Friday, November 29, 2024

Gratitude With a Surprise!

Out Today!


Surprise!

This is a time for gratitude. In fact, this whole time of year is. We become grateful we have families, friends, opportunities, good fortune, and, yes, even bad fortune. Just the fact that we're alive at all is a blessing.

For me, being a writer has been a more fruitful endeavor than I ever thought it would be. Just that that there are some people willing to spring on an ebook, paperback, or anthology, simply because I wrote something in its pages is very humbling. Even more so to those very generous readers who joined the Patreon. You are more appreciated than you will ever know.

Today, my newest published short story, "Fade Away to Anywhere," has been released in the newest issue of Silence & Starsong. The description of the story is below:


fade away to anywhere 
JD Cowan Fantasy, Teens and Up 
To Tony, the mall was a home away from home. What will he do when a mysterious danger threatens it?"


This one goes in some strange directions. I can't really go into this story without doling out spoilers, so I'll refrain from it this time. I can say, however, that it has a link with two stories released earlier this year in Cirsova and Sidearm & Sorcery. A lot of these stories are related to each other in ways that will become clear eventually, but you also don't have to know that to enjoy them on their own. I always wants to make sure every story is a good jumping on point for new readers, and this one is no exception. Check out the issue here!

At the same time as this, the Big Black Friday Book Sale is on, like it always is, running until Monday. You can find a full list of books here. There is no shortage of books but you also have a whole week to parse through the entire list. Have fun! There's quite a lot of good stuff.

As for me, I have Y Signal on sale for a dollar for the next week. Now is your chance to finally pick up this weird adventure of time and mortality set in the past.


Find it Here!


That's it for this week! Not much to update on other than I just recently got over a weird 24 hour bug that totally leveled me. It sure isn't fun losing a whole day out of the blue. No idea where that came from but I'm thankful it's over.

And that's what it's all about, I suppose. Just being thankful. We are exactly where we're supposed to be doing what we're supposed to be doing. There's comfort in that knowledge.

Anyway, have yourself a great holiday and a very well deserved rest and I will see you again very soon.






Saturday, November 23, 2024

Weekend Lounge ~ The True Hero's Journey



Welcome to the weekend! It's time to talk about writing.

Every since those terrible space opera franchise movies started came out back in 2015 there has been a lot of discussion on the "Hero's Journey" theory and how it is instrumental to making any story with a protagonist in it good. Without following this formula you were doomed to fail. The conversation was understandable given how little those movies understood how to make compelling characters and stories, but it also revealed that somewhere along the way our perception of what a hero was supposed to be became skewed.

No longer did we await new stories from the machine with baited breath--now we started to question how they would fail following the Correct Formula. In many ways, we still do this, but it does seem to have clamed down in recent years. Regardless, it was an enlightening time to be paying attention to what the audience thought about this shifting culture of storytelling.

Was there really only one formula to write a hero story? Had Joseph Campbell set out to write a handbook that all writers had to follow in order to make a story worth anything? Were we all doomed to failure unless we slavishly copied his One True Path to mythmaking? Was he actually infallible unlike every other man Earth?

What is it about men named Campbell that spur on slavish devotion? Seems to be a very odd modern phenomenon. Does this name give you insight to the inner workings of writing stories? These questions are getting weirder and weirder, aren't they?

Regardless, it turns out that all of the above was wrong. In fact, this modern conversation of mythmaking does not even originate from Joseph Campbell at all, but by a Hollywood screenwriter who reshaped his ideas into a completely separate formula. Somewhere along the way we attributed things to Campbell that he never actually said.

Yes, much like the insipid "Save the Cat" formula that posits audiences cannot understand or process protagonists without having their skulls caved in with a subtlety sledgehammer, a Hollywood screenwriter invented a new formula from whole cloth based on an interpretation of his writings and all writers outside the system now rush to defend said very system currently falling apart from slavishly following said broken advice. "Don't Read Anything After 1980" indeed. I don't know how this bait and switch happened, but it happened.

