Closing time
Elon Musk may seem comfortably distant from this newsletter, a sweaty princeling throwing tantrums on a faraway planet. Well I have some news, some dour news, some oh-so-sour news: Twitter owns this newsletter platform and is shutting it down by end of year. I'm pretty sure he's doing it to spite me, personally.
Side note: Elon's brother Kimbal is in the food and ag space and is also a turd. Kimbal used to follow me on Twitter but we had a bit of an ~online argument~ (the turd doesn't fall far from the tree) and he unfollowed and blocked me.
Anyway, if I'm honest, Revue was always a trash platform:
Datapoint 1. Just this week I was having dinner with my pal Jake, a Haul subscriber. Jake was like "What ever happened to your newsletter, I used to love reading it!" Apparently he just stopped receiving new editions at some point. Not in his spam box, not anywhere. Other subscribers have told me this same thing — The Haul shows up inconsistently, if at all.
Datapoint 2. I have to send The Haul manually to some subscribers, like education journalist Susan and Swedish diplomat Leif, because I get notified every week that their email servers are rejecting anything from this platform. Not ideal!
Datapoint 3. When Revue went down for days on end this year, their customer support was nonexistent, besides their Dutch founder sending out a handful of disinterested tweets.
Datapoint 4. I'm friendly with someone at Twitter who agreed to informally look into the Haul's tech issues this summer. Her conclusion was bleak: I should move to another platform because Revue "does not have much support." Foreshadowing!
That's why I'll immediately be moving The Haul to Ghost, a cool, non-Substack alternative that comes highly recommended. Hopefully the transition will be seamless! And I'll never write a boring post like this again!
xo (dancing pals of mine),
Jesse
Featured Items
This week I made homemade Philly cheesesteaks (not with the above product), which I'd been promising Abby for months. They were excellent, dare I say an elevation of the form? They also took a long time to prepare, and relied on expensive, tender cuts of steak. This Walmart product will surely be grimier but I can make it in 5.5 minutes, according to the package. A commuter's cheesesteak!
The salvage grocer sells plastic shopping bags for 0.25, like many stores in the city. Hilariously, they ended up with a bunch of bags from my alma mater! The font doesn't look quite right, which makes me wonder if it's like, a knockoff. (LOL at this official UMass typography page.) But who would want to copy disposable products from a mid-tier state school? Unclear.
The cashier couldn't have cared less when I told her I'm a UMass alum. Raised her eyebrows a bit.
How weird is this? Gimmick pizza from the Stranger Things pizzeria. The pizza was totally decent, from a Wisconsin frozen pizza company (WI is nutso), but the gimmick is so dumb. Some website copy: The thick crust is crispy on the outside and airy on the inside - you'll think it was hand-tossed by the Surfer Boy Pizza dudes themselves. Throw a pie in the oven and buckle up your taste buds, brochachos!
(Do you all remember the Dominos/Stranger Things promotion that was also weird?)
We get some of the coolest/fanciest butter at the salvage grocer; this is but a light sampling. And guess what? Butter is back, baby! We typically have at least 5 pounds of backup butter in the freezer. Time Magazine says hoarding will lead to a butter shortage but we don't care.