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.

I don’t know that this piece is entirely ready - it’s very much a case of writing to work something out, rather than writing something I’ve already worked out.

But, I am in NYC, and I will be very busy, so it’s either send this now, or probably not send it for a week, and I didn’t want to keep you waiting.

//

The accumulated detritus of lost futures piles up around us. At this current point in time, most of these futures are neon-tinged and haunted by an analog synth soundtrack. Old futures. Safe futures that would not have looked out of place at any point in the past 35 years. My entire life has been lived under the neonoir-black shadow of these 80s visions.

MJW: Welcome to the latest issue of nothing.here. CJW is at a workshop on another continent, so we’ve given him a fornight off from editing the newsletter and you’re all stuck with me writing the intro. Ha! Fools!

Maybe it’s all the ‘civilisation is gonna collapse’ in the air, but I know I have been utterly unable to consume any media lately aside from comfort/trash: rereads of Stephen King books and reruns of Project Runway. So you don’t just get a rehash of The Dead Zone and a tribute to the father figure I seek in Tim Gunn, I’m lucky enough to be joined in newletter efforts by the usual team who have trawled through various content so you (and I) don’t have to, and they’ve linked it all here. We also have a special guest:

CJW: We’re a few days late with the bonus. Blame me - I got on a plane to the USA on Saturday morning with the newsletter login details tucked into my back pocket.

Anyway, here’s an article from Marlee Jane Ward on the Creative Precariat. We hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to another edition of nothing here. We’ve got another varied selection of goodness for you, and a weird slice of the now. Again, we’ve tried to keep it a little slimmer wordcount-wise, but if you’re following the links that tickle your fancy, you’ll still find plenty to keep you occupied.

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. The most recent bonus was a brain-melting essay on cartoon metaphysics from Austin. I can’t tell you what you’re going to get next, but I can tell you it’s going to be good (and probably weird).

Hi all,

Austin here with the latest Nothing.Here bonus installment. This time around I’m sending you a short essay – it was inspired by Barthes’ Mythologies, which I recently read in a weekend and found perfectly suited to my attention span and the brief little pockets of time available to me. I was aiming for a kind of Herzogian “ecstatic truth” with this essay – I can’t say I entirely believe everything I’ve written, but it certainly felt more convincing and true as I wrote it, something like hypnotising myself. I hope you enjoy it, and if you have any comments, please hit reply and let me know what’s on your mind. Have a great week, and we’ll talk to you again soon.

***

CJW: Welcome to the latest edition of nothing here. We’ve shuffled things around a little bit for this issue, brining the Self-Promotion section up-top, because we’ve got some exciting stuff to share with you all.

Past that, you’ll notice the Articles section is a little briefer than usual, but we’ve made up for it by sharing some really great essays in the URL section, including one from former guest and friend of the newsletter, .