Spooky Season Week 1: Trick-or-Treat Challenges 🎃
Welcome back to another week in Spooky Season 👻
We’ll keep this one short and sweet — below you’ll find:
News and other tidbits you may have missed from this week
Any good news at all
Details on the Trick-or-Treat challenges and how you can participate!
Info on upcoming offerings and events
What you missed this week
Even if you don’t live in Chicago, you may have heard about the ICE raid on the South Shore apartments. But you probably didn’t read the backstory
From Katelyn Burns, about what Black trans women have been knowing about what’s happening to all of us
A few brief views into the dangers of Sora
Also did you know, if you don’t have a tiktok account, there is an open source utility that will let you see links to videos anyway if the account is public? Simply put “see” before tiktok in the url. Like: seetiktok.com/……
On the hidden costs of displacement in Gaza
If you’ve been feeling hopeless this week, a really important letter from my college friend Aaron Goggans that will appear in Kelly Hayes’ upcoming book, Read This When Things Fall Apart (which is available for preorder)
Anything good at all
The federal judge ruling on Drake’s case against Kendrick had so much fun
If you’ve ever wondered how I feel (the correct way to feel) about candy corn
Jane Goodall being pure as hell
Trick or Treat!
This past week was the beginning of the weekly Trick (Tuesday) challenges for the whole month of October here at Necessary Evil. If you missed the instagram announcement, don’t worry—there’s still plenty of time and ways to participate.
This week’s challenge
This week’s challenge (open til Tuesday the 14th):
Trick 👻
Pick your nemesis exercise or drill — one you dread or know you can't do perfectly — and try it 3x this week.
Treat 🍬
It's Banned Books Week! Buy a book for Midwest Books for Prisoners to help give reading access to our friends who are incarcerated.
Check out the gift registries at Skunk Cabbage or Pilsen Community Books. These are specifically for purchases before October 11th, but stay up to date with asks from Midwest Books for Prisoners or donate to them directly.
Do upcoming trick-or-treat challenges
Here’s how it works:
Every Tuesday a new challenge is announced. I’ll put up an Instagram post, so if you’re following there make sure you have notifications on, or you can find all the challenges on the website
You can choose whether you want to do the “trick” or the “treat” (or both!)
You can challenge yourself just for you, you can challenge your friends (lovingly), OR you can let me know what you did — feel free to tag me in your posts or stories on Instagram, and then head to the website to fill in the little accountability form. The forms will stay up for the whole month in case you want to give yourself hard tasks. Submissions that happen within the week of that challenge enter the drawing for that week’s giveaway, but all entries go towards the final spooky surprise, no matter when you do them (keep reading for details on that…)
Entries are chances to win fun stuff (some coupons for free or discounted offerings from me, for example 🙃). Winners will be notified by email.
AND THEN: there will be an extra chance to win a final, special, spooky treat over Halloween. That one is only open to newsletter subscribers, so you don’t even have to do anything — you’re already here! But each additional challenge you take on this month will count for extra entries, so if you want more goes, do more things 😈
So, happy trick-or-treat. Let’s get moving 💪
Upcoming Offerings & Events
How to Have Tough Conversations (Oct 28)
I wrote about how to have tough conversations (and when not to) at length a few weeks ago, and I’m holding a live, virtual event on October 28th for folks who want to dip their toes in on this challenging work. We won’t solve every issue in this 90 minute session, but you’ll get the beginning of a framework for how to approach challenging political conversations with people in your life. Signup is live at the link above! I would love to see you there.
Lining Skills Workshop in Chicago
For folks in Chicago (or who can get to Chicago), I’ll be running some lining (and icarian belt) spotting workshops soon. These are meant to help you learn the ropes (eh??) if this has interested you, so you can safely begin to practice spotting skills with lines. If this sounds like something you’re interested in, check out the currently suggested days/times we’re considering and register your vote! Feel free to respond directly if you have questions.
Stay in touch
That’s all for this week!
Did you benefit from this content? Newsletters are free for all subscribers, but you’re welcome to upgrade to a pay-what-you-want tier if you found it particularly useful and want to offer support. (There may be bonus content for this tier in the future but right now, WYSIWYG).
In solidarity,
Sirus