Let's go into it a bit.

What the Hero's Journey was started as Joseph Campbell's attempt to find underlying patterns in all stories that form an overarching myth for all of humanity. What did stories have in common and what could be shared between them in a large overarching monomyth? He did not cobble a one size fits all formula to write stories, in fact not every story has the same mechanism or tropes, but each has at least some aspect that resonates with others. They all, in the end, point to the same Truth overall. What he was doing was seeing that no matter how different a story was they all played into the overarching monomyth of the human race, but in different ways and with different approaches. What he was doing was the opposite of what everyone expects from the Hero's Journey today. There was no one size fits all formula created by Joseph Campbell.

So how did that come about? How did we get the exact opposite intent of what Joseph Campbell wanted from his work into enshrining it as a one note formula meant to be slavishly followed to create Good Stories? This couldn't have happened organically.

Well, it didn't. The warping of the "Heroes' Journey" came from a book by Hollywood screenwriter Christopher Vogler. What he did was take Campbell's work then build his own formula around it by bending and warping the original purpose into a one-size fits all screenwriting guide. He hammered it in awkwardly to get the result he wanted out of it. That's right, this mutation didn't even come from a formula for novel writing, but one for screenwriting--an art that has been in free-fall since the 1980s ended. And this book being published in the 1990s might give you a hint for why that might have been the case.

Not only did Vogler misunderstand Campbell's intent with his work, he also twisted and mangled several aspects of the Hero's Journey idea, and just plain got a large chunk of it wrong. To understand how that happened I would suggest viewing the above video. After watching it, many of the mistakes of modern writing will come into clear focus, including many of our perceptions of it. In essence: we don't know what we think we know.

There are many ways to learn how to write. Some learn by ear and some study intently to become the writer they want to be. There are even some formulas that can help you become the writer you wish to become. Clichés and tropes exist and are unavoidable in writing. All of this is true and no one is denying any of it.

However, there is not one correct way to write a hero or a hero story. This was the whole point of Campbell's original theory to begin with. All stories shade in different aspects of the overarching Monomyth in various ways. But that is not how we look at it today! In fact, we have warped this into formulizing that which was never meant to be formulized. And why not? Everyone's got books to sell and selling to writers is a profitable gig.

To bend and misshape an idea into the formulaic monstrosity it has become by modern writers and, even worse, writers outside the system this mutation has already destroyed, is a sign that we are going down the wrong path. We are dumbing down the monomyth for no real gain. All we're doing is dumbing down what a hero is and what stories are.

It goes without saying that this will not lead to better stories. The proof of this claim is the obvious fact that it hasn't done so. This will not magically change if we keep doing it repeatedly for yet another couple dozen years. It is a dead end.

You might find this controversial to say, but it is what it is. Over the past half century we have made a lot of mistakes that need to be undone, and travel new paths away from failed ones. It will do us no good to continue mockeries like this if we want to build new roads to travel down these abandoned trails. We need to stop giving credibility and attention to a failed system that is currently bottoming out into the abyss. We need other ways. 

I think we can do it, but we're not quite there, and lionizing mistakes like the above failed formula is one of the exact things holding us back from moving on. We need to "Retvrn" harder than emulating years of a decline that had already been set in motion before many of us were even born. It is time to accept hard truths.

Genre expectations, what makes a hero, morality, purpose, and the meaning of good and evil, have all been bungled by the big dogs in charge and were done so long ago. If we want to move past them we're going to have to go even further back while simultaneously pulling even further ahead into uncharted waters. 

We are close to the fringes of a new Golden Age. In fact, we are so close I can just barely see it over the horizon coming ahead. But we aren't going to get there with these old failed roadmaps. It is time to throw them out the window and leave them behind.

Keep awake and we'll get there eventually. I just hope we can stop with all of these detours so we can get there sooner.






