Innovations Galore

👷🏽‍♀️🏋🏽‍♂️📥🎊

Gang members:

We’ve got a couple of fantastic innovations to announce, improvements that will directly affect the lives of every last one of you, and everyone you know. Well, okay, that’s hyperbole, really dishonest hyperbole. 😔 Let’s say these innovations will be “good,” and leave it there. You can slather on further praise in private, if you like, once you have a few more details.

As you already know, Slow Descent Into Radness offers several subscription “tiers,” where the word “tiers” is just a funny way of writing “money pays.” You, at home, would just say “money pays.” For example, in case anyone is still confused:

Megan: “Damn, this soccer player on TV is good at stomping. I wonder what ‘money pay’ he’s on, with his professional team.”

Harry: “Oh, I know his manager, actually. He has a 5-year, £25 million contract. So he pays his team about £5 million every year to wear the jersey.”

Megan: “Mmmnm.”

Another situation that might arise would be:

Taylor: “Gad, Mr. Bonmblers was teaching when I was in middle school. I can’t believe he's still here. What’s his ‘money pay,’ do you think?”

Matty: “Thanks for bringing me to see your old middle school, first of all. Pretty gross. As to the Bonmblers fellow — I overheard him tell an ugly lady that he’s a volunteer now, meaning I guess he doesn’t pay the school anything.”

And even more closely related to today’s newsletter:

Conch: “You subscribe to George’s substack, right? Which ‘money pay’?”

Lou: “I do the $5/month option. You can’t even see most of his posts if you’re on the free ‘money pay.’”

Conch: “Mmmmnm.”

And so yeah, Slow Descent has three money pays you can sign up for: free, paid, and founder. Unlike many substacks, S.D.I.R. sends (nearly) all posts to all subscribers, regardless of money pay. We believe that the opportunity to give us money which we promise to use on beer or cocktails — or, yes, occasionally wine — is more than enough reward for a monthly subscription fee. UNTIL TODAY. (Did that make sense grammatically? Meaning “until today, we operated with that belief — but no longer.”)

BUT NO LONGER. As more and more of you have started curb-stomping your piggy banks and paying for this service, we’ve grown physically incapable of converting all of the money into “drinkin’ booze.” We find ourselves, unbelievably, needing to offer paid subscribers something in addition to our constant, disciplined ingestion of alcohol. We do not, however, want to lock all you freeloaders out of the fun.

Here’s what we’ve come up with. We’re going to start a biweekly (every two weeks) “AMA”-style post, in which we will respond — at length, if necessary! — to ANY QUESTION YOU CAN PUT INTO WORDS. This can be about our music, about your life, about how to play the “Nobody Move” riff (easy!), about Keith’s hair, about Chris’s fur-lined sex handcuffs, about our opinion of Pearl Jam, about how we train our pets so well, about our best dinner recipes, our favorite ProTools plugins, the financial breakdown of Megaplex’s production budget, or even which piece of equipment that we use at almost every show sucks but we have no choice but to keep using it. Or something else!

These insightful, entertaining glimpses behind the scenes of our lives (and indeed — if you ask the right question — behind the very scrim of sensory data that obscures boundless reality) will be available to all subscribers, but only paid subscribers (including “founders”) can submit questions. Submit as often as you like — we’ll try to work our way through every question over time, though we may go out of order for the sake of making sure each post is a “great read” on par, at least, with something Salman Rushdie would write.

Secondly (if you can believe there is a second thing): Paid subscribers can now send us suggestions for our ongoing Great Apes covers series, and once a month we’ll do a song from reader requests. You can submit requests as often as you like, but if one of your picks is honored, we’ll try to get to other people’s ideas before we circle back to you. Unless… your reasoning is just too damn good. When you submit a song suggestion, you may (and are encouraged to) include your case for why we should cover it. This apologia, if ironclad, may well trump considerations of fairness.

Now, this next part may be a waste of time — we’ll see — but let’s try it anyway: Substack has a thing called “chats,” which are little walled off conversations that we — your omnipotent authors — are empowered to start. We’ll start one for “AMA Questions” and another one for “Cover Suggestions,” [UPDATE: We did it! Follow the links] and these will be alternative places where paid subscribers can submit their requests, instead of using the google form linked through the buttons above. Why both? Is this just confusing things? Yes, maybe. But it occurred to us that while the google form is a nice private way for you to submit ideas, some of you may prefer to hash things out in semi-public with your fellow Descenders. (The chats will only be visible to paid subscribers.) This will let you, for example, discuss cover ideas and come to the sort of group mandates that we will have no choice but to heed. We’ll see submissions that come through the google form, and also those proposed in the chat — you don’t have to do both. (Paid subscribers will receive an email pointing them to each of the chats, and we’ll also link to them in future posts.)

A little complex maybe! We’ll see. Maybe it’s complex the way a delicious stew is, or the transformer network of a wise and funny AI. Or, maybe it’s complex like the plot of Fast X — defying reason, harmful to all who encounter it. In the latter case, we’ll streamline things.

👨🏻‍💻👨🏼‍💻 ⃪ us figuring it all out, and making the good decisions

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If all of this luscious value has you wedging your piggy bank under your car tire, desperate to ramp up to a paid subscription, we can’t blame you: upgrade your free subscription here.

If, on the other hand, you already pay to subscribe and you’re worried that this means we’re going to stop using your fees to buy grog… hushhhh. There, there. Watch this…

Oi! Naomi! Mate…

Naoimi, mate… oi. Oi! Naomi… you really helped us out. Just a few days ago, you REALLY helped us out, Naomi Houghton. There we were, sat at a table on a hot sidewalk in Manhattan, talking about tough business topics and hard logistical puzzles, and what movie to go see, and suddenly we were seized by a powerful thirst, as a person walking next to the Nile might be seized by a crocodile — it was not about to let go, the thirst, it had a good grip on our torsos — and then it came into our minds, like divine ideation, that we had your subscription fees sitting in our digital wallet, subscription fees stretching back to February, you great supporter, Naomi, and so we whistled to our waiter — probably a little excitedly, perhaps a little shrill — and begged him to hurry as fast as he could to the taps, and from there to fetch us two Krombachers, and by god, Naomi Houghton, that’s exactly what he did, this responsive man-boy, and just a moment or two later we descended into bliss, courtesy of you, Naomi, our very true mate.

"Thank god for Naomi Houghton."