One last go for 2024! It's been a strange year for me so I'd like to go over some of it. Enjoy the wild video above and then stay for the rest of the post.
I should also say that the next episode of the Letters from the Wasteland podcast is up on the Patreon. The topic is AI and it's both an hour long and the first of a two-parter, so be sure to check that one out. It went on a bit longer than I was expecting it to. The second part will be out next week.
Also, in case you missed the recent update, I'm in the next issue of Cirsova out next month. We're starting 2025 off with a bang!
All that aside, the last year has been a bit wild for me. I had a very unexpected upheaval in my personal life the exact moment I put up the Patreon and yet at the same time still tried to simultaneously keep this place updated (keeping Cannon Cruisers, Wasteland & Sky, AND the Substack all updated was a bit of a time sink) along with making sure I was writing wasn't the easiest. You know what they say, everything always seems to hit at once.
Though, despite all of that, I did manage to put out my two books for the year. The first was Star Wanderers (please leave a review on amazon if you have not) and the second was Phantom Mission on the Patreon, on top of the short stories in Sidearm & Sorcery Volume Three, Cirsova #20, and Silence & Starsong #4. Despite the increase in distractions, my output remained more or less the same. I've also got stories coming for 2025, as well as others in the can for 2026(!). Yes, I plan on doing this for the long haul.
My plan going forward for 2025 is going to be a bit different, though not that crazy or out there. I'm planning to take the early months of the year, which are typically dead activity-wise anyway, to focus purely on writing and editing. For my two books in 2025 I'm planning to finish off Phantom War on the Patreon with Book 2 and 3, and finally release Book 1 wide on places like Amazon after getting to the edits I've still got to attend to. Like I said, there's a backlog of stuff I have to get through and some things I still have to figure out. Perhaps a Kickstarter for Phantom Mission to get a nice illustrated cover? We will see. That is still a bit of a ways out as of this writing.
On the other side of the spectrum, I have a few short stories already submitted and waiting to release, and others on the side waiting for submissions to open (including some by request, so it's really a waiting game for a lot of this). Writing-wise, I have a few short stories I absolutely must get done ASAP to complete a few projects and then start planning on the next ones. The first quarter of the year is going to be a heavy focus on all of those above all else, then hopefully business as usual once spring rolls around and my schedule can return to normal. Or I suppose as normal as a writer's schedule can get, anyway.
In other words, there is a lot on the way, and a lot I've got to get through sooner than later. That's a warning that blog posting will still be a bit slower for awhile, in order for me to catch up with myself, but it'll still exist. I enjoy the weekend lounge posts, and I hope to continue those. Longer posts will still go up on the Patreon first before coming out here at least a month later. Keeping all of this in balance is going to be a bit of a challenge, but that's part of the fun.
Otherwise, the plan is business as usual. 2025 will feature me still chugging along, God Willing, and putting out some projects I've been very excited for. There's a few things I'm very eager to get done and show you. It's going to be a fun time.
That's all for this year. 2024 has been a weird one, and I am a bit sad to see it go, oddly enough, but there's good times ahead. I'm excited to see what's coming down the pike.
Also, before I forget, thank you very much for 10 years of Wasteland & Sky! Yes, it's been over a decade since I started this journey. I never expected my original stomping grounds would last so long, even with alternative sites like the Substack around now.
I appreciate anyone who has taken time out of their day to stop by, even if you haven't been around long. It's been a long ride this past decade, and I hope to continue on for at least another ten years more. I've got plenty of things to do, and I hope you'll join me as I get through it.
Just got word of this, so wanted to put it out before the year wraps up! This is the cover reveal for the first issue of Cirsova for 2025. Notice a familiar name on there? That is because my story, "Void Railway", is in the issue.
For those curious, it is a Galactic Enforcer story that is a bit different from the previous ones you might have read. For one, though he is in it, Ronan Renfield is not the main character. Instead we follow a gruffer more violent Enforcer named Brandon Stone as an escort mission goes awry. Just what is waiting out there in the gap between the stars?
I had a lot of fun writing this story, and Alex from Cirsova himself told me it was his favorite of the ones I've written for him, so please be sure to check it out when the Spring issue releases in January. Throw in the other great authors above and you've got a lot of bang for your buck. As always, you can never go wrong with an issue of Cirsova.
