Welcome to the Jackpot Soft Launch

Is this thing on? (Yes, if I have remembered to take the out of maintenance mode.)

This blog is one of the literary endeavors I have taken up in my retirement (and light work, too; see the schedule in the sidebar at right; plenty of time for coffee, and to wander about in the garden).

I go into the reasoning behind this project in detail in other posts (see “Why the Jackpot?”, “On Blogging,” and “On This Blog”, for the collective fix(es) we are in, the continued importance of blogging, and the editorial design of this blog, respectively). In short form, I want to move back from social media’s dopamine doom loop to “the blogosphere’s” surges of oxytocin, because I think that’s the only way we can think and feel, as opposed to reacting (and reacting to a user experience and media environment designed to stop us from thinking and feeling). Thinking and feeling, as opposed to reacting, are in my view essential to making it through what is to come.

Readers, this is a soft launch, so you have either stumbled onto this site by happy chance, or you are one of the few people I issued an invitation to MR SUBLIMINAL Or you’re a bot. Go away.

Please poke around, and if anything breaks — or, more optimistically, you see something you consider particularly fine — you can tell me about it in the Contact Form (temporarily open to Anonymous users), or leave a comment (although comments are moderated).

I wonder who will be the first to log in?