If I see one more column, meme, or bathroom-wall manifesto lamenting the good old days before cell phones, I’m going to scream.

You know the ones I mean. They’ve got titles like:

• “What Did People Do Before Cell Phones?”
• “How Cell Phones Are Sucking Away Your Soul (and Probably Your Childhood Memories)”
• “One Crazy Reason to Toss Your Phone and Go Back to Smoke Signals”

I’m half-expecting the next one to be “Why Carrier Pigeons Were the Real Influencers.”

Let me save you some time. I’ll tell you what we did before cell phones — or mobile phones, for my UK friends. We read newspapers. We listened to music. We scribbled notes in notebooks. We stared out the window and daydreamed. We occasionally got lost and, brace yourself, asked for directions.

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I tried to cancel something the other day.

Not a major thing. Not a mortgage. Not health insurance. Not one of those services where you have to decide whether keeping your family alive is worth the silver-tier plan.

Just one of those minor charges that shows up every month like a friendly relative with their hand out.

“It’s just a couple of bucks,” they say, while quietly reaching into your checking account and taking enough money to buy a gas station coffee and maybe one sad banana.

The cancellation process took three menus, a password reset, two confirmation screens, and what felt like a brief conversation with someone trained in emotional hostage negotiation.

“Are you sure you want to leave us?”

I don’t know, Kyle from Retention, I’m not even sure how this started.

Actually, I do.

We used to buy things.

One and done. Shake hands. Move on with your life.

You bought a CD, and then you had the music. You bought software, and it lived on your computer like a well-behaved citizen. You bought a car, and the features came with it, because apparently there was once a time in this country when heated seats were not treated like premium cable.

There was a beginning, a middle, and an end to the transaction.

Now?

Now we subscribe to it.

Music. Movies. Software. Storage. Fitness apps. Meditation apps. Note-taking apps. Apps that help you organize the other apps. Features that were free last year but now live behind a tiny velvet rope.

We didn’t stop owning things all at once.

We just started renting them a little at a time.

Two dollars here.

Five dollars there.

Seven ninety-nine, which is legally different from eight dollars because marketing people have calculators and no shame.

Small enough that it doesn’t feel like a decision.

It’s just a couple of bucks.

Until one day you look at your bank statement and the slow dread of understanding hits you:

Nothing you thought you owned is really yours.

You’re just paying the companies not to take it away.

According to a C+R Research survey, the average American spends around $273 a month on subscriptions—and most of us underestimate that number by about half.

Which means a lot of us are walking around thinking, “Oh, I probably spend eighty bucks,” while our bank account stands in the corner, dressed like a raccoon, holding a flashlight and whispering, “Buddy, you may want to sit down.”

We don’t buy things anymore. We maintain access.

And access has rules.

Access can be revoked or changed without asking you. Access can get moved behind a different tier while you are asleep, because somewhere a spreadsheet got promoted.

BMW briefly tried charging a monthly fee for heated seats.

Not installing them.

Turning them on.

The technology was already in the car. All you needed to do was pay a monthly service charge, and Germany would grant your backside temporary access to warmth. Which does sound like the epitome of German engineering: precise, efficient, and somehow still requiring paperwork.

They backed off after the backlash.

But the idea stuck.

Because it wasn’t really about heated seats.

It was about proving something.

Ownership is optional now.

Access is negotiable.

And the customer is not the owner.

The customer is the recurring revenue event.

Zuora says the subscription economy has grown over 400 percent over the past decade, which is business language for “every company looked at Netflix and asked, what if toothbrushes worked like this?”

It’s not just pricing.

It’s design.

The trick is simple: keep the cost small, keep the billing automatic, and make canceling annoying enough that people decide to deal with it after lunch, which is where good intentions go to die.

“Pause instead?”

“Try a lower tier?”

“Are you sure you want to lose access?”

“Would you like to tell us why you’re leaving?”

No, I would not. I would like to leave. That was the purpose of clicking the button marked “cancel,” a word that used to mean something before it became the opening move in a negotiation.

And besides—

It’s just a couple of bucks.

So we stay.

Not because we use it, because we might.

And “might” has become one of the most expensive words in the English language.

I have one of these.

A social media scheduling app.

Not a big one. Just something that lets me queue up posts across eight different accounts like I’m running a small digital empire instead of a middle-aged man trying to convince people on the internet that lawns are suspicious and fountain pens are still relevant.

