Northern Exposure/BasedCon

Two upcoming in-person meetups

So it’s been over a month since the last Postcard From Barsoom, and I am starting to suffer from guilt over this extended silence.

Partly, it’s that it is summer. I’ve returned from my aimless South American wanders to my homeland, and have been visiting family. Between the long, humid days, and little nieces and nephews running around, there have been more important things to do than stare at a screen all day, such as playing paper airplane hide and seek (which is kind of like fetch, in that it has the great virtue that it doesn’t require me to get off the couch).

Last night I went for a wander around dusk, so that I could admire the sunset and enjoy the sweet relief of the cool evening breeze, as has been my habit these last weeks. Somewhat remarkably, almost every person I met on my circuit of the village was young, fit, white, and friendly. Something about the weather put everyone in a good mood, including me, but in the midst of the relentlessly depressing discourse around replacement migration and ageing populations, the absence of olds, fats, and browns seemed somehow magical, as though a portal to the Sidhe realms had opened in some hidden glade. It felt like a portent ... as, indeed, the sunset itself felt a couple days before, when I was shown a shadow road in the sky.

“O ye’ll take the low road/And I’ll take the sky road/And I’ll be in Barsoom afoooore ye...”

Speaking of the discourse, it simply hasn’t been very compelling recently. Over on X, everyone is talking about Canadian iTart Lauren Southern having a cry after the obvious thing happened when she jumped into anglo-mulatto ePimp Andrew Tate’s bed, which left the poor thing so distraught that she gave Tommy Robinson a coke-fuelled blowjob. I could not possibly care less about this drama. The only possible takeaway is ‘all of these people are terrible’, and after realizing that this was the topic du jour today, I closed X and went to the gym. A few days ago, everyone was talking about Epstein, again, and how we still haven’t seen the files, again, and how this shows that Mossad is really in charge or that Trump’s covering for his pedo friends or that Trump is a pedo himself or how it’s all 5D chess to get the base worked up or or or ... look no one knows, okay, I don’t know, you don’t know, no one writing about this subject knows anything. It’s all noise. Similarly, the recent thing on Notes seems to have been the perennial Christian v Pagan theological mud-slinging match, where once again not a single new thing was said, nor was a single person convinced, and the only thing that was accomplished was to raise voices in righteous indignation over ... well I’m not even sure anymore. I almost got sucked into that one. I wrote a first draft of a piece called ‘Odin, Baptized’, which I haven’t touched for weeks.

So the discourse has all felt very hollow and dull, just repeats of things that have already been said a hundred times already, and I’ve taken this lull in the news cycle as an excuse to let myself get sucked into a huge project again. For some time now I’ve wanted to write out a vision for Canada, a pathway for the country to not only survive, but prosper in the near future, while preserving and indeed developing its character according to patterns suggested by its long-suppressed deep nature. For the last month I’ve been attempting to do just that. The goal is something which is both feasible and inspiring, and which addresses the manifold social, economic, and spiritual threats of the intertwined polycrisis strangling His Majesty’s northern Dominion. I’ve banged out 32,000 words on that project so far, most of which will not make it to print, as a great deal of it is in the form of research notes. When I originally started writing it I’d hoped that it would be ready by Dominion Day, but the July 1^st deadline whipped by a bit too fast, and I spent that day hanging out with my family and watching fireworks instead.

I’m still working on that monster, but in the meantime, I’ve been invited to a couple of upcoming events, which (for a limited time) you can invite yourself too as well.

First, in almost exactly a month – August 15^th to 17^th – I’m going camping at an undisclosed (even to me) location in the wilds of the Canadian forests north of Toronto.

Northern Exposure 2025 is organized by the Company of Adventurers, whose inaugural event I spoke at several months ago. That was a lot of fun. The only problem was that it was over too quickly. So this time we’re going to kidnap the zoomers for a weekend, isolate them in a cabin out innawoods, take their phones away, and force them to hike, canoe, drink beer around a bonfire, get eaten by deer flies, and touch grass.

So far as I know Northern Exposure 2025 still has open slots. If you’d like to come, get in touch with the organizers ASAP. Oh, and yes, you will be vetted. The Company of Adventurers maintains high standards for its companions; fellow travellers of the sinister tendency are not welcome among the righteous.

The second event I’ll be attending is the fifth annual BasedCon, which will be held from Sept 6^th to 8^th in Grand Rapids, Michigan. You can get tickets for BasedCon here.

BasedCon is a science fiction convention which explicitly excludes the debased demihuman mutants that have infested the ‘non’-political science fiction conventions. It is a convention for fans who roll their eyes at (anti)social (in)justice, who just want to have fun, and don’t consider humouring the insanities and inanities of the pronoun communists to be compatible with ‘fun’. The event brings together fans with self-published science fiction and fantasy writers from the burgeoning indie scene. This year, as every year, it’s being organized by founder Robert Kroese, author of the Mammon books – a pre-to-post apocalyptic tale in which the hubris of a billionaire and the feckless greed of the US government combine to bring an asteroid down on everyone’s heads. I read Mammon several months ago, and quite enjoyed it. You’ll also find my friend Professor Rachel Fulton Brown (whose podcast I appeared on several months ago), my good friend the aetherczar Hans G. Schantz, and my other good friend Alexander Macris, the creator of the Adventurer Conqueror King D20 system and author of the Star Spangled Squadron comic which I promised to review and still haven’t (sorry, Alex).

This is not a review, but I can vouch that Star Spangled Squadron is a fun read. Think The Boys, only Homelander is exactly what he looks like on the tin. Oh and the chick in the leather? Actual dominatrix.

If you’d like to come to BasedCon, don’t procrastinate. Registration closes tomorrow, July 17^th. So get your ticket while you can! And yes, I know, that’s short notice ... I wasn’t invited myself until about a week ago, and uh ... okay I probably could have let you know earlier. My bad. I lose track of time during the summer.

That’s all for now. I hope everyone is enjoying their summer. Many thanks for your patience, which I will reward, I hope, very soon.