Nothing Left to Watch

Welcome back to the wasteland!

Been a bit since the last post, but there's also been a lot going on behind the scenes. For instance I was suspended from Twitter/X last week for "Inauthenticity" despite my account being a decade old and have been given no actual explanation for it. I severely doubt a human being has even been involved in the process. That said, there's little I can do about it from my end.

Anyway, let's get to today's topic. We're in 2026 and we're nearing the end of a lot of things we thought would be immortal even a decade ago. In fact, we're closer than we've ever been before and there is no turning back.

Movies are over. I bet you've heard that statement before but never really put much thought into it. Why would you? Everyone has been saying it for years. On top of it, it's very difficult to imagine how the death of an entire industry will come about or look like, especially one older than any of us alive today. Well, now you have a very good view of it happening right now and right before your eyes. You are witnessing Hollywood dies as we speak, and it's no embellishment or lie. Everything is coming to an end, and it won't be much longer.

The above video from Red Letter Media features a look at the recent trend of a sea of flops flowing out of Hollywood. Not even movies people aren't seeing but movies people have never even heard of, movies that barely even exist. Content being pumped out into a flood with no destination is everywhere and nowhere at once. These works might as well be AI generated because for all the effort it is making the same impact on the audience as someone who pumps a random joke video out online. No one is seeing anything anymore, and that isn't going to change.

And the question of why that might be is an interesting one. The younger generations are not watching movies or TV anymore. The only thing that makes money is old IP (which means it is primarily Gen X, Y, and Millennials, watching what is put out) and nothing new is being created or built up. There is no younger audience being cultivated which means the industry is destined for the grave. Much like comic books and the music industry before it, the old ways are not attracting new faces anymore. The only people keeping the old crumbling machinery operating are the nostalgic who still consume the old IP hoping for some of that old forgotten magic to return again. Some even tell themselves that it's just as good as it's ever been. This isn't a formula for growth, creativity, or anything new being done, it's just stagnation.

While this is going on in the foreground of the industry for all to see, behind the scenes hides an even bigger disaster.

At this point, it's all just fighting over scraps. Whatever idea that creativity was ever a part of the formula has long since been lost to cynicism and grifting the next couple of bucks out of the nearest mark. This is the only idea anyone in charge has left. There is nothing being built in these formerly big spaces, it's all in decay.

The older generations only want nostalgia and the younger generations want nothing. Nobody wants a future, so one is not coming. In a few generations these industries will be gone, dead, and buried, with the geriatric Gen Y kids who couldn't let that IP die . . . well now they can then be buried with it. So in the end they get what they want.

Though there are plenty of younger people interested in old artforms, none are actually interested in the current state of any of these industries. No one wants to be a movie star or a director, they want to watch Charles Bronson or see David Lynch's filmography. No one wants to go to the theatre, they'll watch an old movie on streaming or (increasingly) DVD and Blu-ray instead. No one wants to rent from Blockbuster, but they want to know how the rental industry worked. In essence, it's more interesting as a myth than as it currently stands, like walking by the ruins of an old civilization and barely remembering it was there not that long ago.

The above example of the video store is actually the subject of a brand new game released on Steam that appears to be gaining traction recently. Retro Rewind: Video Store Simulator is about running a rental store, specifically, in the early '90s when rental stores were at their peak. There is a good reason for that.

This is because despite appealing to that Gen Y nostalgia, it was also a unique time in modernity not likely to ever be repeated again, and this is really the only way to present it in a way that makes sense to modern sensibilities. There isn't any way to really explain to people who weren't there how these places operated or why they were a big deal.

But now they can have at least an idea.

One might be surprised at how interested younger folks actually are in these old mediums: movies, TV shows, music, video games, and comics. They are just, like everyone else, not interested in the current zombie versions of these things as they exist in in the void of Current Year. One can't blame them for that. They want something made for them, but their generation gets nothing but table scraps and cynical brain rot appealing to keywords and hashtags (the modern version of buzzwords) that exists only to pander and grift a few dollars out of their already slim wallets. No one is aiming for them because they have no idea who they are.

These industries are all fake, and they know it. However, that doesn't mean they don't still hunger for art and entertainment that means something to them. Everyone will always want that. They just know they won't find it in the modern world where everyone is out to get them, not speak to them. It's just a lost cause.

So what actually is the solution? How does one even talk to the younger generations when we don't even speak the same language anymore? Can it be done?

No, probably not.

The only solution is to create a society that values high trust, shared values, and community. It would have to be the opposite of today's hyper individualist (yet, paradoxically, highly conformative) society of backwards language, constant political agitation, and hatred of the past. As long as these divisions exist, there will never be any sort of world like that one that was lost. It will just be more division and less in common until we are little more than several billion little islands floating around detached from each other in the sea of modern society. It's a dead end.

Until then, well, this is what we're left with, and this is all we'll have. Better get used to it, because we'll eventually lose that too. That's just where we are now at this point in time.

