from 9 to 11

I have a feeling that a few people are going to wait until the last possible moment to get on my email list for when I privatize the blog this coming Sunday night (Seoul time). The list has gone from nine people to eleven as some folks have come out of the woodwork to leave comments. My thanks to those folks, and apologies for sounding mean about lurkers. Please understand, though, that's it's frustrating for someone who writes as much as I do never to be rewarded by reactions from readers. I don't know... maybe these readers feel they have nothing to say. Maybe I should try harder to make people feel welcome. I'm at a loss.

Whatever the case may be, it's no longer the Nine Ringwraiths. I can jump from Tolkien to Christianity when we reach twelve (12 apostles), but that is going to sound awfully pretentious, as though I were implying that I'm Jesus and that these people are somehow my followers, which they obviously aren't. So here's hoping we move on to thirteen people before Sunday night because we can then have the Thirteen Colonies from Battlestar Galactica.

If I'm going to write for an exclusive group, though, I do hope that some or all of my invitees will take it upon themselves to find other people for me to invite into the circle because Lord knows I still want to grow the circle. If you find people, please send me their emails (with their permission, of course). You can always email me directly (see address on my sidebar).

A few things to remember:

1. You will receive an email invitation from me, and there will probably be some sort of procedure (maybe involving a password? maybe not) the first time you try to log on to my blog. After that, you should be able to access the blog freely unless you sign out/log off.

2. You do need to acquire a Google account (not a Gmail address) if you don't already have one. That's Google's requirement, not mine. Sorry. See procedure here.

3. There will be no RSS feed, so you'll just have to make it a habit to visit the blog now and then since there will be no notifications about new posts.

4. I will probably be posting a lot less unoriginal content once the circle constricts to whatever the final number will be on Sunday (keeping in mind that others might join belatedly). So please expect very little in terms of embedded tweets, YouTube videos, and memes. I have a feeling that a lot of that lazy blogging is why I have so many bots crawling all over the blog.

5. Since you're about to embark on an exclusive experience here, why not also become a free subscriber to my Substack, where I have a small circle of only a couple dozen people? A free subscription gets you access to 10% of my Substack content plus occasional extras (including free previews of paid content); moving to a paying subscription of only $5/month or $50/year (cheaper per month) gets you the other 90%, and I will never charge more than that. See more here. And/or see my blog's sidebar.