Why a Substack?

Introducing (and Justifying) the Geek Orthodox Substack

So, I already have a podcast at GeekOrthodox.net, and a YouTube channel for the podcast at youtube.com/@GeekOrthodoxVideo… Why add yet another media medium into the mix?

I suppose there’s a lot of reasons… First, I don’t seem to be able to stop experimenting with new publishing platforms, or starting new websites, from all the way back in 1996/97 or so, near the beginning of the internet, when I hand-edited my first HTML website on Christian Fantasy and put it up as part of UBC’s “InterChange” site.

The original version of that site is lost to history now (I can’t even find it on Archive.org’s WayBack Machine!), but I’ve preserved it mostly intact on the “oldsite” portion of ehewlett.net (although many of the links there are broken due to “link rot”), and the original intent lived on for a while in my ChristianFantasy.com blog, which has also been largely abandoned now… And then of course there was my NoteXchange website that I set up for sharing my notes from St. Vladimir’s Seminary, the Spruce Island blog that I set up as an early “social media” site for Saint Herman Orthodox Church, the SocialConservatives and BCPTL blogs that I set up for my father, and many others, all the way down to StoryWeaver.online that I recently set up to experiment with the new ChatGPTs. Not to mention that I was a pretty early adopter of Facebook and Twitter and Google Wave and so on… I might have an addiction, or something!

Anyhow, in this same vein, I was an “early adopter” here at Substack, too; I just never followed through on my plan to create a Geek Orthodox presence here… until now.

So, why geek out about “Geek Orthodoxy” here on Substack? Well, doing so potentially gives anyone interested in supporting my doing so a way to support me in doing so... But, more importantly, as I’ve been working on my Geek Orthodox audio/video podcast, I’ve rediscovered both the efficiency and the importance of writing.

Editing audio and video is hard and annoying… and a process made all the more important by my tendency in both media to ramble. I don’t actually want to ramble on about a topic, as I generally find it annoying when others do so, but if I’m thinking aloud about a topic - which is a genuinely valuable process - that’s exactly what I end up doing. But for the listener/viewer, the process is inefficient. That’s why I like listening to and viewing well-planned and -edited podcasts and videos - which take lots of time to produce!

But writing, for all its inefficiency, actually has “built-in” a relatively quick and easy editing process, especially with modern word-processors, and I find the process of writing, however much I dislike it (I like having written way more than the actual process of writing), relatively easy, and something that helps me to sort out and focus my thoughts. Despite all the newbie problems I had in producing it, the extensive notes that I’d written for my Doxacon Seattle presentation, “The Deaths of Arthur”, made the initial Arthurian arc of my Geek Orthodox podcast a much more focused and content-rich experience than the initial episodes of my (still very much in-process) World of Code arc. So, since I want my podcasts to be better and more meaningful, I’m hoping to work out and work through some of the ideas for them in written form here as drafts and essays on this mostly written Geek Orthodox Substack.

I also want to do more here… One of the other lessons I’ve learned in producing my podcast is the value of producing art for and sharing it with the often very limited audience of people who actually know and care about you. I’ve experienced this first-hand in my brother’s writer’s group, and it’s something deeply embedded in the Hewlett family, perhaps most notably amongst my grandfather and his brothers and sisters, who wrote poetry and created other literary works primarily for one another. In fact, I was inspired in part by my reflection on the importance of creating for one’s “local” family-and-friend group to actually start writing a book that I’ve thought about writing for years, and which I may share in whole or in part here, in semi-serial form, as I go - or I may not… We’ll see how it goes!

So, this Substack, then, is intended as a rough draft, an experimental playground, where I hope to “geek out”, from my personal perspective - which is naturally shaped, in large part, by my Orthodox Christian beliefs - about whatever geeky subjects happen to strike my fancy: fantasy, science-fiction, computers and technology, poetry, literature, games, and whatever other aspects of the “geek” subculture that I grew up in and that has shaped me that may feel relevant as I go. I don’t intend to put much below the “Subscribe now” button, because I very much appreciate the free internet, but I’ll probably put little tidbits underneath the “break” every now and then, just to offer something of extra interest to anyone who might happen to subscribe here.