July might be ending, but that doesn't mean there are no surprises to be had! For instance, here is a new book sale created for male readers. Looking for a good read for a guy in your life? Here is the chance to join in on something really fun!
Running from Wednesday, July 30th (today!) to Tuesday, August 5th, you will have your pick of exciting books made for a male audience. Find the sale over here!
Books on the sale page will be rotated among the selections every day, so new books will be at the top of the page as it goes. Therefore, if you missed something there's always a chance it will be more visible on another day. So be sure to keep checking. We're going to need more male readers going forward if we want to create a better industry, after all.
After awakening in the woods, Christopher Archer finds himself trapped in a world outside of time. Fog monsters, armed gangsters, and a legendary spear, all await his arrival. But what about the fiancé who disappeared months ago?
As Archer explores this eternal midnight, he can only wonder—is this all just a dream, or is there something more hidden in the dark, watching his every move?
There is one choice. He must traverse the nightmare and learn the truth.
In other news, as mentioned earlier I am currently serializing my next non-fiction work, Fantasy Isn't Real, on the Patreon, as I work out the details on a few other projects. If you enjoyed my previous works in this style, you're going to want to read this one. It's going to be very much in the style of those controversial ones.
There's more to come but since this summer has been way too hectic and unpredictable it'll be some time before I can shake out exactly what is coming next. Regardless, if you want a preview, the Patreon is the place to be. I also have nearly 30 podcast episodes and two exclusive complete serials up on it with more to come. Joining definitely helps with production in these crazy times. You are also free to join in on the comments and offer feedback yourself. There's quite a lot there.
That's all for this short update post. Thanks for a wild July and I'll see you again in August!
It's been a strange week with a surprising amount of celebrity deaths, and the heat has yet to calm itself down even a little, but at least it's done. August isn't that far away. With that out of the way, lets get into it!
I know you're probably wondering, if you're over a certain age, when the internet stopped being a fun place to visit with a lot to see and do. If you're under a certain age you might even be resentful over why so many people spend so much time in a place as boring as the internet. These two views are obviously opposites, but they are also both correct. The answer is that the internet was once a much different place than it is today, and what it is today is a far cry of what it once was.
Of course we have discussed the phenomenon of Dead Internet Theory (which is no longer a theory) before, but what we haven't really talked about is the deliberate moves made to get us to this place. We all made the choice to be here, after all. Where the internet was once the last frontier, the wild west of open spaces and the unknown, decades ago, it has now been tamed and razed, leaving little left but the same lame corpo jargon as every place else outside of it. Chances are you only go online now for a small handful of things these days, no longer is it to explore and find new things. Not that you could anymore if you wanted to.
Without even getting to the growing glut of AI generated nonsense, the untold truth is that the internet had already been heading in this direction before we got to that point. Just like in the arts and entertainment, the goal became to automate a constant flow of Content out into the world and into our overstimulated brains, quality be damned as long as it has certain expected Tropes and aesthetics, and that's exactly what it does now. No longer is the internet about exploring or seeing or creating new things: it's about consuming Content.
It's also flooded the world with noise. Yes, even the offline world.
We're overstimulated and obsessed with both blending into the crowd and sticking out from it, our identities as concocted as the formula we desire in the Content we Consume. All this, once again, before the AI issue is even a speck on the horizon. The AI is just the most straightforward way we learned of making it easy to do.
What to be an artist? Generate an image. Want to be a songwriter? Generate a song. Want to be an author? Generate a story. Now you can get any identity you want with the push of button. That's the heart of the whole issue. It is to keep the old Baby Boomer lie alive that "You can do anything you put your mind to" which is very obviously untrue, but as the post-9/11 world has shown: reality is the enemy. It isn't about the art or the people, it's about the self. The atomized and abandoned individual struggling to find a place in a flooded world of noise with no connections to others. This is what the internet is about today, and it's where it was always going to go once social media came into existence nearly two decades ago.
We aren't connecting anymore; we're turning inward and making sure everyone sees us as we do. It's very contradictory, obviously, but that's the nature of where we are.
