[Verse] I'm on a road to nowhere, in a driverless embrace I'm watching the asphalt blur, as I stare into space Waymo takes me places, but does it know where I belong? Dropped off in this wasteland, surrounded by the lost and gone
[Verse 2] San Francisco skyline, a backdrop of empty dreams Silicon Valley's promise, shattered and torn at the seams In this sea of tents and sorrow, I stand here all alone A midwest emo wanderer, searching for a place to call home
[Chorus] I guess I'll just order some Doordash A fleeting comfort in this concrete jungle so brash But as I wait for my temporary reprieve I'm reminded of the irony that life can deceive (ooh-yeah)
[Verse] In the heart of the Midwest, where the sunsets glow Two friends, Glenn and Ben, turn thirty years old (ooh-yeah) Through all the highs and lows, they've stood by each other's side Forever young at heart, their spirits never died
[Verse 2] Late nights strumming chords, writing songs of love and loss Finding solace in the melodies, disregarding the cost (ooooh) They've chased dreams and passions, and faced life's bitter sting But through it all, they never forgot the joy music brings
[Chorus] Happy birthday, Glenn and Ben, may your hearts forever sing (ooh-yeah) As you journey through life's winding road, remember one thing Hold on to your dreams, let your voices be heard Forever young in spirit, the best is yet to be unfurled
[Verse] In the city where the dreamers go I'm searching for a job, don't you know Laid off, but I won't let it define me Gotta hustle, it's time to shine, see
[Verse 2] Scrollin' on LinkedIn, puttin' myself out there Design skills polished, I'm beyond compare I'm hopin' for a company with the vision To recognize my talent and ambition
[Chorus] Swipe right, I'm the designer with the fire Ready to ignite, take me higher I'm the one you've been searching for Hit me up, I'm ready to soar
Hunter X Hunter The Last Mission - Overture (Companion Song to Read With!)
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Dear Reader,
Food For Thought
With this issue, we are officially marking the one year anniversary of the newsletter!
Anniversaries give us a great excuse to pause and reflect on the what and the why of the work completed, the lessons learned.
In this issue, I'd like to go over what I have learned from shipping a weekly newsletter, reveal some metadata and go over if maintaining a weekly newsletter was worth it.
Why?
The first question that should be answered about any decision is why. A strong why is a foundation upon which an abstract tower (and real ones, for that matter) is built. Without knowing why you are doing something, failure will surely arrive, either through atrophy, or through some immediate event.
The whys of the newsletter for bramadams.dev included:
can I publish something that I am proud of consistently?
can I experiment with my writing style, and become a better writer?
can I compete on the Internet without having or maintaining a social media presence?
can I make money from writing prose and/or code?
At the start of the year of issues, I had no answers to any of these questions. Now I am happy to say that I have answers to all of them! I'll be going over the results of these whys at the end of the post.
Business Details
It needn't be said that any endeavor, creative or otherwise, will eventually begin to need energy from outside the system to power it. Initially, you as the provider will be providing the entire energy from your own resources. It will eat into your mind and spirit. And probably your pockets too.
How much did I pay for the newsletter and my site? In 2023, I spent: Ghost Pro = $300/annually, Google Domain + email address = $12/annually. My analyics provider, Plausible, costs $60/annually. There are other costs that are rounding errors against these three, but any person should be able to create a Ghost account and buy a custom domain and begin publishing today, if they so choose.
How much did I make this year? From my calculations, I've made roughly ~$400 since the genesis of the newsletter. This means I made about ~$33/month running the newsletter. Definitely not enough to support a life, or even a newsletter frankly, but being breakeven for what I pay to host and giving me the privilege to write weekly is a good start.
In terms of growth and engagement, the open rate for the newsletter this year has averaged around a 52-54% open rate. This has stayed consistent through the growth of the newsletter. Issue #1 was delivered to 29 people, and the previous issue, Issue #51 was delivered to 130 people.
These opens matter less than the feedback I have received. Over the year of publishing, I have received personal replies or direct messages from ~8-12 members of the community (depending on how you count), which means a lot, since writing and publishing said writing can often feel like pouring your soul into a black hole.
Technical Details
The existence of a weekly email newsletter implies at the very minimum, that email software exists. There are many options to running a newsletter in 2024. I use Ghost because it is the only offering that makes sense for me. I am a developer who wants customizability so I can dive into the look, feel and functionality of my site, but I do not want to have to manage the "everything else" parts of running a modern website (email SMTP, user subscription billing and accounts, server management, SEO, mobile-first rendering, search, comments, etc.). I am a writer as well, which means that I focus on writing. Developers with personal sites often only end up writing one or two posts on their website per year (or forever) because of their insistence to own everything or pay zero dollars in favor of spending hours of their lives reinventing the wheel. Writers suffer the opposite problem of becoming too dependent on the platform they post to, without owning it, leaving them subject to changes decided by developers who may or may not be sympathetic to their causes.
