Zen and the Art of Newsletter Maintenance

The pause that refreshes.

Originally published 8/17/22 on Substack

Hello, dear readers! My apologies for the lack of posts recently. There’s a number of reasons for that, which I’ll go into, but just to be clear and upfront: Against the ’70s isn’t going anywhere, but, as long as it’s on pause like this, no one will pay anything. (And if you are being charged, please let me know ASAP.)

So a couple things happened. One, my rpg group, having been in hibernation for awhile, recently woke up. I’m in the middle of a campaign arc that requires a lot of bespoke adventure creation on my part (cue Arrested Development “I’ve made a huge mistake” gif) and that’s taken energy and attention.

A whole fantasy city. From scratch. Mmm hmm. Way to go, dude

Second, as some of you may know, I run a music tournament on Twitter, from the account @bestalbum95 ¹. With the help of my Twitter followers, we select 128 albums from a given year, give them seeds, and throw them against each other in a bracket. I recently ended one tournament (the Best Album of 1995 Redux) and started a new one (the Best Album of 1990) this week. It’s fun! But these tournaments take some effort to put together and get started. The flip side to that, though, is once the initial work is done, the actual running it is easy. In fact, if I had a little more know-how, I could probably automate it. Point is, we’re in the “running” phase, so that time has now been freed up.

Remember Consolidated? Best Album of 1990 and 49 other people do.

But there’s a bigger reason for my radio silence, one that’s kind of weird, or at least mysterious to me. Composing that Deep Red writeup took a lot of effort, the most I’ve ever spent on one of these posts, and after I posted it, I felt… not exhausted, nor its positive counterpart, spent. I felt empty. Not in a negative, “life is meaningless” way, but in a, for lack of a better word, Zen way. I felt purged. I felt probably as close to what Buddhists call nekkhamma as I will ever feel. I had no desire to write, to pontificate, to metaphorically throw my weight around with my opinions. I felt… free? So between feeling like I had nothing left to say or prove, and other work demanding my attention, I let Against the ’70s slide into dormancy.

(To be clear, this was a very odd experience, but also a very silly one, as if that Deep Red post was somehow the culmination of my life’s work or something. It is not. I’m proud of it, but it’s just something that was interesting to me, not some paradigm-changing piece of writing.)

The thing about altered states of consciousness though: they don’t tend to last. The itch is returning, as it must. I can feel the engines sputtering to life, beginning to rev. (Even now, I find myself trying to write at least a little something on Letterboxd for every movie I see.)

Quick book review: good, especially if you’re looking for information on Robert Anton Wilson and/or Philip K. Dick. It can be a bit academic and obtuse, at least to my tastes, and I’ll probably re-read it because of that. But the author’s insistence on asking us to consider the possibility that these intelligences from another dimension (or whatever) might be real eventually convinced me they’re not. It’s just the drugs accessing the part of your brain that dreams, man. Sorry to be a buzzkill.

As of today, I owe you posts on Avanti! (1972, Billy Wilder) and Smokey and the Bandit (1977. Hal Needham). (Avanti! is a selection from reader Ryan Godfrey, so I specifically owe him as well.) I’ll begin work on those posthaste. As for Deep Red part two, I think I’m going to punt that back a little bit. I had planned to just shoot from the hip regarding how to bring the concept of giallo to role playing games, but I realized that, outside the household name giallo, my knowledge of the genre, particularly the second tier/deep cuts, is limited. So I’d like to do some actual research before running my mouth off ². (I recently gained access to the streaming channel Shudder, and I’ll use their catalog as my curated menu.) Oh! And I need to continue my thoughts on adventure design with a second Adventuring Against the ’70s post.

Giancarlo Giannini in a giallo? More like Giallocarlo Giallonini amirite.

Thank you again for reading, and thank you a hundred times for your support. It means the world to me and everyone here at the Against the ’70s home office (which is just me.) We’ll see you again soon.