I'll leave you with this bizarre (and oddly common) find on YouTube, before that, too, is also eventually swallowed by the void. Travel back to this strange mirror universe of 1991, back when you still had a shared culture and wonder where it all went.

Because it's not coming back again, and the younger generations seem to understand that a lot better than we do.

Thanks for reading! I'll see you all again soon enough.

In case you missed it, I have a recent entry in my "Fantasy Isn't Real" series up on the Patreon! This one is about Anti-Wonder!

Learing Lesons

Welcome back to the wasteland!

Been a crazy February, and March isn't looking to slow down. Here's hoping the weather does, at the very least. I'm still working slowly on various projects and dealing with some annoying real life things, but I'm also still thinking about topics to discuss with you all.

And today's is a good one, so let's get right to it.

Recently, one of the topics that has been running through my head (to the point it became a topic on my podcast), is the subject of Edutainment. It's more about how the definition of Edutainment has stayed the same over the years, but its perception since I was a kid has changed, and not for the better. What was once seen as a joke is now taken seriously, and it has made entertainment and art as a whole considerably worse and less inspiring. I don't think anyone can deny this with a straight face: Edutainment is lame, but now we insist it's not..

The reason for this change is still quite unclear to me, though it's undeniable that a shift exists, at least with those around my age and slightly younger. At some point we came under the delusion that Edutainment was not only extremely effective (it isn't), but it's also worth defending and reshaping entertainment around (it's not).

But there is no reason for this silly belief. Edutainment is a perversion of both entertainment and education, taking the worst parts of both without offering anything in return to make up for its deficiencies. An invention of the 20th century in an attempt to subvert the mass media landscape, all Edutainment has ever done is fail and leave no mark on the minds of its viewers beyond mockery and a neutering of both Entertainment and Education. It just doesn't work.

The reason for this is because both Entertainment and Education exist to do different things, and cannot be crossed over with the other in a satisfying way. Of course this does not mean you cannot be entertained while learning or learn something from entertainment, but that those are secondary to the primary reason said things exist in the first place. You can't prioritize both. It's simply impossible.

Entertainment exists to entertain, it is primarily for leisure. It is meant to allow the audience to relax and unwind, to allow the audience to rest in the place they have chosen to lay their head down. Art exists to allow the patron to appreciate a slice of reality from an angle they might not have expected. There is a sense of trust between the artist, the art, and patron, that involves both understanding and like-mindedness. They all come together to connect for a wider purpose for everyone involved.

No one engages in art and entertainment to be educated: they come to be enlightened. There is a very subtle, but important, difference here. Enlightening means to be shown a world apart and yet close to the one we live in and seeing a new side of it. It does not mean teaching or lecturing the audience about a specific subject. This difference is not as appreciated these days, but it's still reality, and one of the reasons the audience trusts the mainstream industry less and less.

We have lost the original point of what we're doing.

Education, on the other hand, exists to instruct and teach. It requires a very specific type of relationship between the two parties, one above the other. This cannot be an equal relationship where one gives and one takes: it involves one side deliberately speaking down to another party in order to educate them on the subject the student agreed on in order to be there in the first place. This is why so many kids don't learn much in school: they not only didn't agree to this relationship, they also aren't looking to learn in the first place. Education only works when the relationship is agreed upon and the student and instructor are engaged and on the same page. It cannot work otherwise.

This is the opposite of how art and entertainment works. One is done on even ground, the other is not. It's a fundamental difference which precludes any sort of mashup from working, and they clearly do not from any example we have seen over the past decade especially.

Edutainment dilutes entertainment by making its focus on that unequal partnership with the audience. It also dilutes education by masking it in a fog of entertainment and blunting any point that is supposed to have been gotten across through learning. In essence you're getting entertainment without the wonder and mystery, and you're getting education without the focus and clearcut language and relationship between a student and teacher. You are getting the worst version of both at the same time.

And everybody knows this.

This is why obvious propaganda like Captain Planet was a punchline among all the kids when it came out. Everyone knew what it was and it was terrible at doing what it wanted to do. The lessons were unsubtle and not very clever, and the entertainment value was stunted so that those kids wouldn't get the wrong impression of violence or adventure as anything but controlled and neutered. Neither of these approaches satiate childhood wonder.

It was much like how Peggy Charren and her ACT group forced educational content into kids shows and was never not a punchline in the schoolyard. Remember the GI Joe lessons at the end of episodes? The ones that had nothing to do with the show and were crammed in? That was because of her and her ilk. If you don't remember that then there is also the Sonic Sez segments in the Sonic cartoon which had marvelous lessons such as "Don't climb into the dryer" which is as ridiculous as it sounds. You can also find them on YouTube with a comment section filled with people laughing at them, some of which weren't even around when said shows aired.

This is how you know they failed at what they were doing.

All this aside, an other issue is that this lame moralizing occurs while at the same time executives and parent groups keep dictating what sorts of "lessons" shows should be taught to the kids, thereby affecting the creation of these series from people that had nothing to do with their creation. Again, all this was supposedly for kids but no kids liked them and they were always treated as lame punching bags, which is how they stayed for decades.

