Do You Know Where You're Going To?

No one's gonna be a fool forever.

My daughter and I outside of an old lighthouse in Norway. It’s a hike to get there, but once you arrive, they feed you waffles and jam.

Hey folks! It’s been a few months, hasn’t it? Long enough that Substack has changed their backend UI and nothing looks right to me anymore. This is just a quick update to let you know where I’ve been and what the plan is going forward. Nothing too drastic either way, admittedly, just wanted to keep you informed.

First, from the middle of June to the middle of July, I was in Europe! (Where in Europe?) All over the place in Europe! Seriously, we bopped around and hit Rome, Pompeii, Athens, Crete, Mykonos, Istanbul, Paris, London, and Bergen, Norway. It was a lot of fun, hope I can do it or something like it again in my lifetime.

Then, within a couple weeks of getting back, my mom had an accident and broke her collarbone. So I drove 10 hours to help her out and that’s where I’ve been ever since, where I’m writing these words from. (She’s fully healed but there’s a bunch of elderly parent business I need to take care of. IYKYK.) I thought I’d have time to get some more posts out — and in fact, pushed a number of posts further along — but as you can see, no fruit on this tree just yet.

So that’s about three months without posting. And as some of you, whether on Substack or Patreon, have been paying me real actual money in that time, and with me nothing to show for it, I’m pausing all payments until January 1. Substack makes this easy by allowing me to put in an exact date to restart; Patreon, I have to manually pause each month. And because I always forget how it works and missed the deadline, Patreon folk will be paying for September, even though I intended for September to be paused.

Honestly, these names are my favorite part of my Patreon. I dunno, they just make me chuckle. Not even gonna show you the perks, as I was unable to deliver on those pretty much from launch.

Let me talk about my Patreon for a moment. I think I’m going to dismantle it before January. It’s not because it only has three paying members — I know those three people, those three people mean a lot to me, their opinion means a lot to me, and if everything else was the same, I’d keep the Patreon. No, what’s dragging me down is posting here, and having to spend the time and energy to repost there. It might not seem like much, but it’s a nonzero amount of effort, and it ends up looking like ass, because Patreon’s aesthetic is ass. Nothing’s set in stone yet, but I’m finding my time and energy to be more and more precious, and the crossposting feels like unnecessary work at this time.

All right, so what’s in the oven? I’ve got a post on All the President’s Men cooking that I hope to post this month, and I’m still working on the fabled Deep Red Part 3 post about giallo table top roleplaying. Then there’s the Against the ‘70s ttrpg that I want to develop in public, in a series of design diaries. Beyond that… I’m not sure! I want to hit Piranha, The Food of the Gods and Prophecy¹, I’d like to write up choice films from the Damnation Decade appendix like The Boys from Brazil, The Final Programme, and Disco Godfather, and there are some classic movies and shows I need to hit but want to tie in with the AT70s ttrpg (Kolchak, Shaft, Rollerball, The Six Million Dollar Man/The Bionic Woman, The Eyes of Laura Mars and the two Exorcist entries). Jesus, Kent, that’s like, enough for a whole year. Stop blabbing and get to work!

1. This suggests an “Animals Amok” series, of which the 1970s has an inexhaustible supply.