Hey guys. Brian here.

It’s been a few weeks and I still haven’t written final thoughts on WorldCon. To be honest, it was mostly great! There was one tiny fly in the soup, which I don’t need to talk about here. The people were great. I sold a bunch of books. I had great food and great company. I’m looking forward to doing it again in LA next year.

One of the reasons I haven’t written a post in a little while is that I’ve been furiously trying to build a new keyboard for the upcoming Writing Excuses Retreat. For the last several years at the retreat, I’ve given away keyboards, and they’ve all been beautiful and special in their own way. This year, I want it to be unique and even more functional. I want it to be bluetooth and wireless. To accomplish this, I need to change up my game.

Without going too much into the technical weeds, I switched from the Teensy Arduino to the ESP32, which has built-in bluetooth and wifi, as well as a few other features that should make for a great keyboard.

Unfortunately, I’m stuck. I can detect keypresses on every key, but I can only say which row has been pressed. I need both the row and the column in order to determine the key. I have some resistors on order which might be the game changer I need on this front. Otherwise, I’m not going to get this keyboard finished on time, and that hurts.

Okay. Let’s talk about the shootings a little bit, but mostly the media’s coverage.

Charlie Kirk, a racist troll that didn’t give a shit about gun deaths to the point he said, “It’s worth to have a cost of, unfortunately, some gun deaths every single year so that we can have the Second Amendment to protect our other God given rights,” has died.

He was shot and killed, so I suppose he would say that was worth it.

On the same day, a Colorado student shot two others and then himself. If you didn’t hear about that one, it’s not your fault. The media was too busy projecting the theory that the person that shot and killed Charlie Kirk was probably trans. Right-wing pundits and politicians were drumming up hate, threatening retribution and violence on trans people.

And then, it was revealed that the murderer was a young white man from a Republican household. He himself is registered Republican. He posted pictures of himself last year in a Trump costume for Halloween.

As soon as it became inconvenient to pin the murder on a minority, the media storm dried up. They couldn’t change course fast enough, from fomenting violent retribution to praying for the killer.

None of this is surprising. None of this is right. It’s all lies and performance and hatred, and if you spend as much time as I have trying to make it make sense, you’re just going to walk away with a broken heart and wounded faith in humanity.

I’ve seen stuff online suggesting some kind of conspiracy. Charlie Kirk had been one of the few right-wing pundits loudly calling for a release of the Epstein Files, and in the midst of the media storm around that, he died. There’s less talk about the Epstein stuff, for the moment. Isn’t that convenient for Trump?

As I said in another forum: I think the kid was just a lonely idiot that could have used better influences in his life. We are all struggling. The world is fucked up for everyone. And he dealt with it the only way he knew how. I don’t think Trump hired him. I don’t think there’s a conspiracy. Occam’s Razor works pretty well in this case.

I’m really, really looking forward to the day the coup falls apart. They’re too stupid and hateful to work together for much longer. Trump will die, MAGA will explode into a thousand different racist tribes, and maybe we’ll come together to put things back together. Perhaps start with unfucking the Supreme Court and rolling back their pro-King rulings.

There’s one more topic in my subject, and that’s dreaming. I’ve been napping a lot lately, and while I don’t fully remember my dreams, I know that it feels like I’m going somewhere else. A different life, but it’s my life. Different struggles, but they’re my struggles.

I wonder if that’s what the afterlife will be. Slipping from this life into the next, as easily as falling asleep. That sounds nice, to me.

Wherever you are, whatever you’re doing, I hope you’re doing it well, and that you’re happy. Times are hard. Times are unimaginably stupid. Hopefully, we’ll get through them together.