But recently that changed as the people now in charge of the entertainment industry have decided they want to lecture the customers in everything, because they see themselves as above those they are supposed to entertain. It doesn't matter what gets put out, if it has the correct message then it is considered a net good and anyone against what they are doing, for whatever reason, must be a Bad Person. There is simply no other explanation for this madness. This would be like if those parent councils browbeat all the kids back in the day who made fun of Captain Planet for being lame: Who cares if it's lame, it's right!

The thing is, it actually doesn't matter if it's right or not: it has failed as entertainment. It has focused on the lecturing first and left the entertainment a distant second in consideration, and the audience can tell. This approach is a dead end, and it's why no one in charge of these industries can produce anything of value that connects with a wider audience anymore. They can't do this because their priorities are backwards and they have no intention of being humble and realizing that.

This doesn't mean you can't "say something" in art and entertainment. It's more that what you say is meant to be baked in to the piece you're creating. The themes and meaning come from the story the artist has to tell. It comes from the music, the art, the creation, itself. This is how you sometimes get interpretations of pieces not originally intended by the creator. It isn't because either party is wrong but because they see reality from different angles and are able to come together over the piece and find new wrinkles in it together. Regardless, it is impossible to create art without meaning, but it is possible to miss the meaning in the creation process. This is because the primary importance is in the creation: not the intended meanings.

Another way to put it is that education is about learning what you can and can't do when learning about a subject; entertainment is about seeing all the subject has to offer. They are entirely different approaches that cannot mix together.

Edutainment is one of the worst and most embarrassing failures of the 20th century and it is one that has no business carrying over in the 21st. No one learns anything from it, and no one is entertained by it, and yet we pretend it is successful when both the least imaginative and most didactic people are the ones who push for it, thereby proving its failure right out of the gate. If this is the kind of people edutainment produces then it's clearly well past its expiration date.

Instead, let's strive to improve both the dismal state of modern education and create a new ecosystem for art and entertainment. They both need it instead of us constantly hiding behind a failed mutation that has no place in today's climate.

And maybe we can finally leave the failures of the past behind us. We can finally have those better ways we were promised long ago. We're well past due for a new golden age of art and entertainment. Let's make it, together!

That's all for this week! See you all next time!

Check out Cirsova's Winning Secrets campaign and help it reach 5 digits! It's close to crossing the line into a mega success!

Help Out An Author

This is a cross-post. Please read.

From Hans Shantz over on Substack:

Russell and Morgan Newquist have long been active members in the Based Book community. Through running Silver Empire press, and through their own novels, they set an example for us all how to create and promote Based Books.

Now, their daughter, Sera, is suffering from serious cardiac problems, and Russell and Morgon have had to travel hours away from home to ensure that Sera gets the care she needs.





They will need to be at a downtown hotel within walking distance of the hospital, and that can get pricey. Plus all the other expenses that come with a crisis of this magnitude. Let’s help them out

Russell and Morgon have made it clear that any money not used directly for the expenses of this event will be donated to the Children’s Hospital of Alabama because they treat everyone regardless of ability to pay.

You may donate directly via GoFundMe, and consider also picking up one of their excellent books.



War Demons: A Supernatural Thriller
When he came home, so did they...

Driven by vengeance, Michael Alexander enlisted in the Army the day after 9/11. Five years later, disillusioned and broken by the horrors he witnessed in Afghanistan, Michael returns home to Georgia seeking to begin a new life. But he didn’t come alone. Something evil followed him, and it’s leaving a path of destruction in its wake.

The police are powerless. The Army has written Michael off. Left to face down a malevolent creature first encountered in the mountains of Afghanistan, he’ll rely on his training, a homeless prophet, and estranged family members from a love lost...

But none of them expected the dragon.

Jim Butcher’s Harry Dresden collides with Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter International in this supernatural thriller that goes straight to Hell!

Hellgate (Neighborhood Watch Book 1)

Emilia King has made an art of bad choices. Just ask her mother, she’ll tell you every single thing she’s done wrong for years.

When her latest bad choice changes the locks to their apartment and leaves all her stuff on the doorstep, Emilia can’t bear to hear “I told you so” one more time. So she moves in with her grandfather. Then she can have some space to figure out who…and what she wants to be, without her mother breathing down her neck.

What she finds there is anything but peace. Her grandfather battles invisible creatures in the dark. Neighbors torn apart by wild beasts.

Not to mention the moody, gorgeous man across the street with the motorcycle. The kind of man that’s her kryponite.

But when her grandfather falls ill, his position of head of the Neighborhood Watch falls to her. And in this neighborhood, it’s more than measuring grass height or catching petty thefts.

