Hello everyone! I apologize again for my lack of recent posts. I am still devoting most of my available writing time to working on my novel, which is slowly, but surely, progressing. I am no longer confident that I will have a complete draft by the end of 2024 due to the amount of revising I have been doing, but I am still expecting to have a complete draft by sometime in early 2025. Regarding this blog, I have had a post about Netflix’s Kaos saved as a draft for months now, but I still haven’t finished it. I am also hoping to make posts about Gladiator II and The Return, which are both coming out in the next few weeks. I have also been seriously considering the idea of trying to start a YouTube channel for a while now, but I know very little about video editing, I’ve been focused on my novel, and I haven’t gotten around to it.
Like many Americans and others around the world, I am filled with despair over the results of the 2024 U.S. elections. I thought about writing posts about the election both before and after it happened, but I feel so burned out over modern politics right now that I couldn’t bring myself to write them. Even so, I want to let all my readers know that I am currently safe and, although I expect that the situation in the United States will become much worse over next four years, I believe that I will be personally relatively insulated from the worst of it.
Related to this, I would like to announce that I am planning to delete my Twitter account in the near future, partly because I don’t like Elon Musk making money off of me and partly because the site itself has become so toxic and completely overrun with pro-Trump ads, right-wing extremist and Neo-Nazi accounts, and AI and cryptocurrency grifters that it is virtually unusable. The vast majority of the people whose content I was actually interested in have already left. The good news for those who want to follow me on social media, though, is that I already have an account of BlueSky. My handle on that site is @spencermcdaniel.bsky.social. If you want to follow me on social media, you can follow me there.
In the meantime, I am still planning to apply to PhD programs for the third time next month. This time, I am going to apply to more programs than I did the first two times and hope that I will have better luck.
Onward.
It isn’t done yet.
I’m glad you are still plugging away on your writing and your education. All the other Black persons I know are talking seriously about emigration. It’s really worrying. I thought the Vietnam War was bad, but this looks as though it might be America’s biggest self-inflicted wound.