Mykonos—This took me far too long to decide, but I’ve finally joined the Substack online community. I’ve always been a late adopter to social media, in part because I’m a late adopter to technology in general, from a baseline of being a fundamental tech skeptic. And truth be told, I didn’t quite have a handle on what Substack actually was. Was it simply a new, sleek, purpose-built blogging platform? Was it a new rival to Twitter akin to Bluesky? What did the term restack mean? Was that like retweet? It seemed like a lot of it was behind a paywall as well. I was well aware that other writers and journalists were utilizing it as their new platform of choice while being vaguely aware you could somehow make money off of it.
Many questions looked up via either YouTube tutorials or ChatGPT later, I’ve gone ahead and taken the plunge to build one of my own. And I’d like to add that for me there was quite a learning curve, owing partly to the fact that my skill set is years behind the curve since the global lockdown 5–6 years ago. I just haven’t kept up with all these developments in social media and AI while living in NYC. Since I’ve been here in the Cyclades, my mind has a renewed focus, allowing me to drill down and force myself to catch up on years of learning. I VERY reluctantly set up a ChatGPT account on Thera barely a month ago. It’s been a topic of conversation at home in Queens and Brooklyn for the past at least two years, and I’d purposefully kept my head in the sand. Everyone has been talking about the loss of extra work on movie sets, coding jobs at corporations, or most recently, how much water their data centers require. It’s a good bit like cryptocurrency, where I kept hearing people talk about it seemingly incessantly and mostly ignored it until I finally looked into it down the road.
I must mention that when using AI in my areas of expertise, it is wrong about quite a lot, I imagine because the technology is still so new. Like if I look up something about the chronology of, say, 1990s Afghanistan, ChatGPT is often wrong. You then tell it it’s incorrect, and it generates an apology to you. The whole thing is bizarre. But it’s also incredibly useful for making thumbnails for Fabled City, my modest YouTube channel. AI eliminates hours of effort in trying to do makeshift graphic design that in the end doesn’t look all that great. Although its renderings are often a bit too over the top.
In my month or so here in Greece, I’ve been working tirelessly to get up to speed on literally years’ worth of tech topics to the point where I’m often overwhelmed and will have to take breaks. Step outside and breathe. Walk to the bakery to get a spanakopita.
As I’m learning the workflow of establishing and posting on Substack, I will say it’s a fairly intuitive platform. But all throughout the process I’ve been employing AI to accelerate my learning to adapt more quickly. Another facet of it that’s just brilliant is how the social engagement is hardwired into Substack. Whereas here on WordPress, you have to install awkward plugins that eventually die off and don’t function anymore without much warning. Oh, and also, Substack is completely free to set up, whereas here I have to pay my hosting company ever-increasing fees.
I’m still going to keep TWD going as I have for the past 17 years and planning to use my new Substack account in concert with it. Hopefully one can help support the other and vice versa.