Thoughts and Notes and Barbarian Queens

or: news and book reviews

Prairieland

The Prairieland defendants were sentenced yesterday, and all of their sentences are cartoonishly long. Seriously, it’s impossible to read sentences of 70 years in this case without imagining the judge twirling a mustache while he makes his proclamations.

Prairieland was a noise demonstration outside of an ICE facility that went horribly wrong when an officer showed up and drew a gun on an unarmed, fleeing protestor. One of the defendants, Champagne, was armed and shot and injured the officer, presumably saving the fleeing person’s life. It seems likely to me that if Champagne had not been present and not thinking fast, someone would have died at that protest. Instead, nobody did. Champagne was just sentenced to a hundred years in prison. Here is their statement from yesterday.

Now everyone who was at the small noise demonstration is being told they will be locked up, most of them for the rest of their natural lives. To quote the support committee:

The only positive thing I can pull from this is that the bias of the court is so transparent that there might be hope for appeal under better circumstances. And when we finally oust Trump from office, we will need to remind everyone, loudly and often, that Trump is not gone until the vestiges of his fascist administration are gone, and that includes the convictions of anti-ICE protesters.

The Barbarian Queen

Completely and utterly unrelated to that, I’ve started a new serial called Throkda the Barbarian Queen in the Village of Ash. Part one appears in issue three of Foghorn Mag, which is subtitled “an anarchist record of marginal life.” It’s a print-only paper that appears twice a year and is full of advice for organizing and for off-grid life and just generally life in the margins. It’s a great paper, and when they asked me to contribute, I told them I’d rather write about a barbarian queen from a fantasy world who steps through a portal to the woods outside Asheville, North Carolina. And they said yes, as long as it tied in people living off-grid. So it does. You can read part one in issue #3, which you can buy print copies of online or from a few select stores.

Here’s a teaser for it, fuck it:

Blood ran down my blade and blood ran down my chest and a cacophony of screaming filled the royal chamber and all I wanted to do was think, to plan our escape, but there wasn’t time. Parry, thrust, parry. Get closer. Always be closing on the enemy—it short-circuits their training, puts you in the advantage. It’s not safe, but nothing is. The seax in my hand had been forged by my brother (may the Seven Harpies hold his soul with kindness in the Place Beyond All Rivers) and it did its work well.

My two friends were down the hall, working in tandem to break down the door that stood between us and our objective.

One final thrust, and three palace guards were dead or dying on the floor of the chamber alongside the body of their employer, Duke Agglethorn.

Someone was going to have to clean all of it up. Some poor palace servant, scarcely more free than a serf, was going to have to mop up all of that blood. There was no way the stains were ever going to come out of the upholstery. Silk velvet, woven on a loom with two warps, dyed with seashells plucked one by one from the ocean floor. It had likely taken an entire village an entire month to produce just one of the chairs, and there I was splashing the life’s blood of half the palace guard around the room.

Maybe I didn’t want to have time to think after all.

Preparedness

Humanitarian aid meals are deeply, deeply discounted right now. My best guess is that the end of American soft power has led to a massive overstock of basically vegan MREs on the home market. It’s not a good thing. But it means you can get like 300 vegan meals for $150 plus shipping right now. Note that “inspection date” means “open one to make sure they’re still good,” not “expiration date. My friend, braver than I, ate a bunch and said they’re fine with enough hot sauce, and I’ve got a lot of them in my basement. (As with all deep pantry food, store them away from heat, light, and moisture).

Things I’ve read recently

Bounce House, by Matt Dinniman. 2026. I wanted to read Dungeon Crawler Carl because it’s such a big deal that I figured I’d see what the fuss was all about, but I listen to my audiobooks through libro.fm after I quit Audible, and all they had was this other book by the same author. It checks off a ton of my classic sci-fi boxes—the children of generation ship colonization fight against an invasion of gamers from Earth piloting mechs. It’s fun. Dinniman is a good pulp writer. I see why people like his work, and I’ll probably read more from him, especially if I sort out the audio versions.

