Good morning, folks!

After a very productive weekend at MO*CON (see below), we have decided to start a weekly feature letting you all know what we have been watching, listening to, playing, and reading–regardless of whether it qualifies for review on Cthulhuville. As part of building up our community, we’d also love to see your comments talking about what you’ve been consuming over the past week, too!

This weekend we all traveled to Indianapolis to attend MO*CON, a “mini” convention hosted by Maurice Broaddus which focuses on the speculative fiction writing community. We had some insightful, informative discussions amongst ourselves and with authors, journalists, editors, agents, readers, and more.

As part of the wind-up to MO*CON, Ian and McKenzie spent a few extra days visiting, during which they re-watched the Rail 177 trilogy (Unbreakable, Split, and Glass) (Netflix and Max). The conversation inevitably turned toward the unusual design of the series: many viewers did not realize that Unbreakable and Split were related films, and having Glass tie the two together was clever.

We also watched a documentary titled The Antisocial Network: Memes to Mayhem (Netflix), which dug into the history of 4chan, Anonymous, and QAnon. The interviews of key players in these movements were revelatory–especially for folks like us who had not been tracking the relationship between them.

McKenzie has been reading Out There Screaming, the anthology of black horror edited by Jordan Peele. As her thesis for her master’s degree is now officially underway, she has also been re-reading Robert Chambers’ The King in Yellow stories and Jeffrey Weinstock’s Gothic Thing Theory.

JimmyZ has been a longtime fan of historical fiction author Ken Follett, best known for Pillars of Earth. He is currently reading Follett’s latest book, Never, which explores a near future geopolitical intrigue in Chad which approaches a boiling point that may tip the world into global conflict. Follet’s writing style captured his attention many years ago, despite being outside the genres that he normally prefers.

Ian watched Baby Reindeer (Netflix), a genre-bending series that is an anonymized biographical series dealing with Richard Gadd’s struggles with being a victim of sexual harassment and assault while trying to break into comedy. It’s an insightful window into victimhood and a heart-warming exploration of what it means to come to terms with the things we don’t want to discuss about ourselves. He has also started reading Wrath James White’s recent novel Rabbit Hunt.

SITE UPDATES: A couple of notes about some changes to the website–we are in talks with an artist to have the site mascots and our logo designed, so you can look forward to that in the near-ish future. If you had noticed the addition of Little Chibi Cthulhu, that page has been taken back down; we’re not quite ready to add manga to the mix. We have discussed adding Blue Sky and Mastodon to our social media, but we’ll have another update when those have actually gone out. We will also be making some improvements to the website overall by streamlining our tag system, modifying how content is presented on the home page, and more.