Hello. I’m Bob Pastorella, co-host of the This Is Horror podcast, website manager for This Is Horror, and writer. I’m the author of Mojo Rising, They’re Watching (with Michael David Wilson), and have numerous short-stories and non-fiction online and in print in various publications.
Previous newsletters can be found here.
And we’re back …
It has been a minute and lots of things have happened. The state of the world is chaotic—nothing new, right? I feel like so many of us are just tired and frustrated and barely keeping our heads above water. I took a break, but going forward I will try to do better to maintain a sense of rhythm with regular posts. My day job, the Daily Grind, has been really grinding away at me … long hours, employee short-staffed, unable to take any extended time off I’ve earned … it really dragged me down into a spiral of being constantly pissed off at the world. The exhaustion and brutal feeling of burnout have really zapped the life out of my writing routine. That’s not a way to live, and I hate being miserable, but it looks like there’s some light at the end of the tunnel.
Finally!
Finally …
Of course, being in retail, I’m about to be neck deep in the last quarter nightmare known as Holiday Retail Hell, so we’ll see how things go.
Social Fucking Media
We’re kinda at a point where this crazy ass social media experience is about to come full circle. Well, at least for me. I never really got into myspace, so my total experience is limited. Forums were my thing. Before Facebook became a thing (and when it started, it was pretty cool. Now, not so much. Deactivated my account a long time ago and probably will never go back.) I thrived on the message boards, primarily The Cult, then The Velvet almost exclusively. The Velvet was the deal back then. It was a forum dedicated to the works of Will Christopher Baer, Craig Clevenger, and Stephen Graham Jones. There, along with such popular writers as Paul Tremblay and Gabino Iglesias (just a couple for starters), we chatted in numerous posts and threads about every damn thing under the sun. Oh, the conversations we had. Yeah, there was the occasional dipshit who would sign on, but we’d run them off pretty quickly. So many kickass people there. Too many to name. And it was super cool to chat with the unholy trinity about nearly anything under the sun, along with occasional chats about story and craft and genre and writing in general.
Facebook killed all that.
Sure, Facebook allowed us to make connections to even more people, but at the cost of the more intimate setting of a forum. I’ve made some really cool friends on FB, some I’ve even met in person. But, as is the case when massive groups of humans congregate, things started to get messy.
People insist it’s not healthy to thrive in an echo chamber, that you should experience other ideas and opinions that may clash with your own in civilized discourse. We all have the right to express our opinions, and I’ll defend that right until death. So yeah, you have the right to your opinion, but if you don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, then your opinion is pretty much fucking worthless. Stupidity is never as valid as intelligence, no matter how unfair you think that is. Adding more people into the mix in a free-for-all social setting has opened doors and created connections that just wouldn’t be possible elsewhere, but that population expansion also allowed the very worst critters the world has ever seen to have a voice when it would have been so much better if they would have shut the fuck up.
I left FB for Twitter, learned the ropes, and made some awesome connections, even more so than at FB. I like Twitter. Some days I hate it, but let’s be real … even the best things in the world come with a price, and nothing’s perfect. Most of my time on Twitter has been quite pleasant and enjoyable. I’ve come to rely on those connections, and there’s something to say about belonging to a community that brings out the best in people.
Then someone bought Twitter. Terribly ignorant and often quite childish, the new owner doesn’t understand his new toy. Without people needed to run the company and infrastructure, the platform is poised for collapse. We all face the uncertainty that asks more questions than it can answer. Many are worried about the horror community we built from the ground up, and rightfully so.
The community is nothing without people.
It doesn’t matter where we party, as long as we party. Twitter just made partying easier for everyone, but it’s not the place, it’s the who, that matters.
For the moment, I’m not leaving Twitter, though I don’t know how long I’ll be able to say that. Contingencies are in place, and if things go south I’ll make sure everyone has a way to connect with me, and hopefully, we will all find a new place to party. No one knows how long things will last at Twitter. There’s a lot of speculation, and that’s all there is. As Jim Morrison said: The future’s uncertain and the end is always near.
Let it roll, baby, roll
Let it roll, baby, roll
Let it roll, baby, roll
Let it roll
All night long
Music: Lots of Alice in Chains and White Zombie. The new Candlemass album rocks
Films: Work has kept me really busy, but I really liked the new Hellraiser film.
TV: Let the Right One In series on Showtime. The Midnight Club, Andor, Cabinet of Curiosities, and soon 1899.
Books: Fracassi’s A Child Alone with Strangers and it’s fucking fantastic. Holy shit, this book is good … y’all need to get it in your hands now.
Next Issue: Who knows. But it will be sooner rather than later.
peace&love
Bob.