Welcome to another installment of the nothing here newsletter. John is busy working his fingers to the bone, making the transition from full-time work to full-time freelance, but the rest of us are here, with a browser-busting selection of links.
Hi, how are you? Can you believe it's been less than two weeks since that report? Me neither.
Corey J. White (CJW)
The VoidWitch Saga. Newsletter facilitator. Naarm/Melbourne. Tweets @cjwhite.
Marlee Jane Ward (MJW)
Writer, reader, weirdo. Author of ‘Welcome To Orphancorp’ and ‘Psynode’. Host of Catastropod. ADHD, spec fic, feminism, cats. Melbourne, Australia. @marleejaneward
Austin Armatys (AA)
Oh Nothing Press // @ohnothingpress on Instagram
John English (JE)
Photographer - Solvent Image. Writer of upcoming comic CEL. Based in Brisbane, Australia @Herts_Solvent
m1k3y (MKY)
Wallfacer / Apocalyptic Futurist / #salvagepunk / @m1k3y
MJW: The Tower by Andrew O’Hagan from the London Review of Books. If you’ve got a bunch of free hours, read this amazing article about the Grenfell Tower fire. O’Hagan that goes deep into not only the causes and after-effects of the fire, but right into the lives of those who lived and those who died. This is fucking powerful shit, and fucking devastating.
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CJW: Saving Punk from Cyberpunk (via Dan Hill)
[Gabriela Aveiro-Ojeda] observe[s] that “to be anti-colonialist is to be punk, and punk tends to almost never focus on how much of its concepts it owes to indigenous resistance”.
This article is kind of a follow-up to Sam Greer’s excellent piece for Rock, Paper, Shotgun, Trans representation in Cyberpunk 2077 matters, but not because it’s cyberpunk, but here the conversation covers a variety of developers working on indie games, and coming from a variety of different points of view (as you can probably tell from that pull quote).
And to counter that with something groan-worthy: How Punk Rock Can Revitalize Human Resources
Dressed in multicolored pants, combat boots and spiked leather bracelets, SAP’s Chief Human Resources Officer, Stefan Ries proudly strut onto the stage of the MGM Park Theater in Las Vegas to the strains of “Bring Me to Life” by Evanesence.
Imagine dressing in your best, middle-aged dad version of a 70s punk outfit, only to walk out on stage to fucking Evanesence. Fuck off with your dadpunk bullshit.
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MKY: Exploring the Future Beyond Cyberpunk’s Neon and Noir
CJW: I’m not sure if the VoidWitch books fit under ‘woke space opera’ but I’d like it if they did want them to. Is it inflammatory for me to say the evil Empire in the series is directly based on the behaviour of the US during the War on Terror? It’s largely in the background because my protagonist doesn’t consider the big picture, but it’s there, and covered in better detail in a spin-off novel that may never see the light of day.
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CJW: Neon-Noir: Noe Alonzo Photographs the “Ugly” Side of Seoul
I’m a big fan of Alonzo’s work, a great example of real-life cyberpunk-style imagery and bisexual lighting.
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CJW: Francis Fukuyama interview: “Socialism ought to come back”
If you mean redistributive programmes that try to redress this big imbalance in both incomes and wealth that has emerged then, yes, I think not only can it come back, it ought to come back. This extended period, which started with Reagan and Thatcher, in which a certain set of ideas about the benefits of unregulated markets took hold, in many ways it’s had a disastrous effect.
Neoliberalism may certainly have led us to the End of History, but not how Fukuyama meant…
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CJW: Major Climate Report Describes a Strong Risk of Crisis as Early as 2040 (via Literally Everyone)
The one article everyone’s talking about! And another take here. And some fucking terrible neoliberal consumerist wishy-washy bullshit here (but at least they do recognise the need for collective action and voting out backwards and/or corrupt politicians).
In response to the IPCC report, Jane Rawson shared a portion of The Handbook, which she co-wrote with James Whitmore: Living with Loss, which is about grief and coping in the face of climate change. I think this is probably a great response to Austin’s question/concern in the last issue - some concrete advice from people who have done a lot more research on and thinking into climate change.
Billionaires Are the Leading Cause of Climate Change
If popular support actually influenced public policy, there would have been more decisive action from the U.S. government years ago. But the fossil-fuel industry’s interests are too well-insulated by the mountains of cash that have been converted into lobbyists, industry-shilling Republicans and Democrats, and misinformation. To them, the rest of the world is just kindling.
Can we just eat the rich, already?
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CJW: A Sociologist Examines the “White Fragility” That Prevents White Americans from Confronting Racism
“The most effective adaptation of racism over time,” DiAngelo claims, “is the idea that racism is conscious bias held by mean people.” This “good/bad binary,” positing a world of evil racists and compassionate non-racists, is itself a racist construct, eliding systemic injustice and imbuing racism with such shattering moral meaning that white people, especially progressives, cannot bear to face their collusion in it. (Pause on that, white reader. You may have subconsciously developed your strong negative feelings about racism in order to escape having to help dismantle it.)
