CJW: Here's me, overhauling the Bonus Archive to keep everything (Locked, Unlocked, and Lost) in the one place. Look upon our bonuses ye mighty and despair.

2019

[UNLOCKED] MY DISCO, March 2nd at Geddes Lane Ballroom

3rd March, 2019 - CJW

[UNLOCKED] 400 karma points earned

18th March, 2019 - CJW

[UNLOCKED] Bond vs the anti-Bourne: 4GW and the Collapse as a Survival Horror

31st March, 2019 - MKY

[UNLOCKED] Kingscliff

14th April, 2019 - AA

[UNLOCKED] Passive

18th April, 2019 - MJW & CJW

[UNLOCKED] The Beasts and the Birthday

30th April, 2019 - MJW

[LOCKED] This Bong Chills Fascists

11th May, 2019 - HB

[UNLOCKED] Field Notes from the proto-Invisibles Monastery: Introduction

26th May, 2019 - MKY

[UNLOCKED] Cartoon Metaphysics

8th June, 2019 - AA

[UNLOCKED] The Creative Precariat

26th June, 2019 - MJW

[UNLOCKED] Lost and Found

7th July, 2019 - CJW

[UNLOCKED] A Psychogeographical Survey of the Future

20th July, 2019 - MKY

[UNLOCKED] Social Media Ego Death Trip

4th August, 2019 - AA

[UNLOCKED] How to Jury-Rig a Podcast for Fun and (Not Much) Profit

21st August, 2019 - MJW

[UNLOCKED] Telepathy

1st September, 2019 - CJW

[UNLOCKED] A Gesamptkunstwerk for the Terminally Online

16th September, 2019 - AA

[UNLOCKED] Field Notes from the proto-Invisibles Monastery: Escaping the Empire / Life in the Churn

29th September, 2019 - MKY

[UNLOCKED] Am I just depressed or is the world ending?

13th October, 2019 - MJW

[UNLOCKED] FitBit vs Do Easy

27th October, 2019 - CJW

[UNLOCKED] The Worst Excuse

11th November, 2019 - AA

[UNLOCKED] Field Notes from the proto-Invisibles Monastery: on the Gods / on Wandering Towards the Restoration

24th November, 2019 - MKY

[UNLOCKED] Voyeur

8th December, 2019 - MJW

[UNLOCKED] Refused Are Fucking (Un)dead

22nd December, 2019 - CJW

[UNLOCKED] Reconstituted

24th December, 2019 - MJW

# 2020

[LOCKED] nothing here but a podcast experiment

5th of January, 2020 - AA & CJW

[UNLOCKED] I saw someone die tonight

18th January, 2020 - CJW

[UNLOCKED] Field Notes from the proto-Invisibles Monastary 4 - on Dataism and the Stacks

2nd February, 2020 - MKY

[UNLOCKED] The Husband In Your Head

16th February, 2020 - MJW

[UNLOCKED] The Ones Who Stay

1st March, 2020 - CJW

[UNLOCKED] Bingewatching the end of Civilisation

29th March, 2020 - MKY

[UNLOCKED] Tom COVID's The Division

15th April, 2020 - CJW

[UNLOCKED] Out

27th April, 2020 - MJW

[UNLOCKED] Pixels, Pandemics, & The Protestant Work Ethic or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love World of Warcraft (Again)

15th May, 2020 - DCH

[UNLOCKED] Field Notes from the proto-Invisibles Monastery 5 - on Galactic Citizenry and the Breakaway Civ

24th May, 2020 - MKY

[UNLOCKED] a shadow of the rage I once had for God

7th June, 2020 - CJW

[UNLOCKED] 'You're Wrong About': A Love Letter

21st June, 2020 - MJW

[UNLOCKED] NIGHTMARES OF THE FUTURE: The Ghosts of War

20th July, 2020 - MKY

[UNLOCKED] Bad Ideas

2nd August, 2020 - CJW

[LOCKED] In League With the Devil - Excerpt

18th August, 2020 - AA & CJW

[UNLOCKED] Big tech enslaves and murders Muslim minorities

3rd September, 2020 - DCH

[UNLOCKED] Walking and Things

15th September, 2020 - MJW

[UNLOCKED] SUCCESSION: What strange beast of the global entertainment industry is this?

