Welcome to Things You Otter Know
Finally, an actual goddamned newsletter from your favourite Tweeter!
Happy New Year to all of my Otters! This is Ottavia Paluch writing from somewhere in Canada. Welcome to my latest and potentially-greatest project, Things You Otter Know. (The name, by the way, was suggested by James Tate Hill, someone who I am always very excited to call an acquaintance of mine.)
First of all I wanted to give a massive thank you to the THIRTY-SIX of you who have already subscribed!!!! For a newsletter that was only spontaneously launched two days ago, along with my status as an O-list celebrity, I think that that’s sick as hell.
Maybe if you tell all of the Otters you know about this newsletter, we can hit 50 subscribers by next Sunday, January 9th! (Totally picked that date randomly. There’s definitely no meaning behind that date.) Now…
Why on Earth did I make this thing?
If you follow me on Twitter @OttaviaPaluch, you might know that last year (it’s going to take me a while to get used to saying that 2021 was last year) I started posting a bunch of fun long-form essays on hot-button topics (or, at least they were hot-button topics in my head) to Medium. Specifically, they were about terrible sport-adjacent corporations and the Canadian federal election. Then after September I stopped writing them because I got lazy (what a surprise). But the few essays I did write I really enjoyed writing. They were very low-stakes and really more for me than for anything else. And my goal for this Substack is for it to serve a similar purpose. I want it to act, at least for the time being, as my “blog” - something many of you have been begging me to start. Even my brother told me just last week that I should start a blog. He doesn’t know about this yet, though. He also doesn’t know that this is the first and only time I will take advice from him.
As I’ve gotten older my life has slowly become busier - I expect my schedule to be the most jam-packed it’s ever been in 2022, with my fifth and final year of high school coming to a close (thank the friggin Lord) as well as beginning university shudders in the fall (that is, if any of the 5 schools I applied to accept me. omg if uoft accepts me I will BAWL). With my writing time having already become more and more limited, and my laziness sadly becoming more and more apparent, I figured committing to this project for the duration of 2022 would be a fun and exciting challenge for me to take on. Unlike last fall’s Medium project on the Canadian federal election - which I must admit I quickly abandoned after, like, 3 days (I know, I suck) - I have no choice but to force myself to commit to this thing because people like you will be (or at least I hope you will continue to!) be subscribed to this newsletter. So you will likely be waiting on pins and needles to see my weekly rambles in their inbox. I wouldn’t want you to get all hyped over TYOK and then I never update it ever again. That would friggin suck! So I’m going to do whatever I can to keep my word because, as my dad always says, it’s all one has.
The other reason I decided to do this was because if I stick to the bi-weekly schedule is because during the weeks where I’m not working on this newsletter I can work on my poetry!!! You know, writing and submitting and all that fun stuff that I mostly stopped doing after July because of the worst triple-threat known to man…a combination of sort-of-depression, a ridiculous amount of schoolwork, and laziness!!
And what’s more, I did some really fancy mathematical calculations just now, and if I write one two-thousand-word blog post every two weeks and do that 26 times (aka for one year), then I will have written 4,000 words every month for 12 months, which means I will have written 48,000 words for this newsletter over the course of the year, give or take! That’s a lot, right? Right??? (Gotta keep flexing my writing muscles, or else Jessica will find out that I’m actually not as gifted and talented as she says I am.)
TLDR;
I want to write a lot of words, I want a general feeling of motivation, and I also want a motivation to write. Thank you SO EXTREMELY MUCH for providing all three of those things for me.
So, what can you expect from Things You Otter Know?
One essay every other Sunday that features my usual mix of dumb jokes, exclamation points, and wonderful puns. You’re all probably going to screenshot this and call me out a month from now on your private Twitter accounts, but IDGAF.
ANYWAYS.
Posting Schedule! (At least for now…)
Every first Sunday of the month: In Otter News, where I talk about something currently happening that pisses me off. Kind of like what I wrote about here for Medium, except this time I’ll be writing more consistently and about more interesting things. (Or at least they’re interesting to me. I’ll be like TMZ, but for Otters.) Basically it’ll just me pretending to be Dave Zirin. Who, if you didn’t already know, is one of my favourite sports journalists and whose work I will likely be screaming about often. Holy guacamole am I ever rambling. Okay I’m going to stop here and move on. (Name suggested by this guy on Twitter I don’t know.)
Every third Sunday of the month: Otterbiography, where I spend half the time
complainingtalking about my extremely boring and unimpressive life as it currently stands and then spend the other half sharing books, music, the one movie a year that I manage to watch, poems, things Jessica says to me that I will never not cry over, keysmashes, things Matt says to me that I will never not cry over, stand-up bits that YouTube’s algorithm shoved into my face but that I also find hilarious, things y’all write that I probably already shouted out on Twitter but had to share again, things that any of you say to me that I will never not cry over, podcasts, Tweets that I am currently dying of laughter from, etc etc etc. (Kinda like Roxane Gay’s newsletter, The Audacity (Name suggested by some another guy on Twitter I don’t know.)
This schedule will probably change when I get especially angry over something and have to write about it, like, stat. If I somehow manage to stick with this thing up until June and feel confident enough to keep going with it then I might make it a once-a-week thing. The key word here is “might”.
You’re all welcome to reply to these emails, by the way. I wonder if you click “reply” to this email if I’ll be able to see what you write back. Oh well, try it anyway, and if it doesn’t work you can feel better knowing that your deepest, darkest secrets were lost to the void!
January Plans
Since there’s five Sundays this month and this is an introductory email, my actual posting schedule will begin next Sunday: Here’s how I’m hoping it will look:
January 9: Otter This World
January 23: Otterbiography
It remains to be seen whether I can actually stick to this schedule for the time being but you’ve all signed yourselves up to watch me at least *try* to do that, so I will.
Oh man, this was so much fun to write. It felt like I thought of a new joke to write down every five minutes. (Whoever can count them all gets a shoutout in the next newsletter.) I must be, like, Joan Rivers reincarnated or something. (Which would be an insult to Joan Rivers.)
I’ll shut up now. See you all next week!!!!!
🦦 —O 🦦
let's go ottogers nation let's gooooooo
I’m v v excited for otterbiography >:)