A Note from the Flight Deck
Please read.
Wayne Thiebaud
Last night I sent out two new posts for the Birth Year Project: 1939 and 1955. Thanks for asking, as always. They appear in the Birth Year Project shelf (navigate from menu bar on home page).
This brings us up to 22 years (I think).
The ways of Substack are, at times, inscrutable. I continue to be aggrieved when the posts you open have quirks of formatting not on my version. My inner fussbudget makes this Grrrrrr— noise. I mention this today because the heading on the Birth Year Project shelf gives a list of the years done so far, which I’d love to update, but despite a wee chat with Substack’s AI, I can’t find my way there.
Do you know Liana Finck’s Substack?
Free subscribers get Weeklies, a page of her goofily drawn observations about this and that—mostly this vs. that. Anyway, if Liana were drawing my post this morning there’d be a little mound on the left with a squiggle representing me, and way over to the right a little mound with a squiggle representing the heading of my Birth Year Project page. My squiggle would be staring across the abyss between the mounds; its squiggle would be dozing like a gray cat in the sun.
In any case, two new years for you.
This brings to three the number of requesters [1939, 1944, 1946] who are, amazingly, older than I am. And it shows there’s a span of fifty-three years [1939-1992] between the birth year of our oldest and youngest, meaning that at least one of our subscribers is eighty-five and at least one is thirty-two. It pleases me that we represent a bunch of different eras, that we’re not all in our own time silos. Seems healthy.
It would be even healthier if there were more comments, threads, conversations between subscribers/followers. Y’all are too passive.
A bigger item (as I keep grousing about): over half of you don’t open the posts. You signed up, it’s free, you get the notices, you scroll on by. What am I missing here? Too much on your plate? Amen to that. Still. If Liana were drawing the situation, she’d do a graph (she loves graphs). The vertical axis would say: Percentage of Posts Opened; the horizontal axis would say: Degree to Which David Feels He’s Launching Messages Into the Cosmic Void (starting with 100 percent on the left where the axes join). If the number on the vertical axis is high, then there’s a down-sloping trendline.
[OK, it would be loads cooler if Liana drew it.]
Anyhoodle, that’s it on this hot morning in the Pacific Northwest. See you next week, when we’ll have a look at . . . um, whichever of my gaggle of proto-posts wants to go public.
I think I’ll steal Joyce Vance’s sign-off today: We’re in this together.1
https://longd.substack.com/p/birth-year-project-1955
https://longd.substack.com/p/birth-year-project-1939
David, I love your lists. I comment once in a while. I'll try to do better. Great seeing you at Pacific U's MFA anniversary party!
God bless the inner fussbudget.