Death to Realism! 032
Death to Realism! 032
Hope you're all devising various strategies to stay cool these past few weeks! I've had an almost constant batch of lemonade going. If you need a refresher on the origin & nature of these bi-weekly updates, check out the first issue before reading on.
What's New?
It's the last week of July, and therefore the last week the new Plaintext Distro catalog will be up for orders on the website! Thanks to online orders I've just about broken even on the print order and tabling fees despite missing GZF, which is awesome. Going forward, I'll be looking for more local opportunities to distribute the copies I still have, and hopefully be able to make it to an in-person zine fair soon.
I also did an overall edit and added some nice extra effects to the online version of Vault 819, Underground. If you've already played it, it's not anything mind-blowing, but if you haven't yet, well, it's in slightly more shiny and bells-and-whistles condition now.
Coming Soon
Just when I thought I would have to start filling in online forms again, I was invited to take a permanent position at my XML/copy editing/textbook formatting job, which really took a ton off of my mind! I'll see how the role treats me, and whether bi-weekly updates are still beefy enough; if I end up making them more infrequent, I will also put any subscription charges on pause.
I sent the first few chapters of my novel off to an agent for the first time this week as well, which seems to definitely be a process that demands something else to distract yourself with. I finished up some other writing that will appear in a digital, potentially print venue in the fall, and am keeping on with the sci-fi novella project!
The Rec Room
Sometimes if we're having a slow evening we do a random dip into first episodes on Toei's Tokusatsu YouTube channel. The one we landed on this week was Utau! Dairyugujou, which is a marine-themed magical girl musical.
Red Futures Magazine's current submissions call for short fiction or even just joining a sci-fi oriented discussion on the theme of "relationships" and how they're impacted by techno-capitalism is also still open!
The Domino Club Yearbook, which is available in print on the Plaintext Distro site, is also available as a pdf now.
Finally, we had a near-magical experience at the local duck pond recently, where, around every corner, there seemed to be a new type of duck we hadn't seen before, or a small platoon of ducklings. It was practically like playing Glorious Trainwrecks classic WATCH DUCKS in real life!
I've Been Reading
I'm still making my way through Elfriede Jelinek's REIN GOLD, but I also picked up my next read last weekend. Olga Ravn's The Employees is a unique sci-fi workplace novel that takes place on a generation ship. The scenario is different from my current writing project in some pretty significant ways, but I found it intriguing and have been hearing good things, so I decided to grab it. This was on a trip to Burning House Books, which is a slightly newer independent bookshop in Glasgow, and it had a really awesome arts-oriented selection.
This review of Taiyo Matsumoto's No. 5, which was recently re-issued by Viz, is great, and also wide-ranging and informative about Matsumoto's (highly underrated) work in general. I also really enjoyed this look at historical utopian and dystopian architectures in relation to Amazon's fulfillment centers and distributed digital distribution systems. While Crimes of the Future hasn't made it to the UK yet, I still enjoyed reading this piece about Cronenberg's latest work, which helped me process what is so appealing to me about the rest of his oeuvre.
I think that's all I have this bi-week! For new subscribers who have signed on since the last newsletter, you can check out the archive of past issues at any time!
Thank you again for your support,
Emilie