August 2024: Full Steam Ahead
Hey folks,
I'll try and keep this month's newsletter relatively short, because I appreciate that I've already bombarded you with Kickstarter spam last week and I don't want to take the piss. And to be fair, most of what I have to share relates to the Kickstarter so I'm pretty much banging the same drum (and will be for the next 21 days..!)
The Usual
We've just crossed the one-week threshold of the campaign for Brigantia Vol. 2 and it's looking pretty healthy - £2663 pledged and 88% funded at time of writing. There are no sure bets but I'm fairly confident (based on those numbers) that we'll be able to get it over the line! That total is in large part due to a stratospheric first day which saw us raise almost £1800 in the first 24 hours, a frankly ridiculous number which I am extraordinarily grateful for. Early bird tiers work!
The rush of positive posts and comments about the series also warmed the cockles of my heart - creating stuff is an incredibly isolating and demoralising experience at times, because you pour your entire self into a project (comics, music, whatever) and obsess over it until it's done - and you do all of that not knowing whether people will like it, hate it or (at worst) be totally indifferent to it. I'm not saying that I need everyone to be nice to me about the things I write, but it can genuinely help keep the demons at bay for all of us if we're reminded that people do like our stuff and want to read/hear/enjoy more of it.
Anyway, please do check out the campaign and climb on board if you haven't already - the funding period ends on 22nd September and I'm almost done with the layout, so the book should be able to go to print pretty sharpish. Oh, and Kieron Gillen's writing a foreword for it, isn't that nice?
The first few copies of SECRETS OF THE MAJESTIC have also landed on doormats - I sent out a couple just to get the hang of this newfangled Click & Drop/thermal label printer setup that I'm using. It seems deceptively easy, but the books appear to have arrived safely, so all good to go! Here's evidence:
The Tunes
It's a surprisingly metal-light playlist this month! Only a few overtly heavy tracks on here, mainly because I've spent most of the back half of the month listening to the Alien: Romulus soundtrack after thoroughly enjoying the movie (if I had a Letterboxd account my review would be "Uncomfortably vaginal. 4/5.") We kick things off with a great, dark, atmospheric piece from that OST before steering into videogame territory with this re-orchestrated track from Breath of the Wild, one of the best Zelda games. Next is a nice, moody ambient break courtesy of Kyle Preston (a Spotify discovery) before I indulge my inner (lapsed) Mancunian with what is, in my opinion, the best Oasis song. I know that Oasis are a hot topic at the moment, and I'll be the first to say they're problematic, but listening to them reminds me of where I'm from and the years I spent kicking around Stockport and Manchester as a teenager - it's a very specific kind of nostalgia that I'm now old enough to appreciate. I'm not paying through the nose to see them live because it'll be a trainwreck, but I'll happily listen to this tune!
Moving on - I've long appreciated Bob Marley even if I don't know a lot of reggae artists outside of him, so I only discovered this month that his grandson YG Marley also makes music - and it's a nice, laid-back jam for summer written with his mother, the sublime Lauryn Hill. I first heard of Stateless courtesy of one of their songs being on a radio station in the videogame Sleeping Dogs (a fantastic Hong Kong action/open-world game, by the by) and they've remained a favourite, this song in particular. The Appleseed Cast are one of those bands I've never seen or heard anywhere else, but I picked up a CD in HMV when I was younger on the strength of the artwork - I guess I'd describe them as post-indie? The whole album is worth your time! Glassing open up the heavy closing section of this playlist with their furious blackened sludge, before we get into new Opeth (they brought the death metal growls back! And stopped trying so hard to sound like a shit 70s prog band! Thank fuck!!) and closing things out, the ferocious Egyptian death metal assault of Nile, perhaps the greatest example of "write music about something you're passionate about" considering how they've basically been guitarist/vocalist Karl Sanders' Egyptian history/mythology thesis for the last 30 years. I pre-ordered a fancy Anubis statue version of this album (see below) - worth the money? No. Extremely cool? You're damn right:
The Links
Just one link this time, for a long-read article about the absolute shitshow that is AI and LLMs from a writer who clearly knows what they're talking about: wheresyoured.at/burst-damage
I (and probably a lot of other creatives) feel like a real bunch of Cassandras about this whole AI mess - it's a terrible idea, the results are awful and even if they get "as good as done by a human", I cannot express strongly enough how much I reject that. I don't want to read a book from a facsimile of a human, or listen to a song compiled by a computer to try and sound like a human made it - I want to experience art created BY HUMANS, with all their mess and flaws and complex emotions. And that's without even getting into the devastating environmental impact all these models are having.
If you'd said to me when I was 12 that my adulthood would be spent raging at the shattering collapse of our planet's ecosystem, exacerbated by feckless and immoral techbros pumping out emissions just so that your mad uncle could generate a shit picture of Donald Trump in a Captain America costume, I'd probably just have walked into the sea off Broadstairs while visiting my grandparents and been done with it. Roll over, thou grate and restless ocean - roll over the LOT.
Anyway, this article is full of excellent lines skewering those immoral techbros and pointing out just how wobbly the whole structure of "generative AI" is. I for one sincerely hope it collapses in the next 12 months, much like NFTs and crypto currency. Not to be a luddite or anything, but some new technology is just bad and shouldn't be encouraged?
And that's all for this month - by the time the next edition rolls around I'll (hopefully) be celebrating another successful Kickstarter campaign. Thanks for reading!
All the best,