First, Tha NEWS.

We got a real corker of a year going, huh?

I may not have lived in Minneapolis, but as a Minnesota kid, I spent enough time there. I have friends there. I have family there. The murder of Renee Good happened blocks from my friend's former house. What has happened there is unconscionable. One might even say deplorable. And it hurts that another city I consider warmly has been targeted by a government that openly styles itself fascist. I know we all want reprieve from the duty of standing up for what is right, and I'd like to tell you right at the top of this thing that it's okay to rest. As a former choir kid (yet another reason I have been in Minneapolis), I'm particularly drawn to the metaphor of the choir: the group is capable of sustaining long notes by working as a collective, and it's okay to stop and breathe now and then because your neighbors will be carrying the note. And you'll be carrying it when they need to rest. One body, working together. You got this. Breathe.

In light of all that's been going on--I don't know if you've heard but on top of everything else, experts have called the targeted attacks on trans people "genocide"--the past month has been, as you might expect, a bit hectic. Work-wise we're solidly into the winter submissions season, where journals and presses start opening up their various portals to the byzantine world of independent publishing. I have a few out right now, but I've also gotten word back from earlier this year that the folks at Sobotka Literary Magazine have decided to run a couple of my poems from 22 CARDS. They're good people over there. I'll let you know when that opens up for sale.

Speaking of things for sale, I got THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT back up for sale. That link goes to Bookshop.org, but you can also find it at a bunch of other places at books2read. (Ignore that ebook link it's not real but books2read requires an ebook link and it's not up yet.) It's nice to have that done--Amazon can eat a bag of AI dicks.

What's been taking up the bulk of my time, aside from languishing and doomscrolling and yelling at my elected officials, has been completing various projects that have been in the works for several months, going on years. Dani helped me catalogue and sort around 11,000 common and uncommon Magic cards, so now I have relatively smaller task of going through my rares and other oddities, scanning those, and figuring out how I want to organize them from here out. I rearranged the kitchen counters a bit to make the very important beverage station easier to access. There's still some shelving work I want to do in there, but it's better than it was. I have rearranged my workstation to hopefully make it more useful for working on audio projects, so I actually use all this gear that's sitting around. We've been working on building a new network server for storage and various local services like printing and pi-hole. Dumpster Mac (the Macintosh what I pulled from the dumpster) is up and running in its final form as a top-of-the-line unit from 2012. Still need to put software on it, but I successfully tricked it into running Mac OS X 10.8.5 (Mountain Lion) and it has yet to shriek back at me. I have an optical drive again! Two! So yeah, keeping busy.

Second, INTERLUDE.

"everything you need is in the breeze" ~ clipping., "Code"

Third, CONSUMPTION.

• Finished Final Fantasy III Pixel Remaster. I quite enjoyed it, even if some of the systems were a little wonky. It played so much better than my attempt on the DS, and I've also realized that I probably would have bounced off it if I'd ever played it on the NES--the 16-bit graphical style of the PR edition is fun, whereas the 8-bit original version was clearly trying to live on the edge of the sprite-based art the system was capable of, and suffered for it. Will pick up the series again later this year, I'm sure, though I don't know which game yet.

• I did not finish be brave to things. But I'm running out of projects to take up all of my time instead of the reading and writing of work (as well as, to be honest, distract me from the world at large.) I'll get there sooner than later. I've hit the point in the book where Jack's writing style changed and became more of the sort of proto-langauge-poetry it's seen as today, and that's the version of his work that resonates with me the most, so I'm enjoying this bit until I get to his plays, which I am nearly certain I will not understand. Stay tuned for a very confused Ricki in a few weeks.