Down the Dragon Hole:
A Tale of The School of Spells & War

Alis was a quiet librarian at the campus library of the School of Spells & Magic - that is, until the sword wielding buffoon Cahan had the audacity to battle a dragon in her library! Now she's following him off on some foolhardy adventure. As they try to save the university from the mysterious Formless, she fights an equally important battle - to maintain her self respect!

The School of Spells & War is an ongoing collection of old fashioned sword-and-sorcery adventure stories following a wizard and warrior duo as they galavant across the continent of Thillon. Good-humored, powerful warrior Cahan and intelligent, skilled wizard Alis work together to serve their university, the school of spells and war, by battling dragons, investigating plots against the king, hunting witches, and dealing with the ongoing threat of the ancient and mysterious Formless.


Here’s to a speedy and successful recovery for Sera, and thank you all for being part of the Based Book community.

Hans

Coming Soon: Winning Secrets!

Welcome back to the Wasteland!

I have a bit of a surprise to unveil for readers today. I don't usually post these sorts of things, except that one of the parties involved is Cirsova, the best NewPub publisher out there today, and one of the inspirations for getting me into the Pulp Revolution (as well as the man who wrote the foreword to The Last Fanatics), Jeffro Johnson.

As a consequence there is no way I could let this release go without highlighting and commenting a bit on it myself.

Jeffro and Cirsova's new work will be on Kickstarter next week, but you can look below for a preview of what to expect!

Longtime game blogger Jeffro Johnson earned Hugo nods for his in-depth analysis of AD&D’s Appendix N, in his book Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons, as well as for the work he did as the editor-in-chief for the Castalia House blog.

During the COVID shutdowns of 2020, Jeffro and a group of friends gathered to explore a unique objective: explore the early D&D rulesets as thoroughly as possible. This was the birth of the nascent BrOSR movement, an effort that would take the implied goal of the Old School Revival (OSR) seriously.

The BrOSR coalesced as a group of Christian men who, through hearty ribbing and memes, encouraged one another to become better at playing Dungeons & Dragons and produce a better experience at the table.

The group’s principles included playing the game Rules As Written, eschewing homebrewing or house ruling, in an attempt to uncover what the game was truly like when taking author Gary Gygax’s prescriptions seriously. The game contained in the rules contrasts starkly with the “folk game” that D&D had become. While the OSR movement had largely been a vibe-based focus on the aesthetics of the older games, sometimes trying to rebuild them from the ground up, the Bros took an approach that centered on gathering a deep understanding and mastery of the foundational games of the hobby.

Members of this group radically changed the online discussion surrounding D&D, with a focus on RAW, use of 1:1 time, and re-incorporation of David Wesely’s Braunstein as seen in D&D co-creator Dave Arneson’s Blackmoor Campaign. In to providing extensive public-facing campaign reports, the Bros created Brozer: Island of War and Winter (out now through Cirsova Publishing), a Braunstein adventure product designed to teach other groups how to incorporate these elements, and offered it for free digitally and at-cost in print, moving nearly 2000 copies.

Cirsova Publishing is proud to present Winning Secrets, by Jeffro Johnson, RuleOfThule, and Bdubs1776. Originally conceived as the follow-up to Jeffro’s monograph, “How to Win at D&D,” published by Pilum Press in 2023, Winning Secrets collects the receipts for the style of play that Jeffro and the BrOSR championed. The book chronicles the sessions of Jeffro’s Trollopulous campaign, the first campaign of the BrOSR, and contains essays and commentaries offering insightful examinations of the definitive pillars of BrOSR-style play as well as illuminating the guiding values they champion. 

In Winning Secrets, you will join the Bros in their journey, uncovering the brilliant lost secrets of great campaigns which gave birth to the D&D game rules. You will see the complete story play out of how this arcane lore was won through Jeffro’s paradigm-shattering Trollopulous campaign.

In this landmark work, you will find:

    • A persuasive case for why contemporary approaches to RPGs cannot deliver on the game that was promised by the early D&D rule sets.

    • A thorough breakdown of the four pillars of Real D&D, lore from the dawn of RPGs that will elevate the excitement and engagement at YOUR table!

    • A detailed history of how Jeffro discovered these secrets and how he and his friends developed solutions to the challenges offered by high level play.

    • An explanation of why only Christian brotherhood could break down the barriers that were preventing all of us from experiencing the RPG campaign of our dreams.

    • The recreation of a lost artform and an entire world of gaming knowhow that Jeffro pulled out of complete oblivion.

This book will change the way you think about D&D forever. More importantly, it will show you how the game was intended to be played.

