Is "died suddenly" dying suddenly?
Joe Surkiewicz, our indispensable editor, suddenly can't get in to do his all-important work
Today, for no apparent reason (sound familiar?), Joe Surkiezwicz, without whose work we couldn’t put together, nor could I post, these compilations, “suddenly” could not get in to “News from Underground.” He can’t get in via his laptop, cell phone or PC; and he’s also finding it impossible to contact any human being at Substack for assistant. Not only can he not get into “News from Underground” (although he’s a designated administrator), but he can’t even get into his own Substack.
At first I thought I must be locked out, too, so, without checking my Substack, I changed the password. That’s always a good thing to do periodically, but in this case it didn’t help. He’s still locked out.
Although we were able to post the latest “died suddenly” reports on Wednesday night, therefore, today we couldn’t even formulate, much less post, our usual range of what we call “non-fatals”—compilations of reports of people, both famous and obscure, coming down with all manner of horrid “rare” diseases. This is especially troubling, since each week we pick up more and more such items, the number growing all the time (daily, it sometimes seems), so from this setback we not catch up.
So is this sabotage, or just a glitch? Whatever’s causing it, we’re having the familiar cyber-problem of being unable to ask any human being at the company to ask what to do, or to do something about it.
And so we turn to you, gentle readers, in hopes that some of our stalwart and experienced substackers may have been around this block, and have some good ideas for getting back on track.
Thank you all for your time and attention.
MCM
The consistent and persistent problem of the third-party provider, venue.
Many now have a 'Substack', but not necessarily their own website. What seems to be the wisest and best course of action for anyone and everyone, whether musician, journalist, professor, whomever, is the James Corbett model, i.e., to host one's content first of all on one's own website, or at least mirror anything posted on third party sites to one's own website, and to keep backups of that site and all content locally, as its creator, and to be able to move hosts when needed with negligible changes or upheaval.
You have a website, Prof. Miller, so you could use that, have the DS series there, or redundantly there.
Substack could get compromised or sold, shut down down, whatever. Might as well plan on that, and drop it down a level of importance. Still worth using while it exists and is viable, but probably better to not be needing it to be.
Losers have to cheat to win. Deep state cheats all the time because rational thought isn't required.