CJW: Welcome to another issue of the nothing here newsletter. Our latest bonus letter was Part 4 of m1k3y’s Field Notes from the proto-Invisibles Monastary. To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, just go here to .

Greetings and salutations fellow netizens,

here’s the fourth instalment of those #invizmon writings from 2016. In this episode I talk about drifting off-line and why. A quick skim of the PDF shows there’s a few notes to myself in there, which hey maybe one day I will actually revisit.

Rn I’m busy preparing for a life of escalating climate chaos — and if I was still generating content in this style I’d tell you what a fucking pain in the ass it is shopping for Air Quality Monitors and HEPA-filtered Air Purifiers that aren’t designed to plug straight into your local smart home, internet-enabled, surveillance tech waking nightmare of silval-run control.

It’s okay though, I found what I was after eventually and the dust storm that might’ve once more coated Melbourne in a fresh layer of slime didn’t hit us the other night — yeah, the streets have been running red, but it’s not from the blood of our enemies, it’s tons of top soil dumped by heavy weather — so I haven’t even needed to unbox the neat little air purifier I had to order online ‘cause they’re as absent from the shelves of our big box retailers as P2 masks are. And that’s life in the 2020s.

CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. Today is Invasion Day here in Australia. I talked about it a little this time last year, but also want to point to some Aboriginal voices writing around important issues all year round. Here’s a piece by Jack Latimore on the media circus around Australia Day and what it does to black writers - Latimore writes a lot about Indigenous and Australian political issues, and is if you want to see Australia from a different perspective than the one presented by white columnists. Luke Pearson does a lot of work around , an independent Indigenous media organisation. Here he is on .

I was meant to see MY DISCO again tonight. I thought I would have a chance to write another hyperbolic review like last time, but instead I saw someone die.

I didn't see him fall, I just saw the commotion on the stairs. People stepping over what they assumed was a drunk, until someone paused for long enough to realise something was wrong. I saw the two drunks I'd been getting irritated by swoop down and do their best to help before I even realised what had happened.

I looked down from my spot over the stairs, looked down right into the man’s face. I saw the blood spattered around his head and the sick, rolling tilt of his eyes, unmoored. That image struck me, and it strikes me still. I must have seen something the others didn't, because they continued to watch as staff called Emergency, and punters administered CPR. Because they leered over the ledge watching as the paramedics tried to asses the situation - a man dying on the stairs, with an audience, with phones and flashlight, and fucking photos.

CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. I had plans for this issue that I didn't quite get to because I got struck down by some sort of illness. So, for instance, there's nothing here about Iran, though that entire situation is fucked up, watching the American warhawks try to fabricate a war for the sake of political capital/profits/military-industrial hegemony/apocalyptic evangelical beliefs, all with complete disregard for the innocent Iranians that will die needlessly just so the US can wave it's big imperialist dick around. Hopefully next issue we'll have some more to share with you on Iran, but for now you could listen to these two recent Chapo Episodes, or friend of the newsletter Brendan recommends the recent episode of (patreon pay wall link).

CJW: Welcome, friends.

Last weekend I wrote a bonus letter all about the music of Refused - Refused Are Fucking (Un)dead. I’ve been listening to them for 20 years, so I had some thoughts… To get access, see our future bonus letters, and dive into the full archive, you can .

Here’s a Christmas-themed piece of micro-fiction that was originally published at Apex Magazine.

Enjoy.

//

Of course Mum and Dad have to live on opposite sides of the galaxy. Neither will relent, so I gotta spend halfa Xmas day with Mums, then get my atoms bust apart and sent across the Milky to have reconstituted Turkey with Pops in his sad little hab in the Io mining zone. Ugh.

A few weeks ago Austin and I were chatting. I asked him if he had listened to the new Refused album yet, and he told me he was more interested in hearing my thoughts on the album than the album itself. So, here we go.

