I’m always changing how I do things; tweaking, nudging, and sometimes overhauling my process. It’s nice to be reminded that I can learn to do new things, and part of me always believes that this time, I’ve found the perfect method and will never have to change again.

There is no best method, and no end to the search. Balance isn’t an endpoint; it’s a process. Try standing on one leg for a while, you know?

Here are some changes I’ve made to this newsletter, and some that are coming with the new year.

I’ve spent the last couple of months finding a new home away from Substack, and we’ve finally made it happen. Thanks to Editor Emily for all her help setting up the new digs here at Beehiiv, and thanks to everyone at Beehiiv who responded to the many support tickets I filed as I tried to get everything working.

I’m excited about the move; Beehiiv will be a better home for Kirk’s Notes for a number of reasons. Firstly, I find Substack’s willingness to allow hate speech on their platform, including from literal Nazis, to be spineless and pathetic. I’ve heard from readers and listeners over the past year who feel similarly, and who have urged me to move my writing elsewhere. In addition, Beehiiv’s publishing tools are more robust than Substack’s, at least in my experience, which will allow for some nice behind the scenes improvements to how I make this newsletter.

Those improvements come with a (literal) cost, which gets at another reason Beehiiv is a better fit for me. Substack is free to use, but they get a cut of any paid subscriptions. Fundamentally, they’re running a subscription platform, not a publishing platform. In contrast, Beehiiv charges a monthly fee for using their service.

That means another change: I’m counting on reader support not to lose money on this whole thing. Here on Beehiiv, I’ve enabled the ability for readers to contribute if they’d like to. Not a subscription or anything recurring or that comes with extra content, just a one-time deal. So, please consider making a donation!

I actually find paying for Beehive reassuring. In keeping with my general aversion to platform dependence, some part of me just can’t relax while I’m publishing content on a “free” platform. There’s always a cost—as the saying goes, if you aren’t paying for the product, you probably are the product. With Beehiiv, it’s nice and simple. I’m giving them money, and they’re providing tools to publish my newsletter. And there’s no Nazis. Great.

In 2026, I’ll still publish a mix of short essays, updates on my work, and lists of music recommendations. I’ll still share pictures of my dog. The main change will be how I’m going to organize and distribute everything. Instead of publishing a big bi-weekly catch-all newsletter, I’m going to break things up and publish a bit more often. (Just a bit! Like, maybe once a week-ish.) Essays will get their own posts, as will news and updates.

Furthermore, since I know a lot of you like my lists of music recommendations, I’m going to break those out into their own thing. (In fact, I’ve already done it; you can read every list of recommendations I’ve published right here.)

So: going forward, each newsletter you get will be either an essay, a grab-bag, or a list of music picks. Or some other category I haven’t thought of yet. Should make things easier to organize, and allow me to publish a bit more often.

Here are some year-end statistics from Kirk’s Notes in 2025, via the Substack dashboard. Relevant caveats: working at Gawker during Peak Web Media made me pretty allergic to data-driven editorial in general, so I don’t actually make decisions based on traffic metrics. Also, it’s fair to assume that, as with most web traffic statistics, these have been inflated by bots.

The above graph shows the increase in subscribers over the course of 2025 as I finally began publishing regularly. Both my growth and my overall subscriber count are barely a blip compared to the heavy hitters of Substack, but I still love to see a line going up.

Unsurprisingly, the vast majority people read via email - 31,650 views came from email opens. Next was 1,891 views from direct readers on the web. Just 363 total views came from the Substack app. Google provided 270, after which the sources become small enough not to matter.

My four most popular posts of 2025, in order:

I was happy with all four of those posts and think they do represent what I’m trying to do with this newsletter, so it’s nice to see they got the most eyeballs.

On Substack, some of you would “like” a post, which made the little heart number by the headline go up. Given that most people read via email, my posts did not get that many likes, but all the same I am embarrassed by how nice it was to see that a post had more likes than usual. In one of the great tragedies of our age, moving to Beehiiv has stripped my posts of all of their hearts. Some small, sad part of me wonders how anyone will ever know that my writing was liked by anyone.

Anyway, my most-hearted post was Against Platforms, an essay about how I didn’t like Substack and wanted to leave. lol

If you read all that, hey, thanks for caring about my work. And thanks for being here! I’ve got a bunch of other changes in the works, with some big (positive) ones coming for Strong Songs in 2026. But I’ll talk about all that stuff later.

I’ll leave you with these four pics of Appa, taken from a fixed position at approximately 5:02 PM on a Wednesday. She gets dinner at 5PM, and her internal clock is never wrong. May we all adhere to our schedules with such rigor.

Take care, and keep listening-
~KH
12/19/2025