I didn't want to get into self-hosting with Ghost, and Buttondown has no free tier. Those were the ones I looked at.

adding a polish accent to your dutch accent only seems like it would confuse things more

Wow! I've tried to keep my word count down (based on data from my writing on Medium, anything over 7 minutes reading time has severe drop-off) but maybe I should just publish twice a week instead. I'm getting to the cap on the free tier, and need to think about how this project pays for itself...

Is anyone else publishing on Beehiiv? Share yours here, and maybe you can dethrone one of these on my Top 4.

Here's my newsletter (it's a Picnic because there are no tables ∴ no seats at the table, get it?) If you're in tech or tech-adjacent fields, and frustrated, you might find it interesting.

And the last of the top 4 that I found just the other day is The Future Is Like Pie by @redsesame.bsky.social. It's structured a bit more like a conventional newsletter, with a list of good links, but each list comes with a longer, essay-style personal reflection which I enjoy.

The third one, added more recently, is @hiredthought.bsky.social's Strategy Teaming (scroll down a bit to get to the posts). I often say that design is a leadership skill, and Ben's newsletter provides a lot of actionable advice on how to actually practice that.

The second one was @joanwestenberg.com's eponymous newsletter. It's a really good argument for why "STEM only" is horseshit, and the tremendous value that "soft skills" like philosophy and poetry contribute to someone's ability to think.

The first one I added was @spydergrrl.bsky.social's Workshop Alchemy.

The cool thing about a workshop is it's just a meeting with rules. Tanya gives great advice for implementing rules that make your meetings productive (instead of time wasters for everyone concerned) and making decisions stick.

It doesn’t matter if people “truly” believe anything or not. Playing make-believe, publicly participating in a bit like an improv sketch, is just as good as any “sincerely held” belief for all purposes of the function of collective belief in society (though this also shapes people’s private beliefs)

Not the pineapple curry one??

It's so good because the premise is: the average city builder gameplay has nothing in common with how a normal city runs itself, but it DOES resemble a Cold War era totalitarian command economy so why not lean into that

Have you tried Workers and Resources? It's really been scratching the city builder itch for me, and a big part of that is that it doesn't hand-wave things like "people need to get to their jobs to do them"

But I was thinking more in the sense of the shift in focus from classic TW (deploy 20 rectangles of dudes and ram them into the enemy's 20 rectangles) to a blend of CK/EU style cultural development and HoI4 style focus trees that let you either follow history or run down a meme path for engagement.

Oh good to know, I've just been playing CS1 thus far

Pope Leo reconciles every historical schism starting with Arianism in order to stick it to Patriarch Kirill