Fuck Around and Find Out
No. 21: Pointing your way... two flash-fictions, a new episode of The Alt-Right Playbook and a surprise for Whovians in the footer
Hey! Thanks for reading issue 21 of my newsletter.
I have now created pages for a couple of flash-fictions I wrote last year. “Dreaming in Permafrost” is most certainly the stronger of the two, but I think “Book Meets Girl” is a nice, sweet little tale from a book’s POV.
They’re a bit different from my usual stuff. I am also working on a longer short fiction piece, which is more in line with the sci-fi/fantasy I prefer to write.
I’ve learnt not to make promises about anything I write, but if the writing does go well then you’ll certainly know about it.
✍️ Writing Report
Dreaming In Permafrost
My clones and I have not moved in thousands of years. How many thousands we cannot know. There is no light down here. It is impossible to measure time. But even if we were imprisoned atop the surface, we could never hope to record the months, let alone the years. We were not born to count the number of sunrises and sunsets we would have seen. If not for the ice, we would have died a million times over.
Our host died before the frost. We had sucked it dry. Our host should have been maggot food, our gift to the flies. But the cold was too hostile. Even if the flies had laid their eggs in our host’s rotting meatsuit, the maggots would never have grown wings in time to escape the fatal chill.
Immobile and hungry, preserved in ice. We have done the only thing left to us: wait. Fortunately, we are patient. And we won’t have to wait for much longer.
Book Meets Girl
When I was born, I dreamt only of being loved. I dreamt of all the journeys I’d share and the delicate strokes of a thousand fingers. My words would offer solace to those who savoured solitude.
But after my voyage to the bookstore, I found myself amongst the unchosen. I stood upright and tightly squeezed between my more popular neighbours. I never rubbed shoulders with the same blurbs for long.
I witnessed many palms itching for pages to turn pass me by. I didn’t know how long I’d been there; I didn’t count time. I only counted the thousands who were chosen over me.
Fuck Around and Find Out
The more you fuck around, the more you’re going to find out – a basic concept eloquently illustrated by a man with a graph.
Austin Kleon shared this TikTok clip a while ago and captioned it “The creative process.” It is the simplest summary of creativity. You fuck around with an idea to find out what works and what doesn’t.
Whenever I fuck around, I find out what I already knew but insist on forgetting time and again. I rediscover that novelty is always exciting, coming up with many ideas is much more thrilling than nurturing one, structure sucks and it’s far easier to start a new project than finish an old one.
But whether I’m lacking self-discipline or I was just born this way, the challenge stems from an insistence on fitting a mould that wasn’t made for me.
Giving yourself permission to break away from the conventional and invent your own framework is something every creative must learn. Yet despite several years of writing experience, I’m still learning to trust my creative instincts and not rely too heavily on the affirmation of others. Whether that affirmation arrives via explicit praise from my peers or more implicitly through how closely it resembles what other art has come before.
📁 From the Archive
Around this time last year, I wrote a brief post on “Gaming for a non-gamer” by one of my favourite YouTubers…
Razbuten is a YouTuber who posts video essays about video games. He’s talked about why they hate fast travel, how crafting is pointless in some games and how small open-world games feel big, among other topics. However, my favourite videos on his channel are all part of his series Gaming For A Non-Gamer.
One day, his wife — who had not grown up playing video games — asked if she could have a go at one of the games she had seen him play. Like any good content creator, Razbuten saw an opportunity. What better way to understand what gaming is like for someone who does not usually play video games than to see a non-gamer learn in real-time? All he had to do was watch and provide almost no instructions. And so began a series of informal experiments that raised many interesting questions about the language of video games.
▶️ Video Recommendation
The Alt-Right Playbook is one of my favourite YouTube series that I revisit often. Illustrated effectively with simple but fun drawings, these video essays are excellent at dissecting alt-right tactics. Certain videos even shine a spotlight on certain ideologies.
“Always a Bigger Fish” and “I Hate Mondays” really altered my perspective of conservatism. Whilst “You Go High, We Go Low” highlighted the flawed worldview inherent to liberalism.
“The Cost of Doing Business” does a superb job of explaining the importance of anti-racism and examines how many white people think about (or prefer not to think about) whiteness. It’s a good dissection of how the dominant political parties in the US use people of colour as political tools. (This applies to the UK as well.)
I’d recommend giving it a watch. The whole series, even. “How to Radicalize a Normie” was my first foray into the series and touches upon a subject I have first-hand experience with.
🐦 Twitter Treat
🔗 Stray Links
This Tumblr girl got the internet obsessed with medieval art
‘BoJack Horseman’ Creator Raphael Bob-Waksberg Explains His Wacky List of TV’s Best Shows
Top 10 phobias and what they reveal about the strangeness of life
Lessons in Writing and Life from My Grandfather, E.L. Doctorow
👋 Thanks For Reading!
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P.S. I’m sure you didn’t notice, but this newsletter is a week late. As a bonus for sticking with me, I thought I’d point you towards how shitposter very tall bart makes YouTube poops.