Weekly Roundup Vol. 12
Art in all its forms...
Welcome to this week’s roundup! I couldn’t think of a better subtitle. All the Christmas decorations are up at my house - it only took five days on and off! Anyway, this week was more eventful than the last, so let’s get started!
Thankmas
Jacksepticeye, aka Sean, is a YouTuber I’ve followed for nine years now! For the past six years he’s done a charity livestream near the end of the year, between Thanksgiving and Christmas - Thankmas - and the event keeps on growing, involving hundreds more creators doing their own fundraising events. Over those six years over 25 million pounds have been raised for charities. This year it was World Central Kitchen, a charity providing meals for people after various crises.
The stream happened last Saturday, and it was the first time Sean did one in front of a live studio audience, two very fun shows with guests ranging from Danny Trejo (reading a Christmas story) to Ben Swartz (doing about 30 mins of improv with Sean and an audience member) to Patton Oswalt (playing What’s in the Box against an audience member), along with many of Sean’s YouTube colleagues. I caught up with watching the whole thing over the week (as I’m still committed to my social media free weekends).
I’d recommend the watch, but I’d recommend donating even more.
Click here, for a link to Sean’s campaign where you can read more about World Central Kitchen.
Or click here to donate to another group of streamers whose livestreams are still running - they’ve been doing one everyday since the start of December!
Jacksepticeye’s ALTRVERSE
Speaking of mister septiceye, Sean’s first comic book came out earlier this week! He’s been playing with storytelling beyond gaming on his channel since 2015/16, with six different characters now that he’s played. He rebooted the universe beyond little bits in his videos with a short film in 2019, a reintroduction to his character Chase Brody.
Halloween 2022, through an interactive livestream (and the build up to it), Sean really built out his new universe for storytelling. The YouTube live chat had to type in commands to control cameras and complete tasks around a facility controlled by a clandestine organisation called IRIS. We were rewarded with security camera footage continuing Chase’s story, and reintroducing the antagonist of Sean’s storytelling
Anyway, the comic reintroduces and somewhat completely reimagines two different characters, a magician and a superhero. I was very happy when it was announced, a comic book written by proper comic book writers, and illustrated, lettered and edited by equal pros. I’d really recommend checking them out! So far just Issue #0 has been released, with pilot stories for the two characters, but soon they’ll branch out into two individual series of longer issues. There’s talk of narrative podcast coming as well. I’ll be sure to share when my physical copies arrive!
A link to that first issue in print and digital here.
Art in London
The family and I also went up to London this week, first checking out the Royal Academy of Arts where we had our Last Supper and saw a Renaissance copy of a painting of some lunch - wait, no, the other way around.
In Waterstones, I spotted the graphic novel by the YouTuber who kickstarted my writing journey (see the early posts in My Writing Journey here). DanTDM’s book came out seven years ago (where has the time gone???) so it was quite a sight to see it out in the wild. I suppose that’s what you get in Europe’s biggest bookshop.
We popped in the Leicester Square Lego shop which was all Christmassy.
We also picked up a Christmas present for me at Goldsboro books - A limited edition signed version of Psalms for the End of the World by . Link to that beautiful book here. I’d read the first chapter on here, so know it’ll be very good.
Subscribe to Cole’s amazing newsletter too for so many insights on his own journey and interviews with other expert writers, it’ll be like being back at school, in a good way, you’ll learn a lot.
A Getting Published Webinar
Penguin hosted a free webinar last week all about the process of getting published, an hour chat with some good insights from authors and agents, a brief overview of the process from writing to well, being published. I found an agent I’ll definitely be sending my work to when it’s ready, and found another author on here that I’d recommend: .
Visit the page about the event to learn about the panellists here.
The Writing?
I had the same question this week. Putting up the decorations, going out and doing various admin tasks and applications took time away from working on my novel this week, but there’s still time left of today as I’m writing this so we shall see…
This week’s (comic) books
This segment showcases the new additions to my research and fiction collections. This week another great batch of Star Wars comics arrived. It’s like Christmas morning every time!
Four-fifths of the way through the big Dark Droids crossover on all the main series. I’m really looking forward to when the whole event is on my shelves downstairs and I can binge-read through it all.
Thanks for reading! Let me know how your week went, if you feel like it.
Cheers,
Harvey