Praise for Jeffro Johnson’s "How to Win at D&D":

"These 30 or so pages of text in this book are the most impactful and important 30 pages I have ever read when it comes to tabletop roleplaying games and wargaming. It has changed the wayIi approach these games. This book put everything into focus for me, why I wasn’t having fun and didn’t feel good about the games I was running and how to run better games. I've bought five or six copies and have given them to each of my players and I recommend it to anyone I know who plays or wants to play D&D." -- Jon Asharan

"For the scholarly reader interested in the history of RPGs, this book is indispensable. It is thoroughly researched and, in my academic opinion, convincing." -- Gabe Mamola

Praise for Appendix N: The Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons:

"This book may be the most important thing to happen to science fiction, fantasy, and even horror in the past three decades" -- Jim Fear

"An absolute must-read for anyone wanting to rediscover the forgotten literary roots of fantasy in general, and role playing games in particular. I have already been blown away by some of the authors mentioned here, and look forward to a great deal more excitement as I progress." -- Sam Hart

Winning Secrets will be live on Kickstarter from February 25th through April 1st: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cirsova/winning-secrets

Cirsova Publishing:

www.cirsova.wordpress.com

X: x.com/@cirsova

Jeffro Johnson:

www.jeffro.wordpress.com

Loss & Game Over

Welcome back to the Wasteland! I hope you're having a lovely weekend on this very unimportant holiday. Today, I would like to cover a subject not quite touched on much these days. That would be the remainder of the 2000s.

Back at the end of the '90s, things were changing, the overall culture was becoming more connected. Windows 95, especially, broke open the dam that allowed people beyond the tech literate into computer ownership and then onto the internet. This was happening the same time the Telecommunications Act of 1996 consolidated the music industry, the ACT finally managed to whittle cartoons down to edutainment garbage and specialty channels, and the comic book industry was flatlining. In other words, the digital world was broadening at the same time the wider culture was shrinking in scope and in possibilities.

While this was happening, the younger generation was being raised on the only remaining wild west left: the early internet. This mysterious place allowed them to pretty much say and do anything they wanted after the rest of the culture had been slowly gutted to the point Bowling Alone no longer looked like a prophecy but the aim of those in charge.

Physical communities and spaces vanished, and new identities were being forged away from tradition, community, and art and creation. These new identities were formed online and they were centered on consuming corporate products.

If you're of a certain age, you might remember the explosion of "Geek Culture" in the early 2000s. This was an invention of megacorps created by feeding internet scenes their products and rewarding them with baubles and warm feelings. The era of the message board and community manager. Stop by the forums, wear your badge in your avatar or sig with pride, and endlessly talk about our Product. It is part of who you are, after all. This is what Geek Culture was, and why it would later be so easy to weaponize it against their customers when they changed their approach.

That this happened right after every offline entertainment sector was gutted by events like the above was not a victory of Pop Culture as a valid identity and goal, but that all those crippled industries could be now folded into one umbrella and make its users part of the Lifestyle Brand cult. You no longer like the Smashing Pumpkins and enjoy playing Quake III: you were now an "alternative rock fan" who was also a "gamer" and that was z very important part of your identity. What you enjoyed then became who you were.

As these identities grew, so did parodies and and mocking. The ever-hated Big Bang Theory TV show epitomized this new Geek Culture identity, and how good nerds all liked "nerdy" things and behaved and thought the same way about every topic and issue. The show was laughed at when it was on, but is it that much different when you visit a random Pop Culture livestream on YouTube in 2026? How different is it? Proudly antisocial, acceptable and safe political views, endlessly snarky and sarcastic like their teenage years ever ended, and still dressed and wearing the same pop culture shirts and showing off the same shelves they did decades ago, the stereotype the show presented wasn't made up: it was based on real behavior.

And that is what hurt the most.

All this preamble is to explain why the above video exists. For the Millennial Geek, G4 was a beacon of Geekdom and an important memory that defined their childhood. For anyone outside of that group, G4 was a cynical cash grab wrapped up in a made up corporate identity. Now, there is truth to both these views, but the full picture is that it was a network that made its mark appealing to a burgeoning socially acceptable Geek identity and it did that very well.

The cracks in what that identity was and how those who helped fashion it for that young generation are both in said above history of X-Play. At the heart of it is a level of seething hatred and anger for the audience that, while not everyone involved felt, is palpable in retrospect, especially in the atmosphere of today's dead pop culture institutions being constantly skin-suited for spare change. They've never really liked their audience, because they never knew them, and their idea of who their audience was never actually existed in the first place.

This attitude spins out into modern day. Why does it seem like there's so much contempt and hatred for the audience thinking the Wrong Things and why are they not falling in line like they once used to? Why shouldn't I be allowed to selfishly slaughter the works of Tolkien or even the creation of the Hasbro corporation whenever I want to? Why should I give the audience anything they want? Don't I matter most of all?

The fact of the matter is that there was never any real connection between us and them, it was always smoke and mirrors. The old adage that someone's always selling you something extends to TV networks: what exactly were they selling their audience? Not just products, but what was the deeper worldview they were selling? What was acceptable at the time was acceptable because those in charge deemed it so.

Just like a YouTuber who was throwing gamer words around in 2013 at the age of 27 pretending they were "ignorant" at how acceptable it was: it's all a pose. Back then it was simply a way of weaving through what was culturally acceptable to profit off of at the time . . . which is no different than how it works right now. There was never any "edge" it was all just selling an image, and now the image is no longer profitable. It was never real, it was always fake, and at no point was genuine connection the point of what was being done. That is why it is so easy for such people who do this to hate their customers: they never cared to begin with. And this is the hard lesson those who grew up with the fake Geek Culture back then had to learn.

