RED LIGHT BYTES: Update Dossier (2-17-2025)
GOOD NEWS* (*Dacia Sandero Not Included) & An Addendum to Last Week's Reflection on My Work & The Culture Wars...
Welcome back to HQ! Because of everything I’ve got to get done around here, we’re gonna keep things short, sweet, and to the point.
2024 Annual Collection — Debuts FRIDAY, February 21st! (God-willing)
Contains all 20 of last year’s thrilling tales, plus bonuses like our 100th adventure “The 10-Ton Runaway” and the EXCLUSIVE short story “Road to Renewal,” a special one-off story about a character near-and-dear to me, Camionera, the road warrior-turned-mother. Once the nameless heroine of “Hate’s Convoy,” now in a tale of love found on Wasteland roads, relayed via prose and supplemented with original comic art! I won’t share the full cover yet, but have a taste!
Also of note, I will be instating that new pricing scheme for our eBook Quarterlies (as well as the new “print replica” format) alongside the debut of our Spring 2025 Issue. That’s all eBook editions at the everyday low-price of $0.99 USD! Real pulp fun at real pulp prices, and you can take that to the bank!
Otherwise, it’s still business as usual for getting stories pulled together, art in hand, narration recorded and our Quarterly exclusives in check!
Lastly, a bit of newsletterception here. The reaction to last week’s humble treatise of mine has been quite the pleasant surprise and I want to thank you all for the response to it. Moments like these really made my week, as it’s good to know I wasn’t going completely mad. Just mostly.
Like we were 90% full-up, it’s just good to have some sanity reserves on relay.
But in all seriousness, it is good to know that I’m not alone (or at least understood) in my hope and intent to move beyond the “Culture War” framework. Because to tell you the terrible truth, not only am I an accursed optimist, I’m also a pragmatist in most things. And I find war games without tangibles are about as useful as fighting the rain with a flamethrower. I know the gist of things like fifth-gen warfare, stochastic terror, etc., but the damned truth of the matter is that I find the Culture War untenable long-term because of how digital it all is.
I’m not a fan of war on any given day. I’m not Pollyanna about it, and I do have a fascination with military surplus and history, a fascination I naturally lend to tales seen in this series. Doesn’t mean I have to like it wholeheartedly. But the key thing about a war—at least a worthwhile one—is that it is something winnable. It is something with tangible ground to be gained. In the series, the Centurion Offensive of 2466 would mean nothing if the Marshall settlements was some ineffable chess-piece on a 4D virtual board. It’s a land with history and proximity, one whose capture is indeed in peril, as discussed by the desert’s denizens in last year’s novelette “Madhound Theory.”
“What in the devil is the Marshall victory worth if the line can be crossed as easy as my left boot across the cracks on this very floor!? The infrastructure of A.C.E.S. and her operations was destroyed, yes. You do keep many a hound stationed there, yes. But what good’s the line…because whenever these megatanks, assault pawns, and God knows what other gobbledygook comes racing across the desert, we’s the first to get the bad blows.” (Ch. 2)
The fact of the matter is I don’t see the Culture War as winnable in its current state. A digital diaspora of a million screaming voices, thousands of creative talents vying for increasingly shrinking limelight, where the only answer seems to be is shit on the increasingly irrelevant products of moldering dynasties in a field that’s been flooded since the literal dawn of this current decade. People more interested in relitigating the same issues, over and over ad nauseum until the “sheeple wake up” or our favorite multinational, megabillion corporations magically reform into producers of quality entertainment, saving the masses and syphoning off already-tough-to-find interest in independents.
Or my way.
Where you let that all go, and build what you can with your own two hands and the contacts you’ve made. I was one of the early adopters of the Iron Age of Independent Entertainment concept. Not just thanks to the frightening synchronicity of my project’s debut and the idea being introduced, but because I believe it is the most adequate descriptor of what we’re enduring. It is an age of innovation, growth, forging new metal from ancient ore. And what gets lost about its conception as a descriptive epoch and not a pointed movement is that people seem to desperately want a movement, yet are absolutely poisoned on the thought of ever uniting to do anything.
