Tag: Update

Well, ladies and gentlemen, it finally happened. My new Squarespace website is finally up and running. Well, kind of. While I did complete the process to publish the website, it’s still processing the change in the domain name of prestonposits.com.

So far, it’s been everything I hoped it would be. It’s much more navigable than WordPress turned out to be, and I don’t have to worry about adding plugins that I need to pay for or playing Russian roulette with backend software mechanics that I barely understand.

That said, I won’t shut down the WordPress site just yet. I still need to copy all the posts I made (aside from update posts) and repost them on the Squarespace site. That’s going to take some time. On the bright side, though, it means I can focus more of my creative energies on the new two-part Divine Conspiracy story I’ve been meaning to write.

The premise is still the same as the one I explained in the Halloween update, but for those who need a refresher: The first part involves the Banks family traveling to Ireland to take down a resurrected Fomorian that threatens to bring massive death and destruction to the countryside. However, during that story, Finvarra and Oonagh (the king and queen of fae beings and Ricky’s adoptive parents) are kidnapped by Serpent People and taken to the lair of the eldritch gods Yig and Tsathoggua, which lies deep under the catacombs of Paris. Thus, the second part follows Peter Banks and his team as they enter the catacombs and recruit the services of a friendly commune of vampires, ghouls, and werewolves who live under the city to help rescue them.

I’ve mentioned that I’ve struggled a bit with starting the story. One of the big reasons why is that I was having trouble figuring out where in Ireland the story should start. After all the research I’ve conducted, however, I’ve decided to start it in County Meath, just north of Dublin. This is partly because of the several religious landmarks, both pagan and Christian, that lay within its borders (e.g., the Hill of Tara, Newgrange, and the Abbey of Kells). Of course, there’s a good chance the story could travel to other parts of the Emerald Isle. For instance, the Poisoned Glen in County Donegal is often reputed to be where the terrible Fomorian general Balor was slain by his grandson Lugh of the Tuatha de Danann. Maybe the Banks’ Fomorian is going there to accomplish some goal?

I’m feeling pretty good about this story idea. However, the first part is heavily inspired by the short story “Rawhead Rex” by Clive Barker, so I’d better be careful not to plagiarize his plot points. Of course, the second part owes a lot to Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith, and their works are well within the public domain, so who cares if I rip them off?!

But in all seriousness, folks, it’s been fun on WordPress while it lasted, but I’ve got to move on to greener pastures now. I hope you’ll join me on the new and improved Preston Posits website in the future. I hope to see you soon!

P.S. I should also mention before I go that I’m considering expanding my social media presence in case that Space Karen emerald mine nepo-baby Elon Musk ends up finally fucking Twitter up beyond repair. So if you see a Tumblr or Reddit link on my Squarespace or DeviantArt pages sometime in the near future, know that I warned you in advance.

Is it weird to write another update post so soon after the last one? Whatever! It’s my website, and I can do what I want with it!

But yeah, much like last summer, I’m going to be taking a break from the blog for a while to concentrate on writing Divine Conspiracy material on DeviantArt. I’m not planning to make this a yearly tradition; that’s just how the cookie crumbled both this year and last.

I don’t know how long I’ll be away working on the piece. Much like the “pilot” I released last year, this story focuses on the Banks family getting embroiled in a supernatural mystery, except this one involves them going out into the field alongside their fellow Templar knights. Specifically, they head to Massachusetts and team up with the local Wampanoag tribe to determine what’s behind the recent spike in activity surrounding the so-called “Bridgewater Triangle” and soon discover that it may have something to do with the long-buried mythology of the local indigenous tribes.

Writing this story is likely to take longer than the pilot, mainly because I’m writing this new story from scratch, unlike the pilot where I had an extensive rough draft to work off of. As such, I needed to take some time to do research, especially by reading the book Spirit of the New England Tribes by anthropologist William S. Simmons. Simmons’ book proved especially helpful in informing me of the truth of the folktales the Wampanoag and their neighbors used to tell (or at least as much truth as can be ascertained given how fiercely the Puritans tried to stamp them out).

