Greetings endlings,

Time for the third instalment of my serialisation of those writings from 2016. Weren’t they just simpler times? Sigh. Again, exported straight from Scrivener, any formatting weirdness is due to that… but this is samizdat for the end times. So… enjoy?

peace,

CJW: This year is really getting away from us isn’t it? We’re officially in the second half of November, and I barely know where the year has gone. I guess I edited a novel, and planned the next one, wrote a couple of short stories, gave detailed feedback on 220,000+ words of novel, novella, and short story for some other folk, and attended an incredibly in-depth and helpful workshop in the States, and, y’know, I worked and paid rent and did all sorts of things that one has to do to be a useful human (because we can’t all be productive all the time).

Our latest bonus letter came from Austin - The Worst Excuse, about pessimism, music, magick, nicotine cravings, and synchronicity. To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, just go here to .

Being a parent will make you feel crazy, at least some of the time. During a recent stressful period (exacerbated by sleeplessness, sickness and a toddler with a predilection for explosive tantrums that come across like demonic possession in a Peppa Pig shirt), I made the questionable decision to read “Conspiracy Against The Human Race” by Thomas Ligotti. Great idea, idiot!  

The book had a big impact on me. Once I settled into Ligotti’s somewhat hammy Grand Guignol style, I enjoyed his thoughts about the illusory nature of consciousness and the validity of a philosophy built on naked pessimism - just the sort of thing you want to read when you feel like a deranged marionette being pulled in multiple directions at once. Here’s an excerpt from Conspiracy, featuring the sort of thinking that resonated with me at the time:

How much nonsense can we take in our lives? And is there any way we can escape it? No, there is not. We are doomed to all kinds of nonsense: the pain nonsense, the nightmare nonsense, the sweat and slave nonsense, and many other shapes and sizes of insufferable nonsense. It is brought to us on a plate, and we must eat it up or face the death nonsense.

CJW: Step right up, step right up, and welcome to another issue of nothing here.

Our latest bonus letter was written by moi, titled FitBit vs Do Easy - part 2 of my series on Mundane Occultism. To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, you can go here to .

Here's a follow-up to my last post, Telepathy. Consider this Part 2 of my series on Mundane Occultism aka Everyday Magick.

I’m a little obsessed with William S. Burroughs.

CJW: Welcome to a brand new issue of nothing here. If you haven’t heard from us for a while, you might need to check your traps. We’re trying to keep these emails shorter where we can, but sometimes we can’t help ourselves… To make sure your email provider doesn’t hide the longer ones, you might need to whitelist this email address or otherwise train your algorithms that this particular mass of links is one you want to receive.

We liked Marlee’s most recent bonus letter so much, that we thought we’d open it up to the full list: Don’t worry, it ends on an up note. Each bonus letter is something totally different, so if you want to sign up for future bonuses, and get access to the full archive of them, just go here to .

CJW: Welcome to another edition of the nothing here newsletter. This time around we have Ryan K. Lindsay on board, Australian comics writer and all around great guy.

Just a reminder that we also put out bonus letters every other week, with something interesting from one member of the team. If you want to check out the full archive of bonus letters (and all the fresh ones to come), you can become a supporter.

Greetings fellow humans, of which I am totally one.

Time for another instalment in my much delayed serialisation of those writings from 2016, Field Notes from the proto-Invisibles Monastery. It’s a catchy title, tell ur frenz.

So here’s 30-something pages - dumped straight out of Scrivener, so forgive any weird formatting of images, i’ll fix it in post? - of tips and thoughts on life in the end times, as it seemed then… ah, simpler times. Of course, it’s only gotten worse since. Enjoy?

CJW: Welcome! This time around we’ve got another special guest - Dan Grace. Dan has already graced (ugh, pun [surprisingly] not intended) these pages before, thanks to a couple of replies he’s sent in that were so insightful I included them in the next issue verbatim.

Our last bonus letter was from Austin - detailing some of his thinking behind the next issue of Creeper magazine, as well as some experiments in visual narrative and sleep-drone music (both of which really interest me). If you want to check it out, as well as the full archive of bonus letters (and all the fresh ones to come), you can .

G’day loyal subscribers, Austin here. Welcome to your fancy-pants bonus instalment of the Nothing Here newsletter. This time around I’d like to share some research material/process chat and point you towards some ambient music I’ve been working on.

