Tom Dickinson's Cool And Great Newsletter - December 2018

NOTE: This post was originally sent via my old TinyLetter newsletter. It's been backdated here to reflect the date it was sent.

Hi, this is the first one of these. Welcome to it.

Why this newsletter?

This newsletter because I am not going to be using Twitter and Facebook for the next foreseeable little while, but Facebook and Twitter are good ways to let people know things like “I have a podcast” or “this movie is good, you should see it” or “I saw a cool rock”, and so this newsletter is meant to be a substitute for that functionality.

Not Doing Social Media

I've stayed away from the word "quitting" with regard to Twitter and Facebook. I’m currently thinking of it more as a break. I should probably commit to an arbitrary date so let's say I will not be using them until at least March 1, 2019. I could probably go into more detail about why I’ve decided to step back from these services, but "twitter is bad" and "facebook is bad" are ice cold takes, and my reasons for thinking they're bad are pretty much the standard reasons everyone else has, and in any case I don’t find it fun to dwell on the topic, so I won’t.

Yes Doing Social Media

I’m actually not leaving social media entirely, just Twitter and Facebook. I have found Instagram to be more fun and less awful than those, so I’m keeping it around and maybe increasing my usage. (Yes, I know that Facebook owns it.) You can follow me here.

I’ll also be sporadically checking in on Mastodon, the open-source alternative to Twitter. You can find out more about what the heck that means here. If you want to follow me, I can currently be found here.

Updates for December 2018

Okay with all of that preface out of the way, on to the main point of the newsletter: those precious, precious updates. Although, actually. I don’t really have any “updates” for December 2018 per se. That’s not because nothing is happening, it’s because I only just stopped updating Twitter and Facebook a few days ago, so anything I wrote here would be duplicative of whatever’s already been covered over there.

One thing I will mention though! One of my more low-key Doctor Who fandom projects is a website called WhoViewOrder which aspires to provide a list of of all Doctor Who media, filterable by media type or character, and sortable by release date or narrative continuity. Basically it’s a big spreadsheet which exists to satisfy my pathological need to organize data. Sadly it’s a little incomplete and out of date. I was hoping to get an update out by the end of the year but it looks like it might not be ready until mid January. So that’s a thing to look forward to!

Also, if you like animation, you should go see Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse while it’s still in cinemas. You will not regret seeing it.

I have not seen any cool rocks recently. Please reply to this email with pictures of cool rocks.

The Next One of These

The next newsletter will be in late January 2019. In the January edition, I will maybe say a little about how things are going with regard to the second season of my podcast, Doctor Who: The Moment. I will also maybe say a little about what I’ll be doing at the Gallifrey One convention in Los Angeles in February. Also, there will be an original short poem about a lizard.

Until then I remain your humble and obedient servant,

Tom