Hi Crowd!

[Insert obligatory "I haven't written to you since last year" joke followed by copious laughter]

The most persistent new years eve memory I have pegs back to perhaps '94 in Gainesville, we'd all just gotten home from some new years eve show happening at the Hardback with which bands I've forgotten but certainly loved with all my heart at the time, and when I say home I mean the shitty 8 unit breezeway apartment complex I lived in at the time of which 6 of the 8 apartments were occupied by stand up members of the punk community. There were probably a dozen bands and 5 or 6 fanzines represented within those walls though for some reason we'd latched onto one and lovingly christened the building as The Wenix Hotel. Now that I type it I can't remember if anyone from Weinix actually lived there, or if they lived in one of the neighboring houses. I lived in 3 or 4 different buildings within a block of that place at different points, and probably had 15 different roommates. Anyway, this night in particular one of the hometown heroes who lived downstairs and had returned home in the same roving mob I was with had apparently had a lot to drink (not out of character) and was super jolly because of it (also the norm) but I think had recently been involved in some girl drama (again, par for the course) and was fully embracing the notion of a clean slate being ushered in with the new year by embracing literally everyone he crossed paths with in a giant hug and tell them it was all ok now because everything was water under the bridge. Nothing mattered, everything was cool, tomorrow was a new day, and everything was water under the bridge. I appreciate the optimism at the time, though I didn't believe it - I was glad someone did, even if they would come to their senses the next day when they sobered up.

I think about that every year for reasons I can't figure out, so its possible if you've known me long enough you've heard it before. I turn 50 this year so I'm firmly in the bracket where I no longer remember who I told what to or what the actual details where. Maybe I just made this whole thing up right now and only imagined remembering it. Either way, sentiment remains the same. I don't know what this year will bring, but I'm not really optimistic about where it's all headed. Everything feels messy and uncertain, and any prediction feels like it would be misplaced. I do love the positivity though, and seeing everyones lists of things they enjoyed last year and things they plan to do this next one always makes me smile, and introduces me to things I somehow missed. I have no such list myself, though in a way that's kind of what The Crowd is all year long, me rambling about things I enjoyed and things I plan to enjoy in the future. Also, US politics is hard to avoid but a reminder that I moved out of the US a decade ago and have no plans to move back, so many things I used to talk about because they directly impacted me feel different as a spectator. Not that US politics don't impact me, they impact everyone and as a US citizen and tax payer who has many people I love still in the US things are always relevant, but as long term expat they are just relevant differently. I don't know if that makes any sense. A lot of disappointment and frustration, from a distance.

Unrelated, 48 hours ago Tara sent me a text with a link to 75 HARD which is one of these "do this stuff for some amount of time and it'll change your life" programs so with zero planning or consideration we've jumped into it starting today. It's not really a new years resolution so much as starting on Jan 1 makes counting really easy thing. As I type this I'm finishing up day 1 successfully, will I make it to day 2??? I'm not telling you this for any kind of social accountability or whatever as much as I am just using that as an example of how my plans these days rarely exceed 3 days out. You want to lock me into something next week? Good luck, I've barely ironed out my plans for tomorrow.

I don't know if this is an age thing, but way back in the way back when I started writing things like this I always felt like I might know about something a few minutes before other people and as such could offer insight or some useful curations, but these days I always assume I'm late to the party and will only be boring people telling them things they already know. I think that's part of why these newsletters have contained so much more introspection than current events, I can safely assure myself that you don't know what I've been thinking about to myself for the last few weeks. At least I could, any second now someone is going to train an AI LLM on my blog and tweets and newsletters and will then be able to predict everything I'd come up with so I won't need to bother any longer.

I saw this photo of lightning striking the US Capitol building last night and like anyone with a PMA tattoo I immediately knew the reference nature was trying to make, and started singing Bad Brains in my head.

I thought I should rush to social media and post this immediately because I knew 3 or 4 people who follow me somewhere might also get it, and since I've been thinking I want to try and spend more time on Bluesky because I'm sick of Elon pushing his tweets into my feed on Xwitter and the ever growing nazi population, so I went there and immediately saw that Clayton had beaten me to the punch, which I appreciated. Speaking of Twitter, I did this Twitter Wrapped thing which is like some AI assessment of your tweets which was kind of fun to see, though in the "friendly roast" section it said: "Says 'make cool shit' but spends more time documenting other people's cool shit." Fucking ouch Twitter Wrapped that was uncalled for. Though I guess it kind of made up for it with this high praise:

Speaking of cool shit and photos, my UNFINISHED PROJECTS book is done, and people who ordered it early last year have it in their hands already. The post office here in Canaduh was on strike, so I had to take everything with me when I went to the US last month and ship it all from there, which actually worked out better since most of the books were shipping to the US. The workers are back on the job now (though sadly without resolution) so I'm able to ship things from here again. I didn't make a ton of these books, but have about 25 on hand right now so if you want one it'll ship out this week.