As for the blog, I’ll still check in regularly to empty the spam filter and update plugins whenever needed. I’m also hoping I might be able to squeeze in time to write another P.J.’s Ultimate Playlist or Complete Noob’s Guide to the Left entry while I’m at it. I’m also pretty eager to start that series on esoteric spirituality that I’ve been promising you guys for a while now. We’ll see how that turns out!

Also, if you’re wondering what’s going on medically, given how much I discussed that in the last update post, things are going just fine. That bad case of the flu is long past, and while it’s clear by this point that I definitely have hemochromatosis, we managed to catch it at the right time where I only needed three phlebotomies to get my iron back down to healthy levels, so no worries there! That’s all for now. Stay healthy, beautiful watchers!

Hello, everyone. You may have noticed that my upload schedule has recently become a lot slower on the blog. There are a few big reasons for this.

I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I’ve wanted to devote more energy to The Divine Conspiracy on DeviantArt. That is certainly true, as I have been writing a new story centering on the Bridgewater Triangle and how the urban legend intersects with indigenous Wampanoag mythology. Progress has been slow, mostly because I’ve been reading the book Spirit of the New England Tribes to understand their spiritual traditions better.

But that’s far from the only reason progress has been slow. For one thing, I recently decided to have myself tested for hemochromatosis, or iron overload in the bloodstream. My Dad has the disorder, and with all the tests I’ve been subjecting myself to (blood tests, MRIs), it’s increasingly likely that he passed it down to me. Fortunately, the disorder is easy enough to treat. Dad takes care of his by frequently donating blood. A doctor also informed me that eating red meat also contributes to iron buildup, so I’ve been wondering lately if going on a mostly vegetarian diet would help at all (I say “mostly” because, while I don’t have much of an appetite for most meat products these days, I’m not sure I’m ready to give up cheeseburgers or meat lover’s pizza).

On top of that, I also came down with a nasty cold this week that has left me more exhausted than I have ever felt in recent memory. Mom and I believe it is influenza, mostly because it is definitely a lot worse than most colds I’ve had even though a COVID test I took yesterday came out negative. Either way, yesterday morning was an absolute slog. I got up to eat breakfast, only got halfway through because my appetite just wasn’t there, and went back to bed for the next five hours. You can imagine that I didn’t have the energy to stand up, let alone write anything.

The good news is that I’m pretty sure Thursday morning was rock bottom for me, and now there’s no way to go but up. You can likely expect a new post on the blog sometime next week or the week after. There won’t be a big birthday retrospective like the one I did for Watership Down last year, and it won’t be about that TV series I hinted at in previous update posts.

For those who are curious, I was referring to The Shannara Chronicles, based on the Shannara series by Terry Brooks. I remember seeing the first season of the show back when it first aired on MTV and being profoundly disappointed in the choices the series creators made. However, I couldn’t find any streaming services that offered it for free. I especially did not want to pay $17.99 to watch it on Amazon Prime and end up lining that vampire Bezos’ pockets.

Instead, this year’s mini-retrospective will be about a very underrated heavy metal band that is almost as near and dear to my heart as Terry Brooks’ books are. I won’t say which one just yet. Just keep a lookout for it in the near future.

And that’s everything I wanted to discuss with you guys today. Remember to wash your hands and keep your masks on because we may be done with COVID, but COVID sure as hell isn’t done with us! Until next time, friends.

It’s a new year, beautiful watchers, and it’s coming upon almost two years since I started this blog. Incidentally, it was actually one of my 2020 New Years’ resolutions to start this blog. Now, in 2022, I’ve three more. In order of the most to least likely I’m am to actually accomplishing it, they are:

