Dec. 26, 2021, 4:14 p.m.
nothing here but a retrospective - issue 162 - 26th December, 2021
Nothing Here
nothing here but a retrospective
issue 162 - 26th December, 2021
CJW: Welcome! Whatever holiday you might celebrate at this time of the year, I hope you’re enjoying it and getting a chance to relax after another tough year.
For this issue we decided to put together a retrospective - some of our favourite reads from the year, film and TV that grabbed out attention, and various bits and pieces we’ve gotten up to over the past 12 months.
I’d like to take this opportunity to thank everyone who’s supported us this year - people who support us financially, those that reach out with links and comments, and those who share what we’re doing. If you’d like a premium subscription, you’ve got two options:
Both options will give you access to the full bonus archive, as well as new bonuses as they are posted. And if there’s someone who you think will appreciate the newsletter, please forward this to them.
Daniel Harvey (DCH)
Designer, writer, provocateur. Pro-guillotine tech critic. @dancharvey
Articles
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The American Abyss – The New York Times (see also: Among the Insurrectionists – The New Yorker)
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One by One, My Friends Were Sent to the Camps – The Atlantic (see also: Surviving the Crackdown in Xinjiang – The New Yorker)
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Conspiracy: Theory and Practice – edwardsnowden.substack.com (bonus reads: How conspiracy theories bypass people’s rationality – psyche.co & Why People Fall For Conspiracy Theories – FiveThirtyEight)
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The Climate Crisis Is Worse Than You Can Imagine. Here’s What Happens If You Try. – Propublica
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Amazon Prime Is an Economy-Distorting Lie – mattstoller.substack.com
Music
Oh hey, look. A new Low album that’s just amazing. Who would have thought? This time out they’ve taken the thrilling noise rock of Double Negative and matched it to their sparse beautiful haunting pop vocals. Well worth a listen.
Engine of Hell | Emma Ruth Rundle
Recorded live and entirely acoustic this is Rundle and at her most stripped back and laid bare. This is Rundle doing the hard work of processing personal traumas without any of her usual defenses. Hard and beautiful.
TV
- Yellowjackets (Showtime, streaming on NOW TV in the UK)
Juliette Lewis & Christina Ricci together in a survival horror psychological thriller? Sign me the fuck up. Yellowjackets is a drama about the teen and adult lives of an all-girls high school soccer team. Think 80% Lord of The Flies, 20% Lost. The slow burn descent into madness is perfect.
Movies
- Titane
Do you like French art house films? Do you like body horror? Do you like watching violent women doing violence? Would you like a movie that brings you all that without the male gaze making it a schlocky mess? Go watch this movie.
- The Spine of Night
I’ve needed something like this for years. I actually rewatched Heavy Metal a few months back to scratch a rotoscoped animation itch. The Spine of Night visually / stylistically resembles Bakshi’s works but takes a page out of Heavy Metal’s threaded vignettes approach to storytelling. This time out to more coherent effect. Richard Grant and Lucy Lawless do an amazing job in their voice work of showing us the weariness and tortured faith of their characters. You’ll not see another movie like this for a generation.
Books
- Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty | Patrick Radden Keefe
I’m from Appalachia so I’m never far-removed from the horrors of the OxyContin crisis. Regular readers might recall me sharing articles about how repugnant the Sacklers are. This book by Keefe, that expands on this very long read from 2017, is a page turner that will leave you seething.
- The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century | Olga Ravn
Shortlisted for the Booker prize this brief (130ish pages) story satirizes late-stage capitalism and its brutal assault on language itself. Ontological uncertainty, lyrical longing, and an elegiac tone pervades every page of this story. On the surface it’s a “mysterious alien artifact” space opera jag but that’s just rope to pull you into wonderful and artful meditation on the nature of consciousness.
m1k3y (MKY)
@eattrainrevolt
This pandemic is a flat circle I seek to escape. All I can remember from this year is going to a boxing gym for all of three weeks - in between variants - writing that up for a journo class I was taking and then polishing it up a few months later for an anthology. Somewhere in between I played a lot of DOOM and hid in my room. Now it’s Boxing Day and I can’t even find my wraps? Ahahah.
HAPPY ESCALATING CRISIS. MERRY NEW FEARZ.
Movies:
- Shadow in the Cloud - best lil action movie of the year. Hit Girl did not come to play.
TV:
Sure, Squid Game was good (subtext is for cowards)… Now try:
- Hellbound - nobody saw Hard Sun but me. This is 1000x better anyway.
- Sweet Home - lockdowns can always be worse…
- Alice in Borderlands - GIVE ME S2 NOW
And, I only started it last night but:
- The Silent Sea makes For All Mankind look like some crappy Apple TV show.