Substack and buttondown are popular options if you want to write without having control. Hugo and NextJS are popular options if you want to have control, but not write. In my opinion, in the long term, you'll need both. But something is better than nothing, and perfect is the enemy of the good.
Life Lessons
So, did I get better at accomplishing my why as the year progressed?
In terms of consistency, I have sufficiently proven to myself that not only can I indeed publish weekly, I can publish hard things that make me think. I made a promise to myself and my readers, and I keep that promise to the best of my reasonable ability. This ability to speak and act on your truth is necessaryfor self esteem.
In terms of experimentation, the issues have become much more ambitious as they have evolved. Issues started as a compilation of work done that week, as well as things I found across the web that entertained me. Issues over the course of the year have evolved into essays thousands of words long (this particular issue clocks in at over 2500 words). By consolidating, reshaping, and not being afraid of failure, I have learned a lot about what it means to set goals and then take steps towards their reality.
I have become a better writer as well 🙂, yes.
In terms of social media competition, I'd say the results were mediocre to good. No issue went "viral", outside perhaps the well read series ending up on the front page of Metafilter, but the growth has been slow and steady. As I have said before, I am much happier with the creative breadth and depth I have achieved with the newsletter. I could not have done that spending 24 hours a day arguing on Twitter or bragging on LinkedIn.
In terms of money, I have played around with certain posts being free and others paid, etc. etc. This has not worked as I hope, and as a soloprenuer, efforts to make the newsletter profitable and sustainable are key to its continued existence. I have a plan going forward for the second year of issues (discussed below) to bring more revenue into the coffers while maintaining quality, adding discoverability, and not ceding any control. We'll see how it plays out!
bramadams.dev Email Newsletter Season Two
What will the future of the newsletter look like? Heading into year two there are going to be some substantial changes, while other things will stay the same.
Going forward, the newsletter will include a audiovisual arm as well as the written arm.
I want to improve the profit margins as well as increase the discoverability of bramadams.dev for this next year, and to do that, I need to break into video. The videos will functionally feel a lot like the written versions, with the advantage of not having to read them. In addition, a special new creation, Quo-Host (discussed below) will be helping out!
Staring with this issue, I will be taking a month off from newsletters.
I need to write some scaffolding code for season two, and I need to get better on camera with the technology and resources I have access to.
In addition, I am working on an exciting app: Quo-Host, a LLM agent podcast co-host that retrieves relevant quotes from books as you are talking in real time. Many of the lessons I'm taking into Quo-Host were inspired by the lessons I've learned building this newsletter, including the importance of highlights inside quotes, and that the creative process and final output is heavily influenced by the quality of material available in its creation.
Finally, I want to slow down and take some time off. Unfortunately I have other projects in motion that prevent a "true break", but it is important to realize that work can never be "done" and productivity is merely a stream. We need lazy parts of the river, and we need rapids.
Going forward from the return of the newsletter in issue #53, the newsletter will be video and text alternating.
This means the newsletter will still be every week, but half the weeks will be embedded YouTube videos, and the other half will continue to be essays as you see now. Full videos will only be available to paid subscribers, but the first half will be free. This may or may not extend to the written version as well, but I doubt it. We'll see.
And Thank You!!!
Finally, thank you, dear reader, for sticking around. Writing is something I feel compelled to do, much like we need to breathe, but having my writing be read by other humans completes its purpose, and for that, I am in your debt! I'll see you in a month!
Writing is motivated by an impulse not only to direct ideas but also to direct them toward another. Only when a piece of writing reaches another, a reader, does it achieve this underlying intention. Writing is not only a reflective, inwardly directed gesture but is also an expressive, outwardly directed (political) gesture. One who writes presses into his own interior and at the same time outward toward someone else.
I placed the highest priority on the sort of life that lets me focus on writing, not associating with all the people around me. I felt that the indispensable relationship I should build in my life was not with a specific person, but with an unspecified number of readers. As long as I got my day-to-day life set so that each work was an improvement over the last, then many of my readers would welcome whatever life I chose for myself. Shouldn’t this be my duty as a novelist, and my top priority? My opinion hasn’t changed over the years. I can’t see my readers’ faces, so in a sense it’s a conceptual type of human relationship, but I’ve consistently considered this invisible, conceptual relationship to be the most important thing in my life. In other words, you can’t please everybody.
On My Gilded Nightstand - Favorite Newsletter Issues
Here are a collection of my favorite newsletters over the year! Give them a read!
Insane in the Meme-brane
I want human programmers to create ideas I haven't seen before. I want the universal sea of 0's (the world before the first computer was created) to be poetically and methodically converted into 1's by a new generation of technologically enabled code-artists.