Saturday, November 16, 2024

Weekend Lounge ~ Delinquent!



Welcome t the weekend. Short one today!

The following is a three hour video that covers the delinquent genre of manga. It starts from the beginning and purports to be definitive as it is meant to go through the the past to the present. In a sense it does because the creator covers a lot of material to the point where it's actually a bit overwhelming to watch the full thing.

That said, I don't actually recommend watching the entire thing. The first third of the video about the beginnings of the genre and what is considered a "delinquent" manga is the best material. After that the creator gets far too opinionated and misunderstands the appeal of many genre staples (and misses many crossover hits that expands said definition) because he has a very narrow view and specific set of expectations he wants out of it. So if you are interested in learning about what the delinquent genre is and its appeal, you're not going to get much out of watching the whole. Particularly if you've read some of the series covers and find his opinions on them off or bizarre.

But the first hour or so is very informative and a good sum up on where it came from and what the general appeal is. It also show the difference from other forms of delinquent culture across the world.

You see much of the appeal of delinquent stories isn't from bad kids doing bad things but from teenagers learning what it means to live in a world that doesn't have much use for masculine behavior, leaving the young stranded and alienated on how they are supposed to fit in. This atomized feeling is that heart of the genre which then can lead in any direction: from the split between good and bad kids, to traveling down the wrong path, or even learning to channel that energy in a direction that benefits everyone.

You can go in many directions, and the genre definitely has over the years. It's how you get entries as varied as Ashita no Joe, Akira, Yu Yu Hakusho, Tora Dora, and Slam Dunk, and characters from other related and bordering genres like One Punch Man, School Rumble, Fruits Basket, and Saiki K. Its themes are universal enough to be folded into even series that don't focus on delinquents. They remain an important staple in their stories.

The closest equivalent I can imagine in the West would be the works of S. E. Hinton. Most other stories over here tend to miss the appeal of these sorts of stories or characters, opting instead to make them heartless monsters or generic villains. Probably because we tend to see such characters as "bullies" and bullies are treated as very one dimensional. But while there can be overlap, they are usually not the same archetype. Regardless, that is usually how they are used and they always strike me as being very boring characters with not much to say.

That is a shame, because in my opinion, these kinds of characters always end up being my favorites, and I assume they do for many others as well. Feels like a missed opportunity.

Not to say Japan always does them well either. A large chunk of them simply stop at making said character a loud idiot with no redeeming features, and that's as far as it goes. But dig a little deeper and you usually find, in my eyes, the character who always ends up being the best one. I would be ecstatic if we would write more characters like these over here. In case you are wondering, yes, I actually do have many characters like this. And I probably always will. They highlight a specific failing of modernity that more writers need to touch on.

Plus they are always the coolest and funniest characters. There has to be a reason for that! Why else would they be such an important staple in so many stories?

Anyway, that's all for this week. In case you missed it, check out the new post from earlier in the week! It's a good one.

Have yourself a good weekend and I will see you next time!






Thursday, November 14, 2024

Life as a Novelty



*Note: Today's post was originally posted on the Patreon! Join to get early posts on top of podcast episodes and new book serializations!*


I've been doing a lot of thinking, as I usually do either while working or just when I'm not at writing or at Church (which is why I watch and read so many adventure stories: I need a break!), about a subject I don't think gets touched on a whole lot these days. I've especially noticed it goes unmentioned when speaking with others about important subjects. That being the idea of novelty, in that it has become the default view of life to think of everything as frivolous.

For the longest time I've thought about why this subject particularly gets under my skin, and I think it's because it's gotten more obvious as the years have gone by, especially after the Greatest Generation left us years back. The world still feels a little bit smaller from their absence, and I think there are several reasons for that.