It’s all a bit of a shambles, so let’s jump right in…

or

CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. This time around we have a special guest - Melbourne-based author and critic Maddison Stoff.

I’m growing my hair for no good reason. I know, I’m bald, but I figure if I stick with it long enough, I could get a great mad/weird scientist look going on. Or at the very least I could grow a mullet. Baldness in the front, party in the back. (I apologise, but without twitter my weird brain needs a release valve somewhere…)

The bonus newsletters continue, with essays, fiction, and other oddness from one team member every alternating week. If you want to receive them as well as these issues, you can sign up to . If you can’t swing it, we totally understand, and these main issues will always be free.

Hey all, here’s the latest bonus letter from your good friend, me. I already have some idea of what my next piece will be on, so this is possibly the start of a series on mundane occultism.

//

It took me a few weeks to get my podcast queue back under control after mostly ignoring it for three weeks while I was in the States. I don’t subscribe to that many podcasts, and plenty of them are only irregular, but in those weeks away that queue hit critical mass (largely thanks to a backlog of , admittedly). It weighed on my mind as if it was an important responsibility I’d been avoiding, like vacuuming, flossing, or my email inbox, but one that would take 60-odd hours to complete – even listening at 1.2x speed.

Welcome to another issue of nothing here. We’ve got a great selection of articles, a smattering of pop culture commentary and recommendations, and plenty more besides.

Alternating weekly with these main newsletter issues, we also put out bonus letters containing something longer and more involved from one of the members of the team. You can get access to these bonus letters by signing up to become a paid subscriber.

Now, on with the show.

I like a good podcast. I have a long commute. My guilty pleasure is true crime, though I shouldn’t call it a ‘guilty pleasure’ because I shouldn’t have to feel guilty about the stuff that I like. I got enough of that from guys in highschool mansplaining to me why all the stuff I liked was shit. So there.

Anyway.

So, I like podcasts. I also like doing things. I have the kind of brain that needs to be kept busy for the aid of my mental health (or am I simply a millennial living under the capitalist system, indoctrinated since birth to believe that my worth is to be found only in unceasing labour, and with the financial requirement to monetize everything I possibly can? You decide!) I have opinions about things. I’m a middle-class white person. It was only natural that I’d start a podcast.

My first podcast, , is about the apocalypse in popular media. I’ve covered and various apocalyptic fare written by friends and acquaintances. It’s a standard conversational style of podcast, me and a guest. I’ll read the book or watch the movie, come up with questions, and I always ask my guests about their own apocalyptic survivability. It’s good fun, not particularly popular, but satisfying in a ‘look, I made something’ kind of way.

Welcome to another edition of nothing here. This time around we’ve got billionaire bashing galore, the gamification of terror, and much much more. 

If you want, and are able to, you can support us by becoming a paid subscriber and receive bonus letters as well as these ones.

Hi everyone,

Austin here with your latest bonus instalment of Nothing Here. This time around I bring you an experiment in non-non-fiction. The genesis for this (now probably defunct) project came about via my interest in installation art and experimental military technology. I did quite a bit of research for this project, so if you want to further explore some of the concepts contained within, you’ll find yourself travelling down some strange rabbit holes indeed!

I hope you enjoy this exercise in “liminal journalism”, and thanks as ever for putting down some of your hard earned dosh to support our little newsletter.

Take care, and we’ll talk to you again soon.

MJW: Welcome to another edition of nothing here. I’m writing the intro today, because I offered without thinking it through and am now typing with great difficulty on CJW’s portable keyboard with inch-long acrylic talons. Hi! Like always, the newsletter is bursting with stuff we find interesting, amusing, educational, transformative, enlightening… I do go on. TL;DR here’s the shit we dig, crammed in your inbox and face, read it read it read it.

You can't get past me, I'm stuck in the future
The shit ain't all it's cracked up to beThe hovercraft's cool but the air's so putrid

CJW: I’m back (but was I ever really gone?). Did you miss me? I know you didn’t. I’m still jetlagged, so I’ll talk some more about my trip at some other point. For now though, let’s get stuck in.

This issue, we’ve got another special guest - Melissa Ferguson, author of The Shining Wall.