Important Inconspicuous Consumption News!

A fun new development.

I did two Inconspicuous Consumption radio interviews last week. In both cases, toward the end of the segment, the interviewer asked me, “Where can our listeners find your work?” And in both cases I said, “Inconspicuous Consumption is at paullukas.substack.com. That’s P-A-U-L-L-U-K-A-S dot substack dot com.”

It felt a bit awkward each time, in part because of the double “L,” in part because I always emphasize the “K” in my surname due to the unusual spelling (people often misspell my name as “Lucas”), and in part because the full “paullukas.substack.com” is a bit long and unwieldy.

That got me thinking: Substack allows its writers to use custom domain names instead of the default “whatever.substack.com” format. I’d never really thought about doing the custom thing, but what if I used inconspicuous.com? That would be so cool!

I had actually looked into registering inconspicuous.com many years ago, when my book came out, but the domain name was taken back then. What about now? I looked it up and found that it’s available for sale via GoDaddy, so I sent them an inquiry. A few days later I got a call from a friendly sales rep who informed me that the asking price was $100,000. I told him that this was slightly outside my price range and moved on.

What if I tried a tried a different extension, instead of .com? I quickly learned that inconspicuous.net would cost $1,700 (a relative bargain compared to .com but still more than I wanted to spend) and that inconspicuous.org was taken. Hmmmm.

Then I considered inconspicuous.info. The more I thought about it, the more perfect it seemed — even better than .com! After all, what is this project about if not inconspicuous information?

I looked it up; it was available for five bucks. Five freaking bucks. Sold!

After purchasing the domain name, I then had to change a few Substack settings and wait for the new domain name to populate. It went live earlier today (shortly after I published the piece about the wooden bird), as you can see if you look at your browser’s address bar. The old URL will redirect to the new one, so it should be a seamless transition.

(Note: If you’re using the Substack mobile app instead of a standard web browser, there’s no address bar, so you won’t see the new URL, just as you didn’t see the old one.)

That’s my fun news. It makes the whole enterprise feel a bit more official, don’t you think? The next time someone asks me where they can find my work, I will proudly say, “inconspicuous.info”!

Paul Lukas has been obsessing over the inconspicuous for most of his life, and has been writing about those obsessions for more than 30 years. You can contact him here.