Auld Friend!
In the last hours of 2021, I first want to thank you for supporting me, financially or otherwise. This year has put me through intense ups and downs, but you provided an indispensable buffer for all of it. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Some news!
‣ If it suits you, you can now pay for a full year of my Patreon content up front and snag a ten percent discount in the process! It’s a real win-win!
‣ I’m in the midst of launching a blog–yes, a personal blog, in the year 2022. It will host Patreon posts (which are only accessible to my patrons!) as well as free, public content. Nothing is going away, the app will still work, and my official Patreon posts will still show up in your inbox, but I’ll have an additional space to share sporadic essays and odd thoughts for anyone interested. The blog is also just easier to navigate than Patreon (or it will be!), and it’s more fun to browse. The site is still very much under construction, but you can take a sneak peek here, if you like.
‣ I wanted to share some kind of deep year-end list for you, but I don’t think I watched or listened to enough media to offer anything insightful. All I can say is that I really enjoyed songs from Remi Wolf, serpentwithfeet, Mannequin Pussy, Faye Webster, Daniel Bachman, Mister Goblin, Lucy Dacus, Helado Negro, Beauty Pill, Phoebe Bridgers, Cordae, Snail Mail, anaiis, Big Thief, and Arca. OK, maybe that looks like a lot, but there’s so much more that I wanted to listen to and just never got around to–I’m still limited in terms of how much time I can spend listening, though it’s gradually getting a little better. Maybe I’ll have a great list in 2022…
Well, friend, we stand at the precipice of a new year. Ahead of us lie a rapidly worsening pandemic, a global environmental catastrophe, and a flood of unchecked misinformation. Dark times! During my own darkest moments, I’ve never had any magic to get me through it. I continued because there was simply no other option! Some days, I literally dragged my half-paralyzed body across a basement floor to an unlit bathroom in the middle of the night, because that’s what I had to do. I didn’t have any super powers, I just wanted to live! I hope that same sense of absolute necessity animates us in our ongoing collective struggles. We’ll need it!
In the meantime, find someone special and tell them you love ’em.
Humbly Yours,
Ryan
