Welcome to our definitely-not-spam newsletter.

People have to sign themselves up, and then confirm their subscription in a follow-up email. A double-opt-in affair, a two-step process.

Yet this didn't stop somebody from flagging our last newsletter as spam. Not just opting out by using the unsubscribe link included in every one of these things, but reporting it as spam.

And now any ISP that uses the Mailchannels service, which is most of them, is bouncing back every email sent from [email protected] — every damn one of them — and there's basically nothing we can do about it.

We've attempted to change the sent-by address on this one to our normally-unused gmail address, but it's not clear if we succeeded. We'll all find out together. Well, maybe. If we failed, it's possible that loads of you aren't getting this. The other address, the one we use for every important thing, has been borked by a nimrod. We still receive emails to that address, it's just that most of the ones we send from it are getting bounced back undelivered. In theory, it's temporary... but it's a giant PITA. It's hard not to have a dim view of our species sometimes.

On that note, we've been thinking for some time about ditching Mailchimp for Substack.

We're on the cusp of the Mailchimp subscriber limit... when we exceed it, they're gonna want us to pay some nebulous monthly figure based on subscriber and send numbers. We don't begrudge people trying to make a living (Mailchimp crossed $1.35 billion in annual revenue in 2025), but however much it is, we ain't got it to give them. So this is almost certainly the last newsletter you'll get from us through Mailchimp. Going forward, they'll probably come from [email protected] — possibly not ideal, but given what's happened, kinda ideal. Please whitelist that address if you run a whitelist. We can import our Mailchimp list to Substack, which strays a bit from our reluctance to subscribe people to our newsletter all willy-nilly from the admin side, but our intentions are good and it's a one-time thing. Hopefully. If anyone knows anything bad or squidgy about Substack, please let us know. They take a pretty steep 10% of any monetization, but we're probably never going to try to monetize. (Patreon takes an even bigger percentage — and our attempt to get Patreon going for us a while back was a massive fail anyway).

At this writing, there are four tickets left for Sunday's matinee.

We're assuming that any of you who want to go have already made arrangements.  

OK, free movie tickets!

Searching for Sugar Man is coming up on April 29 at the Bellows Falls Opera House, 7:00 PM. That's the first of four classic movies that we're sponsoring this year along with Dave & Sharon Pelland, Rick Holloway, Chrisman Kearn, Andrew Dey, Circuits in the Woods, WOOL-FM, some anonymous angels, and Rockingham Entertainment Development.

We have eight tickets (good for this show only) to give away! They're digital tickets, we'll email them to you and you can either print them out or show them on your phone at the door. First come, first served — just ask! Depending on how many responses we get, we may need to limit it to two tickets per person... but if you want more, do make your wishes known because it just might be able to happen. We'll need requests by Monday morning (the 27th) in case things get complicated. Searching for Sugar Man (1h 26m). A captivating, critically acclaimed rockumentary. Decades after Detroit singer-songwriter Sixto Rodriguez disappeared following the commercial failure of his albums in the early ’70s, two obsessed Cape Town fans try to track down their idol. Though he faded into obscurity in the U.S., Rodriguez had become a huge hit in South Africa. Searching for Sugar Man won the Special Jury Prize and the Audience Award for best international documentary at the Sundance Film Festival. It subsequently won the BAFTA Award for Best Documentary at the British Academy Film Awards, and the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. The International Documentary Association awarded it Best Feature and Best Music. The Directors Guild of America, Writers Guild of America, Producers Guild of America, American Cinema Editors, National Board of Review, and Critics’ Choice all awarded it awarded it Best Documentary.