long time no see; also, kickstarter!
How are you doing? If the answer is “good,” I’m impressed but not entirely convinced.
New writing
The AMERICAN* FUJO* Kickstarter has launched and I'm able to talk about it at last! Alexis and tshirt are editing an incredible anthology, and y'all will fund it if you know what's good for you. I'll be contributing an essay, the working title of which is "Between Fujos."
The hard copy preorders of my TGCF zine Burial At Sea shipped this morning and should arrive in 3-22 business days, depending on how far they have to go. The PDF copy will go up likely by the end of next week; expect to hear from me then!
Blogging????
I started a silly little blog a few months ago: https://durandal.blog!!!! I’m making an effort to put actual thoughts out there instead of letting them wallow in my notes app/on my locked Mastodon. I also need to have intellectual projects that are unrelated to either work or my fanfiction or I will go fully insane. One stone / multiple birds.
Expect mostly TTRPG play session writeups & book/film reviews for the time being. The last thing I shared was a month and a half ago, but in my defense, I’ve been very busy. It was a review of Rose Glass’s Love Lies Bleeding, if that interests you.
I plan to eventually migrate this newsletter to the same platform as the blog, but I need to do more work under the hood to set up the mail service integration, so this list remains in service for now.
Links
Now We Are All Tom on the (animated) filmography of Naoko Yamada
Andrea Long Chu on the reactionary centrism of Pamela Paul
Kieron Gillen on Earthsea and the great worldbuilding question
JP Brammer on Emilia Pérez (+ on Conclave for good measure, since I only watched that last weekend.)
But like, how am I DOING???
Bad.
It's fine. Like, it's whatever. Many of us are miserable at the moment and it is what it is. My roof is leaking and my cat is dying and work is taking years off my life.
On the plus side, I feel strongly motivated to put what energy I can into my personal projects, due to an acute sense of my own mortality and the fragility of life etc. This comes across less like a humblebrag if you are privy to the state of filth in which I have been living for the past few weeks.
I feel very unprepared for the weeks and months ahead. In particular, it's frustrating that much of my energy for organizing or political action is sapped by my attempt to hold the line and accomplish things at my dayjob, which is on the front line of culture war shit but is also institutional and curtailed by all the usual limitations. It feels like cheating to be, like, "sorry I don't have energy for [x action], I'm too burnt out from [relatively cushy public service WFH job]." But the facts are that a punishing work plan, chronic organizational dysfunction, and the constant psychic damage of working in this particular embattled context for the past three years have worn me down significantly.
I appreciated Kai Cheng Thom's piece on community-based suicide intervention strategies, We must live for one another. I continue to be driven by spite and passion. They wouldn't try so hard to kill us if it wasn't really important that we live.