nothing here but 28 zombies
issue 292 - 6th July, 2025
CJW: Welcome back, my friends. Running late getting this email ready this morning, so let’s get to it.
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The Team
Daniel Harvey (DCH) - Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - is also Mia Walsch. Writer & visual artist. Hates the internet.
Corey Jae White (CJW) - author, voidwitch, vacillator.
Lidia Zuin (LZ) - Writer, fulltime goth and metalhead.
Climate Change & The Environment
CJW: Is Paddy Heneghan Dead? - Liam Heneghan at Emergence Magazine
12. A planet is dead when a steady-state equilibrium is reached for all its chemical potential. On the intimate scale, an organism dies when it ceases to organize its environment and is itself reorganized by its environment. To put the matter differently, an organism or a planet dies when it endures a surfeit of decay over production. Death, like life, is not a matter just for the isolated individual; rather, death is a cosmic affair. For all of that, the moment of death remains both misery and mystery; it is when “the ghost leaves the machine.”
A study of life and death, order and disorder, growth and decay, beginning with the author's dying father and covering a lot of philosophical ground from there.
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CJW: Political Dimensions of Solarpunk...Ten Years Later - Andrew Dana Hudson
Probably the most important solarpunk development of the decade, though, is that we were right to bet on solar power. The technology could have plateaued. Instead, costs keep dropping. Efficiency keeps improving. Deployment keeps hockey-sticking. Circularity is getting closer. Land use is looking less zero-sum. A lot of this is thanks to China, but everyone is getting a piece of the action. Solar panels are now cheaper per square meter than wooden fencing. We don’t know what The Street is going to do with this tech now that it’s cheap, but I expect we’ll soon find out. Batteries are coming along too——turns out you can make really cheap ones out of salt, no Lithium Wars required. In general the world of renewable energy generation and storage continues to be full of ideas worth sci-fi-geeking out over.
Great solarpunk retrospective from ADH. Personally my interest has shifted to terrorpunk recently, but hopefully it's an aesthetic/ideology/genre that can inform the struggle for solarpunk futures. *winky face*
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CJW: Becoming Earth - Robin Wall Kimmerer at Emergence Magazine
The very air vibrates with its intake and exhale. There is a deeper sound, a certain hum beneath the silence. I’ve heard that the planet makes a sound, a vibrating chord in C♯ minor. Could it be the hum of life being made and unmade, composed and decomposed? If we listen very hard, can we hear the soaring sunlit chords of photosynthesis, the countermelody of decay? The quiet is so intense, it is as if I can hear the small suck of carbon dioxide entering a leaf, the prick as a fungal strand breaks through the wall of cedar tracheid.
Robin Wall Kimmerer is always worth a read. Beautiful stuff, as usual.
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How a trip to the rainforest restored hope for me and my son - Heather Swan at Psyche - CJW: A beautiful piece on hopelessness, hope, and conservation.
Tech & Design
MJW: People Are Being Involuntarily Committed, Jailed After Spiraling Into "ChatGPT Psychosis"
At the core of the issue seems to be that ChatGPT, which is powered by a large language model (LLM), is deeply prone to agreeing with users and telling them what they want to hear. When people start to converse with it about topics like mysticism, conspiracy, or theories about reality, it often seems to lead them down an increasingly isolated and unbalanced rabbit hole that makes them feel special and powerful — and which can easily end in disaster.
Some scary descriptions of AI-assisted mental health episodes here. A phenomenon so new, that:
...even ChatGPT's maker OpenAI seems to be flummoxed: when we asked the Sam Altman-led company if it had any recommendations for what to do if a loved one suffers a mental health breakdown after using its software, the company had no response.
Society & The Culture
CJW: The Novel of Men - Charlotte Shane
No obvious pull quotes for this one, but I thought it was an interesting and nuanced look at the “Vanishing White Male Writer” “issue”. As ever, Shane is able to muster a lot more empathy than I could…
Movies + TV
LZ - 28 Days Later
The new 28 Years Later is out, so I'm doing my homework and watching the previous movies, which I never did before. It was an interesting watch, the first one. I think I might have spoiled my experience by reading some analyses that suggest that the virus is a metaphor (well, most things are metaphorical in fictional movies, and especially in genre films like horror and sci-fi). But, all in all, it's a lesson that Nolan didn't learn when doing Interstellar when it comes to how to use love as a justification for questionable acts. I mean, I loved seeing twink Cillian Murphy biting his love interest's abuser and ripping his flesh off with his teeth. Beautiful.
Also, I don't know if that’s where the canon supermarket scene in zombie stories started, but it is there. Oh, how fantastic it is watching people bonding over free access to consumer goods! It is obviously a criticism against capitalism, but I was thinking how the abundance of resources makes us generous and nice to other people. Humans are perhaps (perchance!) not inherently evil and selfish; it's the false sense of scarcity, which is the basic premise of capitalism, that makes us so. Of course, we have reached a point where scarcity is a reality when it comes to natural resources and the damage we have done, but, you know, poverty, hunger, all these problems are not caused by scarcity, but inequality, etc, you know the drill.