28th September, 2020 - MKY

[UNLOCKED] Our Centaur Futures

11th October, 2020 - CJW

[UNLOCKED] The high cost of convenience

25th October, 2020 - DCH

[UNLOCKED] Wandering the Icelandic States of America

8th November, 2020 - CJW

[UNLOCKED] Blackbird

25th November, 2020 - CJW

[UNLOCKED] Gould's

6th December, 2020 - MJW

[UNLOCKED] Prometheus: a Christmas Carol

21st December, 2020 - CJW, MKY, MJW

# 2021

[UNLOCKED] The Zombie Guide to Understanding 2020

3rd January, 2021 - MKY

[UNLOCKED] The Secret of the Ancestor Simulation

17th January, 2021 - CJW

[UNLOCKED] A primer on propaganda in the 21st century

31st January, 2021 - DCH

[LOCKED] The Forgetting Navigations, Chapters 1 & 2

14th February, 2021 - MJW

---

[UNLOCKED] Can't Get You Out of My Head

28th February, 2021 - CJW, DCH, MKY

[UNLOCKED] Australia's ecosystems are f---

14th March, 2021 - MKY

[UNLOCKED] Maddy

28th March, 2021 - CJW

[UNLOCKED] A Eulogy for Micajahala

11th April, 2021 - DCH

[UNLOCKED] Cancelling Deleuze

27th April, 2021 - CJW

[UNLOCKED] Becoming

9th May, 2021 - CJW

[LOCKED] Experiments in Expectation (On GPT-3)

23rd May, 2021 - CJW

[LOCKED] August Movie August - The Selection

1st August, 2021

[LOCKED] August Movie August - First Batch

[LOCKED] August Movie August - It’s Over!

[LOCKED] And I Feel Fine

26th September, 2021

[LOCKED] Couch to Hero

24th October, 2021

[LOCKED] Your Body is Perfect, And Other Lies

21st November, 2021

[LOCKED] Batman Returns: A Bativity Scene

19th December, 2021

# 2022

[LOCKED] A Timeline of QAnon Crime

16th January, 2022

[LOCKED] Olavo de Carvalho is Dead

13th February, 2022

[LOCKED] Red Panda

13th March, 2022

[LOCKED] Blood Eclectic

10th April, 2022

[LOCKED] The Farm

8th May, 2022

Remember life before COVID? Remember life before Trump? Remember how weird it was that Hilary Clinton kept dressing like she was running for a spot on the Galactic Senate? Remember the time before the time just now when there was all this weirdness around You Eff Ohs??? Past me does, and he’s been captured in a PDF oncemore - a record 81 pages this time, squirted straight outta Scrivener and into your meat brain mind portals. (I prolly should read over this before going on someone else’s podcast recently too, but that’s a story for another time.) Enjoy.

CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. Let’s keep this intro brief and get right to it, shall we?

Dan penned our latest bonus letter - Pixels, Pandemics, & The Protestant Work Ethic or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love World of Warcraft (Again). You can get access to it, future bonuses, and the full archive, by .

CJW: I’ll keep this brief because we’ve got a long one today - I’ve had to trim some things out of the email version, so click on the heading above to see the full version at the blog. This issue we have our first returning guest - please warmly welcome Andrew Dana Hudson once again!

Our last bonus was about coming out with some big news during a pandemic. To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, just go here to .

Outing myself as a sex worker and former drug addict during a pandemic was a great idea. I’m not being sarcastic. It really was.

See, I’ve got a book coming out in July. It’s a memoir. It’s coming out under a pseudonym because of that whole thing about how I accidentally wrote a YA series, and this memoir is definitely R-rated. Of course I was worried about stigma, moral police, etc etc etc. But everyone was too busy worrying about COVID-19, lockdown, their friends, their kids, and the sorry state of the local supermarket to care about my news. (And by the time the book comes out, it’ll be old news… hopefully.)

The memoir is a hectic story of life and sex and drugs and need and professional handjobbing. It is called Money for Something and my fake name is Mia Walsch.

CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. This time around we’re joined by Ospare! You’ve seen their name grace these pages plenty of times before (with shared links, and when I’ve recommended their newsletter), but it’s great to have them on-board officially.

Our last bonus was a piece I wrote on . To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, you can .

Marlee’s going to have something good for you next time around, but at the moment she’s busy fighting with her landlord and trying to help low income families get tech to help them keep in touch during the lockdown. So that means you’re stuck with me today.

It’s easy to see things through the lens of the pandemic. It’s especially easy when you’re talking about a video game set in America, after the nation collapsed following the release of a weaponised flu virus. So here’s me, talking about the Division, and drawing some parallels to the real world. I just hope it makes sense if you’ve not played the game (and haven’t been paying attention to twitter)…

CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. This issue we welcome Dan Harvey to the team! You may know Dan from his brilliant 20 minutes into the future newsletter, focused on taking tech companies to task for the many ways they abuse staff, manipulate users, disregard privacy, and generally try and run roughshod over society at large. I’m sure some (more) of that will sneak in here thanks to Dan, but he’s also sharing some great art, comics, music, and more.

