guess who's back
Pledges have arrived! And so have confirmation emails (ew)
Hello again to longtime Otters! And hello to those who have just recently joined our Dam and may be incredibly confused as to what the hell I am doing in their inbox.
A refresher: this is Things You Otter Know, the Substack where I write a thousand words about whatever I want—in the most entertaining way I can—twice a week. Stick around! I swear this is gonna be fun.
Today marks the start of season three for Things You Otter Know!
For the record, I am calling it a season for no other reason than because it sounds cool.
Just like how your fave streaming service keeps giving you less episodes and more ads for an even heftier sum of money:
But yes, I have been at this project for three years now! I dreamt up of it in high school and now I’m well into junior year of my undergrad! Ridiculousness, as we discussed last time.
As mentioned, you should see me in your inbox twice a week for the foreseeable future. I mean, that’s the goal. I want to see how consistently I can do this writing thing. Nail myself to my chair and stuff.
This email, like all of my other emails, is not essential reading in the slightest, but if you’ve been here awhile there’s nothing special to tell you. Just a couple of small developments:
Pledges!
I spent the weekend thinking hmm, how can we—we meaning I, no one else works on this stupid thing—make this third year of Things You Otter Know, a little bit more exciting? How can I give this now well-established Substack a little bit more pizzaz? What is the logical next step for me and my essay career?
You could argue it comes in the form of paid subscriptions.
But I don’t think I’m ready to start charging people just yet. Yes, I’ve been at this for three years now, but I don’t write it consistently enough. Or well enough.
However! For the time being I wanted to rather passively gauge interest on if you thought this Substack was worth paying for. Which is why beginning today, I have started using a teeny little Substack tool called Pledges.
Maybe you’ve heard of it? It means readers of Things You Otter Know will now be able to pledge to pay for a future paid subscription to Things You Otter Know if I ever were to beg for your bag.
This is totally optional! You do noooooot have to pledge you will give me your money one day in the distant future. I will not think of you as lesser than if you choose not to.
But for those who are curious: I’ve set the rates super low at $5 CAD a month. I think this is reasonable. And you really do get the bang for your buck, given the terrible exchange rate between the United States Dollar and the dollar that arises from the 51st U.S. state:
And if I ever were to launch paid subscriptions, you would get a hell of a lot of advance notice. I would promote the hell out of it! Because it’s a big step for me, professionally and personally.
I do absolutely envision this Substack being free, like, forever and always until I die whatever the hell you wanna call it. I say this all the time, but I really believe in mutual aid and that gatekeeping helps nobody. So paywalling my stupid little rants seems counterintuitive to me.
If I were to launch paid subscriptions, they would likely be optional. A tip jar kinda thing. I hate paywalls—I friggin hate paywalls, oh my godddd, every time I run into one on the Washington Post or the Atlantic I want to fling myself into the Atlantic ocean—and I wouldn’t want to impose those on any of my readers. A lot of whom, like me, are broke university students!
So those aren’t a thing I ever see myself putting up on the site unless I somehow become a really rich and famous writer (which is never happening, Otters, let’s be real) and all of a sudden, rich and famous people want to pay to read what I have to write and say. Only then I would put a paywall up.
I mean, I would love to brag about how, say, Ayo Edebiri pays $10434 every month to read my writing, are you kidding me.
Confirmation emails!
This is a small administrative step I am really pissed off I have to take but it’s one I’m taking. I am alerting you to it in case you tell you friends about Things You Otter, in which case I adore you!
New subscribers who join the Dam using only their email are now going to be forced to confirm it before officially subscribing. And let me tell you why!
A few weeks ago I received a huge spike in subscriber numbers. It really took me off guard! 20 new Otters in maybe two days. And I spent the next day trying to figure out what had happened—maybe Oprah had picked me for her book club or something?
But then I looked at the emails of the folks who had been subscribing. And they looked fishy.
Jimbob39823applebottomjeans at hotmail dot com type folks.
So I deleted all of them from the list. And then Substack later said this was an issue loads of other Substackers had been dealing with, and they got rid of even more bots for me. Thanks, Substack Gods!
Forcing new Otters to confirm subscriptions will hopefully ensure something like this doesn’t happen again.
That’s literally all I had to say.
Oh, and Happy New Year! I know we’re, like, seven days into 2025, and so the year being new is actually old news. But I don’t give a you know what about any of that.
Take care, see you Friday.