Once the preorder link goes live I will be sure to post it on Wasteland & Sky as always. I've got plenty of other things ahead for 2025, but this was one last surprise needed to be shown. Just look at that cool cover by Wistmoor Studio! It's fantastic stuff.
Thanks for reading and I'll be back soon with one last update for the year!
Welcome to the weekend! It's the last go around for 2024!
For the last Weekend Lounge post of the year I wanted to introduce you to the Cannon Cruisers YouTube channel. This one isn't actually run by me, but my co-host, and, as a result has a more modern look than the rest of our channels. It's not up to date, but the channel will be slowly updated as we have the time.
It's another alternative to check out the Cannon Cruisers, if that's the kind of thing you're interested in. We talk old b-movies, discover old classics (and not-so classics), and have a lot of fun along the way. We've been doing it for over half a decade at this point, surprising both of us. What started as a lark turned into a long term side project for both of us. I don't think we'll be stopping anytime soon. There's plenty to go over.
We've covered over 300 movies since we started, by the way. You can peruse what we covered on our Letterboxd page here.
Uploads on the YouTube channel are not our first priority right now, so if you want to keep up I highly recommend going straight to the blog itself. It was the first place we set up camp and I make sure to update it every week or when there's a new episode up.
As always, check out the Cannon Cruisers if you like or are interested in old movies and want some fun.
Completely unrelated to that, I was recently fooling around with AI music again, and concocted the following EP. It is related to a writing project I've been slowly trying to puzzle out of my end of the year brain.
The idea was to create an EP that matched the weird dour tone at the end of the 1990s and early 2000s before 9/11 or even Columbine really changed the mood permanently. I specifically chose third wave ska to do this with because of how much the genre changed over the decade and I wanted to see if I could push it in a different direction than it went in reaction to the Telecommunications Act of 1996 and the resulting Clear Channel monopoly which more or less banned it and other genres of the time from the radio. So it's an oddly reflective piece on endings since there was a lot of that as we were leaving the 1900s behind at the time.
In other words, I wanted to grab a mood that existed with a sound that didn't. Where could it have gone if things went differently? Who knows. I tried to puzzle it out here. It was an interesting little project to try out because I could almost imagine it existing, even though it didn't. and in retrospect it's kind of eerie, which I suppose was the point.
The album starts with the skate-punk inspired sound the decade started with before changing over the course of the album to being more in line with the more confident style it had by the end of the 90s when it broke into the mainstream. Where could it have gone after this, we'll never know. It was cast out of the club and most of the bands either abandoned the style or deliberately went insular, crashing the genre in the '00s.
This is a bit of a what-if, I guess.
As for how it relates into my writing, well, you probably won't see that for awhile, but a lot of it is based on a story cycle I've had in my head for awhile and have been trying to write down for about as long. So if you see lyrical motifs or lines show up in stories later on, you'll know where they first showed up. It's been strange cobbling this together. I've never quite done anything like this before, so it's been strange figuring it out.
But, really, just have fun with it. Enjoy the music, download it, remix it, or ignore it. Love it, hate it, or be indifferent. Whatever you want. It's a bit of an experiment to help me with inspiration for something else, so it's all meant in good fun. Don't take it too seriously!
Enjoy the Northbound Lights, a band that might or might not have existed from an era long gone that increasingly few remember. There's always something we can learn from those forgotten days. In this case, I don't know. I just felt like doing something strange and off the wall. You can find the End of the Century EP for free here. It might be a bit different than you're expecting, especially if you only know the genre from its oft-mocked tropes.
And that's all for this week!
Enjoy the last week of the year and I will see you soon enough!
Merry Christmas! Not much to say today thanks to the holiday, just a small post to keep things rolling. I hope you're having a good one.
Only two things to share today. The first is the above video on weird Christmas stories, and the second is today's Cannon Cruisers episode, also on a Christmas movie. I'm sure there's much more out there, but this is all I wanted to share directly with you.
The film we covered is 1971's The Christmas Martian, a fairly unknown family film from Canada, that did, however, have much more influence on what came later than you probably know. Highly recommend listening to this one if you enjoy Christmas and/or family movies. It's quite a unique project work looking into.
Anyway, that's all for today. Have a good week and a good rest and I'll see you this weekend. 2024 is almost done, but we've still got plenty to do.
