New Year, New Podcast, New Writing

Time to dust this off and see if I still remember how to write things.

Hello, and welcome to 2024! I hope everyone has recovered from their chocolate hangovers and is ready to face another year of uncertainty, world-weariness and bugnuts election cycles.

I’m starting the year off with a pledge to make more stuff. Between keeping myself sane during the pandemic, weathering the first months of child-rearing and still finding time in the day to eat, sleep and paint Warhammer, I haven’t found the verve the create as easily as I once did. All that changed thanks to completing NaNoWriMo last year, which reminded me that I can make stuff that ends up being pretty good stuff all things considered (though the story for said NaNo is not good, there are bits worth keeping for another day).

As a result, 2024 is “the year I make more things that the internet at large will neither see, hear or remember”. Or, succinctly, The Year of Stuff.

First cab off the Stuff rank: a NEW PODCAST! My best friend Dave and I are the Slice of Cherry Guys, talking about all manner of popular culture things we love and hate and wildly disagreeing about all of it. A month in and it’s been doing pretty well, so go have a listen at:

• YouTube
• Soundcloud
• Spotify

COMING SOON

I’ll also soon have a new journal article out at Critical Studies in Television that discusses WandaVision, easily the best Marvel TV series and an interesting meditation on media consumption and mental health. Co-authored with my colleagues Christopher and Ren, the article will be out in the coming months and shared here as soon as it drops. In the meantime you can see my other academic work on Google Scholar.

On top of these, other things are coming. The big one is that I’m working on a storytelling podcast that shares short tales from AELOS THE WORLD EGG, a fantasy setting I use for creative writing and Dungeons and Dragons games. My aim is to publish stories set in this fantasy kitchen sink of a world (egg), so to start that ball rolling you’ll hear short entries about some of those who live within its yolk.

Otherwise, I have so many plans for things I want to write here. There’s a half-finished essay on Critical Role’s miniseries Calamity, which will soon become full-finished, about the way it expertly deploys emotional storytelling just through rolling dice and ending the world. I have so many thoughts on The Bear, and especially its immensely excellent episode Forks. Continuing on from my essay about Strange New Worlds being fantastic, I want to talk about the fanservice bonanza that is the final season of Star Trek: Picard and its tapping into the larger trend of legacy sequels and the Child of the Hero, seen also in shows like Twin Peaks and movies like that new Indiana Jones trip.

And those are just the things off the top of my head.

This year you’ll see and hear more things from me, and they’ll all be compiled right on this blog. The best is yet to come!