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, Damien Williams.
If you want (and are in a position to), you can support us by becoming a paid subscriber and receive bonus letters (on top of these ones), and the ability to comment directly on the posts (though anyone can hit reply if they have something to share with us). We’ve already got a great (and suitably eclectic) selection of bonus pieces so far, and they’re only going to keep coming. The old bonuses will remain available on the website archive for new sign-ups, so you’ll have a backlog to catch up on, as well as the new stuff.
Alright, on with the show.
Corey J. White (CJW) - The VoidWitch Saga. Newsletter facilitator. Naarm/Melbourne.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW) - Author of The Oprhancorp Trilogy. Host of Catastropod. Your fabulous goth aunt. On Wurundjeri land in Melbourne, Australia. @marleejaneward
Austin Armatys (AA) - Writer/Teacher/Wretched Creeper // Oh Nothing Press // @0hnothing
m1k3y (MKY) - Wallfacer / salvagepunk / ecopoet // Dark Extropian Musings
AA: The Kickstarter for Creeper Magazine has launched today, and folks, I am hyped.
Longtime readers may recall this project from previous newsletters, but for those just joining us, Creeper Magazine is something John “Solvent Image” English and I are putting out through Oh Nothing Press. We started working on Creeper because we wanted to share our love of weird crime, conspiracies, paranoia, folklore, the occult, modern myth, bizarre philosophy, fringe technology and genre-exploding fiction. It’s the sort of magazine that could never exist in the mainstream, so we had to make it ourselves!
It turned out even better than we’d hoped - we received incredible art and stories from the likes of Ganzeer, Helena Papageorgiou, Elytron Frass, Sean Oscar, Tom Syverson, Sophie Sauzier, Ben Nichols, Jon Weber, Ben Mcleay, Benoît Debuisser, I. Caniveau, Murdoch Stafford, Lachlan Barker, Bart Kelly and J Clement.
There’s also work by my Nothing.Here comrades Corey, who wrote a reflection on conflict, culture and consumerism, while m1k3y dropped a survival horror ecoFable.
Head over and check out our Kickstarter campaign if you have half the inclination - the campaign is a short one, only two weeks long. We’re printing this thing one way or another, so you’ll eventually be able to get your hands on Creeper anyway, but I think the KS reward tiers are worth looking at. Besides some stuff like “early bird” prices for the physical edition and an exclusive “Creeper” t-shirt by BakedLab, we also have some pretty crazy offers from John and Corey.
Corey is putting up a “VoidWitch Saga Package” which includes a paperback copy of each novella in his VoidWitch Saga - Killing Gravity, Void Black Shadow, and Static Ruin. They’ll all be signed by him, stamped with a limited edition stamp, and personalised (if so desired). Most notably Corey has also offered to critique a short story or the opening of a novel or novella, up to ten thousand words! Writers out there, pay attention: Corey is a detail-obsessed workaholic who has never done anything half-arsed in his life, so you know you’re gonna get your money’s worth out of that one! (You also get physical and digital versions of the magazine, of course).
And John’s reward tier is just as deranged. If you fund Creeper at the “Solvent Image Tier” he will create a custom artwork for you based on a theme/subject matter of your choice. You retain all associated rights to the image, so you could even use it in a commercial capacity, if you like. Or you can just get something uniquely Creeper-y for your wall!
John is a ridiculously talented professional designer and photographer, so this is a steal. Just in case you’ve forgotten, this is what some of his other work looks like:
If you fund Creeper at this tier, you’ll also get the print and digital versions of the magazine.
Anyway, sorry to go on about this, but I’m so proud of Creeper Magazine. I can’t wait for people to see it. If you feel so inclined please share this link to the Kickstarter and let me know if you’re down to CREEP.
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CJW: The cover for REPO VIRTUAL was revealed over at the B&N Sci-Fi & Fantasy blog last week. I say a little at the link, and there’s also a blurb for the book (I don’t think it’ll be the back cover blurb, but it’s how I pitched the book), so have a look if you want more information.
The book isn’t out until April 2020, but already someone on twitter told me they preordered it, which is fantastic. Soon enough I’m hoping I can talk about a preorder incentive package I’m trying to put together. More details here as soon as I have them.
