Hi! Thanks for stopping in. My name is Ted Travelstead. Since 2009 I’ve gone by the handle @trumpetcake over on Twitter. Elon Musk has finalized his purchase of Twitter. I don’t know Elon Musk personally, but the impersonal things I know about him aren’t to my liking. I’m not stomping away from Twitter in some dramatic fashion, but I’d like to think that him at the helm is as good motivation as any for me to think about sharing my creative output elsewhere. Twitter, despite being pretty harrowing in the past couple years, has done so much for me as a creative individual. It’s simple format, and character restrictions, were a great box to work in and really lended themselves to what I love to do as a writer/creator: be silly in short bursts, create stories in a few words, indulge the strangeness of my mind. I really found a freedom in that, and the fact that a group of people responded positively was real fuel to keep creating. I’m grateful for that, and for a whole lot of people I connected with on there. It’s so surreal to connect with so many people, mostly virtually, and then to think I may never hear of them again because of the dissolution/disasterfication (< smart and cool word I made up) of a website. Like most groundbreaking human inventions and discoveries, the Internet is wonderful and terrible simultaneously. I guess starting this Substack is my attempt to tether myself to whomever chooses to subscribe.
My grammar is pretty terrible, and I’m not sure what I’ll be doing here, but maybe I can offer you a laugh, something to ponder, or at least a brief distraction if you’re looking for one.
Here’s a distraction: as a pre-teen I shoplifted a couple rubber stamps from the sample printing section of a bookstore. When my friend and I got home, and I took them out (I had shoved them down the front of my pants), I discovered, to my horror, that there were blotches of purple of ink all over my… bathing suit area. I thought I was marked permanently as thief and would have to walk around for the rest of my life with a little Grimace living downstairs. Karma is real! (It washed off eventually. By my fortieth birthday it was completely gone.)
)
Made my day.
You’re makin’ me want to jump over to this site myself!