This time we're going to take a look back at someone who was an infamous internet figure years ago before his unfortunate early death. Because this is the Advent season, just before Christmas proper, I tend to like to remind myself as to why I'm doing the sort of thing I am by looking at examples of those who have done just that despite the disadvantages we sometimes stumble through. I this case however, the handicap was much more intense.
Terry A. Davis was an eccentric programmer who created the operating system known as TempleOS. He started his life as a hardcore materialist, like a lot of people who grew up in the mid-20th century, before he began to see the world as a much different place. A genius programmer who only got better with time, he tried to contact the government for work and something happened as a result that has never been fully clarified, which ended up changing the course of his life. He didn't become a Steve Jobs, Wozniak, or Gates, instead becoming someone much different. Considering how those figures eccentric Silicon Valley type ended up, maybe there was something to what Terry went through and would later discuss.
At the same time as this was happening, Terry's mental health and well being was declining in that it became difficult for him to express himself properly and even communicate with those around him. No one really knows where this came from, because it seemed to happen out of the blue. This newly atomized existence for Terry allowed him to become a sort of figure for both simultaneous ridicule and admiration as he tried to hold it together despite all the factors working against him to live as the person he needed to be. This was who he was until the day he died in an unfortunate train accident many years later.
This isn't a happy story in the modern sense, but there is something inspiring in this tale that is hard to pin down if you are a materialist. There was a clarity through the obfuscation, and a meaning in the seeming meaninglessness to what defined him. It can't really be described without seeing what he was like for yourself. There was no one like Terry A. Davis, for good and bad, but he is still very much missed to this day, which is a good indicator of how much he actually was liked by those who followed him, in the end.
If I'm burying the lede here, it is because I don't want to warp the reason I'm talking about him in the first place. Yes, Terry could be very funny, both intentionally and unintentionally. Problems or not, he was just a very animated guy, and he said a lot of offensive things while trying to express his thoughts despite working against his own disabilities. But none of that really matters when you look back on a lot of what he was actually speaking about underneath the funny words and over the top expressions the internet lives for and enshrines as memes for future generations. Much of what Terry figured out ended up coming true and it's amazing that he did so despite the problems he suffered with throughout his life.
Few people actually disliked Terry A. Davis, even less have as time has passed and since his unfortunate accidental death at a much too young age. Despite the problems he fought against that piled against him as he aged, and despite the memes that followed in his wake, there is something about Terry A. Davis that sticks with those of us who have been around since the early internet as something as both a warning and a Cassandra to things that would happen and are now occurring in the modern age. Terry was right, God truly does speak to us all the time. We just have to listen.
Check out the video above if you want a good summary on who this figure is and why he endures to this day, and how he figured out the glowies long before anyone else ever did despite the disadvantages he had in life. All he had was his trust in Jesus Christ and the skills he was blessed with, and that is all he leaned on as he navigated a world he knew he didn't belong in.
If you want more information about Terry A. Davis, there's plenty out there, including an X account that posts images and blog entries from TempleOS that you can find here. Terry is an interesting figure and one that still manages to inspire to this day for a very good reason.
That's all for this weekend and I will see you again soon!
Remember, always run the glowies down with your car. It's the only way to be sure.
"And things are automatic when you see them everyday,
Is it the same routine, or just some fucked up dreams,
That keep you walking, mindless all the way."
*Note: Today's post was originally posted on the Patreon! Join to get early posts on top of podcast episodes and new book serializations!*
Have you ever stopped to wonder why things get made at all? At some point it feels as if we forgot the reason for many things, and why the people who came before us made them, and now we're stuck doing it because We're Supposed To, only faster, dumber, and in more pointless ways. As if we're just filling space because that's all we can do.
That's kind of a depressing thought, but it's one I keep mulling on, especially when I hear complaints of soullessness in the art and entertainment world from people who excuse exactly that every other day and have done so for decades. Every problem we work through today isn't the fault of those who came before or those who created these systems. It comes from those of us who have forgotten the Why in everything we do.
And we don't want to admit this dead end we're reaching was totally avoidable the entire time. Changing course just meant abandoning every poor decision made for decades, and admitting we were wrong. Good luck with that. This is all our own fault.
So you've probably heard the news by now. The AI apocalypse is here and we're all going to die. Art is over now that anyone can type in a few prompts in a generator and get what they need to be satiated. The sanctity of art and creation is finished because machines can do it all for nothing. It's time to hang it up and go home.