And a big thank you to Warren Ellis for the fantastic blurb. Not only did he find time to read it in his #1000mphclub schedule, but he got back to me in no time at all - which makes me think that even for a 100k word novel, I’ve written something quick and compelling.
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MJW: Kindred: 12 Queer #LoveOzYA Stories
Twelve of Australia’s best writers from the LGBTQ+ community are brought together in this ground-breaking collection of YA short stories. What does it mean to be queer? What does it mean to be human? In this powerful #LoveOzYA collection, twelve of Australia’s finest writers from the LGBTQ+ community explore the stories of family, friends, lovers and strangers – the connections that form us. This inclusive and intersectional #OwnVoices anthology for teen readers features work from writers of diverse genders, sexualities and identities, including writers who identify as First Nations, people of colour or disabled. With short stories by bestsellers, award winners and newcomers to young adult fiction including Jax Jacki Brown, Claire G Coleman, Michael Earp, Alison Evans, Erin Gough, Benjamin Law, Omar Sakr, Christos Tsiolkas, Ellen van Neerven, Marlee Jane Ward, Jen Wilde and Nevo Zisin.
Michael Earp asked me to be a part of Kindred in 2018 and I couldn’t have been more honoured and delighted. Earp (currently nominated for the ABA Penguin Random House Young Bookseller of the Year) put this amazing lineup together to make a really rad and important book. Little Marlee would have loved to have read something like this. If you know any young queers who could use a book like this, you can buy it here or order it at your local bookstore.
CJW: Errolson Hugh Sees the Future (via Deb Chachra)
“People often use the word ‘dystopia’ or the phrase ‘cyberpunk’ in relation to us,” Errolson tells me. […] “I think there’s definitely some aspects of that. But really, our whole thing is, Acronym is really about agency. It’s about enabling somebody to do something they couldn’t otherwise. It’s inherently optimistic.”
He pauses, as if he’s feeling his way through the conversation.
“And if it’s dystopian in some aspects, it’s probably because it’s kind of a dystopia right now.”
Profile of the co-founder of ACRONYM, Errolson Hugh. And, of course, now I want to buy a 1,300€ jacket… One interesting part of the profile was the way Hugh talks about the tension between wanting to scale up as a business while wondering “does the world really need more stuff?”
AA: There was one remarkably cursed sentence in this profile:
Bill Clinton walked right into the neoliberal streetwear temple Kith in New York City, and 40 minutes later walked right out with a new pair of $750 water-repellent military trousers.
Neoliberal streetwear temple? NEOLIBERAL STREETWEAR TEMPLE!?! Anyway, I wish I could pull off/afford these kinds of highly-structured fashion-ninja fits. I wonder what the students would say if I rocked up to class wearing something like this:
These Acronym garments look somehow appealing and cringeworthy at the same time. The phrase “I’m a cyber ninja” comes to mind in all the best and worst ways. In this GQ article it says John Mayer is a big fan. That makes sense. I bet he puts this shit on, sucks in his gut, looks in the mirror, and says “I’m a cyber ninja.” Who’s gonna tell him no?
Anyway the guy who designs these things is clearly a genius, they look great, & yet somehow I wouldn’t feel comfortable wearing them. Clothes as fetish commodity for a rarified some, but thought experiment for everyone else. The only real option is to water down the look to pull it off yourself, or wait until fast fashion does it for you (which already kinda happened, I think).
MJW: There’s something to be said for spending the money that it actually costs to produce high quality clothing - special pieces that last a long time, but I’m broke so I just gotta dream of dressing like it’s the end of the world.
MKY: Same.
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AA: Record-shattering underwater sound
Using the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), SLAC’s X-ray laser, the researchers blasted tiny jets of water with short pulses of powerful X-rays. They learned that when the X-ray laser hit the jet, it vaporized the water around it and produced a shockwave. As this shockwave traveled through the jet, it created copies of itself, which formed a “shockwave train” that alternated between high and low pressures. Once the intensity of underwater sound crosses a certain threshold, the water breaks apart into small vapor-filled bubbles that immediately collapse. The pressure created by the shockwaves was just below this breaking point, suggesting it was at the limit of how loud sound can get underwater.
There’s some stuff about the practical applications of this experiment in the article, but I’m really putting this here because of the sheer poetry of it all. Shockwave trains? Blasting x-rays at things? “The intensity was equivalent to directing the electrical power of an entire city onto a single square meter”? I may not completely understand i allt, but in my heart I know I want more. MORE ACTION SCIENCE IN THE ANTHROPOCENE!
