Good evening, folks! Today’s Monday Roundup is brought to you by your very own McKenzie. We have lots of very exciting news going into the summer months and some more general updates, too.

Photos courtesy of Al Bogdan. For more, please visit him on Bluesky.

Me first! Ian and I spent the weekend in Indianapolis at MO*CON, where we made some new connections and collected some content to review. We also rekindled old friendships and, in that process, finally got our Bluesky accounts up and running. We already had one for Cthulhuville, but we each are going to be more active over there on our personal accounts too (me & Ian). If you haven’t yet, please do follow us there! Our heartfelt affection and thanks go out to our friends for the food, conversation, and atmosphere of support.

While there, we also discussed some site issues. Over the next two months, you may notice some changes to the website. Our content should continue to be accessible, but we do need to make improvements to the home page and to each of the content sections.

Ian and JimmyZ also have exciting news that they are working on a new comic book! This is very early in the process, so we don’t have any publication information yet. The script for the first issue is finished and we’ve received the first pages of art from the artist, Rom Silva. The project will be funded via Kickstarter, and more information will be made available here and elsewhere as it becomes available/appropriate to share!

JimmyZ spent the weekend out of town as well, but his was an appearance at Krypton Comics in Omaha, Nebraska with Cullen Bunn for Free Comic Book Day! By all accounts, the event was a raging success. That is the extent of my knowledge.

On more personal notes:

I defended my Master’s thesis today and have officially been cleared to graduate. I have also been accepted into a PhD program with funding, which means I will not be working multiple jobs for the next few years. I’ll be able to do significantly more here with the site.

My pipeline is currently comprised of a lot of short fiction, both text and audio formats, so expect regular reviews along that vein from me. I’ll also be doing some reviews of old novels and short stories, since I’ll be reading a lot of 19th century speculative fiction for my PhD program. Currently, I am reading Ann Radcliffe’s 1791 novel The Romance of the Forest, catching up on the most recent episodes of PseudoPod, and watching Yellowjackets. I have been assembling a table of short fiction zines so I can better track which ones need reviewing and how often. I may publish a reviewing schedule down the line, but it will be a while.

Ian has been busy with his day job, but did want to share that he is currently reading Jason Sanford’s Plague Birds. Jason is a friend of the site and I regard him as a personal friend of mine. Although it will be some time before Ian’s review posts, I do encourage anyone who visits our site to support Jason Sanford on Patreon or to at least follow him. He does excellent work as a journalist covering current events and contemporary issues.

JimmyZ has plans to review Corps of Discovery soon. Otherwise, he has plans to see The Sinners and Until Dawn. Having played the game, I might see about sneaking in on that Until Dawn viewing.

Also! We now have business cards, stickers, and car decals. Very early discussions of future merch have begun as a result of the very positive feedback we’ve received on our new logo design and new mascots (don’t forget to go visit them regularly; they get hungry sometimes . . .)

Thanks for sticking with our little site as it grows!