I use it twice a year.

Right before Dragon Con and Multiverse, when it feels important to look organized and professional for about ten days.

The rest of the year?

It just sits there.

Billing me in the background.

Not much.

Just a couple of bucks.

Now and then I think about canceling it. I open the account page with purpose. I square my shoulders. I become, for one brief shining moment, a man of action.

Then the voice arrives.

What if you need it?

What if, against all available evidence, you suddenly become the person who schedules a month’s worth of content across eight platforms?

What if this is the moment everything changes?

What if tomorrow you wake up as a disciplined media professional with a content calendar, a brand strategy, and pants with no dog hair on them?

So I keep it.

Not because I use it.

Because I like the idea that I could.

That’s how they get you.

Not through greed. Not even through laziness.

Through the small, embarrassing belief that a subscription might be a bridge to the better version of yourself.

The fitness app is not just an app. It is Future You with visible abs.

The language app is not just an app. It is Future You ordering coffee in Paris without panicking.

The cloud storage plan is not just storage. It is Future You, organized and serene, with all your photos sorted into folders instead of sitting in a digital junk drawer labeled “Phone Dump 2018 Maybe.”

The scheduling app is not just a scheduling app.

It is Future Me, successful, efficient, and somehow awake after 9:30 p.m.

So I keep paying.

Maintaining access to things I don’t use, features I forgot about, and versions of myself that have not returned my calls.

And now we subscribe to our own lives.

Nothing got better.

It just got easier to bill.

And easier to forget.

Until you look at your bank statement long enough for the pattern to emerge.

Line after line.

Small charges.

Endless continuity.

A streaming service you signed up for because one show looked interesting. A newsletter you meant to read. An app that promised to fix your sleep, your habits, your posture, your inbox, your attention span, and possibly your relationship with your father.

Each one is small enough to ignore.

Together, they become a lifestyle.

And eventually the realization lands:

You’re not buying anything anymore.

You’re paying to keep access to things you might use someday.

After all—

it’s just a couple of bucks.

And somewhere in the dark, the raccoon with the flashlight is going through your bank statement, shaking his tiny head.

Cold Cuts is my weekly column about culture, memory, technology, and the everyday absurdities we’ve somehow agreed to live with. Subscribe if you’ve also suspected that normal life has some explaining to do.

Tony

If you haven’t driven in Atlanta, imagine a NASCAR track designed by someone who thought The Road Warrior needed more semis: a sixty-mile circle packed with cars that may have driven off the set of a Vin Diesel movie, vehicles that surrendered to rust sometime during the Clinton administration, and quarter panels held on with duct tape and prayer. All of it moving at speeds that suggest thermodynamics is more of a guideline than a law.

A couple of weeks ago I was tooling down this giant super slab—we call it 285, which is Old English for The Circle of Despair.

Traffic was moderate, which in Atlanta means vehicles were moving anywhere between 45 miles per hour (one cargo van carrying what appeared to be every ladder in the Southeast) and 85 miles per hour. I was in the left lane, traveling slightly above the average, when I spotted a giant pickup truck gaining on me as if it had been launched from a rail gun.

When I say giant, I want you to understand that I could see the driveshaft spinning fast enough to generate its own gravitational field. He got on my bumper like he was conducting a surprise inspection of my back seat.

Nope.

I didn’t need this aggravation, so I signaled and started moving over.

Apparently not fast enough.

Mr. Big Truck swerved around me, saluted with his middle finger, then cut back in front of me close enough that I had to tap my brakes to avoid becoming part of his origin story.

And that’s when I saw it: the giant Punisher skull decal on his back window.

I immediately knew what Mr. Big Truck thought the logo said: I’m tough. I’m rebellious. Don’t mess with me.

The problem is this: Frank Castle would hate this guy.

While the skull may project danger and moral certainty, on this truck it mostly said: I make traffic worse for everyone.

Frank Castle—the Punisher—is a former Marine who declares war on organized crime after his family is murdered.

Castle isn’t happy, healthy, or aspirational. He’s a man so consumed by grief and rage that makes Batman looks like the model of resolved trauma.

The Punisher is not a success story. He is a warning label.

Which is why I was curious about Mr. Big Truck, who by this point had woven in and out of traffic only to end up stopped two cars in front of me at the entrance to the Alpharetta Autobahn.

