
A lot of tightening up my various platform presences including here, me.dm (Mastodon via Medium), Post.News, and Spoutible. Instagram, Tiktok, and YouTube are on deck but on the back burner right now since I’m not doing a ton of video work anyway and have plenty of other work to do.
That’s it for this week. Please don’t forget literally ALL of my income is crowdfunded; I don’t collect any kind of disability, retirement, or social welfare (other than Medicaid). I’m digging out of a dozen-plus years of being dragged through about every gutter imaginable, and need all the help I can get. The more support there is for the work, the more work gets done and the higher quality it is and the better I’m able to advertise it.
Much love to you all, I’ll see you next week!
”When any government, or any church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not see, this you are forbidden to know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man whose mind has been hoodwinked; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, a man whose mind is free. No, not the rack, not fission bombs, not anything—you can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.”
― Robert A. Heinlein, Revolt in 2100
“You can not be controlled if your mind is free.” - John Henry