CJW: More weird science!
Experimental device generates electricity from the coldness of the universe
An international team of scientists has demonstrated for the first time that it is possible to generate a measurable amount of electricity in a diode directly from the coldness of the universe. The infrared semiconductor device faces the sky and uses the temperature difference between Earth and space to produce the electricity.
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MJW: For the Thirsty Girl
Women, objects for so long within an atmosphere of men’s ambient lust, emerged to twist thirst from a cloying wish into full-bodied desire. Out of the wreckage of male toxicity, they used thirst to mark the men who remained worthy. There’s a reason [Charlize] Theron is still single — few men can step up. What’s more, in a world run by female desire, some are terrified of being left unwanted if they do.
I’m writing YA at the moment, which always serves to remind me of what a thirsty teenager I was, so this article spoke to me. The idea of men being worthy of thirst - babely, sure, but also not terrible people, that’s the kicker.
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CJW: Bullet Time (via Sentiers)
When a Japanese site called Niconico invented the idea of writing comments directly on top of YouTube videos in 2006, it took less than a year for a clone of the platform to appear in China. In Japanese, the system was named 弹幕 (danmaku), or “bullet curtain,” after a subgenre of hardcore shoot-em-up games in which enemies fly in formation across the screen. Both kinds of danmaku—the games and the comments—required their audience to process an overwhelming amount of visual stimulation at high speeds.
This makes me feel old, because there is no way in hell I want comments from random people cascading down the screen while I try and stream video. That said, this phenomenon and the cultural context Christina Xu provides in the article are fascinating.
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MKY: Build a sustainable Belt and Road [nature.com]
“One hundred metres below the monastery is a motorway so new that animals still outnumber cars on its fresh tarmac. The motorway is a small part of a huge network of roads, railway lines, and air and sea ports ready to transport goods to the 126 countries with which China has signed cooperation agreements in what it is calling the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).”
This brief commentary piece on ‘the largest infrastructure since the Marshall Plan’ dangles an amazing vision in front of our eyes. What if China rebuilt the Silk Road (never forget Pax Mongolica) and did it in a way that merged with nature, instead of paving it over? Why couldn’t this ambitious infrastructure project go the extra mile and have wildlife corridors etc built into it? Then they’d truly be fulfilling their promise to become the ecological civilisation.
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MKY: The only way is down: subterranean survival warning + Edible insects? Lab-grown meat? The real future food is lab-grown insect meat = The future of food is insect meat grown in vast subterranean labs.
I mean, it beats rat burgers.
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CJW: 5G could mean less time to flee a deadly hurricane, heads of NASA and NOAA warn
[T]he heads of NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) warn the issue could set back the world’s weather forecasting abilities by 40 years — reducing our ability to predict the path of deadly hurricanes and the amount of time available to evacuate.
It’s because one of the key wireless frequencies earmarked for speedy 5G millimeter wave networks — the 24 GHz band — happens to be very close to the frequencies used by microwave satellites to observe water vapor and detect those changes in the weather. They have the potential to interfere. And according to NASA and NOAA testimony, they could interfere to the point that it delays preparation for extreme weather events.
Not only are our phones made by underpaid workers in horrible conditions for an exploitative global marketplace, not only are old phones difficult if not impossible to recycle, and not only are these devices the very epitome of designed obsolescence, but now our hunger for mobile data could affect our ability to accurately predict storms, right as we approach a time where damaging storms are only going to become more frequent.
So, hey, all those people living in low-lying coastal areas might die, but at least they’ll be able to stream videos of their own deaths for us to watch!
(The articles I read on this all talked about “American weather satellites” and American storms, so I don’t know if that’s Amerocentrism in action, or if there’s something specific to American satellites that puts them at risk. But, needless to say, if this affects weather satellites all over the world, it will mostly be poorer people living in the global south who will find themselves in harm’s way… All so we can stream more video as we commute to and from jobs we hate.)
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CJW: US energy department rebrands fossil fuels as ‘molecules of freedom’
You’ve all seen this. Yes, it reads like a ban Onion headline. Yes, it’s somehow actually real, even though my brain simply cannot accept it (I didn’t write that piece, but it’s exactly how I feel).