Welcome aboard, Dan!

Bingewatching the end of Civilisation

Or, The Year Without Summer Blockbusters

Greetings my fellow (in)voluntary shut-ins. We all live in Invisible Monasteries now. But, instead of dropping the last installment of those writings, I figured a good old fashioned DXC-style rant about entertainment at the end of civilisation might be in order, so here goes:

CJW: This is a bit of an odd issue, because, well, these are odd times. 2 weeks ago the COVID-19 situation seemed like a distant concern (in my part of the world, at least), but in the past 2 weeks it’s become all anyone can think or talk about. I hope you’re staying safe and well. Please stay to the end - we’ve got some links that might prove useful, and also a community call-out that I hope people respond to.

This issue we say goodbye to Austin. We’re almost 2 years in, and 2 original contributors down. In another 3 years there will be no one here, just a sophisticated GAN I’ve trained to scour the internet and share links and rants with no need for human interference. But, until that hallowed day, you’re stuck with me (Corey J. White) at the helm, your current events sin-eater. And I'm still joined by (MJW), your fabulous goth aunt, and (MKY), your pop culture pundit for the end of the world.

CJW: Greetings from the land of no toilet paper, where panic buying has stripped our shelves of countless basics as people prepare for… I don’t know? Judging by the amount of TP they’re buying, I can only assume they’re preparing for 6 months of self-quarantine, or they hope to shit themselves to death with a little dignity.

I've seen a few people say something along the lines of "if only we reacted to climate change with the fervour of our reaction to coronavirus." And I get what they're saying, but the big difference is that Coronavirus is a situation in which we (think we) can consume our way to a solution. Masks, hand-sanitiser, hoarding food and toilet paper, or at an infrastructural level building new hospitals - the media can point us in the direction of things to buy and we can do so at a panic bordering on hysteria. But the only genuine response to climate change is to address our addiction to consumption, to embrace de-growth, and refocus on local sustainable production instead of a wasteful, capital-driven global network of trade. No one has worked out how to profit from climate change, so no one is willing to act. (Of course plenty of us are acting as individuals and in small groups, I’m talking about our corporate overlords and our politicians who are in their pocket.)

So, right now I’m a little exasperated, and kind of disappointed in my fellow Australians, particularly the selfish, racist, and just plain stupid reaction to the current situation. As for Coronavirus in general - I’ve got some tabs open to read, but haven’t gotten to them yet. Maybe next time.

I think I first heard about Ursula Le Guin’s short story The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas on an episode of Chapo Traphouse, which is probably an odd place for a sci-fi writer to discover a seminal short story in the genre, but here we are. If you’ve not read the story you should, it’s short and important, and available to read here.

CJW: Hello and welcome. Here we are with another edition of the nothing here newsletter, beaming a dense dose of cultural, social, environmental, and political happenings directly into your eye holes.

The work we do here is supported by paying subscribers, who also get access to bonus letters - essays, experiments, fiction, rants, and whatever else we’re feeling at that moment. The latest bonus was a piece of original fiction from Marlee Jane, The Husband in Your Head. To get access to it and all the other bonus letters in the archive, just go .

This, and the last short fiction piece I published as a bonus, Voyeur, have done the rounds of short fiction markets. ALL the rounds. I had no luck, not because the stories were bad, they all said, but because they were not a good fit for the publications at the time.

I think I write a lot of stuff that is not a good fit for anywhere at any time. These past two years have been a rejection-palooza for me (bar one, bar one really good one), and I flip-flop around between thinking perhaps they aren’t the right fit, or perhaps they are just bad.

But I don’t think they are bad, myself. I have confidence in my work. My plotlines are simple, yes, but I know my writing is good. It’s just… weird.

CJW: Welcome to another issue of the nothing here newsletter. Our latest bonus letter was Part 4 of m1k3y’s Field Notes from the proto-Invisibles Monastary. To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, just go here to .

Greetings and salutations fellow netizens,

here’s the fourth instalment of those #invizmon writings from 2016. In this episode I talk about drifting off-line and why. A quick skim of the PDF shows there’s a few notes to myself in there, which hey maybe one day I will actually revisit.

Rn I’m busy preparing for a life of escalating climate chaos — and if I was still generating content in this style I’d tell you what a fucking pain in the ass it is shopping for Air Quality Monitors and HEPA-filtered Air Purifiers that aren’t designed to plug straight into your local smart home, internet-enabled, surveillance tech waking nightmare of silval-run control.