The wild west days of the internet are gone, and there is no equivalent today. Younger generations are moving away from entertainment sectors into their own worlds, whether it be to short form internet videos, old entertainment detached from the modern complex, or creating their own spaces. There is no younger generation with any ties to the way things once were. There is no uniting aspect of culture today except that there is no culture.

All of this comes together to show why the relaunch of G4 was such a disaster: it had no place left and no one to connect with except to cynically reach out to the audience they "wish" they had, which is the same story with every failing part of every industry these days. Having to rely on an audience they never liked to begin with makes them bitter and resentful, wanting desperately to be seen as Good by the designated Good Guys, instead of fading away into irrelevance due to the complete lack of humility and gratitude that got them there in the first place.

I've seen it myself, too. I've personally had the creator of Twisted Metal and God of War tell me directly straight out how much he dislikes Gamers, the very audience who gave him a career. So seeing a host of a G4 series do the same is not surprising. The hatred of the ones who made them and the desire to appeal to those who hate them is a spiritual sickness that defines the back half of the 20th century so very well and why it lead to where we are now.

There is no future resurrecting these old crusty time capsules, because they aren't what we got out of them. They are always going to be what they wanted to be, first and foremost. The same goes for ancient IPs and companies. They're over and done, and they're not coming back, not even if you put the "right" person in charge. This is the last hurdle those older than Zoomers have to finally understand. We can't go back to that. It's finished.

So we should treat it as just that.

Anyway, here is a bonus video from the above creator on Loss, a meme from the same era which reveals much about that era in turn.

Have yourself a great weekend and I will see you soon.

Check out this crowdfund from Pilum Press and support some of the best writers in NewPub today!

World of Pulp

Welcome back to the wasteland!

It's been a crazy decade+ since the pulp revolution first kicked off in earnest way back on those initial blog posts (since collected in one book here). No one would have guessed way back then that so much of what was being said would become standard advice in the NewPub world after over half a century of slander and libel against them proved so effective. At the time it felt like an uphill battle to even give the pulps are fair shake at all.

Back when I first published in 2016, no one was talking about the pulps as anything but either a problematic punchline, or something you had to scrub clean if you wanted to take advantage of what they created. In the time since that era, however, things have changed 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Now saying that you are inspired by the pulps is a selling point to just about anyone looking for something to read.

The pulps have gone from persona non grata into being the belle of the ball. It's still a bit hard to believe for anyone who has been around that long.

The above video is just one example of many in how newer writers are no longer told to tiptoe around the idea of the pulps, especially in a market hungry for something exciting and outside of OldPub's safe boundaries. You can do anything, and all writers and readers need to know that: the dusty old formulas are done and finished. The best example we have are the pulps, and now everyone knows it. Go big or go home.

This is now considered mainstream advice to read and learn from the pulps, without even considering any "problematic" elements, and that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago. Even those in more normie adjacent spheres and platforms say the same thing.

Here is another example from not so long ago of someone praising the pulps from an angle no one would have considered before recent times:

If you haven't noticed, the "problematic" nature of pulps was either barely mentioned or not even talked about at all, which would have been unthinkable post-1940 before now. This is the shift I mentioned way back in the Pulp Mindset: the writing world is different now and the future is in NewPub where the rules have radically changed.

And as things change, so to does how we print and acquire our books. There is more to discuss outside of the stories themselves.

You probably noticed, for instance, how bad Amazon has gotten recently. The downgrade isn't just for general consumers but also for writers and readers as well. It's not only harder to reach customers or gain any momentum on a dead algorithm, but it's also difficult to find a price balance that matches the quality writers want to deliver and readers want to pay for. The options are not exactly getting better any time soon.

This also ties into the recent death of the best available print option for books, the mass market paperback. With OldPub ceding the field and giving up on reaching normal people, what can those in NewPub do to change this?

Here is a report from NewPub maverick Kristen McTiernan, the "No-Nonsense Editor", on some of the new publishing options going forward due to Amazon's collapse, her focus on using pulp as the guiding light.

Not only do we have to consider changing our stories, but now the very formats they are being distributed into may very well change in the near future as well. Whatever is left of the old 20th century OldPub model is slowly crumbling away.

And, to be honest, it is more than overdue.

We're a quarter of a century into the 21st. That's 1/4 of the way into a new era and one rapidly escaping the clutches of a dead time and place. It was never going to stay the same forever.

As can be gleamed, there is much to ponder going forward into the Unknown, but it is more than clear that the status quo will not be so for very much longer. What we thought we knew turned out to be not as much as we figured, and now it's time to correct course. And it looks as if what that entails will be revealed sooner than later.

Whatever happens going forward from here, should be very interesting to see.