I wanted to tell him: if you’re displaying a giant Punisher sticker while trying to shove strangers out of your way at 90 miles per hour, I’m not sure you’re identifying with Frank Castle so much as proving his point.

Frank wouldn’t see this guy as a fellow warrior. He’d see a reckless idiot making life more dangerous for everyone around him.

Big Truck Guy thinks he is the Punisher.

Everyone else sees a dentist named Eugene on his way to Costco.

The odd thing is that we do this all the time. We adopt symbols from stories without understanding the story.

The Punisher isn’t a fantasy about justice. It‘s a tragedy about a man consumed by grief and rage. Yet somewhere along the way, the skull escaped the story and became a generic symbol for toughness and rebellion. Once that happened, people stopped asking whether Frank Castle was a hero and started asking where they could buy the decal.

This has happened before. People quote Tyler Durden while missing the point that he’s the villain. Homelander was never the good guy. Walter White was not a small-business success story. If your business plan involves dissolving bodies in acid, the SBA probably isn’t interested. Gordon Gekko was not offering retirement advice.

I should note here that back in the ’80s I owned a shirt that said, “Greed is Good.”

Hey, it was the ’80s. We were all making questionable choices. Parachute pants. New Coke. Hair products that probably violated several environmental treaties. Me? I bought a T-shirt based on a movie villain.

I no longer hold that belief, or own that shirt.

Which, in retrospect, is exactly the point. My terrible T-shirt choice mostly injured my dignity.

Some symbols go further than that.

Perhaps that’s why the Punisher‘s skull became popular in the first place. Not because people wanted to become Frank Castle, but because they recognized the emotion. The details of the story got lost. The anger didn’t.

Spend ten minutes on social media, cable news, or any metro highway and you’ll notice the same thing: everybody is furious.

Not mildly miffed.

Not “somebody took my parking space” annoyed.

Furious.

Eugene was angry. The people yelling at each other on Facebook and Bluesky are angry. The folks convinced every disagreement is proof of stupidity or evil are angry too.

Traffic feels more aggressive. Customer service interactions feel more hostile. Social media rewards outrage so efficiently that we gave it a name: rage baiting. And the news cycle? We might as well call that All the Anger 24/7. Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, algorithms deliver outrage directly to the device in your pocket because they’ve learned a simple truth: calm people close apps.

We’ve stopped treating everyday inconveniences as inconveniences and started treating them as personal attacks.

Barista gets our order wrong.

Personal attack.

A stranger disagrees with us online.

Personal attack.

The internet goes down.

Personal attack. Act of war.

When every inconvenience feels like an attack, everybody becomes the enemy.

Outrage is no longer an emotion. It’s an identity. Frank Castle isn’t a celebration of righteous anger. He’s a cautionary tale about what happens when anger is the only thing left.

Eugene wasn’t responding to an actual threat. He was responding to a minor inconvenience. After risking a dozen or so insurance claims, he arrived at the same exit I did about three seconds sooner.

The issue isn’t the truck. It’s the mindset:

The world is full of obstacles. I am the hero. Everyone else needs to get out of my way.

Frank Castle isn’t impressed by your truck, lane position, or swerving skills. If we’re being honest, the only thing Frank and I have in common is that neither of us wants you sporting that logo.

Because Frank Castle was never the hero. He was never meant to be aspirational.

Somewhere along the way, we missed that lesson.

Which is how a grieving fictional vigilante became a decal on Eugene’s pickup truck as he raced toward Costco three seconds faster than the rest of us.

###

P.S. While we’re on the subject of stories, the cover for the anthology featuring my Southern Gothic tale The Hog Men of Sweetwater Bottom dropped today. I still get a kick out of seeing my name in TOCs. Some things never get old.

Cold Cuts is my weekly column about culture, memory, technology, and the everyday absurdities we’ve somehow agreed to live with. Subscribe if you’ve also suspected that normal life has some explaining to do.

Tony

Photo Credits:

Truck and highway: Dusan Cvetanovic pexels.com

Skull: Daniel Ellis pexels.com

I285: Georgia Department of Transportation

My father spent his weekends doing yard work like he owed tribute to a minor feudal lord. Mowing, chopping, weeding—all because America took a European aristocratic flex and turned it into a middle-class chore.

Seriously.