//

I discovered Refused in 1999 after coming across one of their tracks on a punk compilation CD. Those were the days of the early internet, meaning I had just enough time to daydream about possibly seeing my new favourite band tour Australia before going online and realising they had already broken up a year earlier.

Refused formed in Umeå, Sweden in 1991, and for their first few years they played . I’ve never been much of a fan of – to me it just sounds too samey. Relentlessly fast-paced, with unintelligible screaming vocals, heavily distorted guitar, a flat bass tone, and a repetitive four-four beat. At least with punkrock I could understand the lyrics, appreciate the humour, and sing along, but old-school hardcore didn’t offer me any of that.

CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. Bushfires are raging across Australia while our government refuses to act and refuses to provide funding for the volunteer firefighters who have been battling said fires for weeks now. And in the UK… well, shit. You poor bastards.

Our latest bonus letter was , a piece of original fiction by Marlee Jane Ward, about performance, exhibition, and self-harm in an alien zoo. I think it’s fucking great. To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, just go here to .

I think, when it comes to my writing, that there will be this dividing line between my ‘bleak’ phase and something else. I feel like I’m straddling that line right now: with no clear idea where to go from here, but with a distinct feeling that I need to make something less… sad.

CJW: Welcome to the latest edition of the nothing here newsletter. Here in Australia, summer has just begun (but you wouldn’t know it from Melbourne’s weather), whilst in America everyone is off celebrating Thanksgiving (in all its problematic glory) and Capitalism (ditto).

We’ve got a whole lot of articles linked below, so hopefully you’ll find something worthwhile amongst the selection.

Our latest bonus letter was Part Three of m1k3y’s series of . To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, just go here to .

Greetings endlings,

Time for the third instalment of my serialisation of those writings from 2016. Weren’t they just simpler times? Sigh. Again, exported straight from Scrivener, any formatting weirdness is due to that… but this is samizdat for the end times. So… enjoy?

peace,

CJW: This year is really getting away from us isn’t it? We’re officially in the second half of November, and I barely know where the year has gone. I guess I edited a novel, and planned the next one, wrote a couple of short stories, gave detailed feedback on 220,000+ words of novel, novella, and short story for some other folk, and attended an incredibly in-depth and helpful workshop in the States, and, y’know, I worked and paid rent and did all sorts of things that one has to do to be a useful human (because we can’t all be productive all the time).

Our latest bonus letter came from Austin - The Worst Excuse, about pessimism, music, magick, nicotine cravings, and synchronicity. To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, just go here to .

Being a parent will make you feel crazy, at least some of the time. During a recent stressful period (exacerbated by sleeplessness, sickness and a toddler with a predilection for explosive tantrums that come across like demonic possession in a Peppa Pig shirt), I made the questionable decision to read “Conspiracy Against The Human Race” by Thomas Ligotti. Great idea, idiot!  

The book had a big impact on me. Once I settled into Ligotti’s somewhat hammy Grand Guignol style, I enjoyed his thoughts about the illusory nature of consciousness and the validity of a philosophy built on naked pessimism - just the sort of thing you want to read when you feel like a deranged marionette being pulled in multiple directions at once. Here’s an excerpt from Conspiracy, featuring the sort of thinking that resonated with me at the time:

How much nonsense can we take in our lives? And is there any way we can escape it? No, there is not. We are doomed to all kinds of nonsense: the pain nonsense, the nightmare nonsense, the sweat and slave nonsense, and many other shapes and sizes of insufferable nonsense. It is brought to us on a plate, and we must eat it up or face the death nonsense.

CJW: Step right up, step right up, and welcome to another issue of nothing here.

Our latest bonus letter was written by moi, titled FitBit vs Do Easy - part 2 of my series on Mundane Occultism. To get access to it, our future bonuses, and the full archive, you can go here to .

Here's a follow-up to my last post, Telepathy. Consider this Part 2 of my series on Mundane Occultism aka Everyday Magick.

I’m a little obsessed with William S. Burroughs.

