Weekly Windup 2: Wound-Down, and Weakly
Weekly Windup 2: Wound-Down, and Weakly
When Word Play Becomes Word Punishment
On March 14 of this year, I “launched” this here Substack with five posts I cleaned up and pseudo-professionalized from the pool of my pre-existing social media long-…writes? This is what my favorite Icelandic band might have called “an alright start.”
On March 15, I posted my first Substack Streaming Original, a surprisingly successful essay about the delightful podcast Dead Eyes. Now I was cooking! Off to the races! Other metaphors! I would post four more original essays over the following eight days.
On March 23, delusionally galvanized by this all right start for my all-Left bully pulpit, I published the “first” (read: only) Weekly Woundup, an inexplicable post-ironic title meant to conceal the utter banality of that dread beast, last surviving eldritch relic of the unknown prehistoric Dreamtime that was Web 1.0: the Weekly Email Newsletter.
It concluded:
“[This has] been fun to write, and it’s nice to look back over the past week and a half and see how much writing I’ve actually done in such a short span of time. Don’t get used to it lmao.”
[That was], of course, the last time I published to [this platform].
I’m nothing if not consistent(ly honest about my inconsistency).
Contents of This Newsletter
We Need to Talk About Twitter
Anti-Semitism Is Racism, Asshole
TV Did Not Exist Before 2015
mobile game addiction is not funy
Platforms All the Way Down
Welcome back to my nightmare.
The EASY ANSWERS newsletter is back, for now. Expect it to be less “weekly” than “no more than once a week.” Often, as today, it will take the form of a roundup of my most notable recent content, under the tentative but slightly less cringe-inducing title, “Weekly Windup.” On weeks where I actually post a new original essay to Substack, you may receive that in your inbox directly in lieu of a content roundup.
While we’re on the topic of digital publishing platforms, I might as well acknowledge the elephant in the birdcage: as we all know, Twitter Is Dying (But Probably). As such, I will “no longer” (as if I ever really did) link to my own Twitter threads in this space. Some of the posts below are on my actual personal Facebook page; the posts are Public, so you can comment there, but Behave Yourselves My Mom Is Watching.
On the Hierarchies of Whiteness
In response to the recent glut of anti-Jewish hate activity in the news — not least of which are the centuries-old, long-debunked anti-Semitic conspiracy theories espoused by Kanye West and Kyrie Irving — I wrote an in-depth post on Friday, Dec. 2 on the hierarchies of power within constructed whiteness (the only kind of whiteness that exists) and how/why it always keeps white Jews in a state of flux and precarity.
I feel that this piece is very well self-contained and says everything I want to say about the topic. As such, and given the gravity of the subject, I will keep this section brief and let the full essay speak for itself.
TV Has Not Yet Begun to Peak
On a lighter note, on Saturday, Dec. 3, I posted this piece reflecting on my ten years’ worth of media consumption records — and how it prompted me to realize that every time we think we’re at Peak TV, we are not even fucking close.
This is humbling and disturbing, given that:
I have always felt like I was playing constant catchup with TV, even before there were…more than five TV shows in existence? and
I know I am not the only person who, since 2020, has expressed feeling like the deluge of new TV shows — that are actually worth watching! — is starting to actually impact my mental health as an “active media appreciator and aspiring pop culture understander.”
The piece identifies a couple of major turning points I noticed in my own history of viewing patterns since 2012 and reflects on what cultural touchstones or global events they may reflect. In short, there was no TV before BoJack Horseman; except that there was really no TV until Disney+; except that there was really no TV until COVID-19.
The only thing to safely infer from this is that no matter how many shows you watched this year, no matter how impossible it feels to keep up, no matter how burnt out you are from trying anyway…there still isn’t really any TV.
ohhhh SNAP
“Wait!” you ask. Not a question, really, but I wait patiently for you to continue.
“If Sin hasn’t been publishing to her own damn Substack for the last nine months, what has this bitch been doing?”
No, your friendly neighborhood rainbow-goth Tranarchist killjoy is not preggerz. That would be a miracle of forbidden science beyond even my considerable powers.
Instead, I have been working as the Content Manager for Hipsters of the Coast, an NYC-based gaming blog that I have deep personal ties with over the past ten years. You may recall that I mentioned them in the last (read-only) Weekly Woundup and posted this stub of my first article for them in several years.
In addition to my ongoing duties for the site, lately I also contribute gaming-related writings there a couple-three times a month. Considering the explosive popularity of the new Marvel Snap mobile card battler, my one HotC post since March that might be of interest to readers of this fine stub-sack is “The Four Core Pillars of Marvel Snap Strategy (or, ‘Marvel Snap Is Four Other Games’).”
The four other games are Rock-Paper-Scissors, Tic-Tac-Toe, Whack-a-Mole, and a Magic: The Gathering Burn-deck mirror match. Sad that they couldn’t all have exactly three words with two hyphens connecting them.
Marvel Snap is also poker, but I am not good at poker so I did not write about that.
I still don’t have any special bonus content to put here exclusively for my one Premium member. Maybe one day I will, maybe one day I won’t!
I’ll visit your inbox again maybe sometime next week or maybe never again, and definitely no sooner than next Wednesday unless I feel like writing something on Monday or Tuesday, which I probably won’t but then again maybe I will.
Keep ‘em guessing, keep ‘em honest. Thank you for your time.
I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Leave,
Sin Black
