RETURN OF THE KING
How's that for an ostentatious, bloviated headline?! But, alas, it's just me.
First off, happy holidays! I hope everyone enjoys these next couple weeks and has a safe, healthy, and happy New Year!
Those of you who have been following me around the interwebs these past few years may recall a previous iteration of this blog over on Substack. I pulled the plug on my site over there a while ago over concerns of the rise of white supremacist voices proliferating across that platform. I then quit Twitter soon after Elon Musk's takeover for similar reasons.
Along the way, I kinda-sorta quit writing, although I continued to regularly review fiction over on Goodreads. I let my website go dark and the subscription to keep it running lapse. I went back to Facebook, then joined BlueSky, but something always felt like it was missing.
I wanted my own space again. A site that didn't exist solely at the whim of some rich, racist, douchebag techbro looking to buy the US government out from under us wholesale and sell it off for scrap under the rule of an authoritarian despot. Somewhere where I wasn't at the behest of a faceless corporation that ruled with a draconian fist and enforced its labyrinthian terms of services in the vaguest of ways and provided nothing in the way of arbitration, let alone information, or human interaction. A place where I wouldn't have my account flagged for review for sharing memes that ran contrary to right-wing and Christofascist groupthink, or locked down for using scientific, historical, or factual terminology that the oligarchs in political opposition to me find "offensive."
Not that I’m a particularly controversial figure. Or, hell, even a known writer of some remit or merit outside of an incredibly small, and likely ever-shrinking, circle. Yet, over the course of the last two years, I’ve been banned from posting reviews on Amazon due to my apparent outspokenness against fascism and authoritarianism as exhibited in my critiques of Eric Raglin’s horror anthology, ANTIFA SPLATTERPUNK and counter-terrorism expert, Malcolm W. Nance’s They Want to Kill Americans, and stripped of my Amazon Associates account. [Cue all the feigned shock and outrage from online commentators that Jeff Bezos would cozy up with Donald Trump at Mar-A-Lago, as if it’s actually a surprise.] Somehow, my reviews have remained largely unscathed at Amazon-owned Goodreads, although there was a period where I had some twit reporting every review I posted, apparently in the hopes of getting me banned from there, too, and a few outraged right-wingers who got angita while clutching all their pearls over my inclusion of a center-left political viewpoint in response to, of all things, political thriller novels.
Between Amazon banning my reviewer account, Twitter becoming a toxic wasteland and Facebook not too far behind it, the online spaces we inhabit and feel a degree of claimancy towards as “our” online spaces is growing ever murkier and lesser. I expect this to get even worse as we march into 2025 and at least the next four years.
So, I decided after some deliberation that it was time to reactivate my own site once again. I’ll be posting my reviews here, and perhaps random other thoughts as things progress, rather than relying solely on other platforms. And if you’re receiving this in your email inbox, that’s because you subscribed to either my previous Substack platform or a prior iteration of my irregular newsletter. If you feel like unsubscribing, you are, of course, free to do so. But hopefully you’ll stick around. I’m certainly planning on it for the foreseeable future, at least.