A while back I read a comment on X that read about how Baby Boomers thrive off of being subverted, as if it is their default view of life. This post was tagged with a video of a criminal chasing a scared young woman down an alleyway only to present "twist" at the end. He wasn't chasing her! This faux criminal was giving her a lost wallet she had dropped. The video was tagged with some sort of heartfelt message about how things in the world aren't so bad or whatever, which isn't an altogether incorrect message, but the problem is that this video gives a false impression of how the world works. This is not how a situation like this plays out in the real world.

If you lose your wallet and someone is going to give it back to you, they are not going to chase you down like a psychopath before having a whiplash mood change at the last moment as if they were some kind of joke on an old episode of The Simpsons. I know this because I've had someone return my wallet to me before. It's very anticlimactic, as it should be. This kind of situation isn't like a plot twist in some old movie. But the above video had to be presented a certain overblown way in order to get its (generally true) message across to its audience.

The above example highlights a problem, an expectation in reality that has been at the forefront of mass culture since at least the 1970s or so when Baby Boomers properly began making culture themselves. It's a the need to have reality subverted, for the natural order to be thrown off, to be tricked and shown how wrong "common" sense truly is. In other words, if you look at the history of mainstream and pop art (and yes, even "High" art) you can see how important escalating the shocking and explicit content is baked into how these stories are told. Everything needs to always be more extreme, ratcheting up to the point where there will be no taboos left. And when you get there eventually you have a free-for-all of atomized folks with different levels of power demanding their own morality reflected in the mainstream and what they dislike stamped out.

An obvious truth here should now be apparent to anyone younger than this generation. Escalation cannot continue on forever. Eventually you either run out of building materials and leave yourself stranded at sea, or you trip and fall down the other side into bottomless nihilism. Either way ends unsatisfactorily for all involved.

This is not referring to horror, specifically, but everything from rock music to romance stories. We talk about how "tame" things used to be when they weren't ever actually "tame" at all. We've simply desensitized ourselves to what normality is and can only feel new emotions by demanding to have our expectations be constantly subverted.

And now you know how we got a generation of people (well, at least a chunk of them) who think telling a normal story, but doing The Opposite of what a normal story would do, is peak art and creativity. It's been this way for ages. This is where the nadir of Subversion bottomed out in the 2010s to the point that even those who had swallowed it up to that time had enough. And now we sit unsure in the '20s just where to progress from here. After all, most of us have never known a climate of anything else, and those that did are long gone now.

So what do we do? The answer is to stop treating life, and entertainment, as a novelty.


Hope I Never Lose Myself


I'm not being facetious when I say part of the reason for the current state of rotting culture is that we have been dependent on this Baby Boomer idea of constant subversion and escalation to the point that there is nothing there anymore. It's over. There's nowhere left to go. The answer is not throwing away the past and only consuming the next escalated sensation in its place. That idea was never sustainable, and I don't know why we ever thought it was. We need another way.

So where do we go from here? You can't create an ecosystem where being surprised is the only thing that matters. Eventually you will train yourself like a viewer of an M. Night Shyamalan movie to the point where the "twist" is all you're looking for. This leads to expecting that twist above all and nothing else about the movie mattering. This is what actually damaged his career more than anything. Novelty above all is not sustainable. If we want to put away obsession with surprise as the greatest need, what else can we hope for? This is what we need to figure out.

Well, the point of stories, despite popular opinion, is not to Make You Think. It's not to entertain either, though that is a very appreciated side effect. Stories are meant to reinforce the Good, the True, and the Natural Order. They exist to boost and support a healthy society and allow it to keep functioning as it is. When you notice so much modern art is about destroying the past or the current norm for Something Better, it makes sense as to why so many argue between themselves over its value. The divisiveness is not a feature, it's very much a bug, at least for society itself. Those indulging in this very clearly see it a different way.

We live in a fractured society, therefore the power of our art is diluted from the get go. Artists and creators now have to work around both this hostile climate and the constant need for Surprise in a flooded market with no real way to reach a higher level of presence to pierce the wider mass audience that have been trained to think of everything as novelty. Of course, there isn't even a "mass audience" anymore and there hasn't been for decades, some would say since Cultural Ground Zero. Artists are hobbled from the start of their journey to the end while navigating a shattered field with no clear sign post or direction to grow in.