This is obviously reflected in everywhere else in our modern world, but the internet was once the last escape. It was once the last vestige of freedom from the safetyism that had been strangling the rest of the outside world since the '90s turned into the birth of Safetyism. Now that online space has begun to fade just as the youngest generations have had enough of the artificiality and wish to blow it all up. They will eventually succeed, regardless of what you believe the "good" or "bad" faction in all this is. It's been a long time coming.
One can always bring up how trends come and go and how times will always change, which is true, however this is different from just a trend or a fad. It's different because the internet has reshaped the way day to day life is performed and the expectations around it. It's changed how people react to one another. It's changed how we see every aspect of the world and raised our tolerance for unreality in everyday life while also diminishing our sense of whimsy and fun. Turns out the real Fantasy is what the Cyberpunk dystopia ended up being. Unreality in every day life, constantly pumped into your brain through ever-present screens.
And even as the digital world implodes, it's still making strides into invading the physical. Constant monitoring, constant pressure to be "on", and the constant elbowing in on strangers' personal spaces continues unabated. It isn't getting any better.
And, once again, this is before we get into the flood of AI Content, mass censorship, or the slow death of social media platforms at the same time as local communities have all but vanished. Everybody is sick of the state of things, but they're going to stick around where they hate to be as long as they can, because there's nowhere else to go.
The truth is that all this is happening because we don't really care anymore. The despair of the '00s lead to the madness of the '10s, which lead to the cracking and breaking that is the '20s. At the rate we're going, the internet will not last into the '30s, an amazing feat for something that was once taught to be eternal. Now it probably won't outlive any of us, at least not in any kind of useable state.
So why do we refuse to reassess our situation? Why do we continue to live in a world that no one seems to want? Why do we refuse to admit the mistakes we made that lead us to this very position we are in today and look for a better course forward? Perhaps it might be that no one has an answer, but it seems more likely that we all know what to do but we are unable to make the move to do it. It's mainly that no one believes they have anywhere else to go. Bowling Alone became real, as it was destined to, and the only way to reverse it is with a lot of effort to rebuild local communities and actually offer something better, something we once had and squandered.
Until then, enjoy the slop future of the internet. There isn't any other place it can go as long as we live our everyday lives virtually and our virtual lives as if they are our everyday ones. Whatever comes next after that is a mystery for the ages, but it won't be this.
What can we do but hope for something better? At some point we have to want more than constant Fantasy. Here's hoping we don't take too long to figure it out.
In other news, I have a story in the upcoming Mistcreek Tales called "Lightning Jim". The only thing I will say is that if you enjoyed Y Signal, you might want to check this one out. It's the first in a new series of shorts I'm working on, and these are going to be really out there. I'll talk more about it when the new anthology drops on August 4th.
I also started a new non-fiction book over on the Patreon called Fantasy Isn't Real, so if you enjoyed The Pulp Mindset and The Last Fanatics, I recommend checking that one out. While the other two are more focused on the present and the past respectively, this one is aiming towards the future. See what I mean by signing up for the Patreon today!
That's all for this week. Have yourself a good one until next we meet!
One of the things audiences of art and entertainment have been craving for a number of years has been an art scene that doesn't beat its audience over the head with what it's doing. Few seem to understand that this has been a problem that existed much longer than the current woes in every media-adjacent industry has. In fact, we have a blueprint for how such an industry was shaped.
Back in the 1980s and 1990s a "Christian" Industry for different forms of media arose. There was a "Christian" space for music, movies, books, and everything else you could imagine. What that ended up doing was creating a cargo cult mentality around it, creating its own language and code of conduct to separate it from the mainstream. Instead of trying to adapt to or communicate with the mainstream, it divorced from it and left everyone outside the bubble to their own devices.
This ended up being a mistake, as both the "Christian" industry and the mainstream would eventually implode into a pile of tired tropes and expected ideas, never to come to together again.
