Welcome to mycyberspace !important;
Am I online?
Hello, and welcome to the inaugural post of mycyberspace! If you're as passionate about wine, vintage fashion, the internet, and the art of the lazy luxury lifestyle as I am, you're in the right place.
Introduction
My name is Shannon, and I am a certified sommelier with a background in hospitality, an eye for aesthetics, and a love for all things 80s, 90s, and 2000s.
Though this substack was launched on 09232023, mycyberspace has been around for the past two years.
Originally, mycyberspace was my personal blog on my website: Lazy Luxury. From now on, every one of my websites will no longer have a personal blog. Instead, they are now destinations and online brands. If you want to check out mycyberspace 1.0 - here it is!
That said, I’ve been blogging since 2014. I can’t believe it’s almost been a full decade! I will always love “old school” blogging, which I am very nostalgic for. Though I no longer believe websites are the place for personal blogs (which is a topic I am more than happy to get into here), I think substacks are the way to go.
So here we are!
A little about me:
My name is Shannon, but online, I often go by the monogram of my initials: sSs.
I'm a Certified Sommelier with a Bachelor's degree in Hospitality from the University of Houston. I am also a born and raised Houstonian and am very proud of it; I love Houston and love calling Houston home.
I spent the past decade in California (wine country and the SF Marina District), which I consider my second home. My goal is to become bi-coastal between Texas and California wine country eventually. Though I'm not quite there yet, I'm lucky to visit often. Other interests include cooking & baking, cars, architecture, interior design, and music.
Today, I'm a full-time digital creator with various brands (Lazy Luxury, 019 Wine, Texaspacific, Plaza Vintage… and something new coming soon!) and content creation, creative consulting, and digital brand development for others.
All my brands & work are inspired by nostalgia, especially the 80s, 90s, and 00s, with a hint of vaporwave and early internet. If we are being honest, all my brands are inspired by growing up in both The Woodlands & Houston (with notes of Dallas!), as well as wine country, Healdsburg, and San Francisco's Marina District. I’m also focusing on all my brands with a web3 point of view.
My end goal with my brands is to create an interactive online world that merges Texas, California, and Wine Country into an immersive experience with a hospitality focus. I also hope to create a platform for those in the hospitality industry (especially somms) to make money online, sharing their passion. I say it over and over and over, but sommeliers are wine influencers by definition. They are the original wine influencers. Let’s get them paid like influencers.
One thing I know for a fact: the following of any working sommelier is local, hyper-engaged, and is probably there exclusively for the wine content.
I very strongly believe this money is better spent on the sommeliers, ESPECIALLY the Masters or anyone pursuing any certification with the Court. I also strongly believe any wine brand will see a much higher return when they work with the stewards of the industry (who all are online, making great content, and most of the wine brands follow anyway) rather than randoms based on numbers.
Every single sommelier I know is extremely passionate about wine but also extremely creative and organically shares about wine online. It’s impossible to be a sommelier and not have a passion for wine. I’d love to see more explore the “influencer” world.
I spent my first decade in the workforce in the sommelier/hospitality world and the second decade in the online / influencer world. I know and understand both worlds very well, so I’d love to help get them out there.
A Taste of What’s To Come
mycyberspace will be my personal blog. If you ever followed me during the “Champagne at Shannon’s” or “essellesse” days, it will be very similar to that. Just blogging like it’s 2015.
I have two options: free and paid. The free version gets you access to a variety of posts. The paid version will be more exclusive and interactive with my brands, as well as a full post archive. Any super, super personal posts will be for paid access only. That’s just how I roll.
Paid will also get you first access and discount codes to my new vintage shop, Plaza Vintage, which launched on 091423. All drops will be launched first for paid subscribers before being released to the public.
Topics on mycyberspace
I have so many posts that I am already so excited to share! Topics you can expect here are:
Wine, wine, wine! As a certified sommelier, that’s obvious. :-)
Vintage fashion & sourcing
Fashion round-ups… one coming almost immediately after I publish this because the sale ends tomorrow!
My creative process, as well as how I work with AI
My journals and my journaling (toying with posting my actual pages with a paid membership)
My thoughts on everything digital, AI, the metaverse, web3, blogging, social media, etc… you name it. I have LOTS of thoughts, and I can get pretty controversial with this.
The influencer and online world (which is where I live right now)
Music & playlists
Photo Albums! I’m going to treat this a lot like the early Facebook days and the Photo Albums there
A behind-the-scenes look at all of my brands: Lazy Luxury, Texaspacific, 019 Wine, and the newly launched Plaza Vintage
All my sourcing for Plaza Vintage and early access to drops. Also, are you looking for me to source something for you? That is included with the paid membership (more on that in a future post).
