Posted by sarahZedig on Sep 26, 2025
hello again! it's been a minute. i've been bad about updating y'all here as to my comings and goings, because frankly the entire internet is sort of a stressful experience these days and it's just easier to get on, do the bare minimum, and then GTFO. later in this update i'll discuss what's been going on with me lately, but first...
i'm just gonna link you to all the stuff i've been up to over the last few months!
BLAUGUST POSTS
blaugust is a thing where you write blogs every day through august. i didn't do it every day but i still got a lot of decent writing done, posted over on tumblr. here's one about the rise of smart phones. here's one about the "problem" of trans women in women's sports. here's one about my thoughts on being a creator in 2025. you can browse the blaugust tag to see the rest, it's a wide variety of stuff that is not terribly polished, but there's a couple in there i'm considering mining for video content.
VIDEO ESSAY REVIEW
i've started doing vidrev again! first i did a roundup of several recent notable essays, and then i wrote a full review of Ro Ramdin's excellent piece "The Invisible Illness We Don't Understand."
i need to move my blogging to a dedicated website. i've got the early makings of vidrev and personal writings on neocities, but i need someone who understands webdev to actually make it functional. otherwise, i'm probably posting too much over on bluesky.
FLASH IN THE PAN APPEARANCE
i was on the Flash in the Pan podcast, a long-running show looking back at 2000s flash animation! i had such a good time that our session went long and wound up split into two episodes. the first episode is a review of a couple random flashes including Mario Teaches Imperialism. the second episode is me gushing about the work of Jason Steele, creator of Charlie the Unicorn, who has gone on to make the shockingly brilliant Shadowstone Park series.
STREAMING
i've been streaming every Tuesday over on twitch. the first stream i read out the script for a video titled What Would A Better Youtube Look Like, and the second stream was me gathering materials for editing that stream into a video that should be coming out in the next few weeks. i posted a stream highlight over on my second channel, where i explored youtube's AI "inspirations" tab and wound up inventing a million sinkdogs. you just have to see it for yourself. in the third stream, i read out and commentated on a werewolf short story that i've been plugging away at over the last few months. i'm trying to keep these streams novel and not just do "i'm playing latest vibeo game," though i'm certain that someday i will wind up doing that again anyway.
GODFEELS
earlier this year we released a very ambitious section titled The Party, which has some of the best writing i and my cowriter have done on this project period. we're now onto track A2, which will be updating sporadically over the next few months whenever a chapter is ready to go live. for those who don't know, godfeels is my longrunning homestuck fanfiction which has thoroughly transformed into a semi-original space opera about characters in and around a post-scarcity society that historicizes itself through the lens of magical girl anime and is populated almost exclusively by immortal gods.
this current arc, Double Album, is written to be a jumping on point for new readers, ideally including those who haven't read homestuck. which isn't to say that you won't feel a bit lost-- rather, this is a story about being in the middle of stories, as the regular cast inherited from homestuck have found themselves thrust into the middle of a story that doesn't involve them and have to figure out what the fuck is going on right alongside the reader. my hope is that the work itself is compelling enough to carry you through even if you don't understand all of what's going on.
OCTOBER HORROR MARATHON
it's almost October! which is the month when my friends and i get together to watch at least one horror(ish) movie every day for the month! you may remember i've done several videos about this tradition already. right now we're in the final stages of figuring out what the schedule's gonna look like this year. we have a list of over 100 movies and we'll be doing a trailer watch party in a few days to vote on what we want to see. here's a playlist of all our current candidates (minus the modest handful of fan-edits submitted this year, since Paradise and Timekeepers of Eternity were such big hits last year, whose trailers only exist on Vimeo for copyright reasons). once we've got the votes tallied, i'll sit down math out the full schedule, pressing my thumb on the scale where appropriate. like last year, i'll be doing vlogs after each one to share my thoughts! the real question is... will i be able to release them in a timely fashion. could they come out before 2026, or even dare i to dream before the end of November?!?! only time will tell...
the big wrench in the gears of doing daily uploads for the marathon (and for a lot of stuff really) is that my internet is ass. even a twenty minute video takes more than an hour to upload, so i have to go to the library to get anything posted in a reasonable time frame.
before you ask, no, i don't think this will be the kind of thing where y'all can join in. i know other, cooler creators on this platform are happy to organize stuff like that, but this is already enough of a production as it is. i will definitely share the schedule once it's finished, however, and y'all are welcome to watch along with us!
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alright, that's the business out of the way. for those of you interested, here's the personal stuff:
i've been sick for the last week and a half, and before that we were playing host to some friends who needed to get away from a bad living situation. i started the year feeling fairly confident, but i must admit, trump 2 has been very unkind to my mental well-being. i recorded one interview episode of trans questioning a few months back that i thought went well, only to find that my recording setup was bad and the whole thing was totally unusable. that took the wind of my sails. on the front of analog video stuff, i picked up a 2000s sony handycam and a videonics analog mixer in the hopes of building out my setup to do some really ambitious stuff... only for both of those devices to be busted in very specific, annoying ways that went outside ebay's refund policies. so that was demoralizing!
that has basically been the mood of 2025 so far. a lot of my friends are in a similar place, having started the year in the mode of "fuck it i will thrive regardless!!" only for the material conditions to sweep in and knock them back down into the mud. i feel reaaaaally bad for all the professional computer touchers out there. the job market is fucking dire right now. with the spread of genAI, the ramping up of adult content censorship, and the frothy-mouthed enthusiasm with which our leaders want to make trans people into actual literal demons, it's been hard to keep one's eye on the ball and be like "actually today i will finish my script about why Twisters (2024) sucks instead of doomscrolling." the timeline is addictive. it feels good to get mad about stuff online even though it is the opposite of productive. maybe, perhaps, even because it is the opposite of productive. it feels like doing something without actually doing something. it's an expression that gets an immediate response, unlike videos or podcasts or essays which take time to write, record, edit, and promote, only to have zero guarantee of getting any traction. this is especially true on youtube, where spirits are lower than ever.
shit sucks man! and i hate coming to patreon and comradery with largely empty hands and a mouth full of excuses, because i'm a lot better off than many other folks in my position. i live with my girlfriend and our relationship is great. i'm not particularly worried about losing our apartment any time in the foreseeable future. and i live in Seattle, a city that has many problems but is nonetheless broadly committed to protecting trans and queer rights. but it's hard not to be affected by the tenor of the news these days, and the suffering of so many human beings across the globe ostensibly being perpetrated on behalf of US citizens.
but that's the point of streaming once a week and pushing myself to write more. i've been making more friends in the local scene, and am in the process of getting approved to volunteer for a local film org. i am trying to piece together some structure out of the structurelessness inherent to that independent contractor lifestyle, and so far the results have been optimistic. i'll keep you posted as things develop, i just wanted y'all to know that i haven't been resting on my hands.
thanks as always for your support. please take care of yourselves.