Goodbye 2025!

Welcome once again to the Wasteland!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Regardless, I am not going anywhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Thank you for reading!

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

Weekend Lounge ~ Are You Smiling?

Welcome to the weekend!

It's the last weekend of the year, and boy has it been quite the 2025. I'll talk about that in one last post on New Year's Eve to close off the year, but not right now. Today I wanted to focus on one last straggling topic I've wanted to cover but could never quite figure out how to. As you can tell I wanted to talk about a more recent phenomenon.

Today's topic is simple: Why is Smiling Friends popular? This might seem like a silly topic but it's one that's been at the back of my mind for a while now. This random show has seemingly taken the internet by storm in a way we haven't seen since probably Rick & Morty's initial explosion, and that was a while back now. Where did this show come from?

Now in case you don't know what Smiling Friends is, I'll try to go a bit into the background of it. The first thing to know is that this is a cartoon they debuted on Adult Swim with a pilot way back in 2020. Season 1 premiered in late 2021 with 8 eleven minute episodes (and one special), season 2 in 2024, and season 3 just this year, with two more seasons to come. The show was created by Michael Cusack and Zach Hadel, animators with a past on Newgrounds and YouTube, and an understanding of older internet culture and humor divorced from current trends. As a consequence, its comedy and animation style has managed to connect with not only older audiences but younger adults as well. Smiling Friends has a strangely universal appeal despite its very niche existence.

The series itself is about a pair of friends named Charlie and Pim who work for the titular company. Their job is to do what the title implies and bring joy to their client's lives no matter what it takes. The universe is a sort of a Roger Rabbit-like one where both people and weird animated races live side by side, and all the chaos that would unfurl from such a place. As a consequence the show also experiments a bit with character designs and animation styles, making its visual style very dynamic and adding to the unpredictability of the series itself.

You never really know what each episode will bring.

[Counterclockwise from Top: Mr. Boss, Alan, Charlie, Pim, and Glep]

All of these factors help contribute to what it is that makes Smiling Friends such a success. Its budget is also miniscule, an entire season purportedly being less than a single episode of Family Guy or The Simpsons, and its odd tone and sense of humor also sets it apart from the tidal wave of Adult Animation that we've been inundated with since the 1990s. That being that it has a truly original sense of style and execution the industry has been lacking for ages.

To understand how this is, I should explain with a comparison. Let me give you an example using a recent animated film I saw.

Back during the summer I viewed Genndy Tartakovsky's Fixed, an animated film about a dog that was about to get fixed by his owners for, well, being a dog. The film is animated extremely well in 2D, some great designs and shots, and some scenes (the one with the cats in the alley, specifically) are extremely well done. All in all, it has all the makings to be a good cartoon.

That said, I didn't quite enjoy the movie. The reason? Oddly enough, it's entirely centered on the writing. The writing was been there done that and dated '90s shock humor I've seen a million times with no new wrinkles. It's hard to be shocking when you've been outdone by things the writer himself did (A Simpsons writer from the classic era wrote this movie, by the way) a quarter of a century ago. As a result, the film is hard to recommend unless you literally don't care about seeing the same thing you've seen a million times just animated really well this time.

That is my controversial opinion on this controversial movie, and that's that there isn't anything here controversial. It's just tired. I guessed everything that was going to happen before it did, because I've seen it before. Even the "moral" is straight out of the 1990s. Good animation can't save boring execution, and this movie is boring.

The problem is that western animation is still stuck in the 1990s irony-poisoned cynical and depressive mode its been since that time. Something like Fixed compared to Smiling Friends reminds us that Fritz the Cat wasn't well received for being shocking, but because it was literally doing things in animation we hadn't seen before. It is nice seeing an animated show with a unique identity trying to aim for something actually interesting for once. No therapy writing or pointless nihilism as a punchline, no reliance on shocking through tired gags to get by, but an identity that is uniquely built for the series itself.