Between that and the release of FREE TO CLAIM December was a good one for finishing up projects, ironically. We're planning a kind of book club thing for FTC where we'll bring in some of the contributors and have semi-weekly chats going through all 900 pages of the book, so stay tuned. I live in this almost constant state of having 50 different things that I'm working on which are at some non-100% level of completion and it weighs heavy, so actually shipping things feels really good. The next to-be-finished thing is NOT DED, the unofficial companion to FREE TO CLAIM which I'm still finishing writing.

Revisiting my earlier comment about feeling uneasy/unrest about the future a lot of what is happening around the world (both near and far) has me thinking about place recently. 15 years ago I wondered what "home" actually means, landing (at least then) on it being, at least for me, more of a when and a who and less of a where. If you get what I mean. Living in Vancouver BC is interesting because more than any other place I've ever lived there's a focus on the indigenous population and who controls the land, with lots of talk about colonizers. To be clear here I don't feel unwelcome, and I've had some really informative and thoughtful conversations with people about related activism and ideas like Land Back, but at the same time I know this place will never be my home. We've now lived here longer than we did in Tokyo, but I'm still homesick for Japan and even visiting now still feels more like being home then living here in Vancouver. There's probably a lot to dig into there, but global events like what's happening in Palestine and Israel and sudden talk of potential US expansionism all kind of plays into this thinking about who belongs, or more importantly doesn't belong, where. When I talk to people or read things others have written about how they desperately want to go home, I can't help but reflect on the realization that I don't have a place that is home to go back to. I don't know what the term for this is, some kind of global homelessness? I used to tout the excitement and adventure of being a nomad, but there's another side to that which isn't as exciting. Japan feels like home in a lot of ways, but I'm not Japanese and could never become Japanese, so even best possible case situation I'd still be a foreigner. I have a lot of Irish ancestry, but it's too far back to grant any kind of citizenship or residency so there's no potential way to "go back" there, and even if I could it's still a place that I've only visited, but don't have any lived experience in. It's funny to think about how all of the places I've spent years living, I don't actually belong in any of those places. None could be home, even if I wanted them to be. Which creates a weird duality, empathy and support for people wanting to go home, while also knowing there's not even a home anywhere for me to pine over. So that possibly gets back to why the who and then when became more important to me than the where, and part of the struggle with Vancouver for me is going into my 5th year here, it's still a super lonely place. I can think of a few places I'd like to live, a lot of that driven by friends who live in those places, but there's always distance between wanting to and being able to, and what you think it would be like and what it would actually be like. Alas.

I did go to my first live "music" event here last month, I use the quotes there because it was a noise show full of chaos and static and harsh walls of blistering insanity. It was lovely and the few people I spoke to were super nice. I bought an Echthros t-shirt after being blown away by the performance, which sadly I didn't get any good photos of because I'd walked to the back of the venue before he started and couldn't get much closer than this.

That's enough navel gazing for the moment. Here are some things you should know about if you don't already -

AI is getting scarily good at pretending to be human, and also pretending to be a specific human. And scammers are going to be taking full advantage of that, so if you haven't already you should come up with a password for your family, don't write it down but everyone should know it so that if someone gets a call or text asking for help or information you can confirm if it's really who you think it is. This might sound silly but people get scammed every day on much more obvious hoaxes, and SIM swaps are becoming much more common. So in the near future you could get a message from a family member from their number and it might sound exactly like them, but not actually be them.

I'm firmly in "I have too much stuff" territory especially when you consider guitar pedals, but I still love seeing what other people are into and the Wirecutter 100 list is always fascinating insight. Kind of wild to watch companies throw money at Trump just to avoid being in his cross hairs, what a racket. Speaking of rackets, apparently in the US cops were making their own crack to sell to people, so they could arrest them and seize their belongings, which often included guns, which they were turning around and selling on the black market.

I want to get this out before the end of the day, so I'll wrap it here and just remind everyone I set up a Telegram group for THE CROWD where I'm posting the occasional meme and link most of which I thought would end up in the actual news letter but writing that now I realize I didn't pull that part off so well, but since there's like 100x more people on this list than in there I should prioritize that for the next one.

Happy New Year!
-s