How do you relate to an audience that doesn't relate to each other anymore, never mind the competition glut of endless choice? Obviously there is no easy answer to that. I'm not even certain there's an answer at all, other than things will only begin to change when the culture itself finally does, and that can only happen when we leave Boomer World and the climate created by its living corpse. Things will change, they have to, but what comes next when it does?

Personally, I think the only way forward is to return to a healthy expectation in regards to art. Desire the Good, the True, and the Imaginative, and put aside the need for subversion and twists, since those are not the purpose of storytelling. Desire more from entertainment than mere Surprise and eventually artists will get the hint.

And, to be fair, I do see things changing. However, that change is coming mostly from the younger generations coming up. That cohort of Gen X, Y, and Millennial, all seem to be stuck in the same mode as ever, though there are exceptions. Half are adapting while the other half dig our heels in further. Soon enough we're all going to have to face the younger generations that have already moved on from the Land of Subversion.

We're not as clever as we think we are, and it's okay to admit it. But we still have to move on from that old idea of art as novelty.




Let me give an example of this refusal to let go.

Awhile back there was a new cartoon in crowdfunding about "adulting" and it was a typical animated sitcom of that The Simpsons started . . . from back in the 1990s. One of the comments on this project said, effectively, "Millennials should not be allowed to make cartoons anymore. They had their chance and they've blown it." They've had the chance to do anything, and they keep wasting it on doing nothing at all.

Of course, the comment is hyperbolic, but is it wrong? Said generation (including Ys above them) have been making cartoons, at this point, for nearly two decades. What did they make? Comedies that "flip tropes", subversive adventure stories where the heroes are "just as bad" and everything is upside down, and despite growing up with 2D, have helped bury the form in the grave for uninspired and well beyond tired CG animation that looks like everything else. They're just managing the decline and it is time to call it out for what it is.

What, exactly, have we added to the medium? What is our distinct mark? What is it we even have to say? Why do we refuse to ask any questions or push beyond the same ones we're "allowed" to ask and have been repeating for decades? We can aspire for more than this.

While I agree with the growing assessment that Gen Y is more of a scribe generation, meant to record and carry on knowledge, than it is in actually applying fresh creativity to anything, I do think we are in a very real danger of leaving behind the wrong things while we take useless garbage with us instead. We're old enough that reassessment is due. And it's a problem that needs course correction now before we lose yet more important things.

As we've touched on before: nobody needs to know about or endlessly analyze tropes. We've been doing it for a quarter of a century and it has not produced better art, just people who want stories to be checklists that are "subverted" because audiences think the point of stories is to be tricked or "made" to think. Art has become a quest to find the next jangling set of keys for the ever distracted audience that just want noise to fill the silence.

This isn't what art or entertainment is supposed to be.

Perhaps this is an unfortunate side effect of being brought up in a post-War society where comfort dulls the senses, but it is the reason despite having more art and entertainment made in the last century than the rest of recorded history combined, so much of it is so awful and only getting worse as we get further along. And no, it has not "always been that way" or whatever similar nonsense you are told, not when your modern industry prides itself on not understanding the past and willfully distorting and dismantling the work of the dead. It's far more insidious now than it ever has been, and this is not something to pride ourselves on.

It is because art is no longer made to reinforce cultural standards and beliefs and lift up your neighbor in fellow man: now it is meant to shape them to be like you. While that might have worked for awhile, the Baby Boomer generation was completely hoodwinked by this psyop after all, their children were then thrown up in a world of unreality, the safest and most improbable time in all of recorded history. Now that this false world is falling apart around us, still we cling to the hope that screaming into the void will accomplish anything as long as we tug on bootstraps and give a firm handshake to people we won't look in the face otherwise. All this in an atomized world where everyone is constantly talking past each other to make a little more pocket change.