This is the current atmosphere of the world of art and entertainment now, buoyed by people who kicked up no fuss the entire time they made their way to this end state they supposedly hate so much while supporting every decision that led to this moment. Now because it might infect some billionaires in a city that hates art and meaning on principle, it's suddenly a real problem. We need to make things illegal! We need to fine and harass people into complying with our betters! We need to combat automation and soullessness in art!
But none of this is happening, and it's never happened. There is no putting the genie back in the bottle when you don't even know how long ago it was let out.
We let it happen
I watched the Telecommunications Act of 1996 happen which allowed Clear Channel to own radio. No one said or did anything as popular music was destroyed by this idiocy, just as they said nothing when auto-tune allowed corporations to bypass talent to put their own replaceable automatons on the charts instead. This was not a change that improved art.
I watched HD rob us of hundreds of talented game developers and studios because now they needed to sell millions just to break even. Nobody complained because they got their shiny graphics, even if the games became shallower and more automated. This was not a change that improved art.
I watched CG take over movies, leading to a uniform bland fake-computer image slathered over every film. Countless talented stuntmen and practical effects creators were thrown aside for sterile computer images. This happened at the same time sound mixing and acting all sunk into the grey goo of conformity. This was not a change that improved art.
I watched animation move to computers because it was "easier" and decades later no one can make a movie that looks as good as Akira or Secret of NIMH and we're supposed to ignore that truth because they can sometimes look like HD PS2 cutscenes instead. As long as we get our 9 millionth take off of Shrek with the same character designs, choppy animation, and low effort subversive snark "humor" somehow that's good enough to spout the empty catchphrase "Animation is cinema" when it has never been less cinema in its entire existence. This was not a change that improved art.
So my question is as follows: if you didn't care years ago when all of these mediums were being beaten down and flattened into conformity for corporations' ease of use, leading to what was already a factory belt-line production of effective automation . . . why do you care now?
This was always going to end here. We kept telling them it was okay, what right do we have to tell them to stop now? Why didn't we say anything earlier?
It's because we never cared about the art itself: we cared about consuming it quicker. All we wanted was more. More of what, exactly, didn't matter.
Computers have already been misused for decades to make art production easier (for the people in charge to manage) instead of smoother. They were originally sold as being able to assist artists in making what they were already making, just with less obnoxious distractions which would allow them to take less time and carry less of a load. And, as well all, know, this is not what happened at all. Was it supposed to destroy practical effects, passion, creativity, 2D art, entire genres, and make everything into one giant homogenized mud-genre meant for mass consumption by a people who otherwise no longer have anything in common with each other except what they consume?
Is this really it?
If that is the case, then why is this worth fighting for? Who cares about art made deliberately to remove the humanity from it, to fulfill a concocted outdated formula that hasn't been relevant since the twin towers falling was still fresh news? Why are we even consuming these things to begin with? To what end? What exactly is a computer going to take away at this point that we haven't already let them take away from us?
There already isn't anything left. We gave it away ages ago for automation, long before computers were even a factor. We did this because we wanted it this way.
What "art" is being defended by taking a stand against AI? I hate to break it to you but the large corpos and Hollywood are already using it. They were the first to use it and they're going to keep using it. You can get mad at an author for using an AI-generated logo for his first novel but that's not going to stop Tor Books from using AI-generated floating spaceships on their boring modern covers. But the latter, as they have been for the last quarter century, will continue being excused while those just trying to get by will be scrutinized.
It happens all the time.
This isn't AI, but what would change in this situation if it was?
And, again, I hate to repeat this, but the reason this stuff is accepted is because we've accepted every change they made solely because we just want to be left alone to consume product. We've slowly lost our standards as to to what the purpose of art even is, as long as its repeating shopworn catchphrases and Current Year phrasing we can consume it proudly, call others names if they aren't consuming it, then move on to the next corpo product we are designated to worship. That's all it is now. There is no depth or ambition in any of it.
In this climate, what does automation even imply? Automation from what? Outdated genres, tired ideas, and safe content from corporate approved creatives who will lecture you if you don't support the machine? I hate to break it to you, but they're already on auto-pilot to begin with. They already have nothing to say. A machine prompt that they then tweak without saying it out loud won't make any appreciable difference in what they do.
It's because they have nothing to say in the first place.
