online chat parties and other conversation pits (announcing a new feature for subscribers)

come hang out in the online feelings bathtub

this is from series 7 of Taskmaster, but I think of it as the unofficial Griefbacon logo

Hi friends. Welcome back to long-time subscribers, and especially welcome to new subscribers. Mondays are usually when we have our conversation pit discussion threads, and we’ll still have one of those this week, but today I’m trying out something a little different. As you might have already seen if you subscribe to other Substacks, or as you might have been alerted to by an automatically generated email from this newsletter (sorry!), Substack has a new chat feature, where we can all talk to each other in a more immediate discord/Slack/AIM (never gonna pass up an opportunity for that link, sorry)-esque fashion. I’m excited about it as a way to more easily jump into conversation with this community, and excited to have even more opportunities to hang out in the wonderful conversation pit we’ve built here.

By the way: I’ve sent this email to everyone, but the chat is only for paid subscribers. However, subscriptions are on sale right now, and if you’d like to join the chat, or check out any of the other paying-subscriber features, you can sign up right now and jump into the conversation pit with us.

To join the chat, you’ll need to download the Substack app, which is currently only for iOS (I know, it’s annoying) as messages are sent through the app rather than email. Here’s how it works:

Download the app by clicking this link or the button below (or both, go crazy, do what you want).

Next, open the app and tap the chat icon on the menu bar along the bottom of the app’s screen. It looks like most other chat icons, referencing a fraught history of other apps and websites and forums that have long since passed into myth and legend. This is some of what we’re talking about in the chat.

And that’s it, from there you can just jump into the thread and start participating. It’s kind of like the conversation pit but at a slightly more crowded part of the party, all of us talking underneath the noise. Type stuff in the box, @ people to reply directly, do all the stuff you have done in other chat spaces and apps and websites over the years that have accumulated into the shape of what we call a life, as each of us creates our own small language of survival and change, habit and love, making meaningless symbols again and again into meaning. We’ll be talking about this in the chat, too.

There will also be a subscriber-only essay later today (it’s particularly near to my heart), as I still owe you one from the weekend, and then on Wednesday there will be a super-long, super-weird essay that may or may not be about the current state of twitter. But for now, let’s chat. I’ll see you there.