It was two variants ago, but apparently SPACE SWEEPERS also came out this year. Imma def rewatch that after finishing the above South Korean space horrorz… and this year right.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW)
is also Mia Walsch. Writer and recently socially awkward.
Did anything happen this year? Did I do anything? No, but really. I can’t remember.
Articles
Corey had this listed under his articles and I stole it because I have no recollection of any other article I’ve read this year. I found this really touching, and a super progressive way of treating mental illness from so long ago.
TV
- Superstore
I’m behind the curve on this one, but when Corey introduced me to it earlier this year, I did not expect it to be the sex-positive and union-promoting show that it is. Plus, it’s one of the few examples of pop culture that actually presents the pandemic in any way.
Movies
- Promising Young Woman
This was such a hard movie to watch - each scene taking my discomfort to new levels, because if you know, you know. Didn’t make it any less important. A revenge film that has no fucking winners, and the ending went there, it really did.
Podcasts
This is a podcast about the song by the Scorpions, the effect it had on a generation, and the rumour that it was written by the CIA. ROCKAGANDA?!! Try listening and NOT getting the opening whistled tune in your head.
This is a limited series historical podcast about the eradication of smallpox. It shows the desperate fight against a disease that killed ⅓ of those who contracted it, but also chucks in some disses against colonialism and talks about vaccine hesitancy through that lens. It’s made by Paul Cooper, who does another favourite of mine, The Fall of Civilisations Podcast.
Self-Promotion
This written as Mia Walsch on the Tryst Blog. I am really proud of it. It’s a subject that digs deep into my heart, and I feel like I really got my writing voice cranking.
During the… sixth? lockdown in Melbourne I did a weekly workshop run by the Sex Work Narrative Salon. It was a bright light in my week, a thing that inspired me to write for the first time in so long and at the end result is this zine, After Curfew, a collection of writing inspired by the workshops from all the attendees.
Corey J. White (CJW)
Author, podcaster, sin-eater.
Articles
On autocomplete and similar algorithmic writing recommendation engines and the way they could (will?) flatten and depersonalise our written communications.
This is a fantastic personal essay on natural disaster (and thus climate change), comparing and contrasting Japanese language and storytelling to that of the West.
I read a lot about NFTs, but most of that was focussed on the crypto, environmental, and utterly-bullshit aspects. This here piece is looking at NFTs in relation to art, artists, and the art world (and culture/consumerism more generally). It’s fun and scathing, and the author is obviously well-versed in the world he’s describing (and decrying).
Great piece on economists and how they got us into this climate change mess.
- The Controversy Behind the False Memory Syndrome Foundation - Katie Heaney at The Cut
Not only was False Memory Syndrome developed by a man who was accused of sexual abuse by his own daughter, but it was developed in response to those accusations.
I bring this piece up again because it was referenced in a recent episode of TrueAnon and they just reinforced how much damage the FMSF has done through their work in providing expert witnesses for hundreds (maybe thousands) of child sexual abuse cases cases over the decades.
A really interesting excerpt from a book (I have since started to read) on communism and how we could use the current fragmentation of society/culture/etc to create space to reach toward non-capitalist futures.
We shared another piece on longtermism from Phil Torres back in August, but in case you missed that one, this is another piece worth the read.
One of the best pieces I think I’ve seen from Monbiot - and that’s saying something when he is consistently writing great pieces.
I shared this one only recently, but it’s such a great read. On sleep, induced dreams and their effect, advertising, and more.
I’ve talked before about how we live in a SFnal future, but one that’s rendered mundane by its intersection with our reality. Here we see it again - some Inception style shit for the purpose of… selling more beer.
Music
My Disco’s latest album delves even deeper into the realm of experimental and ambient noise after their previous album Environment. I might prefer Environment, but that’s because Environment was exactly what I wanted in an album, so any follow-up that changes (evolves?) the formula is going to take some time for me to adjust to. This album only just dropped in the past few weeks, so I’ll give it time to grow on me (and hopefully see them perform some of these tracks live sooner rather than later). [For reference: I’ve listened to Environment 126 times since it was released in 2019, and that’s just on one device.]
Genghis Tron return after years of hiatus with a new sound, gentler than their previous iteration, but still vibrant and rich.
Not an album from this year, but one I’ve listened to many times. Wolfe’s best, most interesting, and most nuanced album to date.
TV
- Way of the Househusband (Netflix)
I feel like the main gag of this show (“He’s a former Yakuza who’s now taking to househusbandry with the same energy and honour!”) is wearing a little thin with the second batch of episodes, but the first episode gave me one of the biggest laughs of the year.
- Teenage Bounty Hunters (Netflix)
I watched this at the very start of the year, but I’ve already rewatched it since. Funny, sweet, action-packed at times, and with real emotional heft.