Tunnel in the Sky, by Robert Heinlein. 1955. I grew up reading Heinlein, and though I don’t agree with him politically at a macro scale, I enjoy his books and a lot of his ideas. This is probably my favorite book of his, and this is probably the fourth time I’ve read it (twice as a kid, and now twice as an adult). I’ve got two copies on my shelf, both older than me. One was my dad’s, and one was his older brother’s. A high school student in an off-world survival class takes his final exam by going through a gate to survive on an alien world. It’s a libertarian but empathic story. One that serves as apologia for colonization but is still woven through with an interesting sort of kindness and was consciously intended to teach “woke” lessons to 1950s boys reading pulp sci-fi. It’s interesting to see where the author’s intended anti-sexism and anti-racism succeed and fail in retrospect. Rereading this, I can see how it influenced my thoughts, even to this day. There’s some Tunnel in the Sky in that post-apocalyptic vignette I just published here, The End, Like Sand, in how it discusses building an open but organized society during crisis.

Finna, by Nino Cipri. 2020. Listened to the audiobook of this a couple weeks ago. It’s short and sweet and entertaining: a store that is legally distinct from Ikea is capable of spontaneously generating portals to parallel universes, and a minimum wage worker and their ex are told its their job to go through that portal to rescue a missing customer. It’s fun. It’s a romp. The title “finna” has nothing to do with the AAVE word that means “gonna,” for better or worse.

As always, I also maintain a list of books I recommend over at the worker- and queer-owned bookshop Firestorm. Full disclosure, that’s a referral link, and it gives me a cut of sales (and you a discount).

Things I’ve watched recently

The Death of Robin Hood. 2026. I figured I was gonna love this or hate it, and it turns out I love it. I’m fascinated with how modern films (especially A24 films) are willing to take seriously the idea that all battle is essentially horror and film it as such. The movie is basically “what if Robin Hood was just a regular ole outlaw and he’s old as fuck and not feeling great about all the murdering and such.” It wasn’t the movie I hope I’ll get to see one day, in which Robin Hood is a brutal anti-hero but still a class warrior. Instead, it was a movie I’m glad I saw, that blends pagan and christian theological concepts seamlessly and feels more true than any glossy retelling of the past ever will. And the music is incredible.

The Drama. 2026. Another A24 film, and if I’m being honest I’m sort of tired of how every gritty romance movie is about people just being terrible to each other. Though maybe I should be excited about “what if we film romance movies like they’re horror movies,” this one mostly left me uncomfortable in, well, an uncomfortable way instead of a cool way.

Good Luck Have Fun Don’t Die. 2025. Fun weird sci-fi that makes ya think. Self-aware of being cheesy, a bit over-the-top in its message of “kids stare at their phones too much these days,” but overall a good message well told.

Wake Up Dead Man. 2025. Everyone told me I had to watch this when it came out, but I slept on it. Everyone was right. This movie is extremely My Shit. A Catholic mystery written by one real life atheist and solved by another fictional atheist, but woven through with all of the best understandings of faith that one can imagine. My only problem was that I’m faceblind as hell so one of the main plot points went right over my head until I looked it up later.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple. 2025. Simply astounding. Gorier than most of what I prefer to watch, but the violence mostly felt earned and it built towards something meaningful. Also after reading a ton about the Gauls and the Celts, I find the whole “pillars of bones in an open-air ossuary” all the more compelling and historically accurate. If I were to rank the four movies in the series, I’d go, from worst to best, 28 Weeks Later (the second movie), 28 Years Later (the third movie), 28 Days Later (the first movie), and then Bone Temple, the fourth movie, as the finest in the series.

Weapons, 2025. Did you know that I didn’t watch horror movies for years? Like ten years. I lived in a van and was often sleeping by myself in the middle of nowhere, so it just didn’t do me any good to watch horror movies. But eventually, during the pandemic, a friend made me watch them with her alone in my off-grid cabin in the woods, and I realized that horror does a better job (or at least a more reliable job) than any other genre at peeling away at the world beneath this world that we can intuit but not see or touch. Weapons does a good job of that, of bringing real horror and magic (and what is magic but horror?) into a humdrum suburban environment.