Off the back of this, Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrisburg has announced that we’re increasing exports of coal, or as he likes to call it Battler Fuel, True Blue Coal, or Fair Dinkum Rocks.
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Cutting Room Floor:
One billion year old fungi found are Earth’s oldest (via Ospare)
On indigenous oral histories surviving for 7-10 thousand years: The Oldest True Stories in the World (via Lex Griffiths)
On sexism in journalism: The Story My Male Editors Kept Killing
On the recent Australian Federal Election: Fair Go or Ego? (via Alison Croggon)
MKY: US
Fuck yeah Jordan Peele. Maybe the most unsettling thing about this was the Manson vibes. Which… do we really need rn/ever? But then again, Jordan has a point (Charlie was ahead of his time as an open Nazi spouting bs about the coming race war). And I strongly suspect that this subtext will prove stronger than whatever late Tarantino has come up with in his Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Us is a film that, having never seen C.H.U.D, I’d put as an inversion of films like Descent and [REC].
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MKY: THE GOOD FIGHT
Hiding in plain sight within CBS’s locked garden of streaming content is the best dramatic depiction of our current era. Over three seasons we watch legit queen Diane Lockhart struggle with the Trump era, then attempt to navigate it and finally, fight back. All of which aren’t without consequences. And I can’t wait to see what the fourth season will be like.
This show made such an impression on me I got lost for a week making a hyperreal object set in its universe.
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MKY: GO GET ROGER STONE
I’m late to watching this, but holy shit! - this is might just be the best thing I’ve seen since Hypernormalisation, and probably even more necessary to watch rn. Esp if, idk, you’re trying to craft an antagonist for your near-future cyberpunk novel you’re totally working on.
This was very much prompted by my bingeing The Good Fight and falling down a rabbit hole after sucking on a fentanyl lollipop Blum gave me. LOL.
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CJW: Prospect
I watched Prospect the other night, which is a new low-budget SF movie on Netflix, starring Sophie Thatcher and Pedro Pascal. I think most people who enjoy it are going to latch onto the design and world-building elements. The retro-future aesthetic, chunky interfaces, and physicality of some of the tech is really interesting - for example, turning a crank to charge a battery for a gun, or the prospecting technique which looks like something out of the Scavengers cartoon that Austin shared a couple of issues back. But for me, it sort of fell down with the story - an Old West prospecting tale with science fiction trappings layered on top. It takes place on a harsh frontier, after a (not-gold) rush has ended, where our main characters are forced to ally with dangerous scoundrels in order to go after a legendary haul of valuable materials. There’s even a weird, isolated religious sect that dresses all in black. I’m not a big fan of Westerns, but even I’ve seen one or two with that same basic plot.
These sorts of cross-genre mash-ups can lead to really interesting stories, but here it didn’t quite come together for me. It actually reminded me of True Grit in some ways (mainly the focus on a young woman who “should” be but isn’t outmatched by the environment and situation she finds herself in), but it’s not as well-shot, well-written, or well-acted as that film. This is not to say it’s necessarily lacking in any of those areas, rather that most films are going to suffer under a True Grit comparison.
[Tangent: There was a part in the middle of the film where Pedro Pascal’s character had a chance to go full arch… and then redeem himself shortly after. While that turn itself might have been a little cliche (it’s what I was expecting to see, after all), it also would have made for a far more interesting scene. A character simply running away from danger is not particularly tense or satisfying.]
Prospect is not bad by any stretch, but I wager that how you feel about the movie will come down to how much you like Western-ish mash-ups, and how much you appreciate the chunky and clunky design aesthetic.
CJW: After Cyberpunk, by Ingrid Wolff
I’ve spent the past year or so planning, writing, and editing a cyberpunk novel (that I sometimes call ‘end of cyberpunk’ because I see it as a very now look at the subgenre, mostly free of nostalgia, that could help open the path to solarpunk or something else), so of course I’m interested to see other people critiquing cyberpunk from a contemporary lens. This essay covers the past and possible futures of cyberpunk. For all the intellectual weight lifting it does, it’s actually rather short.
Solarpunk, as a post-steampunk æsthetic, shares with it the similar annoying white tweeness (which has perhaps found its apex in “hopepunk”; one wonders where one finds the point in worshipping a genre which thought that a return to “Johnny B. Goode” was rebellious, as opposed to, say, This Heat or Throbbing Gristle) and consequent lack of interesting fiction as a genre, but unlike steampunk, has a number of æsthetic ideas that could be productive if put in a different context, without the enforced cheer and the didactic form.
