Hello. The hasty monster in the header of this missive is named Mechnozoid and I must tell you that there are going to be more doodles in a similar vein to come. I am pretty rusty at drawing, but email is a disposable medium.
If blog posts are ephemeral as lightning bugs by nature, exhibiting life only so long as they circulate, then surely newsletters are mayflies by comparison. You don’t actually delete a blog post when you’re done reading it, after all! Or maybe you don’t delete newsletters either, and you’re one of those people with a five-digit unread email count. I can’t think about that too long. Let’s move on.
The point I was trying to make is that I want to make digging around in blog archives a regular feature here in Kaijuville. A good piece of writing doesn’t have to be new to be worthwhile; some pieces even improve from the perspective of passing time.
I think this is true of much of the work of Derek Guy, who was influencing my taste long before he blew up on social media. His piece Workwear and Gender from 2019, which is both a brief history lesson and a spotlight on designer Emilie Casiez, stands up just fine today. I’m pretty sure there are sweaters I own just because of this post; it prodded me to think about what I could get away with in my wardrobe, and for the better.
Please stand and turn to hymn number 645 in your hymn books, the one about the chicken farmer and the spaceship.
Writer and designer Jez Burrows ran a cool project for many years called Dictionary Stories, where he assembled pieces of microfiction by collaging example sentences from different dictionaries. He put a capstone on the work by compiling them in a book, then moved on to other things, including his own very intermittent newsletter. But you can still browse back through the stories online, and they remain great! Just ask Frank.
Of course, there’s one thing that preceded blog archives and will always (in my estimation) outrank them: webcomic archives. Madeline McGrane is not a webcomic artist in the traditional sense, but she has some wonderful short pieces you can read for free right now. The panel above is from the very good Vampire Horse and the Werewolf Bandit. I’m going to link to her site again at Halloween if I remember, but this email will be long deleted by then, so that’s okay.
That’s all the non-news from Kaijuville this week. Thank you to those of you who followed me here from my other blog, or Sophie’s role model of a newsletter, or a vibe-coded web app named after a slang term for a bordello. Don’t worry about it. Let’s not get stepped on today.