The reason this doesn't work is that Christianity is meant to face the mainstream head-on, not ignore it or talk around it. It's about the destiny of man in the face of the Perfect Man, after all. And art, as we've discussed many times, is meant to connect us and find meaning together. We're meant to have art poke and prod and point us in the right direction while showing us more we might not have considered. If you truly believe in the Savior of the Universe, then you should not hold that belief to yourself. Unfortunately, that is more or less what the "Christian" media complex evolved into being in record time. It's now just another industry with a particular image slapped on top to make it seem different while it sells pale imitations of what the already poor mainstream offers.
However, there are a lot of believers out there who don't want to be part of such an isolated island. There are plenty that want to connect and reach out to others, and find a Higher Meaning to it all.
The above video shows a list of authors who did just that. While being Christian and believers of the One True God, they never forgot their vision was also to reach people who either might not believe or might not even know what the author is talking about in the first place. They released the point of connecting means going outside yourself and doing more than preaching to the choir, and as a consequence their work is much more enduring than you'd figure it would be.
What happened in the 20th century was the siloing of ideas and interactions, backed up by corporations to give the illusion of community based on perceived tastes, at the same moment local community was falling apart around us. We're currently in the last days of such a system as both the internet works to destroy itself, and the old companies struggle to make a profit without turning something into a formulaic franchise or digging up corpses to put in modern skinsuits to attempt the same thing. The climate is changing, and it's a necessary change, but it's going to hurt when it does. It's happening right now in certain places.
What we need now are people who not only believe in a better possibility for what is to come, but also aren't afraid to reach others with their ideas. The old battle lines are faded now, slipping away with both the passage of time and new generations questioning if they were ever really there to begin with. When can we finally work together again to build a better future? It has to happen at some point. It's inevitable.
I know plenty of creators working out there to make a change, and I know many audience members doing the same. We all know it has to change. Eventually, these efforts will cause a shift and the old paradigm will be just a memory. Until then, we can't stop pushing.
In other news, I just put up a new episode of the podcast on the Patreon (Can you believe it's been a year now?) talking about what from the 1990s is worth salvaging. We usually talk the opposite so it was interesting looking it what actually worked. It's a long episode so I made the preview a bit longer to compensate, so if you want to listen you can find it here.
I'm also starting a new post series that may or may not lead into another book in the vein of The Pulp Mindset and The Last Fanatics. Join now and you'll get to see it as its written and see how it shapes up. I can only do this because of the readers, after all.
There is a lot to look forward to. Don't despair over the future because of the dilapidated state of the mainstream: that is temporary. What is to come in the future will offer a much different world, one where all of this falls away. You always gotta have hope, after all.
As the old saying goes, keep your eyes on the prize. Just don't make the mistake of the 20th century and forgetting what that even is to begin with. There's much more than we can even imagine.
Been quite the scorcher around here since July started. I hope you're managing to keep cool. The heat doesn't look to be easing up anytime soon. But enough of that, let us get to today's topic!
Let us talk about heroism.
For a long time, ever since at least the 1990s, there has been a problem in understanding the purpose of heroes and heroism in storytelling. Before that decade that believed subversion was the future (a vision that eventually lead downhill to complete bottoming out completely in the 2010s), writers and authors had a clear vision for what it meant to be a White Hat in a story. That was eventually lost. Now, because of this modern misunderstanding, it has taken an entire industry of people divorced from the mainstream to basically figure out how to get that lost notion back. The 2020s has been a real relearning experience over this and many other subjects. As has been said, a lot of it is like relearning to ride a bicycle.
The above video by The Second Story channel (the same one that exposed "Fantasy" as being a Del Ray formula, not a genre) has decided to weight in on the muted nature of heroism and good in stories these days. What happened to what was once so obvious an idea and why can even a series with such wanton death and subversion like Attack on Titan still manage to understand heroism more than our comparatively simple superhero movies. It is a good video that seeks to answer the question we've all been asking for years now. What even is a hero anymore?
