Personal Interlude: "Freebies and Other Marketing
Want flyers? Take heed of this installment
It’s now been nearly a year since the first installment of The Annals of St. Remedius Medical College wafted your way, much like the other effects of overdosing on pickled eggs and beer, and now it’s time for Phase Two. Much like other attempts to define Phase Two, this one took a while, but now there’s a plan. Sorta. Maybe.
To begin, your humble chronicler has been going through either a wave of revived interest in publishing or a midlife crisis, and the practical upshot is a deep dive back into the zines of the 1980s and 1990s. I don’t miss writing for zines back then, considering the fevered egos and general sociopathic behavior of far too many editors and publishers, but I miss the camaraderie and getting free stuff in the mailbox. Zine culture is undergoing a revival, with a lot of us old guard passing on what we learned the hard way to two generations of youngers who want to get away from their phones for a while, and some of just miss bits of weirdness that aren’t attached to some Facebook AI slop factory. Hence, the plan is for St. Remedius to go analog on occasion.
What does this mean to you? Well, if you’re a paid subscriber, you’re going to start getting pledge incentives for your trouble. (For those born at the tail end of the Twentieth Century or within the Twenty-First, the Public Broadcasting System paid for television broadcasts of Sesame Street and Doctor Who and all sorts of weird movies by shunning ads and instead holding regular pledge drives. This usually meant a group of station managers and a phone bank of volunteers taking calls for pledges of money, usually in exchange for getting various items such as autographed books or other items generally difficult to access other than through the pledge drive. Whether it was worth it to listen to a station manager drone on for an hour before returning to the scheduled program is debatable: a Milwaukee PBS station ran for years just by threatening to bring back pledge drives if viewers didn’t send money, and the vague threat was enough to get grown adults to scream in terror.) I’m currently working on a few specials to go out before the end of May, in a nice folder with lots of St. Remedius goodies. The hope is for these to be regular annual packages, with the likelihood of their coming a lot more often based on the latest ideas rattling around in the old tin can I laughingly call a skull.
And for those with free subscriptions, those coming across this via the SubStack app, or those forwarded this by that elderly relative who also mails you porn by accident? Well, you get goodies, too, but you’ll have to work for it. As of this writing, I have a batch of six flyers ready to go out: some of you have seen the Space Battleship Edmund Fitzgerald flyer, but the others are brand new and made specifically for this promotion. All I need is a mailing address and they’re yours: the first 100 who respond get their physical mailbox loaded with disturbing St. Remedius lore.
(Privacy Notice: any personal information, particularly email and physical addresses will ONLY be used to send information related to the St. Remedius newsletter, and will not under any circumstances be sold, traded, given away, or passed on to any other party.)
Still interested? Cool. To get your free flyers, either respond to this email if you’re already on the mailing list, send an email to StRemedius at gmail. dot com, or send a postcard or letter to:
St. Remedius Medical College
2334 West Buckingham Road
#230-204
Garland, Texas 75042
…and include a mailing address where it’s most likely to be received. (If you want it sent to a work address and said workplace screens physical mail, I can’t guarantee that you’ll get your flyers. Sorry, but that’s been a problem in the past.)
The usual disclaimers: Supplies are limited. This offer ends when all flyers are distributed or on May 31, 2025, whichever comes first. No purchase or subscription is necessary, but paid subscriptions won’t be sneezed at. One per recipient. Please feel free to pass this to others so they may participate, but please don’t give others’ addresses without permission. No cash value. rty34pr is the pond.
And in other developments, within the next week, Parker is going to get his wish for worldwide fame and acclaim. (The picture above pretty much sums up his feelings on the subject.) It’s time to set up a Redbubble site just for newsletter weirdness, and that includes lots of Mandatory Parker strangeness. T-shirts, posters, notebooks, throw pillows, and even plans for print calendars. Keep checking back, because things are going to get strange.
Want more hints as to the history of St. Remedius Medical College? Check out Backstories and Fragments. Want to get caught up on the St. Remedius story so far? Check out the main archive. Want to forget all of that and look at cat pictures from a beast who dreams of his own OnlyFans for his birthday? Check out Mandatory Parker. And feel free to pass on word far and wide: the more, the merrier.