That sentence is evidence of that. This post will appear on my WordPress blog and my Substack… er… whatever Substack’s thing is…

Obviously my regular Substack readers won’t have noticed this diversification, because Substack is part of that diversification. And also I don’t have any Substack readers.

I do still have WordPress readers though, and frankly I need you guys to stick with me through this apparent midlife crisis, because the internet outside of the blogosphere is a scary place.

Ultimately my rationale for being available on multiple platforms is to increase the number of people exposed to James Proclaims, because ultimately, if WordPress has taught me anything, it’s that a small percentage of the world likes my stuff. It’s a very small percentage, but my reasoning is that if I make myself available to a bigger portion of the world, then a small percentage of a larger base is still a larger number overall. Which is good for my ego.

Substack aside, which is really just WordPress from a decade ago, but with added celebrities, I am also trying out other platforms to try out other media. I have enjoyed making a podcast with my friend Ben, and I enjoy making my solo podcast. The one with Ben gets a fairly consistent number of listeners and might actually have some commercial potential if either of us could find an ounce of business acumen. The James Proclaims podcast is a more self-indulgent affair, but once I turn that phone into a video camera, and start talking to the back of it, I find the whole thing quite fulfilling and therapeutic. Whether anyone else will ever listen or not, it’s cathartic, and does help me generate a lot of ideas, some of which become blog posts on here, (here of course being whichever platform you are reading this on). I have been more prolific as a writer of late and I think that owes quite a lot to my move into podcasting, so it’s quite the ecosystem I’ve created for myself. There is of course a whole quality versus quantity debate to be had, but that’s never been a debate I’ve been overly keen to have with myself. Not least because I can write what I think is a masterful piece of prose about something important and worthy which will receive no traction at all, while a haiku about trousers that I wrote in thirty seconds will be my most popular post of the month. In the internet age, what is worthy of attention is never decided by the author so I’m now of the view that if I produce something I might as well post it.

Where to post is more of an issue.

And so recently I turned to Threads.

I’ve generally eschewed the ‘short-form’ over the years. Twitter always seemed like a pretty hostile place and its transformation to X has hardly made it friendlier.

Threads seemed a bit more suited to my style. On some level it’s still a Musk versus Zuckerberg debate and ultimately the answer to that would always be ‘neither’.

But no short-form platform is ideal and frankly Threads seemed more suited to my banal style. And actually I have been quite pleased with my early forays into short-form writing.

Initially I thought I needed to compose the same kind of pithy subtext-filled observations as I do on here (where here is) but on Threads it seems I can literally write whatever comes into my head and post it. Sometimes it’ll get a response, sometimes it won’t, but quantity over quality is the game.

Ultimately though, I always want to be making some kind of a joke, so most of my posts have been mundane observations of life with a little comic twist. I can’t predict what will do well, but some have done pretty well in terms of generating the comments and ‘likes’ that we treasure on all platforms, while others have been completely ignored.

Sometimes though, people miss the joke. One of my first posts was:

I always knew my writing wasn’t for everyone.

Thanks to Substack, I now know my writing isn’t for anyone.

At all.

Which is possibly the closure I needed.

Now I’m not having an existential crisis. I was merely pointing out that Substack has not been the resounding success I thought it would be.

But I got this as a reply:

Your writing only needs to be for you.

Lovely sentiment but wildly missing the point.

So I ‘liked’ the response (even though I didn’t really like it) and posted this:

I completely agree, but Substack does rather promise an audience and thus far has failed to deliver one in a timely fashion. Unlike Threads, which delivered you on my very first day.

Good right? I didn’t pick a fight. I just replied with a little humour and sort of thanked the person (Threader?) for their response.

But no, apparently I’d misjudged their misjudgement of me. For they replied again:

I wasn’t delivered, I chose to comment. There’s a difference. Substack is very audience centric as in you tend to need an audience already or some other established presence elsewhere you can try migrate over as starting from zero is basically next to impossible at this point without marketing and budgets.