CJW: Welcome to a brand new issue of nothing here. If you haven’t heard from us for a while, you might need to check your traps. We’re trying to keep these emails shorter where we can, but sometimes we can’t help ourselves… To make sure your email provider doesn’t hide the longer ones, you might need to whitelist this email address or otherwise train your algorithms that this particular mass of links is one you want to receive.

We liked Marlee’s most recent bonus letter so much, that we thought we’d open it up to the full list: Don’t worry, it ends on an up note. Each bonus letter is something totally different, so if you want to sign up for future bonuses, and get access to the full archive of them, just go here to .

CJW: Welcome to another edition of the nothing here newsletter. This time around we have Ryan K. Lindsay on board, Australian comics writer and all around great guy.

Just a reminder that we also put out bonus letters every other week, with something interesting from one member of the team. If you want to check out the full archive of bonus letters (and all the fresh ones to come), you can become a supporter.

Greetings fellow humans, of which I am totally one.

Time for another instalment in my much delayed serialisation of those writings from 2016, Field Notes from the proto-Invisibles Monastery. It’s a catchy title, tell ur frenz.

So here’s 30-something pages - dumped straight out of Scrivener, so forgive any weird formatting of images, i’ll fix it in post? - of tips and thoughts on life in the end times, as it seemed then… ah, simpler times. Of course, it’s only gotten worse since. Enjoy?

CJW: Welcome! This time around we’ve got another special guest - Dan Grace. Dan has already graced (ugh, pun [surprisingly] not intended) these pages before, thanks to a couple of replies he’s sent in that were so insightful I included them in the next issue verbatim.

Our last bonus letter was from Austin - detailing some of his thinking behind the next issue of Creeper magazine, as well as some experiments in visual narrative and sleep-drone music (both of which really interest me). If you want to check it out, as well as the full archive of bonus letters (and all the fresh ones to come), you can .

G’day loyal subscribers, Austin here. Welcome to your fancy-pants bonus instalment of the Nothing Here newsletter. This time around I’d like to share some research material/process chat and point you towards some ambient music I’ve been working on.

It’s all a bit of a shambles, so let’s jump right in…

or

CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. This time around we have a special guest - Melbourne-based author and critic Maddison Stoff.

I’m growing my hair for no good reason. I know, I’m bald, but I figure if I stick with it long enough, I could get a great mad/weird scientist look going on. Or at the very least I could grow a mullet. Baldness in the front, party in the back. (I apologise, but without twitter my weird brain needs a release valve somewhere…)

The bonus newsletters continue, with essays, fiction, and other oddness from one team member every alternating week. If you want to receive them as well as these issues, you can sign up to . If you can’t swing it, we totally understand, and these main issues will always be free.

Hey all, here’s the latest bonus letter from your good friend, me. I already have some idea of what my next piece will be on, so this is possibly the start of a series on mundane occultism.

//

It took me a few weeks to get my podcast queue back under control after mostly ignoring it for three weeks while I was in the States. I don’t subscribe to that many podcasts, and plenty of them are only irregular, but in those weeks away that queue hit critical mass (largely thanks to a backlog of , admittedly). It weighed on my mind as if it was an important responsibility I’d been avoiding, like vacuuming, flossing, or my email inbox, but one that would take 60-odd hours to complete – even listening at 1.2x speed.

Welcome to another issue of nothing here. We’ve got a great selection of articles, a smattering of pop culture commentary and recommendations, and plenty more besides.

Alternating weekly with these main newsletter issues, we also put out bonus letters containing something longer and more involved from one of the members of the team. You can get access to these bonus letters by signing up to become a paid subscriber.

Now, on with the show.

I like a good podcast. I have a long commute. My guilty pleasure is true crime, though I shouldn’t call it a ‘guilty pleasure’ because I shouldn’t have to feel guilty about the stuff that I like. I got enough of that from guys in highschool mansplaining to me why all the stuff I liked was shit. So there.