The above video describes it more in depth, but what makes animation such a great medium is the expressiveness in drawings you can't get with other mediums. We've spent so long watering down what makes every medium what it was for the past 30 years we've gotten to the point that being the medium itself is considered criticism (see the terms "videogamey" and "overanimated" that did not exist back in the 1990s) because something dares to do what the medium does best and was always built to do. It's all backwards.

It's as if we've been taught that abandoning the medium itself for some kind of blob of non-identity, of generic Content, the kind that fills the corners of modern corporate slop, is the highest aspiration. How long can a medium keep itself locked into a time that is a quarter of a century old without dying? That's the question. And I think we have our answer via the current stagnant state of things.

And it's part of why the creators of Smiling Friends created their own studio. ZAM Studios was made in order to combat what the founders deem a stagnancy in the medium and in the industry itself. They are hoping to bring back some of the spark the industry has been lacking for some time. You can read the linked article to learn more.

Here is the work they did on the Billy Idol song from his recent documentary:

So what comes next? Well, it seems like underground animation has been making a lot of strides over the past few years. Perhaps the medium will soon dislodge itself from this stuck rut its been in for much too long and start delivering uniqueness again. We can only hope.

Until then, we have at least two more seasons of Smiling Friends to look forward to (probably more than that, honestly) and hopefully a new direction for the western industry that tries to take after its success. It would be nice to have an actual good trend spring up for the first time in ages. I sure hope it happens.

Animation is a greatly unique medium that deserves its respect. Not in the sense of making it "mature" or "serious" or whatever warped perception we have of art divorced from reality, but in the sense that it offers a way to communicate differently than any other one, and that is one that should be cherished and cultivated. We do not need anymore subversions or inversions of what makes the medium what it is: we just need to want to have it at its best. No more Peggy Charrens or endless subversions of her disastrous work as the be-all end-all of the medium.

We need to build, not tear down. And to do that, we need a new perspective on how we got here in the first place, and how to move on from it.

That's also what art is supposed to be: a celebration of life, of being alive, and what we're all capable of doing and being. We don't need crusty, dated 20th century principles and subversion to guide us anymore. We can finally aim for something better than that dead era.

And we can also have fun along the way.

Some examples of the show in action

For documentation on another medium that was subverted and gutted, check out the eternally controversial The Last Fanatics!

Merry Christmas!

The Y Signal gang from L to R: Danny, George, Ray, Andrew

Merry Christmas!

I wanted to thank you all for another great year here. The longer I'm around the longer I'm thankful I even have the chance to do it at all, even if it's not much. It's been a very chaotic year behind the scenes here, as many of you know, but at least I will be leaving it in the dust soon enough with more to look forward to ahead.

Next year will be the 30th anniversary of Cultural Ground Zero, a sign that much has changed in ways we didn't even imagine as little as five years ago. To celebrate both this milestone and the holiday season, I've done a read through of the second part of Y Signal, "Snow Out", on the Patreon. For those who don't know, this is my secondary podcast called The Drifter Mindset dedicated to both reading my own stories and talking about them in a conversational style. This is also the longest episode so far at two hours(!) long, so tune in if you want something relaxing to listen to on this sacred day of celebration.

"Snow Out" is the middle of Y Signal which itself takes place on the Christmas of 1995, making it the 30th anniversary of that in-story event. Check it out for yourself (as well as 40 other podcast episodes and various serializations and written pieces) by signing up for the Patreon. I'm going to be stuffing it with a lot of good stuff in the year ahead.

On top of it, Cannon Cruisers has put out our usual Christmas Special episode this year! We decided to cover the 50 year old horror classic (Yeah, it's that old now), Black Christmas! Check it out for yourself and see if this film holds up. We most definitely do.

That's it for this short update! See you soon for one more Weekend Lounge post to close out the year before one last update on New Years. Thanks for the support, and have yourself a great Christmas season!

Check out Y Signal, a story of what really happened in 1995 when nobody was looking!

Weekend Lounge ~ The End of Fanfiction

Welcome to the weekend!

