Bits, bobs and bots

Hello, fellow consumers of culture!

Thanks so much to those of you who responded to my "best reads of 2024" post with your own top fives. I have added these to my reading list for the year. The first one I've read from those was Zadie Smith's The Fraud, and that was excellent (my fave quote from that is at the end of this newsletter). I do love getting responses to these newsletters, so keep them coming. 

How's this for a glamorous story about the life of a writer? I recently had to spend both time and money cleaning out about 550 robot signups from my list of subscribers to this free newsletter. That number of signups put me over the subscriber limit for a free plan, so the service would not release my 2024 best-of post to you good folks until I upgraded my plan.

I needed the email to go out before it ticked over into 2025, so I had to stump up for the upgrade before I could solve the bot problem (one box unticked in the back end of MailChimp settings. You'd think if it's a bot-screening measure, they'd just make it the default, wouldn't you?). As well as ticking the damned box and paying about $50 for the temporary upgrade, I had to go through all my subscribers and delete the bots manually, one by one, identifying them from their nonsensical first names and surnames. Somehow a feeling of malevolence arose from these fantastical names. Some people spend their lives trying to create art and meaning. Some people spend their lives finding ways to fuck that up.

Pursuing a creative life can, frankly, be thankless enough without some bot farm putting the boot in. Anyway, here's hoping for a change in fortunes and 500 real signups this year!