Anyway.

So, I like podcasts. I also like doing things. I have the kind of brain that needs to be kept busy for the aid of my mental health (or am I simply a millennial living under the capitalist system, indoctrinated since birth to believe that my worth is to be found only in unceasing labour, and with the financial requirement to monetize everything I possibly can? You decide!) I have opinions about things. I’m a middle-class white person. It was only natural that I’d start a podcast.

My first podcast, , is about the apocalypse in popular media. I’ve covered and various apocalyptic fare written by friends and acquaintances. It’s a standard conversational style of podcast, me and a guest. I’ll read the book or watch the movie, come up with questions, and I always ask my guests about their own apocalyptic survivability. It’s good fun, not particularly popular, but satisfying in a ‘look, I made something’ kind of way.

Welcome to another edition of nothing here. This time around we’ve got billionaire bashing galore, the gamification of terror, and much much more. 

If you want, and are able to, you can support us by becoming a paid subscriber and receive bonus letters as well as these ones.

Hi everyone,

Austin here with your latest bonus instalment of Nothing Here. This time around I bring you an experiment in non-non-fiction. The genesis for this (now probably defunct) project came about via my interest in installation art and experimental military technology. I did quite a bit of research for this project, so if you want to further explore some of the concepts contained within, you’ll find yourself travelling down some strange rabbit holes indeed!

I hope you enjoy this exercise in “liminal journalism”, and thanks as ever for putting down some of your hard earned dosh to support our little newsletter.

Take care, and we’ll talk to you again soon.

MJW: Welcome to another edition of nothing here. I’m writing the intro today, because I offered without thinking it through and am now typing with great difficulty on CJW’s portable keyboard with inch-long acrylic talons. Hi! Like always, the newsletter is bursting with stuff we find interesting, amusing, educational, transformative, enlightening… I do go on. TL;DR here’s the shit we dig, crammed in your inbox and face, read it read it read it.

You can't get past me, I'm stuck in the future
The shit ain't all it's cracked up to beThe hovercraft's cool but the air's so putrid

CJW: I’m back (but was I ever really gone?). Did you miss me? I know you didn’t. I’m still jetlagged, so I’ll talk some more about my trip at some other point. For now though, let’s get stuck in.

This issue, we’ve got another special guest - Melissa Ferguson, author of The Shining Wall.

I don’t know that this piece is entirely ready - it’s very much a case of writing to work something out, rather than writing something I’ve already worked out.

But, I am in NYC, and I will be very busy, so it’s either send this now, or probably not send it for a week, and I didn’t want to keep you waiting.

//

The accumulated detritus of lost futures piles up around us. At this current point in time, most of these futures are neon-tinged and haunted by an analog synth soundtrack. Old futures. Safe futures that would not have looked out of place at any point in the past 35 years. My entire life has been lived under the neonoir-black shadow of these 80s visions.

MJW: Welcome to the latest issue of nothing.here. CJW is at a workshop on another continent, so we’ve given him a fornight off from editing the newsletter and you’re all stuck with me writing the intro. Ha! Fools!

Maybe it’s all the ‘civilisation is gonna collapse’ in the air, but I know I have been utterly unable to consume any media lately aside from comfort/trash: rereads of Stephen King books and reruns of Project Runway. So you don’t just get a rehash of The Dead Zone and a tribute to the father figure I seek in Tim Gunn, I’m lucky enough to be joined in newletter efforts by the usual team who have trawled through various content so you (and I) don’t have to, and they’ve linked it all here. We also have a special guest:

CJW: We’re a few days late with the bonus. Blame me - I got on a plane to the USA on Saturday morning with the newsletter login details tucked into my back pocket.

Anyway, here’s an article from Marlee Jane Ward on the Creative Precariat. We hope you enjoy it.

Welcome to another edition of nothing here. We’ve got another varied selection of goodness for you, and a weird slice of the now. Again, we’ve tried to keep it a little slimmer wordcount-wise, but if you’re following the links that tickle your fancy, you’ll still find plenty to keep you occupied.