The year's almost over, so let's settle in with a good topic today. It can't decide if it wasn't to be snowy or cold where I am, so hopefully it's been steadier for you. Regardless, we've got less than a week until Christmas and less than two until the end of this very strange year. Let's get into it with a topic we've touched on before.

We're going back to the well again with the topic of fanfiction. Particularly we're going to discuss the fanfic mindset and what it has led to doing to creativity. The recent above video by The Second Story on topic blew up, as it usually does with this channel, because it hit on an industry taboo that has been choking the scene for over a quarter of a century at this point. Some of the backlash has been expected, but the larger point needs to be addressed: how did we get to where we are? It didn't fall out of the sky, and one of the sources of fanfic brain comes from the idea that nothing new can really ever be made, which explains a lot about today's climate.

So while we all know the weaknesses of fanfic (and even fanfic writers themselves know it), we still insist on dragging it into everything creative we do as if we need to. Why is that? Why do we insist on fanfic brain over using creative muscles to make something new? Why do we even glorify our inability to fashion originality? It is strange.

And why do we continually reward the lowest common denominator while we also admit it is also the lowest common denominator? This seems obviously destructive, and yet we persist in insisting it is the way it needs to be.

Part of this is due to the IP-heavy way we think about creativity and storytelling. We think about storytelling like children think about toy boxes. "I will have my own Star War", "My MC is just like Goku", "my setting is similar to Asimov but with a twist", and so on. It's "toyboxing": insisting on playing in someone else's world while simultaneously seizing control of it for your own gain. It's using someone else's work as a crutch while also trying to turn it into a strength at the same time. Fanfic brain at this stage has become terminal.

Essentially, we want to make "our own" versions of something else more than we want to make something original or say anything new. In essence, we want to endlessly replicate the feelings we experienced when we were kids experiencing this New Thing for the first time, and while there is nothing wrong with that on a surface level, there is a certain mentality that comes along with it that has very much become harmful. We would rather keep toyboxing than actually create or build anything at all.

As has been said relentlessly, there is no such thing as anything truly original, just reiterations on old ideas. This is true. It is the main reason modern genre checkbox obsession has become so limiting and heavily outdated, because we've been expected to rehash the same corporate IP ideas for over half a century at this point.

However, when one is inspired by something, it is usually because it means they have something they themselves wish to express influenced by that original source. To be honest, this is how we get all the best art and entertainment. This chain of influence is what makes it all so fascinating and all so human at the same time. This is what creation is.

Fanfic is the opposite of this. It is the equivalent of playing toys with your action figures to invent new scenarios alone in your room. The thing is, this is supposed to be done as a child when the imagination is still in development, when you still don't know what it is that speaks to you about these things. At the same time, fanfic is this process but with writing. It is a launching pad for younger people to help understand what it is that truly matters about what they love and either move on from it as they get tired of it, or move into writing original works inspired by what they love and contribute to the culture they grew in. The point is that this stuff is a starting point, not an end point.

"Toyboxing" 

But that isn't how it works anymore in our industries.

Now the mainstream is filled with people who see storytelling as little more than toyboxing and writing rooms as little more than fanfic factories to push their own head canon onto an audience that either must except it or go away. They don't really want to create: they want to usurp and become that thing that first inspired them in the first place by wearing its skin and commanding respect. They don't actually want anything new, they don't truly want to express anything, and they aren't at all looking to entertain. They just want their immature selfish desires validated, their fanfiction to be the new canon, and the obvious worship that follows.

It is a poisoning of the relationship between not only art and artist but between audience and artist. It is twisting the good to be purely in the service of selfish consumption. Everybody is an island, after all! Either get on mine, or get out. That's just where we are.

The issue isn't that any of this fanfic process exists at all, after all it pretty much always has and always will. The problem is that this is almost the entirety of not only the mainstream entertainment industry and a large portion of the independent one to. It's the baseline instead of a fringe, like it once was. Which medium is this description referring to specifically? That's the fun part: it's every single one of them. This is everything now.