Thanks for reading, and I'll see you for the next one!

Check out Cirsova's second Mighty Sons of Hercules campaign! Close to funding and with many cool surprises inside!

"Do You Understand?"

Welcome back to the wasteland!

We're finally in 2026 and the new year. Hope I didn't keep you waiting too long!

As you can see, things are a little different around here these days. Posts will come out when they come out, and will be about whatever I can make them about. However, most of my writing energy is focused elsewhere this year so it'll probably be a light one for posts. Regardless, here I am, and here is the first post for 2026.

Today's subject is not entirely related to the video above, though it is included in the subject. I realize what a controversial topic the AI thing is and how there are so many triggerwords that set emotions off in different directions when heard or read, but I'm hoping we can bypass all of that to talk about it from a different angle. Instead of talking about "real" or "fake" I want to talk about the future and how we're going to process information. 

The Second Story's video is specifically on how AI is coming about at a bad time for literacy and making it worse, which no one really denies, and she is very thorough in her argument. Whether you are all-in on or staunchly against AI, the truth of the matter is that there are positives and negatives to it neither side wants to acknowledge in order to keep their position pure and just. We can admit that. That is fine and all, but that means there are angles that can't be discussed without a portion of those involved in said argument flying off the handle in a fit or rage or smarmy sarcasm. This isn't exactly a productive use of anyone's time.

None of that will help with today's subject. I want to talk about a part of this whole debate that is never really addressed at all.

Now I know how divisive or tiring the topic might be, but I want to specifically point out one part in the video itself to focus on today. This is on how AI affects not art or even writers or artists, but on cultivating readers.

The clip is here:

 

For as long as I've been alive, and maybe for yourself as well, we've been very busy trying to automate the world to make it easier. The question might be to ask "easier for who?" but even that is not necessarily the subject for today's post.

The end goal of modern society for at least as long as HG Wells was talking about "The World Brain" and what "we should do with ourselves" has been a conscious effort from a gaggle of late 19th/early 20th century materialists to create Eden on Earth. All we had to do was train human beings with the right keywords and phrases and eventually they will become like algorithms themselves, endlessly operating until they fall apart with age to be replaced with new cogs in the machine. Heaven on Earth for those in charge.

However, without any theory of what human beings are beyond meat puppets on strings, they also hold no value of them as living beings because "living" is a vague term that can mean whatever you want. In essence, human beings are nothing but pawns on the board that get instantly replaced with new ones, because that is how those in charge think the world works. They don't actually have any theory in mind for groups or individuals, they don't care who anyone is or what they're apart of, all they want is new pieces to constantly replace old ones.

What's worse is that they don't even remember why they're playing this game in the first place. To them, it's just How It's Done, because that's how their father and grandfather and great-grandfather operated, oblivious in the knowledge that the period they live in is an anomaly in human history, not the advancement of it, and that it is very clearly coming to an end. Whether they realize that of not is irrelevant aside from the fact that they are clearly losing control.

This doesn't mean they will be "overthrown" or "destroyed" or any fancy buzzwords they taught us from the fiction and fictious accounts of history they allowed to be spread, but that they are decayed along with everything else. They might think they're winning, and in a material sense they probably are, but in the end they will also be a cheap mockery of what came before. They do know this. The question is if they can gather the strength to avert from the iceberg before it's too late and they end up like every other era in history they pretend never happened.

So what does all this have to do with literacy?

The point is that we were never taught to actually process information or learn. We were taught to react to key words and phrases to guide is into our slot to keep the factory chugging along, even as it falls apart around is due to misuse. "Literacy" has never actually existed to make us smarter or to build anything new, because that would go against the Spirt of the Age. Those were always just buzzwords to keep us in line and to puff our chests out. Remember the Kid Who Reads archetype from the '90s? The "reading is magic" and "imagination is everything" hokeyness? Those weren't done to make anyone more imaginative or to be better readers. If they were, and if everyone remembers that happened, because it did, why do less people read than ever before in human history?

And no, this isn't about the younger generations, because I can see the technological excuses coming a mile away. I'm talking about the older generations, the ones that were reading Harry Potter while playing Grand Theft Auto: Vice City or Goosebumps while playing The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time decades ago. Why don't they read anymore? They indulged in Reading Rainbow like everyone else, and they read when they were younger. So why not now?

We might be "busier" but every generation was busy and yet they all found time to read. One could also point out OldPub's complete collapse and failure to create readers (In truth, their job is to pass on the "correct" knowledge and behaviors, not teach creativity or spread imagination), but that wouldn't also explain the aversion to indie spaces or classics. At some point, literacy changed focus to relying entirely on catch words and social pressure at the expense of even understanding regime propaganda. They don't even want us to think that much anymore.

Perhaps that should be the question we ask when the fading culture of today drops things on our laps: how will this help us escape the trap we've been stuck in for so long? Will this get us out of the failed utopia of HG Wells and his World Brain? If not, then how is it designed to keep us there and what can we do differently?