If you want, and are able to, you can support us by becoming a paid subscriber and receive bonus letters as well as these ones. The most recent bonus was a brain-melting essay on cartoon metaphysics from Austin. I can’t tell you what you’re going to get next, but I can tell you it’s going to be good (and probably weird).

Hi all,

Austin here with the latest Nothing.Here bonus installment. This time around I’m sending you a short essay – it was inspired by Barthes’ Mythologies, which I recently read in a weekend and found perfectly suited to my attention span and the brief little pockets of time available to me. I was aiming for a kind of Herzogian “ecstatic truth” with this essay – I can’t say I entirely believe everything I’ve written, but it certainly felt more convincing and true as I wrote it, something like hypnotising myself. I hope you enjoy it, and if you have any comments, please hit reply and let me know what’s on your mind. Have a great week, and we’ll talk to you again soon.

***

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, .

Greetings netizens and residents of the Dark Forest internet.

I, m1k3y, am beset on all sides by sounds of deadlines whistling past my head.

So here’s something else from the Archives. Or, how I guess I’m now very belatedly serialising my last great writing project, circa 2016 - the InvizMon diaries; AKA

Welcome to another issue of nothing here. We’re still experimenting a little, and this time around we’re trying to do a better job of keeping the newsletter (and the articles section in particular) a little shorter. One of the ways we’ve done this is by trimming some article links right down to just the links and a line for context, and putting this under the “Cutting Room Floor” at the bottom of the articles section.

Along with all the articles, we’ve got experiments with AI text generation, AR experiments, book and film reviews, and more.

Here in Australia we just had our Federal Election. Sadly, but unsurprisingly, Australians just voted for another 3 years of climate change denial, austerity measures damaging the lives of people with disabilities and poorer folk in general, continued racism and marginalisation against Indigenous people, cuts to health care, a continuation of our abhorrent immigration policy, and a mainstream right-wing party that is not afraid of racist dogwhistling and getting into bed with actual fascists. Basically, Australians in general, and rich boomers in particular, just voted for the economy over the actual lives of other Australians living today, as well as future generations. So we’re feeling a deep sense of dread here this morning.

As ever, if you want (and are in a position to) you can support us by and receive bonus letters (on top of these ones), the ability to comment on the posts (though anyone can hit reply if they have something to share with us). So far the bonuses to date include a recipessay on weed & fascism, essays on 4th-Generation Warfare, the multiplicity of places, and religion in video games, a live music review, and some short fiction. You’ll get access to all these (via the ) and all the rest we come up with over the coming months.

CJW: I am neck deep in novel edits and have no mental energy to spare for a bonus letter this week, but I had this recipe/essay (recipessay?) lying around, from good friend of the newsletter Hilario Bukowski, which he’s given me permission to share with you all. My original plan was to put together some sort of Drug zine/capsule for Oh Nothing Press, but this is the only piece that came through before I got distracted by something else.

Enjoy!

//

CJW: Welcome to another issue of nothing here. As ever, we’ve got a lot to share with you - articles, reviews, a reader letter (thanks Ed!), and plenty more.

Hi, how are you? I’m working hard on novel edits and stressing a variety of other things, and I’ve had Love Shack by the B52s stuck in my head since last Saturday. But on the plus side, I’m past the con-crud, and in the next few hours I’ll find out if won the Aurealis Award for Best Science Fiction Novella.

MJW: I was inspired to write The Beasts and the Birthday after reading Garth Nix's Shades Children. I started thinking on books that put their characters through such brutal situations, like and , and then leave them to get on with their lives, make families. After coming across a few articles on intergenerational trauma, I decided to write a story about a family living in the aftermath of a massive, worldwide event. 

Welcome to another issue of the nothing here newsletter. The last issue went out a little earlier than usual, and that seems to have been well received, so we’re trying the same again.