Musicians wanting to be Led Zeppelin is nothing new, but they used to discover their own original sound along the way to becoming their own band. That doesn't happen anymore. Being inspired by the Simpsons meant something when it was the wittiest show on television, but not when it equates to being another clone with nothing to add to the conversation except cruder jokes and dumber dads with evens stiffer animation. What is the point of such a show, and what does it add to the conversation? Then there is the recent process of taking an old IP you might not have even grown up on and "updating" it for Modern Audiences while gutting it of everything that gave it that character in the first place. Toyboxing at the expense of the audience? That's just cultural vandalism, the obvious endpoint of fanfic brain. None of this aspires to grow anything, leaving the culture stagnant.

It doesn't aspire to be anything except either a thumb in the eye to enemies or a pat on the back from allies. That isn't art. It's junk. And it's the climate we operate in now.

The entire point of creating is to put something of your own out there into the world, to make your mark while simultaneously honoring what came before. The current way it is done of perverting the past while spitting on it and sneering at those you are meant to be communicating with is completely backwards. That is why it does not resonate. That is why the divide between audiences and artists and entertainers only seems to widen.

Until we move on from mocking while stealing from those who came before, the fissure will only widen. Not to say all fanfiction does this, but those with fanfiction brain definitely do lean in this direction in how they worship one part of the whole. It isn't everyone who writes fanfic, but the seed of the mentality is still very dangerous to where it should not be as widely spread as it has been over the past few decades. It cannot be the majority of art and entertainment, because when it is it becomes today's climate.

Nobody wants that, not even those currently in charge of these industries and doing this exact thing right now. It's all just a big mess of half-formed ideas couched with relationship drama that doesn't ever lead anywhere. No one can seem to write a happy ending anymore if they can't ever actually put their toys away for good.

So we must move on from this mentality into better things. It is the only way we can finally leave the mistakes of the past century behind. What else can we do but move on, and try for something a bit more satisfying than that which lead us to where we are?

Let's just hope that next time we remember what it's all for, and it's not ourselves and our own ego. There is more to existence than playing with our toybox while forcing others to watch, and we need to start showing it once more. We need to tell stories again.

And we will. The era of fanfiction is over. What comes next is to be seen. We still have to build it, after all.

Speaking of new, the latest issue of Cirsova just dropped! Check it out for some new stories of thrilling adventure and daring suspense!

Weekend Lounge ~ How to Read!

Welcome to the weekend!

I hope you're doing well. It's getting cold fast around here, and boy am I tired of the weather already. It's only December too! We still got a whole season ahead of us.

Not much of a post this week with the holidays swinging around soon, but I wanted to put this one out regardless. Given that books are ostensibly the main subject of the blog, or at least very adjacent to it, I wanted to take them on in today's post. It's also been a fairly consistent topic in a lot of circles recently, so it's probably time to focus at least a little on them.

What makes reading so important? You've almost certainly heard it was at some stage in your life, and it's almost just as certain that whatever reason you were given chased you away from reading instead of towards it. Why is that? We should consider that.

We have a lot of questions to ask before we can get answers.

Why you should read classics? What even is a classic? Do they exist? Why do they matter? All of these are important queries to ponder, though they are rarely asked even by those in charge. These are valuable questions that don't tend to get answered these days, or if they do they tend to be stock unsatisfying ones that have led to the current widespread literacy problems we've been suffering since the end of the 20th century.

I've made plenty of jokes about how when I grew up the Boomers in charge made reading seem very unappealing or lame, epitomized in the infamous "Chicken Lover" episode of South Park with the bookmobile guy. If you're old enough, you remember that stereotype he embodied. That joke character is the exact stereotype that turned reading from a hobby into being a social issue and punchline, and one that made it lacking in all excitement and masculinity. This is the key reason males of my generation and younger drifted away from the medium.

