incredible things being revealed on RichStack
What you're missing in the Moby Dick groupchat
This edition of Deez Links is brought to you by Squarespace, which is where I built my personal website, deliacai.com. This is your sign to finally make your site, too, using this link with the code DEEZLINKS for 10% off.
Unfortunately I will always click on any headline that guarantees a New York apartment disaster story, which is how I got sucked into Alyssa Coscarelli’s Substack post about a nightmare basement dogcare situation and then punted out the other end on her Rec League page. Have you guys heard of Rec League yet? Besides its very brazenly Substack-inspired page design, it appears to be a platform that promises to do away with that pesky middle step gunking up the mighty business of influencer affiliate linking (that is, writing and reading parasocial-forward text) and plugs you straight into your favorite influencer’s product recommendations instead. Came across this the same week that Byline launched Buyline, a shopping column that is also an insouciantly text-lite product round-up. I was talking to Kyle about this, and he made the classically astute observation that influencers are the new retailers. Well! I guess we are all getting aligned on the real reason for being online, at least.
I know you don’t need another group chat or a book club to join but WHAT IF it was a book club group chat dedicated solely to discussing Moby Dick? That is the situation occurring over on the Deez Links “subscriber chat” for the next few months because I finally cracked open Mr. Melville’s finest for the first time a few nights ago and was floored immediately (and that alliterative skill is why we made it 10 years into the game, folks).
My first Moby-related revelation is that apparently I’ve lived 33 years on God’s green earth without knowing where “Call me Ishmael” and the general “Call me ____” structure came from? When I flipped to the first page (of my giant beautiful creamy-papered Arion Press edition) (not an affiliate link lol just sharing for the love of the type-setting game) and read those words in their proper context at last, I screamed. Having just done my Wuthering Heights homework, I guess I was somewhat prepared for the narrative framing à la the oral tradition — “listen my children and ye shall hear” — but for some reason it really cracked me up because that intro just felt so TikTokker intro-coded in 2026. Hey guys, it’s me, story time, here’s how I wound up on a ship in the middle of the Polynesian coast. Reader Colette Keane had a good theory on this in the chat (see, if you contribute to the chat you might get cited in Deez!):
So far this is my favorite passage, which is basically Herman being like god I fucking love water, JUST LOVE IT, don’t you love water…
Very curious about where this story goes. Namely, do people in any country that is not the U.S. even care about Substack at all? Or does all that state-mandated healthcare make blogging a bit less desperate and therefore moot as a profession….
Not a knock on Katie and her tweet here, but it is interesting that all the media newsletters that are immediately top of mind are by the boys. Maybe because the girlies are too focused on making $$$ via their shopping newsletters…
There’s RichTok, and then there’s whatever Plum “Original Voguette” Sykes is doing with her Substack, which includes interviewing/doing spon con on the woman who made the Cotswolds “happen” and includes incredible quotes such as, “at one point I even had a water menu with twenty six varieties of mineral water and a tea bar with things like peony tea.” If only Hermy Melvs lived to see those words…
~A message from our sponsor~
Literally the other day I clicked through to a friend’s new website for his side gig, and was impressed. “This site is slick,” I texted him, and he was like, it’s Squarespace! Apparently the design tools have only gotten better to use ever since I built my personal website in 2016; if you use the Blueprint AI Builder, you basically just answer some questions to get the site you need in 5 minutes. Plus, the integrated Squarespace SEO tools make sure your site is optimized to be indexed with meta descriptions, an auto-generated sitemap, the works — ensuring you show up on search engines. Give it a spin, and use this link with the code DEEZLINKS for 10% off.
Hermy Melvs!
Richstack is the term I have been waiting for. Thank you for your service.