They’ll rally around their chosen idol for the task. They’ll rally around their personal interests. But God forbid they turn it into an actionable movement. God forbid anyone, in a Culture WAR, mobilize an infantry, unite on the frontlines and get some things done. Promote ways to beautify your home if you’re so terribly troubled by the existence of Jackson Pollock. Proper recommendation lists (shoutout to projects like Shepherd who featured me last year), and the like. And of course, the truth is that plenty of people do this, but it doesn’t get anywhere near the traction or attention in Culture War spaces as addressing the mass media releases that, regardless of what we all say, make their money back almost automatically and vanish from the zeitgeist.
Beyond, however…
Great channels like Dungeon Chill and Majuular, completely removed from this aberration of a zeitgeist, manage to produce long-form, engaging retrospectives of rare, underrated, plainly obscure or well-loved game series and have managed to grow at incredible rates in a mere 2-3 years. I don’t care about their politics; I couldn’t give a rat’s ass. Because what they do is good. What they do is DAMN good. They are some of my favorite channels to watch when I have the precious little downtime I do because they take you on a journey into worlds and ideas I had never before seen, not in these configurations. They are also the creators I look to for how I am approaching my own video work.
It will take time, and it won’t have the same instant-gratification of a dunk or a point well-made to people who couldn’t care less. It will be a beacon to people who actually care enough about the art and entertainment they engage with, and an entryway for those willing to learn. I got a lot of knowledge in me and it’d be downright selfish to keep it to myself.
If you watch the shitstorms on platforms like X and elsewhere, it’s a garden-variety free-for-all of backstabbing, ankle-biting, forever-debating. Jealousies, indiscretions, and crossfire galore. I don’t pretend to be innocent of this either. In fact, I paid dearly for it, for the medium truly is the message in this case. I couldn’t begin to count the hours lost, the anxious mental fog, and the sheer deflation of my will to do anything at all after even ten minutes of scrolling the platform. It was part of why I was so late on the draw last year. I was consumed.
Social media is an addict foundry that forges nothing but discourse, and should you be blessed by the priestly algorithm, enough engagement to spin into sales. More often the case, you become a pundit, a man known more for talking about other’s work in canned lenses than your own or that of which you uphold. No one buys your crummy book or your lame new LP. They want to suckle on the sweet teat of outrage and beg for more. So even if your book isn’t crummy, even if your album is well worth a spin, it all pales in comparison to people reading about things they know, and savoring the schadenfreude of watching them fail.
This is what the Culture War ultimately amounts to. It keeps you trapped in an endless cycle of relitigating, obsessing, and degrading yourself to focusing on pap that’s not worth a fraction of your precious life here on Earth. We are born, we die, and in that short window of time, it is best to make the most of what we can control instead of chain ourselves to things we can’t control. I can’t control the behavior of others or the paltry nature of modern entertainment media. I can’t control the flow of time, I can’t change the past, and I have literal ZERO method of redress for things that happened before even my parents’ birth.
I CAN control how I curate my life, the recommendations I give to friends and family, and the time, energy and skill I possess in the making of what I wish to see in the world. I can improve, grow, and build. I can encourage others to do the same, and I try my damndest to. That is my view of the Iron Age. It’s a calling card I use to say “I’m here building something. Something that matters to me and that I hope people will enjoy.”
I don’t care what the hell anyone on X says about it, I’m done playing with the crack-addict feeding frenzy that is the modern social media ecosystem, slave to short-form stupidity and microcosmic trends. I’m blessed to know some of the doers in this world who are making what they love and building themselves up beautifully. I’ve seen stupendous work from everyone from Rippaverse to Vaughn Coleman and I’m happy to still be working with people over at ANVIL and Go West. Above all else, I’m truly blessed to have a series like 365 Infantry as a door-opener and a learning curve, as well as to have enough energy left over to be working on everything from music to video retrospectives to other written series and more. Thanks for helping make that possible. As always:
May God Bless You & This Force. Be Seeing You!