28 Weeks Later
I think this sequence was much less metaphorical, so much more focused on the shock value of having your loved ones devoured by zombies or… being abandoned by them. I think it’s even more impactful than the first, not on a macro level, but on a micro level, as it points out more personal issues than a more collective sense. It still focuses on the nature of people, good and evil, sacrifice, and survival. I’m looking forward to watching the new film and seeing how they tackle the topics this time.
MJW: 28 Years Later
CJW and I saw this at the cinema last weekend. I was expecting nothing, I hadn’t even read a synopsis or blurb. I love the 28 Days universe, and was super keen to see where they’d taken that world.
The evolution of the infected was expected, but I was really interested to see the wormy-type crawling-on-the-ground infected – though I did wonder why they had to be fat. The Alpha fast-type zombies were no surprise, but if you’re a size queen you won’t be disappointed by the main alpha of the film – such nudity. I saw a meme that said it should have been called 28 inches later.
The film’s premise, with lil Alfie Williams taking Jodie Comer as his sick mother to the ‘doctor’, was an okay one, but it relied on characters making stupid moves, which can be frustrating.
I was waiting for some powerful scenes and interesting shots like we got in the first installment (Cillian Murphy wandering around an empty London was revolutionary filmmaking), and didn’t feel like they delivered, even with the crazy iphone rigs they set up. There’s always a lag to followups when the initial film is so successful at what it’s trying to do. The ending is a surprise, but I’m not sure if it was a good or bad one. Still trying to decide.
CJW: Yeah, the slow zombies being fat just seemed like completely unnecessary fatphobia - “These zombies are slow and stupid - let’s make them fat, lol!” Fuck off. Not to mention the fact that it doesn’t make any sense. The only thing we see them eat is worms, so how did they gain that much weight?
I don’t really have much to say about the movie because not only is it the first part of a new trilogy (apparently), but it felt like it too - like it was half a season of a prestige TV series condensed into a film. Is it good? Parts of it are. I won’t be able to say if the whole thing is good until I see the other half of it…
Oh, and the shots they got with that rig just made it seem like I was playing a video game and it had a huge frame rate drop.
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LZ: The Ugly Stepsister
This movie caught my attention last year because it tells the story of Cinderella from the stepsister’s perspective. From the trailer, I thought it could be a revamp of the tale, with Cinderella as the evil one, but it’s not that simple.
Well, it’s a Norwegian film, and Scandinavian cinema is never that black or white but always very “to the face.” It won’t try to sugarcoat things or avoid nudity and other not-so-good sides of humankind. Of course, American movies also do that, even British, as I just discussed above, but Scandinavian films are raw, and that’s why I like Lars Von Trier so much, despite him being very controversial as a person.
It turns out that Cinderella is not really a poor thing, and neither is the stepsister, Elvira, the personification of evil. In fact, we see how circumstances make people act cruelly. Curiously, I had seen two reels today that talked about how to recognize someone who is evil and how smart people will lose their gut feeling to rationalizing everything. What the last reel meant was that even though you can feel something is wrong, you rationalize it, explaining the reason why someone was terrible by telling it’s trauma, or whatever.
This movie brings up a bit of this discussion, but, as expected, it’s a lot about beauty standards and the pressure on women to fit in. We see different points of view towards this; Elvira’s is about the one who is perceived as ugly and will do everything to be beautiful in order to be accepted, treated with dignity, and ultimately loved – by the prince, by people, by her mother. There’s a heartbreaking scene in which Elvira sees the prince with his friends in the forest, and, boys being boys, they talk obscenities and suggest whether the prince would like to have that girl. He does spend some time looking at her, as if somehow he could see what’s underneath the “ugly” facade, but he says he finds her ugly anyway.
In spite of that, Elvira still idolizes him and sticks to the mental version she has created for him after the poetry that he supposedly wrote. That hit me so hard. When in love, some people (me) will simply ignore the red flags and/or the actual person and stick to the potential, to the idolized version we created in our minds. And then it feels like it’s all about you making enough effort to be pretty, to be talented, to be attractive in order to earn that person’s love, but that person never existed, to begin with.
It’s also very interesting to see how, in this movie, Cinderella is not a virgin and is in fact in love with the horsekeeper. But she needs to marry the prince because she needs money and emancipation from the household where she’s now a servant. She manages to go to the ball (I love how the ripped dress is rebuilt by silk moths), where Elvira had caught the attention of the prince after so much sacrifice. He tells her how beautiful she is, and that hits like an “I love you”, but this is only to leave her alone when Cinderella arrives.
We don’t know what exchanges they have, but we only know that the prince has fallen for someone who didn’t even want him. It’s not even that good wins over evil because Cinderella wasn’t always nice to Elvira either. We also see more clearly how Elvira’s mother is rotten and will do anything for male attention, even sleeping with a boy she originally tried to couple with her daughter.
