Happy Thanksgiving!

I'm very grateful to all my diabolical droogies, readers and subscribers!

Well it’s been quite a year! For one thing, it’s flown by in a sort of blur, perhaps even faster and blurrier than any previous year. It’s also possible that I say that about every year. Time has a way of speeding up as you get older. I should probably slow down a bit and try to be present, but there’s always so much to be done and never enough time.

I wanted to thank all of you, my droogies—subscribers, paid subscribers, YouTube subscribers, social media followers, readers, lurkers, detractors—for sticking with me all these years (or however long you’ve been engaging with my content). I am always trying to do better and often failing when it comes to consistently updating diabolical or my YouTube channel. I’m even worse when it comes to sitting down and writing the fiction I keep promising to write. I have all these ideas but a terrible fear that when I actually get to it, I’ll fail. That creates writer’s block and self-loathing, and basically I just need to get over it.

In any case, it’s been quite a year. I made this video recently about my struggle with alcohol that landed me in the ER (again) with a diagnosis of pancreatitis. Since then—it’s been two weeks—I’ve been doing extremely well, and I aim to keep riding this wave of good feelings and hope as far as it will take me. I’m hitting the gym, eating healthy, getting sleep, and most importantly totally 100% sober. What a difference two weeks makes. I feel incredible!

Some other stuff I’ve been working on, other than the endless parade of house projects and chores and parenting stuff that takes up so much of my time, includes my ongoing somewhat obsessive AI artwork hobby. The picture at the top of this post is an AI image I made of anthropomorphic turkeys sitting down to a Thanksgiving meal. They look like Skeksis from The Dark Crystal, which makes me think maybe Jim Henson once had this same idea from whence these dark and unsettling creatures were born.

I’ve been doing a lot of watercolors:

Another big occasion recently is the end of Fear The Walking Dead, a show I covered longer than almost any other. I think The Walking Dead is the only show I covered for a greater number of episodes, and I believe I started writing about that somewhere in Season 2 (so about 10 seasons). I didn’t start reviewing Game Of Thrones until Season 3.

Here’s my review of the Fear The Walking Dead series finale, which was just absolutely preposterous and terrible. But I will still, in a strange fashion, miss it.

I also penned a list of Thanksgiving movies, if you’re interested in some suggestions for things other than football to watch tonight or this weekend.

I’m still deciding the direction I want to take this newsletter going forward into 2024. A part of me wants to just write about history and fiction and fantasy and art and post my AI stuff and my poems (my latest poem is, I think, the best I’ve ever written—not to toot my own horn, as they say, but it’s something I’m genuinely proud of).

Another part of me sees the election looming and thinks that perhaps it’s time to dust off the political commentator in me and start paying attention and offering up some—hopefully—common sense observations on the shitshow we’re all about to find ourselves embroiled in. Perhaps a little bit of both. We shall see. I also want to revive the book club and start doing movie nights where we watch classics and then discuss. That could be fun. Whatever we do, it will be more than what you’ve gotten in 2023 from me.

I made a little Happy Thanksgiving video as well:

I’ve been a bit of a hot mess the last few months, but I’m on the mend. It feels as though somehow God reached down from the heavens and gave me this horrible, painful wakeup call, and that having suffered through it, I see it as a miracle.

For that, I am so humbled and grateful. I am grateful to all of you, and to my wonderful family and friends, and that I have access to all these great movies and shows and video games and books, and that I get to write about them and make videos about them for a living. There is so much to do, so many things to read and watch, so much knowledge to gather and wisdom to be gained, however painfully at times. So much good food to prepare and devour. So many stories to tell. Life is good, and I am thankful.

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving, folks.