In Europe, a large stretch of clipped grass meant, “Look at me, Alistair. I own so much land I don’t have to grow food on this part.” Americans looked at this bit of Old World performance art and decided it was something we should embrace for status, conformity, and property values. Which is why today, homeowners all over the country spend at least one day a week fighting greenery that has existed for billions of years.

I swore it wouldn’t happen to me.

And yet, this weekend, I found myself performing unpaid labor on land I already own. Well, the bank, the county, and I own it. But I sure didn’t see the loan officer or tax appraiser sporting a shovel and scythe. I was the only one out there clearing kudzu, pulling weeds, sawing down saplings, and uncovering a buried pile of bricks beside an old wooden tire swing set.

The tire swing frame was fun because whoever built it had sunk it into the ground with what appeared to be seventeen feet of concrete. Apparently, it was designed to survive a Georgia weather event serious enough to earn its own Wikipedia page.

I used to blame the homeowners association for issuing lawn decrees like magistrates with clipboards. Turns out, not so much. It’s not really the county either, though they do employ people whose job description appears to be, “Determine how much nature the county is willing to tolerate.”

No.

The real enemy is photosynthesis.

Nature never signed a cease-fire agreement with the subdivision’s developer. It does not recognize property lines, HOA covenants, or the authority of a middle-aged man with hedge clippers. Every homeowner eventually discovers they are not in charge of the land; they are merely negotiating temporary terms.

And nature has never lost to a homeowner.

After six hours of cutting ivy and kudzu, hauling brush, and removing vegetation that seemed to respawn as quickly as I killed it, I came to an uncomfortable truth: I had not cleared the yard... I had opened a puzzle box, and the lawn whispered, “We have such sights to show you.”

And that’s when I decided I needed a flamethrower.

In my defense, I didn’t start this yard project wanting a flamethrower.

I started with enthusiasm and a pair of gloves.

Then came the rake.

Then the shovel.

Then the pruning saw.

Then the reciprocating saw.

Then my wife asked why I was pricing military surplus equipment on the internet.

My lawyer has asked me to clarify that I do not own a flamethrower.

My browser history, however, has opted not to comment.

I spent my Sunday negotiating with the Earth. The Earth, to its credit, was patient. It let me sweat. It let me curse. It let me fill bags, stack bricks, and briefly believe I had imposed order on one corner of the world. Which, I suppose I did, brief as that respite was.

The worst thing about yard work is that makes you feel like one of those manly men in country songs about hammers, dirt, dogs, and trucks. And beer. So much beer.

I am not a beer drinker, and there are only so many heroic sips of American Honey a man can take before every tree branch starts looking like a test of character.

After half a day of work—enough sweat to fill the bed of an F-150—I finally made progress.

Not victory.

Progress.

At best, I battled it to a draw; the kudzu is already returning.

But almost as if rewarding my effort, the yard revealed a secret brick pile under twenty-five years of green ambition. Like a gift.

My day started with clearing kudzu.

By lunch, I’d uncovered a cache of bricks and spent the rest of the afternoon half-expecting to find a satchel of Confederate gold or Jimmy Hoffa‘s teeth.

Instead, I found a rusted bow saw, part of a fence post, and an old forty-ounce beer bottle.

Which feels about right.

You go looking for order and find evidence that someone else once stood in the same spot, fought the same fight, drank something questionable, and eventually surrendered the territory back to the plants.

Which sums up homeownership: Not dominion; custodianship. You get a mortgage, a deed, and the temporary illusion that the land has agreed to your terms.

Before dinner, I noticed the first fresh green shoots pushing through the dirt.

The cease-fire was over.

I suppose I’ll be back out there next weekend.

Not because I’ve won.

Because the plants have requested another round.

Cold Cuts is my weekly column about culture, memory, technology, and the everyday absurdities we’ve somehow agreed to live with. Subscribe if you’ve also suspected that normal life has some explaining to do.

Tony

The other day I was sitting in a coffee-shop when I did something that apparently alarms modern society.

I pulled out a notebook and a fountain pen.

Not a phone. Not a tablet. Not a laptop.

A notebook.

You would have thought I’d assembled a ham radio and started transmitting to Moscow.

A few minutes earlier, everyone around me had been discussing marriages, medical issues, office politics, weekend plans, family grudges, and digestive interventions at full coffee-shop volume.