Now I investigated them a little and it looks like they are a somewhat embittered writer themselves, who frankly would like a commercial audience, haven’t got a commercial audience and therefore want to share the misery. Whereas I am not miserable, dear reader. I’d like to make money from writing but I’m fully aware I’d need to do something much better than this to do so.

So I let that one sit, didn’t engage any further (other than to ‘like’ their response even though I didn’t really like it.)

And I moved on. And I posted some other stuff. And some of it got a bit of traction and I had a bit of fun in the comments section and I was enjoying myself.

Suddenly thread-worthy ideas were jumping into my head on an hourly basis and frankly from what I can see, posting a lot is absolutely fine, even encouraged on Threads.

The weekend I started though was the weekend of the Reading Festival, which I go to every year, because it’s very much down the road from me, and I’m able to volunteer through being a teacher (as a responsible adult believe it or not) and then I get in for free. Which is just as well, because I’m too old to know who most of the acts are.

So I’d been in and out of the festival all weekend and I’d noticed a phenomenon which I’ve become increasingly aware of at other gigs (I actually do manage to get to a surprisingly large number of concerts, due to Reading’s proximity to London and the fact that most shows start after my kids have gone to bed, so Mrs Proclaims doesn’t mind me leaving her in charge).

And what I’ve noticed is that a lot of people film bits of songs on their phones. Not entire songs, never the whole set, but bits of songs, and that this is pretty common. I find it a bit annoying at times because sometimes I end up not being able to see the band due to a phone being directly in my eyeline, but really I just find it strange. Why do people film the concert rather than just enjoying it? Surely no footage will be as good as the widely available footage that already exists on the internet. What are they getting out of this?

Also, a lot of people do seem to just be filming a sea of other phones held aloft.

So I posted this:

Now you’ll note I only got the one like but there are 9 comments. I really managed to annoy an entire section of the Threads community.

My first responder said this:

Fair enough, quite a good rebuttal. I responded with:

Which he liked and then he sent me footage of a Royal Blood concert he’d been at, and I’d just seen Royal Blood at the Reading Festival so I replied to that and all was good with the world.

Then I got my one ‘like’ and thought nothing more of it.

Then my phone went a bit nuts for a while and I got this:

Ok, clearly missing my original tongue-in-cheek tone, but not unpleasant.

I also got this:

followed by some pretty good front row footage of the act she saw. Fine, but I wasn’t really talking about the front row and she obviously got the point I was making anyway because she followed up with:

Which is sort of acknowledging that not everyone does what she does right?

I could have responded to both of these with a pithy, slightly apologetic comment as I had done with my first commenter. But I also got this:

which was followed by some admittedly excellent (again front row) footage of this person literally being handed the mic by the lead singer of the band and singing. Of course you’d want to capture that, but absolutely not the point I was making.

He also then decided to comment on one of the other threads (ah so that’s where the name comes from!) this:

Now I am, I believe, OP. And I don’t hate art. I don’t much care for the genre of music he seems to like, but nothing about my original comment would surely indicate that I hate art. If anything I think my point was, I like live music, let’s all just enjoy that instead of trying to capture an inferior version of it that we’ll probably never look at.

Which I still believe is what most people do.

I film my kids all the time. I love my kids, I love looking at footage of time I’ve spent with them, and yet I hardly ever do that, so I constantly have to remind myself that it is the spending time that’s important and not the digital memory. But I still do it. And I think that’s sort of what most people do at concerts. They’re having a brilliant time, but they sort of cheapen their own experience of the event by trying to make the memory last forever.

But clearly I provoked some outrage.

I looked up my last friend. He posts a lot of quite angry stuff on his own account, so I probably shouldn’t have worried.

He actually did post some poetry. I didn’t care for it. Perhaps I do hate art after all.

One of his posts said, “I must stop picking fights with morons on the internet”.

He had one reply.

Not from me.

It said, “maybe you’re the moron?”

Rather than trying to douse the flames in my comments section, I deleted that post. That’s the beauty of short-form, it’s all fairly disposable.

It didn’t seem worth getting into an internet argument.

I’m better than that I thought.

Although clearly I’m not because I just wrote this…