Of course it didn't start there: Golden Age Siffy Fandom hated masculinity, as you can see reading literally any article on the subject from the time, but it was a logical conclusion to make. The "Chicken Lover" character is no different from the pencil neck degenerate who hated Edgar Rice Burroughs and seethed over Ray Bradbury getting attention for writing the wrong stories. In fat, they are basically the same character. 

The parting with masculinity and males was a long time coming, and even when the industry had a lifeline with books like Goosebumps or Harry Potter that actually did appeal to males, the publishers went out of their way to shake that potential base as soon as they could. In the process, the audience has fled and to this day has no interest in coming back. As a result, OldPub has labeled itself as anti-male, in that males deliberately keep their distance from it. You can argue with the verbiage or their intentions if you want, but it is clear that they did it to themselves by choice.

That aside, reading has been dying for a good while. Something must be done to stop the hemorrhaging. However, that is only half the problem.

The other side of it is the question of how we bring people back to reading? That is what we must ponder. It's not a simple task and it requires a lot of work to answer. One thing that won't work, however, is finger wagging and making mandatory book lists of the sort that chased the wider masses out in the first place. The primary goal should be to make reading exciting and engaging, and that means finding and highlighting exciting and engaging books that do more than check boxes. In NewPub, there is no shortage of work being published that does this. The issue is more in finding it in the typhoon of books out there. In OldPub, the problem is backwards: there is much uninteresting material being pumped out, and it is extremely easy to find. Getting that straightened out should help the confusion and help the space grow.

The above video on learning what a classic book actually is and what it should entail is a good way to understand how to read in a world where reading is frowned upon. Well, unless we are discussing fanfic (and that will be for a future post), and the like. The fact is that there are a lot of reasons to read, and the classics can give you all of them at once. This is why they are classics and why they should be seen as the goal of the medium, something to aspire to beyond the bare minimum.

Unfortunately, the way they've been taught has not only damaged their reputation, but also the process of reading altogether. And what this hatred of reading has lead to a society that simply can't and doesn't want to read or process entire segments of knowledge that were once common not that long ago. This bad way of teaching is responsible for the destruction currently plaguing not only the entirety of the arts and entertainment sectors, but all of society itself.

As can be seen here:

This wider problem is not improving, and it will not until true value is placed on literacy again. This is because it turns out that reading is important, but not for lame and embarrassing Baby Boomer reasons like "magic" or "imagination" (though you don't hear those hoary tropes anymore, as if they meant nothing to those in charge to begin with), but because it is actually important to form us as people and a society. Literacy is a non-negotiable, as we're quickly rediscovering.

Reading is important to process the world around and above us, the universe inside and outside, the long gone past and the upcoming future, and each other. If we cannot do that anymore, then we are destined to implode inside ourselves. The world we inherited will lose everything we were supposed to carry on and leave us barren. If that happens, then all of this we have gained from our ancestors will have been for nothing. We're already losing important parts of ourselves for no good reason, and at this rate the next generations having nothing to start with will only make it more difficult for them to build on anything or succeed.

Current ways are simply not working.

Of course none of it is hopeless, but the amount of time being wasted clinging to dead industries and mechanisms that no longer (and probably never did) work, is holding up any real change in a direction we need. Instead we linger in talks about endless IPs, meaningless trope checklists, and how to wring more money out of dwindling audiences. None of these address the issue, and we all know it, but for whatever reason the conversation keeps circling around to them over and over.

True change starts from the bottom up. The base is what has to be build upon. Why is this hobby, this art, and this medium, important in the first place? What makes it so valuable, and why do we need to treat it more seriously? Why does all of this matter in the first place? We need to figure that out before we lose even more of our reason to create at all.

We're ready now. It's no longer the '90s and cynicism and overbearing sarcasm is finally dying, as is the irony poisoned sincerity that was big in the '00s. We have a path forward out of this pit at the bottom of this endless cycle we have been trapped in for so long.

Now to take it.

Thanks for reading, everyone! I'll see you soon.

Mysterious radio waves... Alien civilizations... Monsters in the Old West... Dark sorcery... 14 Tales of Wonder!