- Love on the Spectrum (on Netflix in Australia, not sure about elsewhere)
A reality show that follows different people on the autism spectrum navigating dating and love. Highly recommended.
Books
This is an absolutely brilliant bit of grimy, dirtbag (French) literature, that mostly impressed me with the utterly distinct characters and utterly distinctive voice for each one.
I’ve got the two sequels sitting on my bedside table. With any luck I’ll get through one or both of them in the next few days of blessed peace with my time off work (unpaid, sadly).
One of the best science fiction books I’ve ever read, though I’m sure it’s not for everyone. A first contact story about what it means to be sentient and the curse of consciousness. It’s a fundamentally anti-human book in some ways, pessimistic and nihilistic - in the same wheelhouse as Ligotti’s Conspiracy Against the Human Race.
The sequel, Echopraxia, is also worth a look. Not as good as Blindsight (but few SF books are), but I think its treatment of the vampire is much fuller and more interesting.
Harkaway’s Gnomon was a superb piece of literary SF, again with utterly distinct voices and stories, all building one atop the other. I don’t know that the ending quite worked for me (or one of the story’s threads, I suppose), but everything else was so flawless I still recommend it highly.
The Gone-Away World is Harkaway’s first novel, and it’s a completely different beast to Gnomon. Less literary, more plot-driven, but still brilliant and surprising and touching. I highly recommend either, but GAW is probably more enjoyable.
This graphic novel by Igor Baranko was first published in 2004 under the name The Horde, but I got a copy of the 2012 Humanoids publication under its true title. It’s a brilliant mix of science-fiction, myth, and mysticism with utterly fantastic art, following various parties in their efforts to capture and utilise the spirit of Genghis Khan. Might be hard to track down a hardcopy.
Games
I mentioned Inscryption pretty recently, but I’m mentioning it again because a) it’s a great fucking game, and b) the developer just added a roguelike mode that has sunk its claws back into me.
Basically it’s a deckbuilding game with puzzle/escape room and roguelike elements, but the game shifts and changes as the narrative progresses. The story is weird, multi-layered and metatextual, with a vibe of slowly creeping dread. It’s fantastic.
Podcasts
I’ve mentioned Trash Future in the main newsletter previously because they often cover topics that we’re also covering with our selection of articles. It’s a must-listen for all your awful mundane cyberpunk-present needs. Every time they talk about a new start-up it’s some terrible dystopian bullshit that could only come from the sick minds of VC cunts.
Self-Promotion
One of the bigger things that happened for me this year was that my novel Repo Virtual won the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novel. More at the link above.
Early this year I joined the Buddies Without Organs podcast with Sean (of the brilliant Wyrd Signal podcast) and Matt (aka Xenogothic), and we did some fantastic episodes on the work of Gilles Deleuze. In the New Year we’re pivoting doubly - from podcast to streaming (joining the relaunched Zer0 Books youtube channel), and from Deleuze to the work of Mark Fisher.
I’m really excited about the Fisher pivot - Deleuze and Guattari are incredible thinkers and I’ve really enjoyed delving into their work, but Fisher is more accessible, still brilliant in his own right, and often ties his thinking into pop culture in a way which encourages the sort of deep readings of text that I enjoy.
I wrote this piece for Interstellar Flight Magazine (I wanted it to be for October, the spooky/horror month, but it was delayed), in which I talk about fascism as cosmic horror through the lens of the cinematic masterpiece Come and See.
You might have read this one because I accidentally sent it to the full email list at the time. On becoming and gender and other things.
Another personal piece I wrote this year that I’m happy with - on (constructive) nihilism in the face of climate change (and all the rest).
Lidia Zuin (LZ)
Journalist, MA in semiotics, and PhD in Arts. Sci-fi writer, futurology researcher and essayist. @lidiazuin
Self-Promotion
This is an essay I wrote first in Portuguese and now it’s available in English on my Medium profile. :) If you had the chance to check it on Netflix, His House is a contemporary horror movie which blends fantasy/horror elements with political and social issues such as the refugee crisis, warfare, and African culture. I definitely recommend you to check this movie out.
Another translation that I finished for an essay that I wrote back in 2020. Here I comment on the book with the same name written by the British author Aaron Bastani. For those familiar with other Singularity University terms like “abundance” and the “faith” in space mining for an utopian future, here’s a more left-wing, politicized analysis of the possibilities of automation.
New translation! This was an article that I published at CNN Brasil, but now it’s available in English for those who want to learn more about the ecological messages found in Dune – both in Herbert’s book and Villeneuve’s adaptation.
You might remember that some newsletter ago I recommended the book “Pharmako AI” written by a human in partnership with an AI. So here’s my interview with the author and some reflections that I had about this robotic Wittgenstein-ish work.