Blogging in 3D
How blogging was fundamentally changed by the existence of sharing chats with LLMs.
Can a Gardener be a Perfectionist?
A thesis into my favorite book of 2023, Gardens by Robert Pogue Harrison.
The Real Book Quotes of L.A.
Nine weeks before the issue where I announce Commonplace Bot (below), my first experiment in getting quotes into vector format and "doing" something with them.
Napoleon's Secret Weapon
I like this issue because of the breadth of topics it covers, as well as stretching my skill in novel tasks of art, programming, storytelling, and thinking.
Bleeding Edge Technology is Made for Silly Art
In this issue, I get to play with creative coding. I really do love creative code. I also introduced the Random Post button, a mainstay of bramadams.dev.
A House of Cards & Time Block Reflection
In these issues, I am vulnerable about how my life is influenced by decisions and failings, as well as a look into my systems that keep me going.
Anything But Commonplace
This post marked the launch of my most ambitious project to date, Commonplace Bot.
I cannot sufficiently convey in words how impactful Commonplace Bot has been to my reading practice, as well as my writing process.
From this issue forward, the influence of the commonplace Bot is clear in my work, and I have no doubts that will continue to be the case going forward.
We All Start as Strangers
An issue about friendship. Friendship is underrated in our day and age.
Self Surveillance
The concept of arbitrage is important to me because I think it is something I do well that many knowledge workers do not, and it is an immense psychic relief to do correctly. Not to mention, great for progeny.
The Losers of the Open Source Movement
I think the open source movement is over hyped. Especially when wielded by virtue signalers.
The Holiday Series
My first "series" issues. I think my look into the downsides of Christmas were interesting, though I did receive feedback that it might have been a bit harsh. Some predictions for the current year.
Are GPTs Websites?
I think GPTs are a really big deal, though it might take a bit to get there.
The Well Read Series
This series has gotten me called a snob by the Internet, but if I am to be a snob, I am more than happy to be a snob about books. A reading habit is a critical component to a life well lived.
Your Art or Your Life Series
In this series, I go over why having your own site in 2024 is not only the cool thing to do, it is the right thing to do.
Thanks for reading, and see you next Sunday next month!
In the last issue, I made the case that the widely-discussed-but-never-acted-upon suffering of social media is caused by a saturation point that we have long past by avoiding acknowledging the sunk cost fallacies of our "profiles". I claimed that the remedy for this supersaturated state is to "hit the reset button", to download the data and restart your digital profile's existence (or delete it all together!).
The inspiration for that issue ironically came from the one you are reading right now, the issue posted after. I had been meditating on the value of craft, art, business, and human creativity in the era of "content creation schedules". The seed of last issue's craft argument was that if you are truly good at what you do and have a strong base of self-esteem, deleting your profile should be an overall good thing for your craft, as it will allow you to prove it wasn't luck that got you to success in the first place.
Specifically, I had been trying to divine the value of effort being put into a personal website. After all, time is limited and everything we do has an expiration date. Surely, there must be a more effective use of one's time, yes?
The answers I found in this process took me from the caves of Lascaux, to the Twitter page of Mr. Beast.
Following is a short journey into incentive structure, motivation, and finding what it means to be an artist.
Dawson spent the beginning of his career in London as a salaryman, and began to tire of the hypocrisies of urbanity and industrialization. He was disgruntled with how mundane life had become under the thumb of his employer, the noise of his crowded London neighborhood and his neighbors in his posh flat, and most critically, his desires to have novelty and beauty in life.
As a response, he began to plan his flight into the "wilderness", to buy a small plot of land where he could tire his body and mind with farm work during the days, and literature during the evenings.
Dawson's book starts out very practical as he describes his journey in finding a place for his family to live, including some failures in the process of finding the right place to call home. He also addresses some of the finer points of homesteading and enjoying time in nature.
The second half of the book is much more philosophical, and discusses in length what it means to "do good" as Dawson verbally spars with an urban friend of his about what man owes his fellow man. The root of the argument was as follows: is it malicious to the downtrodden to opt out from the city life and flee to the hills?
I open this issue with the story of Dawson because I think there are many parallels in the era of our digital lives. The "Londons" of the web are the sites that traffic millions of users daily (social media), and personal websites function like a cottage in the countryside. In London, you may interface with thousands of people a day, including famous people and big wigs! On the other hand, as a cottage owner, you know people may occasionally drive by and appreciate the petunias you've planted in the front yard, but your day to day experience will largely be a solitary endeavor. And you'll never see Timothee Chalamet or Zendaya walking around your trellis, that's for sure.
As such, we cottage owners must find a different incentive structure, one that can withstand the empirical scrutiny of "meaning".
I can think of no better place to argue this from than art.
