WELCOME TO THE YEAR 2000

THIS IS THE FUTURE OF COMMUNICATION

So yeah, it's a newsletter. Been meaning to get around to this for about, oh, six years or so, but you know how it is. I've had a box on the website for most of those years saying "leave this ticked and I'll occasionally send discount codes and stuff" and yes, six years is admittedly a bit of a stretch if we're using the word "occasionally". 

There has not been a single month that Christopher MycoPunks hasn't been trying to cyberbully me into doing some kind of fancy digital newsletter. He's not wrong, but I've not been into the idea.

What it is, right, is this: I'm not really keen on getting emails from companies. For example, I only ever wear Tokyo Laundry pants because I've got brainworms and only owning one brand of pants means I can skip having to make a decision in the morning because there's only one choice (I also only own one brand and type of trousers). This means I'm an accidentally loyal customer of Tokyo Laundry boxer shorts. However, when they email me (and these motherfuckers send a lot of emails) and they're all like "oh hi Dan haha we're best mates now" the sheer insincerity of it all makes me want to shove them into a hedge. Fuck off, brand.

However! Not all of my customers can be arsed with Facebook or Insta (and I don't blame them), so sometimes cool updates and suchlike get missed, and I figure this is actually a reasonable way of getting in touch with the people that have actually purchased something from us. Orangutan Trading Co ain't a big faceless company like Tokyo Laundry, it's just me (and now my handsome chum Patch) grafting away getting spores into tubes and packing all your orders up, so it's about as micro-business as it gets, and your support means a lot to us because it quite literally feeds our kids.

What will (probably) be in this newsletter going forward:

• Monthly roundup of what's been going on
• Infrequent discount codes
• Whatever else is in my brain that needs to escape into the real world
• Newsletter subscriber exclusive products

Exclusive products, you say? Yep, I've got a lot of cool spore prints, but some I don't have enough of for it to make sense creating entirely new product pages, as I'd be out of stock within a month and then all the work of getting product photos and doing all the writing etc would be wasted. 

What I'm gonna do is set up a password-protected page, send out the password in a newsletter, and then only the people reading the newsletter will be able to buy that product. It's a sort-of "thanks" for being a repeat customer.

I'm not going to be doing discount codes in every newsletter as that's mental, but every now and then, yeah, sure. They won't be in these archived newsletters that get posted up on the blog though, because they're time-limited, and the newsletters won't be going on the blog immediatedly.

All Things Fungi Festival '26

It's almost time for All Things Fungi Festival '26! The festival takes place on September 18th - 20th 2026, at the Chiddinglye Estate in Sussex. Last year was my first one, and it was fucking brilliant. Wall-to-wall neurodiverse mushroom enthusiasts, which was great for me because I could have whole conversations without having to constantly internally monitor myself for "oh god am I doing the overtalking about mushrooms again". I'll once again be helping MycoPunks run the Community Mycology Tent, where we have plenty of interesting practical mycology sessions run by some of smartest people you'll ever meet. We've also got free WiFi so you can download your mucky movies for bedtime, we've got sofas, and obviously I'll be there which really should be top billing on the festival adverts but they seem to keep forgetting to put me on there, the jabronis.

WHAT HAVE I BEEN PONDERING THIS MONTH:

The best Dolly Parton quote ever, that I have loved for years, was "Find out who you are, and do it on purpose". Fuck yeah. Other people can perceive you however they like, but just being the real version of you with no masking is the way to live, and my life's been all the better since I've embraced it. She was a top-tier human, the Anti-Trump, if you will, and the world's poorer for her absence. 

So that was the newsletter!

Like I say, that went out a while ago to cool newsletter subscribers, it's alright for my first stab at it. Funnily enough this is my first morning waking up in my own house after All Things Fungi Festival, and I'm already beginning to write the debrief stuff from the festival for another blog post. It was a heck of a lot of fun and I got to meet hundreds of interesting mushroom-loving people. More on that at a later date though, yeah? Cheers for now!