As has been mentioned before, the modern obsession with villains and "anti-heroes" came about because morality was thought of as simplistic and lame. This was brought about because out culture had lost what made a hero so admirable and worthy of imitating. Heroism became a weak frame that holds do-gooders back from "doing what is needed" and keeps them one note "paladins" who have to meekly follow whatever law that binds them. They're all weak and feeble-minded dupes who can't possibly be as cool as the rogues who do whatever they want, morality be damned!
Of course, none of this is what good actually is (nor what real paladins actually do, believe, or act like), but it has been a misunderstanding festering for decades now. In fact, the source might be traced way back to the age of Saturday Morning Cartoons when Peggy Charren told parents that heroes shooting villains is uncouth and it is a moral duty for heroes to spout textbook catchphrases and government approved laws directly back at the viewer so that they don't forget to become a good citizen. School never ends for children, after all.
This generation then grew up, and brought this mutation of morality to full flowering in mainstream storytelling, whether by aping it or by subverting it, but neither side seeming to understand that the entire frame is warped to begin with. That is what has lead the current industry to have such a superficial version of Good and Evil as concepts: it is all filtered through the ACT, and few from back then have realized its influence on every corner of modern life. "You are what you eat" doesn't just refer to food.
It is much how you come across people who speak like sitcom characters or use internet vernacular in real life. It is learned behavior, and it has affected everything.
That's right, much of the modern idea view of heroism, and it being entirely western in creation, comes from the already backwards understanding of morality embedded in the heads of the Saturday Morning Cartoon generation, a medium that was deliberately heavily neutered and watered down to get children to understand the importance of recycling, listening to teachers, and preventing the third (and first) world from breeding by equivocating them to rats (Captain Planet & the Planeteers still airs on TV, by the way), and how all villainy in the end is just one-note buffoonery or evil for evil's sake. To the Saturday Morning Cartoon generation, you either are good by doing what the Good Guys say, or you are an evil scourge to be eradicated. It is this absurd now because we let absurd people talk us into this.
And now you also know why the modern political climate is the way it is, and why a whole generation cannot seem to understand the motives of people they see as cartoon villains needing to be thwarted like the heroes in their cartoon shows always manage to do. Don't you know Sonic the Hedgehog shares my thoughts and beliefs on the constitution! It's this ridiculous now for a good reason. None of this came out of nowhere, and it is not normal or natural to think like this.
Regardless, everyone used to know why The Shadow gunned down villain and why Mack Bolan went on his revenge quest, and they were not called "anti-heroes" at the time, because they weren't, and aren't. They only come across that way when filtered through Saturday Morning Cartoon logic that was picked up by generations under the Baby Boomers who then carried it into other mediums like comic books and video games as they grew older, as well as the ever-popular video essay on YouTube. This misunderstanding of morality has poisoned everything in the west. This is why heroism is so massively misunderstood today. For generations, this was seen as normal and The Way It's Done, which is what lead to the dead end we cornered ourselves into. We had an artificial morality as a frame and we've yet to fully cast it aside into the dustbin of history.
But it is being cast aside. Slowly and deliberately, it is being done.
There is a realization here and that's that we don't live in the Saturday Morning Cartoon era anymore. A generation of kids have come of age never experiencing that mutation of morality and are now working on their own stories without even considering those once expected rules. That leaves the rest of us to make a decision to finally decide whether we want to continue down this path, or finally admit we might have been wrong all along. Heroes are not what we thought they were: they really are so much more.
Heroes were never boring, we just became boring and forgot what heroes were supposed to be in the first place. Once we rediscover that lost art, we'll be on the right track again. It's going to take some time, and a lot of arguments and butting heads, but it will eventually happen. You can see the change everywhere outside the mainstream.
The future is as inevitable as the Truth prevailing in the end. Good always wins, just not always in the way we might expect it to.
In other news, there's only a few days left to get two of my books for a buck! You can get both The Last Fanatics and Y Signal on Amazon for some quality summer reads. I particularly recommend The Last Fanatics if you only read the blog version. It has been edited quite a bit to fit into book form, and those are my preferred version of the texts. Either way, enjoy yourself! Summer should be a good time.
That's all for this week, and I will see you next time!