For now, we can only ask questions, but if we aren't allowed to ask them, or even teach others how to ask, then we'll be stuck in the loop, destined to decay with the system that created it. And maybe that's the lesson in all this.

Anyway, thanks for reading and welcome to 2026! I'm not sure when the next post will be, but I will thank you for reading for so long. It's been a blast.

Have yourself a good week and I'll see you again.

Cirsova's second volume of The Mighty Sons of Hercules is halfway to being funded! Jump in to get yourself some exciting tales of peplum adventures from the best writers of weird and action today! And grab volume 1 while you're at it!

Goodbye 2025!

Welcome once again to the Wasteland!

We finally made it to the end of 2025! It's been a long and bumpy ride with a lot of surprising twists and turns (especially if you were me), but now we can finally close this one off for good. It's the end of the year!

For this last post of 2025 I merely wanted to thank everyone who stuck with me through it all. It's been a strange one, and next year promises to be even stranger, so you will definitely have much to look forward to from me. However, it probably won't be as much on the blog.

You probably already noticed less posting this year, with a shift to the weekends, and those posts will still continue, but there will be less of them. I need to refocus my efforts on writing stories, especially after everything that has happened in my personal life. Of course I'm going to keep posting here, but it will just be much less of a focus in the near future. That said, I do thank you for every post you've read this year. I am still surprised that anyone reads these at all, since back when I first started writing posts a decade ago I didn't think anyone would be reading them, never mind a full ten years out. It's been a crazy experience.

In 2025, I put out a story in Cirsova Magazine, a new novel serial on the Patreon, and had tales in two different anthologies outside of that. All of them are some of my best work, so please check them out! It's been a weirdly productive year, though not in the way I am used to. Perhaps that's just a sign of the changing times.

That aside, there is still the Patreon where you will get the most bang for your $5. There you will get over 40 episodes of 2 ongoing podcasts, two serials (with a third in planning stages), exclusive posts and updates, and more to come. In fact, there is an end of year episode of the podcast up today about the future! Check it out here.

There are multiple projects in the works for 2026 still to be revealed. I have a story coming in Cirsova Magazine in 2026 (a new Galactic Enforcer tale!), a full-on book that will be released, and a large project that is not mine to reveal yet but is currently deep in the works. On top of that there was a huge shift in my personal life outside of writing that will definitely change how I operate going forward, though I will have to wait and see just how that will happen. Until then I will do my best to continue as I have been.

Regardless, I am not going anywhere.

2025 was also the 30th anniversary of the events in Y Signal, as I've mentioned before. In fact, right now we're living through the 30th anniversary of "Snow Out", the Christmas story in the book. I actually did an entire podcast episode both reading excerpts and talking about it here. But next year will also be the 30th anniversary of the conclusion of the book, which took place in summer of 1996. All that to say is that it will also symbolically be an important year as well. One of the projects I hope to be able to start on is the follow-up to that very book. No, not a sequel: Y Signal has a pretty definitive ending, but a follow-up to it. You can learn a little bit about the background of all of this on the podcast, if you desire.

These specific stories are meant to be both a reflection of a specific era currently being (perhaps deliberately) forgotten and a document of the people who lived there and what they were like and thought at the time. I've mentioned before, but part of the reason these tales came to fruition was due to how the mainstream and Hollywood have been attempting to dilute that period, if they ever address it at all, and are attempting to rewrite it for their own ends. There has been a concentrated attack on the past, and I will not have it. As a consequence, there is nothing like Y Signal or this upcoming project, and there likely never will be.

But beyond that, what do we have to look forward to in the wider culture? The wild west days of the internet are over, Hollywood is bottoming out, video games are shifting away from AAA, and publishing is still a complete mystery. Nothing is solid, especially publishing.

While OldPub is dying, NewPub is still in growing pains. Amazon is quickly fading out and the crowdfunding model is becoming more common, but then what comes after that? We're still trying to figure that out. There are a lot of question marks ahead and there still has yet to be a clear path forming in the haze. We'll just have to see where 2026 takes us from this point on. I can't even begin to guess where we're heading.

The world is a very different place from when I first published the first post on Wasteland & Sky over a decade ago to now. It certainly doesn't feel like it if you only look at the surface. Most of the buildings and sights in every day life are the same, if not rusting and falling apart from a lack of maintenance, but compared to previous decades the stagnation on the surface is obvious. Underneath, however, much has shifted and will continue to shift until the outside matches the current state of the interior. We've got much to look forward to after that.

Once again, I wanted to thank everyone reading my posts, or anyone who has ever read my posts, my stories, my books, or whatever I've put out there. It means a lot that I was able to reach anyone at all from my obscure position on the fringes of life and this scene. I hope to continue for as long as I am able to.

Thanks again for a wild 2025, and let us all look forward to the 2026 ahead. May it shine bright and show us the way forward.

Thank you for reading!

Find out what really happened 30 years ago in Y Signal! The end of the world came sooner than everyone realized!