This is what is so frustrating about the current AI hullabaloo. It is getting mad at students not hiring professional voice actors for free college projects that aren't monetized in the first place. It is screaming at shitposters making memes instead of badly editing existing art for free. It is grinding your teeth as Normie Joe puts in a couple of prompts to slap together a joke song to send to his friends. This is the sort of thing that attracts the most ire: not a megacorp creating entire opening sequences with it to cheap out on paying their already existing employees. The only explanation as to why this exists is because we no longer even know what we're doing with art anymore.
None of the above earlier examples take anything away from "real" art. In fact, it frees up artists from wasting their time and ability from doing the bare minimum (artists not having to live off porn commissions is a good thing) and are instead allowed to focus on improving their craft and finding something to say that isn't just repeating the talking points from their favorite streamer or news source. In contrast, a corporation generating an entire opening sequence to get the product out the door faster shows they don't even have a reason for said opening existing in the first place. AI or not, there was never any attempt at art here in the first place.
Instead of raging at normal people using tools to make throwaway pieces of content for fun, perhaps standing up to corporations who not only have the means to do better, but refuse to, is a better use of our time? After all, they are the ones who lowered standards in the first place, and even found ways to turn consumers against patrons with their own brand of insipid insults like "toxic fanbase", "x-ist, y-cel fans", and whatever else low IQ kindergarten name-calling they can use to explain why not consuming corporate slop is evil.
It's been over eight years since Patton Oswalt insulted James Rolfe for not being interested in a terrible looking movie that flopped because it was terrible, and nothing has still changed on this front. No one could even explain why the movie should exist to begin with without checking of a list of tropes they wanted to subvert. It's nonsense.
To be extremely blunt, the reason the proliferation of AI is an overall good thing is because it no longer allows mediocrity to be held up as genius when anyone can just automate their own mediocrity instead. Artists have to be held to a higher standard, and some people do not like that. Artists who adapt, who use these tools right, and who focus instead on rising above what a machine can do, have absolutely nothing to worry about. Why would they: a machine cannot copy originality and high quality. That goes against the purpose of something being automated in the first place.
We both deserve and need this to happen, because, at this juncture, it's the only way to finally snap us out of those dull haze we've been stuck in for far too long. We need to finally start looking up again. There is more to life than this.
I know you've probably heard all this before, I'm not saying anything all that new new, but I think it needs to be kept in perspective as to why the old industries are currently dying and why newer ones are springing up in their places. It isn't due to AI--it is due to what allowed AI to spring to life in the first place. Focus on the real reason this is happening, not the end result. To do otherwise would be missing the forest for the trees.
AI is not going away. You don't have to like it, but you're going to have to accept it. We're also going to have to handle it better than this:
Anyone who can be replaced by AI, should be. It's really that simple.
The whole purpose of art is to bare your soul and stretch yourself to connect to others in a way that only you as an individual can. If a machine can replicate that then it can't be all that special to begin with.
This is the end result of wanting to make everything automatic. It was never going to end any other way.
I don't want this piece to come off as mocking or insulting, but as more of a chance to stand reevaluate where we're heading and, for the first time in my existence on this planet, to try and stop letting things decay--to finally move forward in the correct direction. That is part of the reason I'm doing all of this, after all. I want to contribute to a better world, not a dying one. I've already watched the decay of all the above industries happening in real-time over the decades, and I will no longer be a part of that.
Thankfully, I'm not going to have to be.
The solution is to finally put things in their place and to strive for more than mediocrity--to stop accepting decay as normal and The Way Things Are. No, it's not normal, and it's not the way things have to be. It's only normal if you let it be, and we don't have to do that anymore. With the creation of some many independent and small creator-owned spaces now, you have an endless sea of options before you. Why would you ever want to stay on a sinking ship?
At the end of the day, there is no AI apocalypse and nothing is getting worse that hasn't already been allowed to get worse for decades. No, instead this is a wake up call and a signal for us to finally take a new path forward.
What we need instead is hope for the future, and I think we have more reason to feel confident for a new path now more than ever before.
The only thing that's dying is the old ways, and in this case it's more than earned. We've got much better things to look forward to, and it's about time.
Welcome to the weekend! We're a mere ten days away from Christmas!
As we get ready to head towards the halfway point of the '20s, and as the internet begins closing in and breaking down, now is probably the time to take a good look at just how wild it was back then. Remind yourself on just how different it was. What better way to do that than with this look back at the figure who probably best represents the way it was in the old days, the ever-controversial, and very Gen Y, Mister Metokur AKA The Internet Aristocrat AKA . . . a lot of names!