The last 2 weekends, Marlee and I have been at Supanova, talking books, our books, writing, sci-fi, and other nonsense to anyone who would listen. We had an absolutely fantastic group of fellow authors on tour with us this time around, Victoria/V.E. Schwab was the big international author, and she was delightful, smart, and incredibly hardworking, was (as we Aussies like to say) good value (and she’ll be the guest on an upcoming episode of Marlee’s podcast), was a real sweetheart, was kind, intelligent, and endlessly generous with her many fans, and last of all was the absolute bastard, . I’M KIDDING. Alan is a great guy, and is also our special guest for this issue. Being the only 2 male authors of the Supanova bunch, and being the authors of some violent tales, Alan and I were scheduled together on panels, and I had the pleasure of spending a good deal of time chatting to him across both weekends.

CJW: Here is another bonus letter for you all from Marlee and I, but with this one we’re going to open it up to the public in a couple of days’ time and link to it in the main newsletter. I didn’t want to dump the whole thing into the main for a couple of reasons. For one thing, it’s a bit long for that, and for another, I’m always hesitant about talking mental health issues publicly. A voice in the back of my head warns me that talking about this might close some career doors for me in the future, but at the same time, I have to talk about this. Because it might help someone. Because we aren’t in this alone. Because every time I've brought up a big mental health issue, I've had at least one person respond to say that it helped them to better think about their own depression, or the issues of people they know. Because I would rather lose some theoretical future work than let someone suffer alone. The greatest trick depression ever pulled was convincing you you’re alone. But you’re not.

So here’s this. It’s heartfelt and true, and it hurts. If you aren’t in a place where you can read a couple of thousand words about suicide ideation, then please skip it.

//

Edit: The full Creeper Issue 1 PDF is now free for download, but read below for a sneak peek.

//

Hello loyal subscribers,

AA: Welcome to another instalment of the Nothing.Here newsletter. Corey and Marlee are at Supanova Melbourne this weekend (if you’re quick and local you might still be able to catch them, which is why this is going out a bit early - just look for the "Literary Legends" section). I guess m1k3y was busy wing-suiting into the Amazon to rescue a famous tree (or something), so you’re stuck with my sleep-deprived and rambling intro instead. Sorry. Hi.

There’s a lot of fascinating reading ahead of you - AI and the nature of “intelligence”, the villainous associations of classical music, extended discussion of The OA, the gamification of civic participation, and much more besides -  so I won’t take up too much space here. Your time is valuable, and we’re glad you saw fit to spend some of it with us.

MKY: Here’s an unpublished, lightly updated piece from a couple years back I like to call Bond vs the anti-Bourne, taken from one of my classic megaposts that almost was, Lifestyle Tips for the Empire 2.0: Ghostin' in the Surveillance Marketing State

Welcome to another edition of the nothing here newsletter. This time we have special guest Damien Williams, who has graced these pages previously when I occasionally share links from his must-read Technoccult newsletter.

Damien Williams (DW) is a PhD researcher at Virginia Tech in the Department of Science, Technology, and Society. His research areas include ethics, epistemology, philosophy of technology, philosophy of mind, and the occult. @Wolven most places;

I’ve recently been playing Far Cry 4, because I am an extremely dedicated gamer who plays only the latest games (this is a joke: not only did Far Cry 5 come out last year, but a new standalone game based on FC5 recently dropped). All told, I’m enjoying the game—even 5 years later it looks gorgeous, the missions are interesting (would be better in co-op, but for some inexplicable reason only sidequests are open to co-op), and the gunplay feels good—but there’s one thing about the game that irks me. The karma system.

Welcome to issue 19 of the nothing here newsletter. This issue we’re joined by Andrew Dana Hudson, an award-winning speculative fiction writer, and part of the team that put together the upcoming Weight of Light anthology from ASU (but more about that below).

We have a whole variety of awful for you, as well as some art and some hope to help see you through.