Seeing as 27 Australian Senators (vote them out) just voted for a white supremacist slogan, I feel like they could probably do with reading DiAngelo’s book, or just this review at the very least.
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CJW: ‘Fortnite’ could only exist in a world that’s running out of resources (via Adam Rowe)
But that we have a legitimate cultural phenomenon based on a ritualized kill-or-be-killed game style, and no one seems overly concerned about the implications, is something that I think is worth noting.
Fortnite, or Post-Collapse Survival Simulator 2018.
AA: Scarcity, in video games and in life, is not a recent concept. Yes, it has come into sharper focus in this current moment (the dreariest trudge towards apocalypse imaginable), but the idea that this game “could only exist in a world that’s running out of resources” (so, like, now? And also any other stage in our past? I mean, they’re called “non-renewables”, after all…) is specious and reductive. Obtaining resources and eliminating other players for those same resources is a common video game mechanic, and Fortnite (which is a great game, btw, and one that I play a lot and really suck at) is only the latest example in that long lineage. I mean, just wait til the author hears about Fallout.
I think Fortnite - which is undoubtedly a notable phenomenon, for all the reasons mentioned in the article - is interesting unto itself, and not just as some sort of vague thinkpiece-allegory-container. The worst part of this article is that the author clearly hasn’t actually played the game, besides maybe a cursory bash to say he actually did it, which gives this article a “let me tell you kids my spicy contemporary take” vibe. I currently have a low tolerance for pop-culture metaphor in place of more grounded and practical discussion, and seeing - for perfect example - the genuine horror of social media used to promote dehumanising rhetoric by Israel only makes me feel like these sorts of takes are wasting my time and distracting us from important material concerns… this shit is just chaff in the form of abstraction.
In any case, I’m looking forward to the author’s next article - “What Can Harry Potter Teach Us About Planned Economies?”
MKY: Scientists Are Playing Fortnite on Twitch to Teach People About Climate Change
when ur thinking about #scicomms and messaging around the end of the world, this is a thing…
MJW: Black Wave by Michelle Tea is a beautifully written book; part memoir, part apocalyptic fiction. I picked up a copy from Elliott Bay Books in Seattle - the kind with the cut pages, and it’s signed as well - when I was over there, and I only just got to it now. I actually wish I hadn’t read it so I could read it again for the first time. I finished it at 4am while I was wracked with excruciating period pain, which sort of made it better? Our protagonist, Michelle is a queer fuckup in San Francisco, wallowing in alcoholism and the beginnings of a smack habit, and she moves to Los Angeles to escape it all just as the world is ending. This book is fierce and hopeful, sad and triumphant. It features magical dreams, queer abandon, attaining sobriety and fucking Matt Dillon. Read it if you like lit memoir, queer fic, and the end of the world. Which I fucking do.
AA: 4:3
This is less of a recommendation for a specific movie, and more a recommendation of Boiler Room’s recently launched film site 4:3. It is an expertly curated selection of short and feature-length films, with topics both music-related and otherwise.
Current offerings include a brilliant “season” called AFROFREQUENCY (curated by Jenn Nkiru) that includes Flying Lotus’s psychedelic freakout feature film KUSO, the seminal afrofuturist fictional documentary “The Last Angel of History” and documentaries focusing on genius musicians like Sun Ra, Al Green and Sonny Rollins.
The site also has curated selections exploring topics like Breakcore music videos, Japanese Noise music, a collection of Anti-Drug PSAs & much, much more.
It’s free once after a fairly painless sign up process and there’s tons of great content to explore.
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MKY: AMERICAN ANIMALS
This is a surprisingly intense and captivating art heist film meets scared straight video with a side order of ‘the unreliability of memory’, that mixes fiction and non-fiction to incredibly dramatic effect. Honestly, I was just expecting a fun lil heist movie, but the result is the antithesis to those fun loving criminals in the Oceans <X> series.
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CJW: BoJack Horeseman Season 5
I think there are better overall shows “on TV” at the moment, but for my money, BoJack Horseman has to be the best-written show since at least its second season. We’ve had “adult” cartoons before, and cartoons dealing with serious issues, but I don’t think we’ve ever seen BoJack’s particular blend of humour, word-play, and deep, deep dives into psychological issues like addiction, and intergenerational trauma (to name just two). Every time you think the show couldn’t get better, they raise the bar again (this season’s funeral monologue episode is a prime example), and every time you think the show couldn’t get darker, they surprise you.
This talk with the show’s creator, Raphael Bob-Waksberg, covers a lot of ground, including jokes he now sees the show shouldn’t have told, #MeToo, LCK, and Jessica Biel being fantastic.
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MKY: FIRST REFORMED
or how the my dark shadow felt seen…
This is a movie exploring the consequences of one man’s dark struggle to deal with the ever-escalating climate catastrophe. It’s why you’ll find papers with titles like “The death of hope? Affirmation in the Anthropocene” piled on my own desk, next to research on collapsing insect populations and dramatic loss of mammal biodiversity. Fun stuff. It’s hard to remain optimistic rn… like, that is The Struggle. But, also… I Want To Believe. Still, if we end up with eco radical groups with names like REV 11:18, I won’t be surprised one bit. Apart from the ending, I really dug this.