No, the only way forward is to throw out the bathwater, not the baby. We don't need to obsess over the jangled key of tropes: they show up in everything regardless. We need to remember what stories are made to point towards, to enforce, and to lift men into. They do not exist to fill shelves that will be dumped into the landfill in fifty years for the next batch to take its place. This is purely temporal thinking, and it is not sustainable.

Man's destiny is Eternal. We are more than pieces and parts. We are more than this. Our art should reflect this, not point away from it.

Life isn't a novelty, it's a Blessing, and it's time we start acting like it.






Saturday, November 9, 2024

Weekend Lounge ~ Book Moralization



Welcome to the weekend! It's been a wild week. Time to unwind!

With the destruction of OldPub over the last few decades, many have wondered exactly what comes next. How do we get people to read again, and how to we change the image of the hobby being for anti-social weirdos who make the hobby their entire personality? That is a tall order, but we might be starting to have some answers for it.

The main goal to get people to read can only be accomplished if it seems inviting from the outside and is seen as a "cool" hobby to get into. Right now, reading is neither, and that is because it has turned into a clubhouse for people without personality. In essence, like everything else currently being destroyed, it is being run by fanatics that wish to be looked up at and considered purely because they engage (or are seen to engage) in the act of reading. This is because of the (false) image created by 20th century Baby Boomers mad about movies and video games who wanted Reading to be seen as Above and Beyond such low brow art forms. It didn't matter what you read (as long as it wasn't men's adventure, genre, or horror!) but the act of reading by default made you a more imaginative and smarter person than someone who doesn't.

I don't know how I can accurately explain this worldview that mutates into the clownshow you see today, except to watch any entertainment that features books from the 1970s or so to the end of the 1990s (when it abruptly ceased due to Gen X getting in control of entertainment). You will see the act of reading treated as a sacred act on par with attending Church, where as long as you read a book you will Get Smarter. It doesn't matter how, but it will happen. Therefore those who write books are not only smarter than normal people, those who read books, and a lot of them, is not only more informed and brighter--they are who who should inspire to be.

Of course we know now that this isn't true. This mentality lead to the Kid Who Reads, a midwit type of person who believe engaging in an act raises ones IQ and should be inducted in the high priest class because they Read Books. It's been a disaster for the hobby.

The above video highlights where this mentality has landed today in the modern climate. Books are seen as status symbols for Smart People, again, largely from lame Baby Boomer propaganda, and used as little more than as an aesthetic for Likes and Shares on social media. Reading has gone from a hobby based on imagination and wonder into being nothing more than another fad on social media. And it was never going to end any other way.

Check out the above video, and ignore some of the comments that miss the point, to see just how off track the hobby has gotten and how much work we have to do to bring it back. It's going to take some work, but it can be done.

What we have to make sure of is that we never allow arts and entertainment to fall to this level of shallow novelty ever again. The last thing we need is more disposable culture.

That's all for this week. I'll see you when we're deeper into November and hopefully the weather stops flip-flopping from one extreme to the other. I want my fall weather already. Enough of this in between nonsense.

Have a good one!








Saturday, November 2, 2024

Weekend Lounge ~ Long Live Pulp



Welcome to the weekend! And welcome to November as well, I suppose. I hope you're having a fantastic All Souls Day.

This time I wanted to share a different sort of video than I normally do. I wanted to tackle the change in mainstream opinion on pulp happening in real time. 

We've spent a good chunk of the last few years going on about the importance of the pulp era while the mainstream narrative since the 1960s has been how much of a joke they were and how disposable the era was. Not only that, as per our old friend Sam Lundwall, they were poor pretenders of the past and it was their duty to correct the gross injustice of allowing readers to have their stories. They did this by cratering the genre into the ground and making their "genre" irrelevant and dead in the process. I'm not going to go through that again. If you've read The Last Fanatics, you already know all of that. If you don't, I highly recommend reading it to be informed on how we got so off track over the last century. You won't see the past of the old and dying publishing industry in the same light.

