Contributions to the internet’s low-brow lingua franca

Editor’s note: Fingers has finally moved publishing platforms! This is the first edition of the boozeletter being sent via Beehiiv. Your subscription status should remain unchanged, but migrations like this are always messy, so if you have any problems, please email me: [email protected]. Thanks for your patience, and if you’re interested in more of the details of the move, see the section below.—Dave.

It is this boozeletter’s considered editorial position that drinking in America is best covered with a mix of serious reporting and unserious shitposts. Why? ‘Cause fuck ‘em, that’s why. View-from-nowhere, “I saw The Newsroom and liked it,” title-case Objective Journalism™️ is dumb and bad for many reasons, but one that gets less play is that it is often deeply boring.

Drinking in America is many things, but boring is not one of them. To cover it properly, Fingers has, since its inception, married high-quality investigations and analysis with low-quality memes. I’m mostly talking about the stuff you’ll find at the boozeletter’s official Instagram account (which you should follow if you don’t already, please and thank you), but also the stickers I print on occasion. After all, what are stickers that say “HARD SELTZER IS A PSYOP” and “FOUR LOKO CAN’T MELT STEEL BEAMS” if not shitposts made flesh vinyl? Exactly.

This year, for the first time ever, I’m rounding up Fingers’ best-liked memes of 2024 in one place. It’s my way of celebrating the boozeletter’s contributions to the internet’s low-brow lingua franca (and, candidly, giving myself a little bit of breathing room to smooth out kinks arising from migrating to a new platform.) Without further ado, here are your 2024 Fingers Shitposts of the Year.

Caption (left): The Bushwick is Winston-Salem's newest nightlife spot, serving elevated pre-Prohibition mixology and small plates from a husband-and-wife team that just copied a bunch of bars they saw in actual Bushwick during their three-year stint in the city. Opening soon, reservations required for bar seats.

Caption (right): 🎶 Tale as old as time / song as old as rhyme / Beauty and The Beast Unleashed 🎶

Caption (left): The story, all names and characters portrayed in this meme are fictitious. No identification with actual persons, places, and products is intended or should be inferred.

Caption (right): Hops were originally used as a preservatives for ales on the long voyage to India, &c. &c.

Caption (left): Huberman in the headphones, "AI" in the email signature, elevated elixirs in the near future

Caption (right): Bro let’s just move to Toledo, we can all buy mansions for $75,000, open Ingrid’s like we always talked about, and finally do shit our way.

Caption (left): Reply hazy, try again 🎱

Caption (right): Willet Pot Still Reserve actually has a super-hot girlfriend from camp but she lives in Canada so you can't meet her sorry

📬 Good post alert

If you see a good post that the Fingers Fam should know about, please send me that good post via email, or a DM on Bluesky or Instagram.

🎧 Bud Light’s Gamergate gauntlet, explained

It’s grievance politics all the way down as The Atlantic’s Charlie Warzel joins Taplines to talk Gamergate, Bud Light, and the astonishingly durable power of coordinated harassment campaigns by online reactionaries. Tune in for a cross-discipline episode on how 4chan misogynists proved out a bad-faith playbook to roll flat-footed corporations back in 2014, and why well-resourced firms like Anheuser-Busch InBev are still falling for it a decade later.

Check out the video above if you like to watch your podcasts, or find it on your preferred platform here. Don’t forget to subscribe so new episodes show up directly in your feed!

🧹 More on the boozeletter’s move

On Tuesday, I migrated Fingers from Substack to Beehiiv, with an engineer from the latter platform kindly holding my hand throughout the ~90min process. The move included most of Fingers’ four-year publishing archive and most of its ~7,000 subscribers.

As a blanket statement, if you have any problems—with your subscription, receiving the newsletter, logging into the website, figuring out why something is laid out weirdly when it never used to be, etc.—don’t hesitate to email me: [email protected].

Some notes on the move:

• What this means for you: Hopefully nothing! Because Substack is a layer that sits atop of my payment-processing software (Stripe), all paid subscriptions should have transferred over as-is. Free and paid subscribers can log into Fingers on the web by clicking the link in the upper-righthand corner and enter the email at which you receive the boozeletter. More info on that process here.

• What this means for me: Hopefully something! I’m looking forward to growing Fingers on the Beehiiv platform, which has more customization options and some other tools Substack was lacking. From an operational standpoint, Beehiiv is a good deal cheaper than Substack, too, so I’ll be able to capture more margin: the former will set me back around $1,000 annually, compared to around $4,000 for the latter. That’s significant savings for a small, independent, one-man-band like your fearless Fingers editor.

• Why I migrated “most,” not all, of Fingers’ archives: Like any transfer between content management systems, there was some breakage between Substack and Beehiiv. Most of this was cosmetic stuff, image galleries and so forth. The biggest genuine loss is the comments sections, which are locked into Substack’s platform. It was a tough call to leave those behind, but I believe it’s the right one for Fingers’ future. That said, thank you to everybody who made the comments sections so vibrant on the old platform; hope you’ll do likewise here!

• Why I migrated “most,” not all, of Fingers’ subscribers: We ported over all of the roughly 600 paid subscribers to the new platform, for the obvious reason that they fund my work and I would very much like to keep working. Pretty simple. Less simple was figuring out which of the ~6,500 free sign-ups were actually real, and which were defunct addresses, spambots, etc. Ultimately, we identified more than 2,000 addresses that had a) never paid Fingers a cent; b) landed on Fingers’ list via Substack’s recommendation engine; and c) hadn’t opened an email in the last six months. This more or less confirmed the suspicions I wrote about back in June about the quality of sign-ups Substack was sending my way. No wonder my open rates had been tanking.

Fingers isn’t a newsletter about newsletters (god forbid), so I’ll leave the operational review at that. Other publishers, feel free to reach out if you’re contemplating a similar move and want more details.

On a more personal note, it’s very scary to move platforms when your livelihood depends on it. Thanks to all the paying Friends of Fingers and Fingers Founding Members who have supported this project, especially this year. For the rest of you, consider upgrading to support my reporting in 2025, here’s a discount:

Make sure you toggle to “annual” to take advantage of the deal. Hope to see you on the other side of the paywall.

📲 The best Fingers meme ever and/or lately

Don’t miss out, follow Fingers on Instagram today. It’s free and your feed will thank you. (Not really, that would be weird. But you know what I mean.)