This might be harder for younger folks to understand in an age where the internet is overrun by insane schoolmarms with loopy rules and puritans for the lame status quo of Current Year, but as infamous as the man called Jim might be for those who know him, he was actually a pretty common personality for those who grew up Gen Y and spent their late teens and early adulthood engaged in the early days of mass internet adoption. That was back when the internet was still a wild frontier yet to be conquered by the most boring people imaginable.
How was it different? In many ways.
Basically, everyone knew the internet was not real. It still isn't real, but we used to know that more deeply. You went on to blow off steam, find some cool corner of the internet that showed you things you didn't know, hang out with other like minded fellows, then you disconnected. It wasn't your life, it was more like a hobby to engage in when going out or calling friends just wasn't feasible. This was in fact how it was throughout the '00s. Gen Y, still under the yolk of the soon too be fractured Geek Culture, got together and shared their favorite products and events, and even messed with each other like guys used to do once upon a time. Things are different now, though, unfortunately, not in a better way.
What you should see in the above video of Mister Metokur's rise and . . . well, not fall--he's still around and still popular in certain circles, is someone who sees the digital world for what it is. It's a playground with endless possibilities where you can find anything. You might not disagree with how he spends his time on it, but it's clear that his approach was one we once understood long ago before we started following Influencers with Platforms, thought leaders on social media, and nauseating artificiality like that. Back before buzzword culture, we were just having fun.
And now the internet is on the way out. It probably won't even have proper recordings of how things really were before it went off the rails, so be sure to remember for yourself. It's only through building on what worked that we can build something better. And we're going to be building a lot in the years to come. We're going to have to.
Also, if you can, please send prayers his way. Jim has a sickness that has sidelined him heavily over the past few years, putting him on his deathbed more than a few times, though it's miraculously dulled none of his humor. That is a trait we would do well to imitate. Gen Y might be having a rough go at it, but I believe we are just now hitting our prime years on this Earth. Pray that we might all not only make it, but thrive and show the world just what we are capable of.
There is no limit to what we can do, a lesson that early internet should have taught us before we fell in line with those wanting to destroy it for clout and a couple of bucks. Let's finally go anywhere and do what we need to do. We've still got a decade to salvage.
Welcome to the weekend, and December! The year is close to done, but we're not.
For this week I wanted to go back a little to the previous subject. That subject being heroes. There is quite a bit more to say on the subject.
One of the major topics has been the failure of enshrining subversion as a storytelling idol. The mainstream has been trying, in increasing efforts, since the 1990s, to cast doubt on and talk down on heroism and the Good as storytelling essentials.
They've used every trick in the book to warp taste and reshape the audience, from the anti-Tolkien flatline that was People Are Bad And Nothing Matters to the superhero turds of Heroes Aren't Real And We'll Prove It Through Our Strawmen, to even failed satires of books like Alien Bugs Are Good, People Are Always Bad, where the audience satirizes the satire to reaffirm the original book's message and the big brain subverters think not being able to understand that reaction makes them smarter than everyone else. It's pretty much a mess, and it all stems from having a class of creators that hate Creation. And as a result, the audience has left them behind.
Because despite it all, the truth slowly seems to be coming clear. Despite how hard they've tried over the past quarter century+ to do it, heroes cannot seem to be truly subverted. Even the modern "smart" attempts always end up failing in the end.
For a more concrete example of what I'm talking about, I highly recommend watching the above video that shows exactly that. Despite an iron grip on the audience's attention, the tired attempts at talking over them and flipping over what they love has ended in a disaster. No matter what they do they can never escape the truth: heroism is real and it will never go away, be poisoned, or made "grey" with "complexities" by people who have yet to truly do anything interesting or new with their so-called creativity. All they do is make muddier versions of things people already like, and that's quickly losing audience members in the modern day.
What does this mean, in the end? You already know the answer, it's been clear as day the entire time. Despite our endless insistence on jangles keys and Being Surprised, at the end of the day we still want the same thing to happen. Everyone always wants Good to win, and Evil to lose. That hasn't changed, and it won't change, no matter how much one wants to blur the line to make themselves seem greater than they know they truly are.
Nothing really changes, even when it does.
That's all for this weekend and I will see you next time! We've only got one months left to close out 2024, so let's make it count!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
*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.
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.