I've received quite a few arguments over the years in regards to that controversial book. From my harsh tone (actually toned down from the original article series), to repetitive arguments (fair, but then again that's what the work is addressing), to a hidden agenda to make "Science Fiction" Christian (an argument by paranoiacs who clearly have something they want to share the class), to more general and much more level-headed criticisms detached from emotionalism. However, one thing that can't be denied is that the "genre" is dead and the roots of its death go far back--back to before anyone currently alive was even born. And the problem can no longer remain unaddressed if we wish to continue. Thankfully, it's no longer how it once was. Attitudes have changed much in less than a decade, and they're poised to change even more in the rough times ahead.

It's about time we recognize this obvious sea change more outside of NewPub and even the industry itself.

And we are! It's just taken some time.


The pulp spirit lives in NewPub!


It's not 2017 anymore.

Despite all of that, my earlier book, The Pulp Mindset, was made to combat anti-pulp and anti-audience expectations in an industry that has been trying to control its readers (and failing) since the 1940s. That book remains in fashion because everything stated in it, despite coming out half a decade ago, is still very much true. The OldPub attitude is unchanged, to its fortunate detriment.

However, times have changed since I began publishing nearly a decade ago. I could talk about multiple things--the explosion of AI flooding submission boxes, the growing viability of serialized stories on the internet, and the slow death of amazon as a mega-platform mirroring the collapse of OldPub box stores, there are no shortage of changes reshaping the industry.

But one thing has definitely changed, one thing that can't be denied, and it was the one thing the Pulp Revolution was formed years ago to do. And they succeeded at doing it. Their mission was to prove to the world that the image of the pulp era was incorrect and deceptive, formed by anti-social weirdos to tar the writers and stories and ward off writers and readers away from them. This is undeniable. You can even go back and look at old articles from before 2018 on the subject and you will find they are slathered in dismissive and even insulting attitudes. This era was garbage and why would you ever read it when Fandom made the first good fiction starting in 1939 when they took over the industry? Just ignored that it inspired almost all the best things you like from the later half of the 20th century--they somehow convinced everyone that this was the way to go. All of these obnoxious attitudes were how pulp was discussed for about 70 years, and all it has lead to is declining literacy rates and leaving scores of stories out of print for weak reasons.

This isn't the case anymore, however. The above video is one by an internet video maker who more represents the common opinions of this sector of the industry. You can tell by how he describes what he likes and why he likes it. This isn't an insult, this is why it is important. Listen to how he talks about the pulps beyond What Everyone Knows (which is now accepted is incorrect) and how he becomes engrossed in a world gatekept from him from nearly three quarters of a century. He also, correctly, links it to the stale nature of OldPub and how safe, toothless, and generic, so much of what is pumped out feels today. How did they manage to make it all so different? What happened to the wild and the weird? And how can we get it back?

It's a good video because it's one that would never have been made a decade ago. I know that for a fact because we've talked about such things on Wasteland & Sky before. The vibe shift and mood change has been quite the pleasant surprise and proof that the Pulp Revolution was a success. The industry will never be the same again.

I recommend the above video. It's surprisingly good and coming from an angle you might not expect. It also shows just how much the industry has changed in such a short time. At this point, just thinking where it will be decade from this is even more exciting.

We're finally on our way. The era of the Fanatics is over.

That's all for this weekend and I will see you next time! November is finally here, and the end of the year is a stone throw away. Surprises are still on the way.

Long live pulp!







Thursday, October 31, 2024

Happy Halloween!




Hello, and welcome to Halloween and the day before the weekend comes! I hope you're all settled in and ready for some fun.

