01. When in Turkiye

Went to Istanbul, primarily to deliver the kiddo to his mother--who doesn't live there but was there at the time--and figured I might as well do a little sightseeing while there. Ended up contracting a vicious COVID variant that put me out for a good month. And the AirBnB I was staying at was apparently infested with bed bugs. Believe it or not, this was my first ever encounter with bed bugs, and I spent an awfully long time wondering why I was developing some strange lizard arm.

Despite everything that could've gone on this trip actually going wrong, my feelings about Istanbul remain unshaken: It's such a beautiful city. And that goes to tell you how amazing a place it is.

Before all the mishaps, I managed to scoop up a selection of independent Turkish comix magazines--thanks in part to recommendations from Ahmet A. Sabanci, who I once had the chance to link up with in Denver many moons ago--and was pleasantly surprised by how unflinching and hard-hitting some of them were.

02. The Solar Grid: Revised & Expanded

Someone had asked me to put together a proposal for speculative objects pulled from the world of THE SOLAR GRID for inclusion in a futurism exhibition of some kind. So, in going through the entire book with that particular eye in mind, I began to notice--much to my horror!--a number of terribly glaring mistakes: a regular hand where there should've been a claw, missing outfit details from this character or that, backgrounds that needed reworking, scenes that called for additional pages, and quite a lot of dialogue that needed rewriting. I've detailed most major changes in a blog post over at Ganzeer.Today.

You'll notice the edits are sprinkled throughout the book, but the bulk of them are actually in the very last chapter. Gave the book another good read after all edits were made, and man, it's astonishing how a handful of changes can really elevate a work to an entirely new level.

This new REVISED & EXPANDED edition can be experienced in e-book form from:

Sadly, none of the changes made for the REVISED & EXPANDED edition will be reflected in the serialized installments from Radix Co-op or the forthcoming boxset that collects them; Issues #1-8 came out a long time ago, and issues #9-10 have already gone to print. The covers for the installments however are exclusive to the installments and will not appear in any collected edition. And they're pretty great covers, if I do say so myself. Not to mention all the snazzy print and production stuff that Radix is so good at pulling off.

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03. Recipe

MOONY BALLS

When I get to spend time with the kiddo, much of that time goes towards devising considerably healthy snacks. This one was a big winner.

Ingredients:

1 sweet potato (roasted & mashed)
1/2 cup peanut butter (preferably unsweetened)
1 cup rolled oats
2 tbsp molasses
1/2 cup dark chocolate (melted, preferably unsweetened)

Instructions:

Mix sweet potato, peanut butter, oats, and molasses.
Form into balls.
Chill in freezer for 15 mins.
Dip each cold ball into melted dark chocolate.
Refrigerate coated balls for 20 minutes until chocolate shell hardens.

You now have a scrumptious sweet-potato & peanut-butter based dessert 👌

"Right now for me it is 80-85% [creating short form video content] and 15-20% writing the books."

- Jason Pargin

What have the tech overlords done to us?

04. Reads: Ahmed Khaled Towfik's UTOPIA

Finally got around to reading Ahmed Khaled Towfik's 2008 novel UTOPIA (in its original Arabic), and fuck me, it's good.

Alaa lives in the gated north coast city of Utopia. Protected by a private security outfit comprised of ex-US marines, Utopia is shielded off from the rest of the world where Alaa has spent his entire life relishing in the fruits of pampered living. Little joy is derived from anything anymore, so together with Germinal--one of his many fuck buddies--he decides to smuggle his way into Cairo, now decayed and neglected, to hunt.

And that's where things go terribly wrong.

A thrilling page-turner, the novel is also plump-full of piercing social commentary. An English-translation is available from Bloomsbury (which I haven't read and therefore cannot assess).

05. Petrocultures 2026

Where: Dresden University of Technology

When: August 27 | 11:00 am - 1:00 pm

What: Six scholars at the top of their game and I will take to the stage in Dresden and engage in a vigorous conversation about THE SOLAR GRID. The scholars in question include:

Dominic Boyer, Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Rice University (author of No More Fossils, Energopolitics: Winds and Power in the Anthropocene, and Understanding Media: A Popular Philosophy).
Stacey Balkan, Associate Professor in the Department of English at Florida Atlantic University (author of Rogues in the Postcolony: Narrating Extraction and Itinerancy in India and Solarities: Seeking Energy Justice).
Frederic Caille, Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Savoie Mont Blanc (author of L'invention de l'énergie solaire and La figure du sauveteur: Naissance du citoyen secoureur en France, 1780-1914).
Swaralipi Nandi, Associate Professor of English at Loyola Academy (co-editor of Oil Fictions: World Literature and Our Contemporary Petrosphere, The Postnational Fantasy: Essays on Postcolonialism, Cosmopolitics, and Science Fiction, and Spectacles of Blood: A Study of Violence and Masculinity in Postcolonial Films).
Imre Szeman, Professor of Human Geography at the University of Toronto Scarborough (author of Futures of the Sun: The Struggle over Renewable Life, Zones of Instability: Literature, Postcolonialism, and the Nation, and Energy Culture: Art and Theory on Oil and Beyond).
Brianna Anderson, Assistant Professor of English at the University of Texas in El Paso (creator of The Environmental Comics Digital Database).

How is this even possible?

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