the newsletter is changing

there's a treat in it for ya

sure, not a real conversation I ever had, but the original one was good if you’d like to listen to it on the Teach Us Consent podcast.

As this newsletter has just reached it’s HALF A DECADE birthday (quite proud of how I’ve always been on platforms early before they blow the hell up tbh), it’s time for it to morph into it’s next cuter, cooler version just like a Pokémon. I just learnt where the word Pokémon comes from¹ . Every day is a school day and I fucking love it. Anyway, I digress. I’m doing some behind-the-scenes work to develop this newsletter into something you (hopefully) like even more but I am determined not to assume what value looks like to you. As much as I think I know why people follow me, I don’t 100% really. In fact, I’ve often been completely wrong about that, which is why I am begging you from my tiny, boney yet moisturised knees to fill in this short survey I wrote. It will help me figure out if some of the plans I have for Gina’s Space align with what you’d like and, more importantly, it will tell me what you don’t like. And please, please don’t be afraid to give me constructive feedback about this newsletter or what you’d like it to do better. I have worked with Theresa May and in London ad-land in the noughties, I am used to feedback (and still hate the tories).

This newsletter is for me, but it’s mostly for you – you’re the one receiving or paying for it, and while I want to make sure the (little) money I make from it is proportionate to how much work I put into it, I am pretty keen to invest more of my time and creativity so that we can grow it into something meaty, joyful and really, genuinely helpful.

As a small incentive for filling in the survey:
✹ 1 paid subscriber who fills in it will get a gifted lifetime sub
✹ 1 free subscriber who fills it in will get a free paid lifetime sub
✹ you will all make a nice Northern women extremely happy

Thank you in advance, gifted subs will be announced next week!

G x

1. The name of Nintendo’s lucrative franchise was created through a process known as wasei eigo. That phrase, says language writer John Kelly, literally means “Japan-made English” and refers to the process of Japanese speakers taking “English nuts and bolts” and “assembling them into new Japanese words.” In rare cases, if the term proves popular or useful enough, it then gets borrowed back by English speakers, coming full circle, poké-style.

In a common version of this process, Japanese speakers start with English words — in this case the raw materials were pocket and monster — and then “transmogrify” them so they sound like a more typical Japanese phrase and describe a novel concept, Kelly says. The words get spelled out in a Japanese writing system used for foreign words, called katakana, so academics call this step “katakanization.”