This quote from Rick Rubin's The Creative Acttransitions us nicely from domicile to the creative domain.
Imagine going to live on a mountaintop by yourself, forever. You build a home that no one will ever visit. Still, you invest the time and effort to shape the space in which you’ll spend your days. The wood, the plates, the pillows—all magnificent. Curated to your taste. This is the essence of great art. We make it for no other purpose than creating our version of the beautiful, bringing all of ourself to every project, whatever its parameters and constraints. Consider it an offering, a devotional act. We do the best, as we see the best—with our own taste. No one else’s. We create our art so we may inhabit it ourselves.
Your Art
Art is unique. You can go anywhere in the universe and see a sky filled with countless stars, magnificent purple sunsets, infinitely vast oceans, tundras, snow-capped mountains and lakes of fire. You can breathe any number of gases, or see magnificent storms that will literally blow your socks off. Hell, you can even see multiple suns in the sky at the same time! These events and phenomena are all exceedingly commonplace.
But as far as our modern knowledge reaches, there is only one place and time you can experience art. Here on Earth. In the era of the Holocene.
In other words, there are few things more rare in the universe than your favorite book.
In its truest form, art resists any attempt at summarization. Art can be multiple things to someone, or one thing to many. The highest compliment an artist who has mastered their craft can receive is: "I love this work, but I struggle to define it, so I tell my friends they have to see it themselves and decide."
Even the earliest art mankind produced was done as an offering of sorts, a gift to the Muse that lives in your head. The artist who is in the flow state feels compelled, pushed, pulled, prodded, as if their art is a geyser bursting from pressure built up under the surface. The scream of art is to lash out onto the canvas and tear away at it in our own image.
Because of this process of (un)intentional creation, any work of art is both standalone and forever related to the context in which it came from. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is beautiful, but a wallpaper-version-perfect-copy on the ceiling of a Golden Corral by the strip mall ruins the point. All art has an internal message that the creator was trying to explain to themselves first (and others, second) and a relationship with the messaging of its immediate surroundings.
On a personal site, every post, everything that fits conveniently under a slug URL, is an art piece. Each is a standalone piece of media that can live many different lives in many different contexts.
Consumers of art presume that a single particular art piece defines an artist, perhaps their masterpiece, but this is not the case. An artist is constantly swimming through the stream of their art. There is no finish line. Every piece merely craves completion so it can make space for the next piece. The duty of an artist is to move. Just move. Just don't drown in the deluge of creativity.
Your Gallery
Mr. Beast didn't make his art successful. We did. On the platform that is known as YouTube, Mr. Beast is oxygen.
The success of Mr. Beast has caused many downstream effects, many clones, and in some weird coincidence, even more creatorsdiscussingtheclones. The platform itself imposes its messaging, its voice, its ouvré onto those who live and create inside its borders.
But.
Success is relative, and few of us ever become larger than the name we were born into. It is very impressive, the capacity of a human name. Imagine the most important person you know. Isn't it strange how all their deeds in life fit cleanly into their first and last name? How big is a name, really?
In the era of TikTok influencers, many creators have struggled to move their audiences off platform. This is because their voice, whether or not they realize it, is edited by the community they post in. They are the Internet version a Londoner. Or a Tokyoite. Or a Chicagoan. If you leave, you have to find a new niche. You can learn more about this problem from Hank Green's Creator Problem video.
To own your domain is to own the platform which follows your evolution as a creative. The domain you create in becomes the voice. The conversation emerges from the art you've created over time, and as you change, the platform changes. In this framing, the website itself becomes a meta art piece of sorts, always whole, but created from many different parts (the human body is also like this: you were whole as a baby, and whole as an adult, despite the obvious differences between the two states of being).
Your Life
I titled this issue "Your Art or Your Life" because, there is no difference, in my mind. The experience of "life" is merely paying attention. Your expectations of what you hope your life might be might differ from your reality, but what you experience, what you're experiencing, and what you will experience is the sum total of you.
It follows that any art you produce, intentionally or unintentionally, is a byproduct of moving through the world, taking action and trying to distill the concept of your experience, of who you think you are at that moment in time, into a medium you can tell yourself and others about (movies, music, art, code, dance,...).
Indeed, a personal website, consistently maintained, is not one, but both, the gallery and the art piece. A home in the woods, where you find your artistic voice by listening to the silence.
You cannot flag and you must not stop. You must work on your site with fervor, while also allowing it to grow and die slowly as the years creep by. It must breathe with you, be born with you and perish with you. You must create with the seasons of your life, to follow the voice in your head wherever it may lead.
And in the third decade of the 21st century, writer Bram Adams found a domain to create in.
Drop by next week for issue #52, a special anniversary edition of the newsletter! I'll be reflecting on newsletter-ing for a year straight, and discuss my plans for year two of the newsletter.