• Start doing sit-ups everyday. I feel like I should be doing a little more exercise considering that I’m usually spending 70% of my days off sitting down, either in front of a computer or reading a book. Besides, I’m kind of curious to see how far the number I can do in one sitting goes up by the end of the year.
• Get a drivers’ license. I flunked the first driving course I took when I was in high school, and another one I took during college ended up getting cut short because of what I assume was a bureaucratic foul-up. This isn’t to say that I’m not totally blameless: I tend to get easily distracted, which certainly isn’t an ideal quality in a potential driver. However, I feel like I would be less of a burden on my parents if I was able to drive myself to wherever I needed to go.
• Learn how to play the guitar. It feels kind of weird being as obsessed with music as I am and yet not being able to play an instrument. The problem is that the instruments I have available to play on hand are… less than satisfactory. One is a classical guitar made by Hohner that has a body so big that I can barely get my arms around it. The other is a much smaller children’s beginner guitar made by First Act that is much easier to handle but is missing its lower E string. Of course, assuming that I manage to surmount those obstacles, there’s still the matter of whether or not I have the patience to actually master the riffs. Still, there’s plenty of easy ones to start with. Pantera’s “Walk” might be a good place to start.

But you probably don’t care about all that. You’re probably more interested in what I have planned for writing on the blog (and possibly also DeviantArt). To be honest, however, I’m kind of low on ideas at the moment. True, I still have ongoing series like “P.J.’s Ultimate Playlist” and “The Complete Noob’s Guide to the Left” to keep me occupied. But beyond that, I’m having trouble coming up with new ideas beyond direct follow-ups to subjects I’ve already written about. Indeed, beyond the series I mentioned above, I have two main concrete ideas right now:

• The first is a follow-up to the one I wrote about ten common climate change denial myths. I’ve come to believe that the original top ten list didn’t cover enough myths, especially because I’ve since learned about major ones that I missed, like the idea that volcanoes emit more carbon than humans. I’ve also heard new ones from Dad or other relatives (like one involving a 27,000 year solar cycle that’s causing the Earth to start moving away from the Sun, thus causing a period of cooling… maybe. I don’t remember the details). You can probably expect that one sometime later this month.
• The next are two more ideas for posts relating to the subject of paranormal triangles, which I think may come out sometime next month (which is fitting, since my first paranormal triangles article came out on February of last year). The first is going to look at ten of the most infamous disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle to determine whether or not more mundane factors might have led to their vanishing. The second is going to look at Ivan T. Sanderson’s concept of “vile vortices”, of which the Bermuda Triangle is a part, to determine whether or not these places really are as dangerous as Sanderson claimed they were.

I’ve also been considering making lists debunking myths relating to the 2020 presidential election and myths relating to the January 6th insurrection. I’ll also definitely be continuing my look into offshoots of Marxist-Leninist philosophy in my “Noob’s Guide” series in my never-ending quest to prove that there is an alternative to the neoliberal capitalist system that made the Capitol insurrection happen in the first place.

But beyond all that, there is something else that has been bugging me. I’ve mentioned before that I am a huge animation buff. But I feel that hasn’t been reflected that well in my work on this site. Aside from the article I wrote on the “animation age ghetto” and the reviews I wrote of Watership Down’s three animated adaptations so far, I haven’t done much in that arena. I still need a bit of time to figure out how I might remedy that, although the best idea I have right now is maybe going through each year going backward from 2021 and seeing which films and T.V. series were the best of each year. Maybe. We’ll see.

On top of all that, I want to focus more attention this year on The Divine Conspiracy on DeviantArt. I find it hard to muster up the courage to actually work on my “magnum opus,” though, mainly because I find the amount of ambition that I’ve invested into the concept intimidating. I have so many things that I want this series to be. I want to explore ideas from the esoteric sides of religion and spirituality that I barely even understand. I want to convincingly show the weight of the cosmic horror elements pressing down on the Banks family. I want it to be an accurate portrait of the world as I see it, with the dark supernatural forces battling the Banks’ constantly exacerbating reactionary and regressive forces that are tearing both America and the world apart. I want to be sure I can make my characters actual characters and not just one note stereotypes and stock archetypes. Above all else, though, I want it to be a good fantasy series that makes people laugh, cry, grip their seats in terror, and hits the same emotions as any of the great fantasy epics of our time.

But I’ll deal with those struggles as they come, and my PrestonPosits watchers can expect a further short update regarding my activities on DeviantArt in the near future. For now, though, let’s hope this New Year is better than the last two. I look forward to what I can accomplish in the year to come, and I hope you’ll stick with me for the ride. Until next time, beautiful watchers!