Personal updates, thoughts, and musings! Speaking of updates…
Online Updates
A big reason why I started this Substack is because, right now, my brands are going through a pretty gnarly transfer. Long story short, I moved my brands from WordPress to a different platform in 2020. This was a huge career mistake on my end.
I am a team of one (and my AI, which I always joke is my one coworker, but on a serious note, I also couldn’t do it without my AI). I do all my front-end and back-end. I do all my web design. I do all my graphic design. Every single thing you see from me online, I do myself. I have no team or outsourcing other than my AI.
Since I do everything myself, unfortunately, I did it wrong. As a result, the original 2020 transfer was clunky. After transferring, I’ve been unknowingly building websites with an unstable base. On top of that, all the other back-end updates (new domains, etc.) never went smoothly. As a result, my sites had many back-end problems that accumulated over the years. These are the types of problems that, in return, ended up making my sites unindexable.
Not to mention, the other platform was expensive. To put it into perspective, hosting all 5 of my sites (yup, I have another one coming soon) on WordPress is equivalent to hosting ONE there. And all of them were on there.
It became crystal clear that the easiest way to move forward is to start completely from scratch and transfer what makes sense to WordPress. This transfer is a long process.
I’m not anti the other platform at all, and I think it’s a great place for beginners. It just wasn’t the right platform for what I was trying to build. And if anything, I gained a new skill! I can now say I understand various platforms well. I know how to create a good-looking and unique website there. I also learned the back end better and learned from my mistakes. Anyone who uses that as their base can hire me to help them, whereas I wouldn’t know how to use it three years ago.
I was on WordPress for 7 years. The other platform for 3. They are extremely different and have completely different interfaces. Now, being back on WordPress, I am pretty rusty with it. As I build my sites there, I am also reteaching myself WordPress. It’s wild when something so familiar is now foreign!
During all this, I also decided to remove all personal blogging from my websites for good. I am doing this because of how the brands evolved and how I want the websites to be laid out. It is not my blog, nor is it about me. Instead, I’ve always seen what I was building as an Online Oasis, a destination for others to relax online.
I also had to come to terms with the fact that we are no longer in web2. We are in web3. Utilizing the internet and blogging as a whole is just different now. This was also something I actually grieved for a long time. To this day, I still miss the 2000s/early 2010s of the Internet. I was stuck in the blogging & Instagram world of 2014-2018, but it no longer exists. And it never will again. Let go or be dragged.
For now, the old sites are still showing up (except for Texaspacific, which shoutout that absolute doll of a site because it’s the only one that has given me zero problems ever since conception in 2020). It’s because I am working on the new layouts for all the sites on WordPress, so I am keeping the old ones up in the interim. I’ll announce here when they are live.
So until then, now I have a place where I can blog, post, and honestly just hang out online whenever I need to take a break from all of the above.
SO- that’s the big update. If things have seemed weird and stale, that’s why. Making things online is kind of weird because it’s easy to think it’s instantaneous. In reality, anything you see online from me in an instant takes weeks, months, or sometimes even years to create.
That said, what is coming next, I am SO excited for. My brands evolved in a way I could only dream of, and I am excited to get back to smooth sailing online.
I am also so incredibly excited about Plaza Vintage. Plaza has been five years in the making, and I have so much inventory. My goal with Plaza is not money but instead continuing to give life to the past. I am so incredibly inspired by the 80s/90s/00s. Sourcing vintage is one of my favorite things to do, and I like to think I have a unique taste!
I have always wanted to start a Vintage shop. I was about to launch it in 2019 when I lived in the Marina, but then I got married. And then COVID happened. Then we moved to Texas. Then I deleted everything (literally everything: my old blog, my influencer instagram with 20K followers, everything. deleted NOT deactivated) and went offline for years. Also I have zero regrets about that. Then, a few other life changes that, if I ever share, will be paid access only.
Finally, it’s time, and the first drop will be live soon. And mycyberspace will know first. :-)
If all this sounds like your cup of tea (or glass of wine!), make sure to hit that subscribe button. Better yet, become a paid member to access exclusive content, Plaza discounts, vintage sourcing, and VIP access to something else coming soon! And for anyone generous enough to donate as a Founding member, you will have a permanent discount code at Plaza for all purchases.
Thank you for being part of this journey from the start. I am happy to have you here. Here's to a life well-lived and well-loved.
xx sSs