MKY: THE RESPONSE
The Response is new podcast and radio documentary series that explores how communities come together in the aftermath of a disaster.
aka a podcast for planetary stewards interested in mutual aid, resilience and living through -gestures wildly- THIS.
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MKY: Benjamin Walker’s Theory of Everything - False Alarm Part XII: Wolfgang
A journey through the evolution of reality deniers - from the Truthers to the Hoaxers and Climate Denialists - this ep of The Theory of Everything makes the disturbing case that… they’re winning?
CJW: This is definitely one of the better False Alarm episodes, but in general I’ve found the whole series to be consistently disappointing. The argument being made is too vague, and the whole thing has been too self-indulgent (even for a show that has a fairly high baseline of self-indulgence).
Maybe that sounds needlessly negative, but I think that’s precisely because if any podcast should be doing interesting stuff about the media and social media landscape of 2018, it’s ToE.
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CJW: The Hilarious World of Depression - Chris Gethard Does Not Avoid the Collision
The Hilarious World of Depression is a podcast where John Moe interviews comedians (and occasionally musicians) about their experience with depression. It works extremely well, likely because a comedian’s entire job is dissecting their own thoughts and experiences for the entertainment of an audience, but also because Moe is a kind and intelligent interviewer, leading people through some of the darkest points of their lives with sensitivity and levity.
The interview subjects range from the very famous and very successful (Neko Case, Neal Brennan, Aimee Mann, and John Darnielle, to name a few) to less familiar names (for instance, the episode with military veteran turned comic Thom Tran was great). I’ve been listening to the podcast for a while now, and while it’s not necessarily something to look forward to (sometimes you want a break from your own depressed mind, not an hour of podcast dedicated to it), it always feels worthwhile. I found the episode with Ana Marie Cox to be inspiring, and the episode with Neal Brennan was a great accompaniment to his phenomenal Three Mics stand-up special.
Anyway, I only really know Chris Gethard from his role as Ilana’s doormat boss on Broad City, but he’s (apparently) an experienced and talented comedian in his own right. It hadn’t originally occurred to me to share this in the newsletter, but my mind keeps going back to this episode, mainly because it had me ugly-crying at one point, and I’m still trying to process. (I don’t know that it’s a particularly sad/depressing/devastating episode, more that it’s really touched on one my own issues, which I’m not even going to go into because this is a newsletter, not therapy). Needless to say, if you or anyone close to you lives with depression, this is a really helpful resource, while rarely feeling as dry as something you’d normally refer to as a “helpful resource”.
John, if you ever decide to do a Literary World of Depression spin-off, I’d love to chat.
CJW: MY DISCO - Severe
I actually discovered My Disco because one day I got curious about what the other people from Clann Zú were up to. Their earlier albums are interesting and spare post-rock but it’s their most recent album Severe that really caught my attention. These weird, oppressive, electro-tinged tracks sound like the music you’d hear emanating from within a decrepit temple for a cult that worships distortion.
They’ve got a new album on the way, and I for one can’t fucking wait.
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Jungle Fever – BBC2 documentary (1994)
AA: I’ve been listening to a lot of Jungle recently, all of it from the “classic” period of ‘92-97, and I’ve been astounded at how exciting, relevant and energetic this music still sounds. There is a solid BBC2 documentary on YouTube called “Jungle Fever” (available here) that is a great primer on the scene circa 1994, and a nice time capsule of a culture, place and time I’ll never get to directly experience. The documentary features pioneers of the genre like Shy Fx, LTJ Bukem, and DJ Rap.
If you want to listen to some seminal jungle tracks to see if it’s your thing, might I suggest Terminator by Goldie or Top Cat’s Ruffest Gun Ark (DJ Rap remix)?
Still on the rave-em-up-selecta tip, I’ve been enjoying theJust Jam series of live DJ mixes. They feature interesting DJs (and occasionally MCs) doing their thing in front of a greenscreen while all sorts of wild and entertaining visuals are projected on and around them. The aesthetic is ramshackle and charming, and the tunes are bangin’ – it’s great hang out material (I usually put them on and dance around my living room with my toddler). if you’re interested, maybe start with this mix by Hyperdub founderKode9 and Loefah? It’s bloody good.
MJW: Finally, the first episode of my podcast Catastropod is out! Seven months is how long it took to get 6 episodes about the Apocalypse, edit them, go through a depressive episode and then find the wherewithal to finally finish and post it. Catastropod is about the apocalypse in myth and media (mainly media). In the first episode Mel Campbell and I discuss Stephen King’s The Stand. Listen to my terrible voice and my overly loud laughter as we talk the novel and the miniseries, women and disability in the apocalypse, and the way that The Stand was my gateway drug to the end of the world. Pod fucking save us!
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CJW: That’s all folks. We’ll be back in two weeks with another dispatch. In the meantime, look after yourself.