I have to get something off my chest

It’s about substack.

In every individual’s career on a communication system, be it substack, twitter, MSN Chat, or pressing little triangles into clay tablets, there comes a moment when they have strong feelings about said system, and they must express themselves about it to the others. There’s no point in expressing it to their families and friends who don’t indulge in such things, so they take to the typewriter or little triangles, and express it to the others in the medium.

I started writing this the other night, hiked up on Ginger G&Ts, and made myself cry. Laura Kidd 💌 Penfriend (musician extraordinaire who I insist you follow) had written a note in the substack app, something about substack, and I agreed with her. It was a feeling I had had for a while, and was delighted that someone else felt the same.

This writing about a medium, it all gets a bit meta¹, preaching to the choir, circle jerkish, inside baseball, navel gazey, but it’s a rite of passage that we must all go through. Once I get this out of my system I will never do it again. Probably.

Here goes.

Why I bloody LOVE substack.

(tldr: substack is almost like the early 2000s blogosphere and I’m here for it).

In 2003. I was living in a village 30km south of Lisboa, had done for four years. I had two tiny children, a workaholic then-husband, and I had no friends outside of the city. In the village, I was known as “the Englishwoman”, and regarded with suspicion. There was only one other foreigner in the village that I knew of, a German lady who never spoke, with a Joan of Arc hairdo and two huge Dalmatians. Mariana, who owned the nearest mini-market, in a time when they were the only shops in the village (the nearest supermarket was 15km away. It was only around then that Continente opened a Modelo in the next village. It was incredibly exciting) was the only person in the village, apart from my in-laws, who had any time for my stumbling over the language and asking questions. She and her husband had lived abroad for some years, so she understood. I will be forever grateful to Mariana. I was extraordinarily lonely, but didn’t really know it.

A friend in Lisbon one day told me that there was this new website where people were writing things. At the time, I used to ask her things about Portugal, and also just said things like “this country is CRAZY!!” and she suggested we put my statements and her responses in a thing called a blog, or in Portuguese, um blogue, in which we could wildly disagree about stuff.

We did this for a few months, a bilingual blogue, and I loved it. It became harder to keep going with our different rhythms, both with tiny children, and we stopped, but I had caught the bug. The following year, I started another blog of my own.

I had never wanted to write, that was never my thing. I was always going to draw, but I found this thing of blogging and was having a blast. I wanted to express my culture shock to a handful of people somewhere, anonymously, with pictures.

some of my gazillion blog avatars from the last 20 years

I created an alter-ego, Vitriolica Webb and her more-like-me sister, Madge. No idea why, but it stuck. Vtiriolica was an idiot posho from England who didn’t understand Portugal, but thought she did. Every day, “she” would take one hour out of my day, to write and draw something ridiculous about Portugal. About cafés. About the village ladies who wouldn’t talk to me. About really hideous looking food. About fado, and football, and Fátima. About television and telenovelas. Occasionally, Madge would sidebar her with “better” points of view, but it was mostly the Vitriolica Show. Every single day, for about four years, I was doing this. It became my job. Every day, something would make me think “ooh, blogworthy”, a common ailment among bloggers. My daughters would tell me to “stop blogging!!”. I was part of the Portuguese blogosfera and the British blogosphere. I had thousands of hits every day, dozens of comments and conversations. I made my own emojis so that if you commented in my comment box, instead of a smiley, you’d get a lady in a bata. I was making people laugh. I was making other people very, very angry. What a drug. Later, Blogzira made an appearance and killed off Vitriolica, mostly because I wasn’t anonymous any more and couldn’t be as rude about people. She was a bit softer.

Facebook appeared as a yearbook-looking-thing for rating chicks, twitter arrived as a silly micro-blogging tool that sat in our sidebars, and the end of the reign of the blogosphere was in sight. Luckily, really, as I was all burnt out. I had exhausted most of my silly nonsense about Portugal.

Oh, but what it brought me. It brought me work, in Portugal and abroad, and everything I do now, work wise, has a direct lineage back to my blogging twenty years ago. It brought me friends, in Portugal, the UK, France, Belgium, the Americas, fine, wonderful bloggers. All these years later, we are still connected in some way. It taught me to write better. It brought conversation and arguments that had some basis in reality. We had to fight with actual knowledge and ideas in those days, not just 280 characters-worth of ad hominems. It boosted my confidence. It let me be me, when my sense of humour and showing off tendencies had always been a bit embarrassing to the people in my real life. It trained me in dealing with arseholes and asshats. With years of blogging and later, years of writing a column, the only English person in a Portuguese newspaper, I’ve had more insults, patronising bullshit, idiot-splaining, and death threats than you can shake a digital stick at. It still sucks, but I can laugh it off after 30 seconds, rather than a lot longer.

For the last few years, I’ve not written much, outside of what I do for work. It felt pointless. I would write on my own website, random stuff, that would never see the light of day. And then one day, last year, I thought no, this is silly, I’m GOING TO SUBSTACK. So I did, and it feels like 2003 all over again, I am back to being in my early 30s, making new connections, and reconnecting with old ones and seeing things every day that are “ooh, substack worthy”.

I’m not crying. I just stabbed a stick in my eye.

1. not Meta… that was a cheeky move on Zuckernerd’s part, using Meta as a name, a word that we were using all the time already in the internet zone, see also “threads”, my god, the CHEEK. Musky Elon did the same with a LETTER that we all use, every single day, and now it’s almost impossible to describe the micro-posts on either of those sites:

“The other day, I tweeted, I mean, I… what do you call it? An X?, I X’ed? That’s ridiculous… as I was saying, the other day I tweeted…. ”

“I saw in a thread today something something. I mean, it’s not a THREAD, as in a long list of micro-posts in any micro-blogging site, but one single micro-post in threads, the app”.

Proof that ZuckerMusk has never met a real human being.