Tom Dickinson's Very Good Newsletter - Very Late January 2019

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

Regarding my inexcusable lateness

In the first edition of this newsletter I said:

The next newsletter will be in late January 2019.

As it happens, this was not true, which is why you must be careful not to believe everything you read on the Internet.

Regarding Gally

I had intended to write about what I'd be up to for the then-upcoming Gallifrey One convention in Los Angeles, a celebration of all things Doctor Who, but that convention just happened, and I just got home from it, so let this be more of a postmortem. The con was very good! I went to a lot of great panels and got to spend a lot of time reconnecting with friends and making a whole bunch of new friends.  Probably the highlight of the convention programming for me was the Academic Symposium, run by Joy Piedmont and Paul Booth. There were a bunch of amazing talks from fellow fans, including a fantastic keynote from Tai Gooden, on "The Fandom Hierarchy: Women of Color’s Fight For Visibility In Fandom Spaces." I gave a talk called "Time Can Be Rewritten: Meddling and Morals," using the lens of moral philosophy to examine how Doctor Who treats the question whether history should be changed. I'm really proud of it and I plan on adapting it into a YouTube video so that more people can see it. Stay tuned for news about that.

Regarding The Moment

Another one of the best parts of the convention was hearing from people about Doctor Who: The Moment. The reaction was universally positive, which was nice! Not that I expected much in the way of negative reaction, but there was a lot of "I love your show!" and also a lot of "I haven't heard your show yet but I hear it's very good!", both of which are very nice to hear. I also had a few people ask me when the show is coming back. The answer is: Spring 2019! What exactly that means, I'm not sure yet. My initial hope had been to drop season 2 starting in February, but for a number of different reasons, that has not happened.  Late March or early April seems more likely now, but that's not a promise, it's just a projection. I've been recording conversations and I'm really pleased with how they're turning out, and the first couple edits are shaping up really nicely too. More news soon!

Regarding Socials

My social media hiatus went on hiatus because I kind of wanted to be back on Twitter for Gallifrey One hype reasons. But now that Gally is over, I've put my twitter back to bed for a while. Not sure how long I'll be away this time, but one thing's fairly certain: I'm done with Facebook for the foreseeable future. I really haven't missed it a bit since deactivating, and I really hate Facebook as a company so I'm not inclined to want to be a part of their thing. (I realize that Instagram is owned by Facebook, and I'm still using that, but that's only because I am a terrible hypocrite.)

Regarding Schlaugh

However, I'm using Schlaugh. Over the past few months I've made some tweets referring cryptically to a social media site I've been using but am not allowed to talk about. Well now I am allowed, and it's called Schlaugh. Schlaugh (pronounced like ???????) is a social blogging platform kind of like livejournal or xanga but you can only post once per day, and everyone's posts show up all at the same time overnight. Since it will absolutely never have new content on it throughout the day, you probably won't develop the compulsive checking habit that so many of us have with other social media sites. It's also very small right now and it's used entirely by interesting, thoughtful, strange and silly people. I've been using it for over a year and It's been a genuine delight. If it sounds interesting to you, please check it out! You can follow me at schlaugh.com/nowwearealltom

That's all for now. I realize that I promised that this edition of the newsletter would have an original short poem about a lizard, but I didn't write one so there isn't one.

The next edition of this newsletter will be out when I have something to tell you about. Until then, I am as I ever was and ever shall be:

Tom