It’s okay though, I found what I was after eventually and the dust storm that might’ve once more coated Melbourne in a fresh layer of slime didn’t hit us the other night — yeah, the streets have been running red, but it’s not from the blood of our enemies, it’s tons of top soil dumped by heavy weather — so I haven’t even needed to unbox the neat little air purifier I had to order online ‘cause they’re as absent from the shelves of our big box retailers as P2 masks are. And that’s life in the 2020s.

CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. Today is Invasion Day here in Australia. I talked about it a little this time last year, but also want to point to some Aboriginal voices writing around important issues all year round. Here’s a piece by Jack Latimore on the media circus around Australia Day and what it does to black writers - Latimore writes a lot about Indigenous and Australian political issues, and is if you want to see Australia from a different perspective than the one presented by white columnists. Luke Pearson does a lot of work around , an independent Indigenous media organisation. Here he is on .

I was meant to see MY DISCO again tonight. I thought I would have a chance to write another hyperbolic review like last time, but instead I saw someone die.

I didn't see him fall, I just saw the commotion on the stairs. People stepping over what they assumed was a drunk, until someone paused for long enough to realise something was wrong. I saw the two drunks I'd been getting irritated by swoop down and do their best to help before I even realised what had happened.

I looked down from my spot over the stairs, looked down right into the man’s face. I saw the blood spattered around his head and the sick, rolling tilt of his eyes, unmoored. That image struck me, and it strikes me still. I must have seen something the others didn't, because they continued to watch as staff called Emergency, and punters administered CPR. Because they leered over the ledge watching as the paramedics tried to asses the situation - a man dying on the stairs, with an audience, with phones and flashlight, and fucking photos.

CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. I had plans for this issue that I didn't quite get to because I got struck down by some sort of illness. So, for instance, there's nothing here about Iran, though that entire situation is fucked up, watching the American warhawks try to fabricate a war for the sake of political capital/profits/military-industrial hegemony/apocalyptic evangelical beliefs, all with complete disregard for the innocent Iranians that will die needlessly just so the US can wave it's big imperialist dick around. Hopefully next issue we'll have some more to share with you on Iran, but for now you could listen to these two recent Chapo Episodes, or friend of the newsletter Brendan recommends the recent episode of (patreon pay wall link).

CJW: Welcome, friends.

Last weekend I wrote a bonus letter all about the music of Refused - Refused Are Fucking (Un)dead. I’ve been listening to them for 20 years, so I had some thoughts… To get access, see our future bonus letters, and dive into the full archive, you can .

Here’s a Christmas-themed piece of micro-fiction that was originally published at Apex Magazine.

Enjoy.

//

Of course Mum and Dad have to live on opposite sides of the galaxy. Neither will relent, so I gotta spend halfa Xmas day with Mums, then get my atoms bust apart and sent across the Milky to have reconstituted Turkey with Pops in his sad little hab in the Io mining zone. Ugh.

A few weeks ago Austin and I were chatting. I asked him if he had listened to the new Refused album yet, and he told me he was more interested in hearing my thoughts on the album than the album itself. So, here we go.

//

I discovered Refused in 1999 after coming across one of their tracks on a punk compilation CD. Those were the days of the early internet, meaning I had just enough time to daydream about possibly seeing my new favourite band tour Australia before going online and realising they had already broken up a year earlier.

Refused formed in Umeå, Sweden in 1991, and for their first few years they played . I’ve never been much of a fan of – to me it just sounds too samey. Relentlessly fast-paced, with unintelligible screaming vocals, heavily distorted guitar, a flat bass tone, and a repetitive four-four beat. At least with punkrock I could understand the lyrics, appreciate the humour, and sing along, but old-school hardcore didn’t offer me any of that.

CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. Bushfires are raging across Australia while our government refuses to act and refuses to provide funding for the volunteer firefighters who have been battling said fires for weeks now. And in the UK… well, shit. You poor bastards.

Our latest bonus letter was , a piece of original fiction by Marlee Jane Ward, about performance, exhibition, and self-harm in an alien zoo. I think it’s fucking great. To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, just go here to .

I think, when it comes to my writing, that there will be this dividing line between my ‘bleak’ phase and something else. I feel like I’m straddling that line right now: with no clear idea where to go from here, but with a distinct feeling that I need to make something less… sad.

CJW: Welcome to the latest edition of the nothing here newsletter. Here in Australia, summer has just begun (but you wouldn’t know it from Melbourne’s weather), whilst in America everyone is off celebrating Thanksgiving (in all its problematic glory) and Capitalism (ditto).

We’ve got a whole lot of articles linked below, so hopefully you’ll find something worthwhile amongst the selection.

Our latest bonus letter was Part Three of m1k3y’s series of . To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, just go here to .

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.

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).