nothing here but astrocolonialism

issue 154 - 17th October, 2021

CJW: Welcome back to another edition of the nothing here newsletter.

nothing here but anti-fascist mutual aid

issue 153 - 3rd October, 2021

CJW: Hello, and welcome again to another edition of nothing here.

nothing here but shapeshifting animals

issue 151 - 19th September, 2021

CJW: Welcome to another instalment of the nothing here newsletter. We've had a huge influx of new subscribers - welcome! I'm not sure what brought you here, but I'm glad to have you join us.

nothing here but slime molds and Heisenberg cubes

issue 150 - 5th September, 2021

nothing here but deepfake pitches

issue 148 - 22nd August, 2021

CJW: Everything happens all the time, as these past 2 weeks have attested.

nothing here but outsourced torture

issue 146 - 8th August, 2021

I’m coming atcha from Wurundjeri lands in Melbourne, in lockdown number 6 (Lock Fast, Lock Furious), and I can’t travel more than 5 kilometres from my house. Again. This time we’ve got a robust climate section (there’s just so much going on, though I never read it ‘cause I spend enough time crying in the shower…) as well as billionaire migration, anarchist prepping, memes, and more.

CJW: My mental health has taken another dive, and I’m finding it basically impossible to engage with my article reading, at all. Usually when this happens I can still read, or at least skim, the articles, but I might struggle when it comes to writing them up for the newsletter - this time around though, I can barely bring myself to read them.

So, I’m going to be taking a bit of a break from being your current events sin-eater. I decided that while I’m taking a minor break, I might dive into this list of movies I’ve been keeping around for ages, and finally get around to watching them. Thus I present to you, the inaugural August Movie August (because heaven-forbid I actually take any time off-off).

Below I’ve included my list of movies so that if you want to play along at home, you can. And if you do, feel free to hit me up with your thoughts and I might include them along with my own in my next dispatch.

nothing here but dicks in space

issue 144 - 25th July, 2021

CJW: Welcome, welcome. You'll notice below that I've decided to replace the Articles, URL, and Data Viz sections with topics. That way you can home in on the subjects you're interested in and skip over the ones you aren't. It makes so much sense I don't know how I didn't think of it before now.

nothing here but a practical effects arms-race

issue 143 - 11th July, 2021

Hey everyone! This issue m1k3y is back, and we have the pleasure of adding Lidia Zuin to the roster permanently! This is a fantastic team, and I’m really excited to see what we can bring you.

nothing here but corporate serfdom

issue 142 - 27th June, 2021

CJW: Thanks for joining us again for another issue of nothing here. This time out, we have returning guest Maddison Stoff, Melbourne-based writer, critic, musician, and generally rad person.

nothing here but ecosystem revival

issue 141 - 13th June, 2021

Welcome to another edition of the nothing here newsletter. MKY is taking a break but I hope we’ll have him back next month. In the meantime we have special guest Lidia Zuin! Lidia is a Brazilian semiotician, journalist, researcher, futurologist and professor.

nothing here but this electric face

issue 140 - 30th May, 2021

Welcome to another edition of the nothing here newsletter. We’ve got more of all the good (read: bad) stuff for you.

Early this week, I (CJW) was given access to OpenAI’s GPT-3 beta. I half-expected my application to fall through the cracks, thinking they’d be more interested in technical applications rather than the sort of stupid experiments I was likely to conduct, but either they’re letting any old chump get in, or I managed to wow them with my brief application spiel.

My pitch was that I wanted to explore GPT-3’s potential use as the next evolution of the Cut-Up Technique, invented by Brion Gysin and popularised by William S. Burroughs. I’ve experimented with the Cut-Up Technique (CUT) plenty before – both cutting within a piece of work to see what new insights might reveal themselves through the arbitrary juxtaposition of words and phrases, and also as a tool for combining two vastly different texts. CUT can be fun, and it can also be revealing and confronting, like one time where it found the intention behind a very personal piece of writing even when said intention was not on the page.

nothing here but a birth of violence

issue 138 - 16th May, 2021

CJW: Hello again and welcome.

CJW: On Becoming...

Every now and then there’ll be a new meme that spreads through author twitter about an author’s brand, or what themes they find they keep writing. I’ve seen variations go by a dozen times, easily, and I always scrolled right past each time because I had no idea what my response would be.

Being able to work out the answer to that question would mean being able to step back and look at a project subjectively, and I’m usually so deep in a project I can’t tell if it’s any good, let alone what bigger themes it might be touching on. But working through another edit on my current manuscript I finally figured it out… And it’s about damn time.

issue 136 - 2nd May, 2021

CJW: Welcome to the latest instalment of nothing here. It’s a big one. Sorry? This issue we’ve got returning guest, Andrew Dana Hudson. Thanks for joining us Andrew!