No, really. This movie hit me on so many levels that I didn’t cringe so much at the gruesome scenes as I cried my heart out. Given the opportunity, I will also invite you to read this essay I wrote a few years ago about when horror movies make us cry.
Games
CJW: The story behind Liberty Island, Deus Ex's most iconic level - Andy Kelly at PC Gamer
It was Deus Ex's anniversary recently, so this piece went around sosh. I recently tried to play Deus Ex with a bunch of interesting mods, but I couldn't get it working. It's a fucking classic though, and I'd love to replay it one day.
Music
LZ - Life
I recently started listening to emo, or more specifically, screamo, once again. I was never a specialist, and I wasn't really into emo back in the 2000s, but more recently, I have found an intersection between some black metal bands and hardcore, some blackened guitars in screamo, and so on. Even in black metal, I prefer the more screetchy vocals, which sums up to me loving female vocals in this genre (heads up to Turia, a Dutch band I recommended a few newsletters ago), but Life is a band that also uses some very interesting back vocals, some echoed chanting that for some reason is so powerful (and you can check it in this song).
There's not much information about the band online and, if you check last.fm, one of the tags is ‘Japanese’, which made me think they were from Japan… But, apparently, they are American, and Encyclopedia Metallum classifies them as atmospheric black metal and screamo. Huh! Interesting.
Most of their albums are called demo something, but I would recommend especially the demo two.
I was so lucky when I saw a reel on Instagram with some shots from the music video for Castle Rat's latest track Wizard. Oh my god, not only is the band so stylish and the vocalist has a beautiful voice, but she's also absolutely gorgeous, and they look like an irl dnd group. Their music is a blend of heavy metal with sludge, but also stoner and doom. I don't know, I just know I'm obsessed with their music and aesthetic. I just realized they played here in my city last month, and now I want to die! Hahah
And speaking of dnd vibes, I also stumbled upon some neofolk songs that are pretty epic, like this one. It's very simple, even short, and the lyrics are only “I will restore honor to our name, I will rise above our family shame”, and it just grows and grows and FUCK YES, go Bewoulf, go, my dude, seek revenge, kill them all, bathe in their blood and rewrite your history on their skinned hide!!!!!
Renaissance of Whimsy (Spotify playlist)
Very interesting playlist that I found recently. A mix of 70s songs that have medieval vibes, but also different sorts of music that somehow all connect to this idea of a medieval revival, farmers’ market in the town square, jesters and bards, the medieval party at the end of The Love Witch. It's nice and refreshing!
Art
MJW: Lydia Pettit
I’m loving Lydia Pettit’s creepy, dark pieces, and I, for one, am loving seeing my mid-size body represented in art.
The Self-Promotion
LZ - New drawing!
If you didn't know, I have an Instagram account for my art, and more recently, I became addicted to the song Look to Windward by Sleep Token and got inspired enough to make this illustration after it. :)
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Back in January, Crisis Actors by myself and Maddison Stoff was published at Strange Horizons, but as it was part of the broader Stop Copaganda project, it’s now been re-released as part of a special issue of COMPOST Magazine, which includes a summary of the discussions that were had about the story at RightsCon in Taiwan earlier this year.
The perspectives post on Crisis Actors is great, with an exploration of all the ideas that Maddison and I discussed as we were planning, writing, and editing the story.
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MJW: Liquid Silver Open Call for Submissions:
I’m editing a new anthology of science fiction and fantasy written by sex workers called Liquid Silver (after the club/brothel in Tank Girl.) Here’s the callout:
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS 🌌🛸
Liquid Silver: An Anthology of Sci-Fi and Fantasy by Sx Workers. What does sex work look like on a Mars colony, in a utopian solarpunk community, or a radically different, far-future Earth? What are street workers like in an urban fantasy setting? What does a magic brothel look like? How do you sugar when you’re a sentient cloud of mist? What role does sex work play in futuristic or divergent timelines?
Liquid Silver, slated for publication in 2027, is an anthology of science fiction, speculative fiction, and fantasy written by sex workers. So many sex workers are nerds scattered throughout brothels, strip joints and hostess clubs, reading doorstopper fantasy books between bookings or scribbling sentences about space in the notebooks they stash in their lockers. Sex workers across the globe also think critically and imaginatively about what the world could look like in the future, on different planets, in alternate realities, and we want to create a space for them to bring these thoughts to life.
We’re looking for short speculative stories of 1,000-5,000 words written by current or former sex workers. Your piece can contain depictions of sex work and sex workers, and explore the idea of centering or challenging sex work narratives in science-fiction and speculative fiction. We’re seeking speculative fiction, science fiction (hard and soft), fantasy (no sword and sorcery please), apocalyptic, horror, dystopian, slipstream, cli-fi, cyberpunk, and anything weird. We are also welcoming graphic storytelling from 1-5 pages, as long as the images are in black and white.
Contributors will receive $200 for their piece and profit shares in perpetuity. 🗓️Deadline: December 31, 2025.
The Memes
