This and more in this week’s edition of HarperTheFox news.
BUTT FIRST!
I Lost My YouTube Channel
Yep, the one I’ve been growing steadily for years.
I honestly am not sure why. My best guess is that auto-moderation dug up some boundary-pushing posts from the winter of 2023. To be fair, I was doing much thottier stuff back then, and it is completely possible that some of it violates YouTube’s current guidelines.
I didn’t knowingly break any rules, YouTube has given me essentially no explanation, and my appeals have been rejected. So, as best I can tell, a robot looked at 2023 Fox and vaporized the whole thing.
Years of careful audience-building: gone. Whoops.
So What Happens Now?
Weirdly, I think this might be good for the newsletter.
Until now, I’ve spent a significant chunk of time every week assembling neat little YouTube roundups here. Obviously, that system is dead. (And I’m sorry that all the old embeds are dead along with it.)
Instead, I’ll give you a short list of links to the places where I routinely post parody songs and other funny videos. Pick your preferred social-media hellscape, scroll back through the last week, and you’ll probably find things the algorithm neglected to show you even if you already follow me.
FOR ALL MY MOST RECENT POSTS, pick your favorite platform!
More importantly, losing YouTube has coincided with a change in how I’m thinking about this newsletter.
For a while, subscriber growth had stalled, I wasn’t entirely sure what this thing was for, and I had quietly assumed I would eventually kill it and point everyone somewhere else. I kept writing for the people already here, but I mostly stopped trying to grow it.
I have completely changed my mind.
Lately I’ve found a groove here that has convinced me there is something worth building: something thoughtful and funny and personal that complements the stuff I make everywhere else. So I’m going to keep tweaking the format and see how good I can make this thing.
And this week I’m trying something for paid subscribers: a Mama Fox Memo.
This is a short, chatty voice memo of the sort I normally send only to close friends. I was actually introduced to this particular form of friendship by the enormous social media personality BigMerla, who I’ve become buds with, and who taught me that busy moms can maintain actual human relationships by lobbing voice recordings at each other whenever they find six uninterrupted minutes.
This week’s memo will include, among other things, a couple of parody-song ideas currently rattling around in my head involving the word follow and the extremely sophisticated comedic technique of replacing it with swallow.
You can help me decide whether any of them deserve to become actual songs.
Offlining the Kitchen
Meanwhile, in physical reality, I am dismantling my house.
For anyone brand new here: for much of the last year, I’ve been preparing to move my family into a camper trailer and live full-time on the road. We plan to give notice on our rental September 1st, which gives us a drop-dead move-out date of September 30th.
So I’ve started taking the house offline, one room at a time. Everything comes out. Baseboards get cleaned. Floors get vacuumed. Door shuts. Nobody goes in there anymore.
This has produced an increasingly absurd house.
Some spaces are empty and absolutely impeccable. Immediately adjacent to them are spaces that look like a bomb went off.
I have an entire wall devoted to things going to the dump, currently composed largely of cardboard and assorted non-food garbage. I have another enormous pile of things coming on the road with us, which my husband wants exploded across the floor so that he can contemplate how to Jenga—or perhaps Tetris—all of it into our available storage. And scattered among the wreckage are little baby-and-toddler play yards where I have established protected zones in which the children can safely exist.
And now I have taken the kitchen offline.
Which is slightly inconvenient, because we still eat.
The handful of kitchen appliances coming with us currently live on the floor of my entryway. Pantry goods are stuffed into white Sterilite drawers along a wall. But, we have three folding tables, two induction cooktops, a countertop convection oven, and an Instant Pot.
And for the last several days, that has been our kitchen.
We’ve been making outstanding home-cooked meals entirely on the back deck and eating them outside. And after all the work of dismantling an entire room devoted to the preparation of food, I’m discovering that apparently “a kitchen” can be condensed into a surprisingly tiny footprint that expands when we need it and collapses again when we don’t.
I’ll report back next week on what other parts of a functioning American household I have successfully rendered unusable.
But it’s not over for paid subscribers!
Down below, you will find my first ever Mama Fox Memo where you get to spend 8 minutes and 16 seconds inside my brain.
See you down below!