• Demonschool. It's a hybrid rpg/tactical/puzzle game set in the fall of 1999 where you gather of team of new college students (the school part) to fight demons (the demon part). I'm enjoying it so far, with a bit shy of 12 hours in--somewhere between a quarter and a third of the way through--I can say that the story and characters are good enough, and the combat is engaging (even if there might be a touch too much of it), but where they really knocked it out of the park is in presentation. The art is amazing, jumping between Ace Attorney-style dialog scenes and a retro 3D isometric-ish view, but the battle screens are where the environmental storytelling really takes off... the real world breaks away and you engage your enemies (you know, the demons) in some sort of nightmarish void remix of wherever you are. Enemies explode into pixelated clouds of demon blood, abilities are satisfyingly visceral whether physical or magical, demons are proper weird, and the bosses are (I've only hit two so far) incredibly well done. And the soundtrack is killer. Just tops. Pretty sure I'll carry this one on to completion.

• On the last trip to Half-Price Books, I picked up a couple Melvins CDs as well as Motley Crue's Decade of Decadence, which is really the only Crue album you need (although Dr. Feelgood is excellent), and which I traded away as a kid for the copy of AC/DC's Live that I have.

• Started following a new Youtube channel that focuses on how classic electronic songs from the '80s through today were constructed through drum machine beats. A great example is this one about New Order's "Blue Monday". I absolutely fell down that rabbit hole and watched pretty much all the song analysis vids in one go. Even if you're not exactly a fan of synth-based music, you should check it out just to see how pop songs in general are constructed. It seems so simple when it's laid out in this format, but man, it's hard to sound easy.

• Did you know you can hack a first-generation Amazon Echo to run on open source software?

Fourth, HUSTLE.

The new hotness is THE FAILURE EXPERIMENT, which you can get here. It’s a serial poem based in Philip K. Dick, JG Ballard, 20th Century cyberpunk, Jack Spicer, and, well, me.

There’s my chapbook, A Void and Cloudless Sky. By being a subscriber to this newsletter, you're also entitled to a free PDF version, which you can get here. If you want a hard copy, it’s available here.

If you're liking this whole project and want to support it directly, here is my Patreon. All paying subscribers receive access to all content I post there, for as little as $1.

Finally, THE OUTRO.

I've been having a lot of trouble sleeping lately--mostly staying asleep. One could blame the amount of caffeine in my system, but that really hasn't changed much. I just wake up at like 4am and my brain is still going like I never actually went to bed. It's really unfortunate, because lack of sleep is one of my migraine triggers... I don't need a lot of sleep, but not enough is like... chronically under six hours. Which is where I'm at right now. It's not good.

I've been trying to think of other times in my life that have been like this, where I've had trouble falling back asleep after waking up, and I think I have it. It's hypervigilance. I think anyone that knows me, or has read my work and thus quasi-knows me, knows that my childhood was... we'll say "rough". Have you ever heard of Adverse Childhood Experiences, or ACEs? Basically the CDC did a big-assed study in the 1990s and discovered that certain events in a kid's life were statistically correlated to increased health risks in several areas, and this theory has been reinforced over time. Anyway Lil' Ricki had enough of 'em to qualify for a lifetime of bullshit (including up to 96% higher risk of developing Long Covid!!) and as such I was awake a lot as a kid, never knowing exactly what was going to happen. Got me CPTSD and a predilection toward alcoholism.

But that same feeling pervades now. Every day is some new fresh hell. Are my neighbors being kidnapped? What part of my life is illegal right now? Can I walk the four blocks to the store and not get harassed? Are they launching tear gas in my family's neighborhood? What damn agency's helicopters are circling now? It feels fucking terrible all the time, and my brain refuses to stop processing it, waiting for it.

But here's the thing: we defeat it by working together. What is working in Minneapolis has been cobbled together from techniques everywhere--following agents in LA, joyous noise parties outside their hotels in Portland, whistle networks and school protections in Chicago, all of it has coalesced in Minnesota and been finally publicly acknowledged. (The cynic in me notes that it wasn't until they started shooting white people, but even that note arguably makes me part of the problem, and I'm happy for all the resistance we can muster regardless.) We, collectively, are getting through this. And it's only really just started. But we can all sustain this note so long as we take some time to breathe, both metaphorically and literally. It's gonna be a long one; you may need multiple breaths.

And hopefully we'll be able to sleep soundly at night.

Love you all, thanks for being here.

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