I wonder what someone firmly embedded in the solarpunk subgenre would think of this, because from the outside “white tweeness” seems about right (at least for the part of this discussion I’ve witnessed on twitter). I understand people wanting to give us utopian (or just non-dystopian) visions of the future, but I do wonder at what point hopepunk becomes indistinguishable from burying your head in the sand while the waters slowly rise. I can see hopepunk and activism going hand-in-hand, but hopepunk as activism is simply a waste of everybody’s time.
If cyberspace is to survive as a positive element (rather than merely the place where the culture and surveillance industries meet, still a viable route for fiction), it must embrace the surreal. It must stand in total contrast to the current internet, which has, in betrayal of its potential, chosen to collude with the culture industry and present a mundane, defanged æsthetic (to say nothing of the forgotten potential of experimentation with the structure of information), such that even buttons cannot have sharp edges.
This quote perfectly sums up why I’m increasingly sick of social media and much more engaged with The Republic of Newsletters, a couple of private chat groups, and the Restricted.Academy forum.
AA: It’s funny to me that part of the prescribed antidote to the allegedly “totally empty, homogenous, and wholesomely suburban” aspects of Solarpunk is to read Nick Land’s “Meltdown” and “Machinic Desire”. Like, yeah, that might help, but just make sure you don’t overdo it and end up recommending the corporate enslavement of homeless people.
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CJW: Heavenly Bodies: Why It Matters That Cyborgs Have Always Been About Disability, Mental Health, and Marginalization (by and via Damien Williams)
This latest essay from Wolven is fantastic. In it, he ties together a lot of topics, cyborgs, space travel, disability, intersectionality, etc etc. I’m sure the main point of this essay is to change the way people think about disabled folk (and other marginalised groups) in our society today, but I could also see this inspiring/informing some really interesting sci-fi. I don’t know that I’m the one to write it, but I hope someone does, someone personally affected by the issues in the essay.
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CJW: Making Kin with the Machines (via Sentiers)
We propose rather an extended “circle of relationships” that includes the non-human kin—from network daemons to robot dogs to artificial intelligences (AI) weak and, eventually, strong—that increasingly populate our computational biosphere. By bringing Indigenous epistemologies to bear on the “AI question,” we hope in what follows to open new lines of discussion that can, indeed, escape the box.
We undertake this project not to “diversify” the conversation. We do it because we believe that Indigenous epistemologies are much better at respectfully accommodating the non-human. We retain a sense of community that is articulated through complex kin networks anchored in specific territories, genealogies, and protocols. Ultimately, our goal is that we, as a species, figure out how to treat these new non-human kin respectfully and reciprocally—and not as mere tools, or worse, slaves to their creators.
In Sentiers, Patrick Tanguay shared something of a press release about the paper linked above. If you’re short on time you might want to stick with that, but if you’re at all interested in Indigenous Epistemologies in the realm of tech, specifically in regards to intelligent-ish systems, then the full paper is definitely worth your time. (Personally, I found the language/tone of the press release grating and couldn’t get through it, but the paper is much better.)
The section titled “wahkohtawin: kinship within and beyond the immediate family, the state of being related to others” will probably be of most interest to readers of this newsletter, so feel free to scroll down. It in particular encompasses a bunch of different topics that we (and Damien Williams) talk about regularly, but then goes even further into some interesting spiritual areas.
CJW: Photographer Jun Yamamoto Captures The Magic Of Japan Streets At Night (via Aidan Doyle)
There are so many incredible photos at the link, but this one really grabbed me:
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CJW: And that’s it for another issue. Lots of really interesting stuff here, if I do say so myself. Thank you for choosing to spend this chunk of time with us, and a huge thank you to our paid subscribers. We do this because it’s a big, weird world, and we love to explore and talk about it. Knowing that people enjoy what we do enough to support us really means a lot.
It can be rough out there. We all need to find our people, build our communities, and do what we can. Be good to yourself. Be good to your loved ones. But don’t feel that you owe anything to people who disrespect, denigrate, or otherwise harm you, especially if those people should count among your loved ones.
If you’ve got anything to share with us, please hit the reply button.