Notice: this article originally appeared in the afternoon of January 30th, 2020 on ninaillingworth.com and is reprinted here in full for expediency and completeness.
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Editor’s note: unfortunately I have a lot to explain and not a lot of energy to do it with, so I’m going to try and keep this short and perhaps a bit blunt – please bear with me.
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“What happened to you? Where have you been?”
Roughly ten days before Christmas, my Grandmother on my late father’s side died. Immediately after Christmas, my Grandfather on my mother’s side passed away. Although I honestly didn’t think these (admittedly very sad) events would affect me very much, they did and I entered a period of deep confusion and mourning.
Just after the New Year I also managed to contract a flu virus that was particularly virulent; perhaps you’ve had the same virus or know someone who has – from what I gather it managed to get a large number of people this winter. I can say with some certainty that I haven’t been as sick as I was then, for as long as I was (just over two weeks, and I still have not entirely recovered my energy and endurance) since I was a very young child. Writing (or doing much of anything) during this period was very difficult; although I concede that I still found the energy to write a few extremely mediocre posts on Twitter - probably because I’m a sad social media addict.
Further complicating matters, before any of these horrible (to obviously varying degrees) events occurred I’d agreed to take an advertising side project job for a retail store after Christmas; as such as soon as I was well, I had to finish the advertisements I’d promised them because they were already late. Fortunately for my writing (but perhaps not my grocery money), the project proved far too labor intensive to keep doing alongside creating content and I decided not to renew the contract – which is now over.
Finally I spent the last week working on, setting up and recording the pilot episode of a full length podcast I’m partnering with my friend Nick Galea to produce, called “No Fugazi.”
“When are you going to get back to writing something that isn’t Twitter shitposting?”
As soon as humanly possible; if I hadn’t spent this evening working on various social media accounts for the No Fugazi Podcast and writing this update, I would have spent it working on an article. I can’t promise I’m going to post something every day, and as I mentioned above the flu virus I contracted this year was so bad that I still haven’t recovered my stamina yet; but it is certainly my intention to publish a new article within the next day or two.
My research notes are (perhaps understandably) a mess right now though, so I might ease into this with more opinion pieces, op-eds and book reviews at first – in the interests of getting some content out quickly after a long, unwanted break.
“What’s this about a podcast then?”
As I mentioned, I’m partnering with my longtime friend (and the former co-host of the “That Guy Sucks” podcast) Nick Galea on an ongoing series we’re calling “No Fugazi” – a podcast about manufacturing consent, media manipulation & social engineering through propaganda in American culture. You can find it on SoundCloud (and now apparently, ITunes) under the name “No Fugazi” or by checking out the show’s new Twitter account @NoFugaziPodcast.
I’ll also be making a post on my various blogs and social media accounts with more details about the podcast and links to the pilot episode later today (hopefully.) All in all, I think the pilot podcast was a good start with plenty of room for improvement as we record more episodes.
“Is the podcast free to listen to?”
Yes; all of the content I’m involved in creating online will always remain free for all to enjoy – we may at some point put up a tip jar on Patreon for the podcast so my partner Nick can share donations from fans of the podcast with me, but donating will not be required to listen to *any* of the episodes.
“Is Bernie going to win the Democratic Party nomination?”
Yes, convincingly and on the first ballot.
- nina illingworth
Independent writer, critic and analyst with a left focus. Please help me fight corporate censorship by sharing my articles with your friends online!
You can find my work at ninaillingworth.com, Can’t You Read, Media Madness and my Patreon Blog
Updates available on Twitter, Mastodon and Facebook. Podcast at "No Fugazi" on Soundcloud.
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