Though I shared it on the Cannon Cruisers blog and Spotify like always, I wanted to make sure everyone caught our extra long special where we talk about the Exorcist films, particularly the second and third entries, and why they might (and might not) be worth seeing. Of course we also touch on the first in context to the others, but it's kind of needed considering the subject. Regardless, it was quite the episode and we go for nearly an hour.

In other news, you might have missed it but Cannon Cruisers also has a Letterboxd page where we input all the movies we covered on the show over the years with our most recent ratings averaged out between the two of us (this is why you see some half stars when we deliberately do not do them on Cannon Cruisers proper) as well as links in the reviews to the episodes themselves! Be sure to check out our page here!

To be honest, I'm surprised Cannon Cruisers has been going on as long as it has. I thought we might have gotten bored and dropped it, but it's still going strong, even after we ran out of proper Cannon episodes. Seven years down is quite the run. Here's to many more!

If you want an update on the writing front, there's not much to add right now. I have some posts on the Patreon I'll get around to posting here eventually, and I've still got the next part of the serialization to edit after I finish writing the pair of short stories I've been tussling with. Aside from that, things have been going the same as usual on the production front.

My next story should also be announced for release very shortly. We're still just waiting on the artist to deliver the final piece. I can't give an estimation, but it should be soon. As always I will update when I can do so.

That's all for today. Have yourself a great Halloween, a fantastic Friday, a fruitful All Saints Day, and I will see you again for our usual weekend posting!






Saturday, October 26, 2024

Weekend Lounge ~ Missing Hyperborea



Welcome to the weekend!

The weather's getting colder (in some areas), and Halloween is just around the corner, so let's cover something more fun and a bit spooky today. Instead of the usual tales of blood, gore, and chaos, lets us look into one of forgotten pasts and obscure lands. Where is Hyperborea?

A lot has changed attitude-wise since the 20th century ran out, but one of the things that has changed is our consideration for how weird history and the paranormal are actually quite entwined with normality in ways we never really considered. Dry materialism has never been a good enough explanation of the strangeness we see around us, only religion even bothers to point towards it and show that it is far more natural to the state of how things are than we have considered. When you stay in your daily routine or automatic thinking you tend to blind yourself from the possibility of any existence outside your dulled narrow scope. What lies out there? We might never know, but that does mean we shouldn't forgo curiosity.

That in fact has been one of the underlying themes of some of my recent stories like the ones in Cirsova #20 and Sidearm & Sorcery Volume 3. When things finally do go sideways, things you never imagined possible will be revealed as very much possible. And once that happens, the times can never go back to what they once were.

Then we will have to move on from this neutral state of waiting for normality to return or for it to spring out of thin air like magic. In many ways we were living in a dream world before--that is what the 20th century was meant to be, after all. We were to have a new normal, a new base, that would shield us from our natural state and nature. As it has fallen apart, we now know we've been missing too much of us to continue on the way we have. You can't go home again.

But, then, was it ever actually home in the first place? If not, then which is actually the dream world, and which is reality? Or maybe there's more to connect them than we originally thought. Maybe it is more complicated than 20th century materialism thought possible. In fact, that's a big part of the stories in Star Wanderers. Even in a future where we supposedly know more, there will always be much that is still out of our grasp. It's just the nature of things.
 
As the above video from the YouTube channel Midnight Broadcast shows, people have been considering this subject for a long time. It is a good reason why the writers of Weird Tales are still the most influential of the 20th century, even a century removed from the magazine's formation. They were the few still considering these questions while the pocket protector set were attempting to force convert everyone to dated Science that would rule our every waking moment. Of course, I already wrote about them in The Last Fanatics. What we are dealing with now is what they were trying to replace for their own new world order of eggheads.

So as you get closer to Halloween, consider just how much we don't know about what is waiting in the between, and how much we'll never know in this lifetime. Such a thing might seem frightening, but I consider it amazing. It gives off a sense of awe about just how wild all of this really is. We don't know anywhere near as much as we think we do, and that's great.

Have yourself a good weekend and get ready for November!

The cold is almost here.