“…my mother still hasn’t spoken to my brother since Thanksgiving.”

“…then my naturopath put me on a liver cleanse.”

“…the colonic changed my life.”

One woman was telling a friend all about her husband’s latest offense, which, from what we all heard, involved either poor judgment, poor timing, or an alarming misunderstanding of what counts as “just giving someone a ride home.”

Everyone at the neighboring tables had become an unwilling supporting cast in this drama of overshares.

We were not eavesdropping.

We had been drafted.

Then I opened my notebook.

The reaction was immediate.

The couple at the next table lowered their voices. A man across the room glanced over twice. Another man, who had been speaking at full volume about his weekend and the life-changing properties of a hazy IPA, suddenly developed operational security protocols.

He went from podcast host to submarine commander in under three seconds.

Nobody said anything, but I could feel the question hanging in the air.

Is the bald guy writing about us?

Which is funny, because until that moment, they didn’t seem especially worried about being overheard. They just didn’t want to be remembered.

That’s the part I can’t stop thinking about.

We are surrounded by surveillance almost every waking moment of our lives. Cameras record us at intersections. Stores track us through loyalty cards. Websites follow us with cookies. Phones know where we are. Doorbells record us walking the dog. Entire industries exist to collect information about us, package it, analyze it, and sell it to someone else.

Most people shrug and take Facebook quizzes anyway. According to the Meta test I just took, I am reincarnated from 8.7 pounds of russet potatoes.

Which, frankly, feels specific.

They’ll pour their souls into an app built by people who name their children after file formats, but let me open a notebook and suddenly I’m Stalker McStalkerson.

A Forbes piece, citing Harvard Business Review’s 2025 list of generative AI uses, put therapy and companionship at number one. That’s a lot of personal information to hand to a machine before getting nervous about a bald potato with a notebook.

Pull out a Moleskine in public and suddenly everyone acts like they’ve spotted a federal agent. Not even a cool federal agent. One of the paperwork agents who wanted receipts from Mulder and Scully.

Why?

Because the camera records everyone.

The notebook records someone.

The camera is automated. The notebook requires a decision. The camera says, “you were present.” The notebook says, “you were interesting.”

And that is a completely different feeling.

The more I think about it, the more I suspect people aren’t actually afraid of surveillance. Not exactly. If we were, we’d at least stop volunteering for so much of it. Wave to the CCTV in any major metro and hope it gets your good side.

No, what makes people uncomfortable is attention.

Specific attention. Human attention. The possibility that another person noticed them and found them memorable enough to write down.

Nobody worries that a traffic camera caught them scratching their nose. But let a writer scribble something after they say, “My liver cleanse pills fixed everything,” and suddenly everyone is concerned about documentation.

The fear is that they might become material.

I know this because I carry a fountain pen.

If notebooks make people uneasy, fountain pens elevate the situation into mild suspicion. A phone is invisible because everybody has one. I could write the same notes about IPA guy on my phone and nobody would blink. But a fountain pen feels intentional.

Nobody accidentally carries a fountain pen.

It’s like arriving somewhere with a falcon on your shoulder.

A fountain pen suggests that you considered all available technologies and said, “No. I prefer liquid ink and a writing instrument that occasionally behaves like a Victorian plumbing system.”

A fountain pen is not just a pen; it is premeditation with a nib.

There may be a generational divide hiding in here. When someone takes out a phone, we assume they’re consuming something. Texting. Scrolling. Watching videos. Arguing with strangers about whether fries count as a vegetable. They should.

A phone suggests communication.

A notebook suggests authorship.

When somebody opens a notebook, we assume they are creating something. Creation carries consequences.

A conversation disappears.

A written account survives.

A joke becomes a story.

An observation becomes an essay.

An awkward encounter becomes evidence.

That possibility sits in the back of people’s minds because deep down, everyone suspects they are one weird sentence away from becoming somebody else’s essay.

Which, to be fair, they probably are.

Pull out a notebook and a fountain pen in a public place and watch people shift in their seats.

Apparently we don’t mind being surveilled.

We just don’t want to end up in somebody else’s first draft.

Which is unfortunate.

Because if you’re explaining why your husband needs two hours to drive the babysitter home, I’m sorry, but you’re already in my notebook.

Cold Cuts is my weekly column about culture, memory, technology, and the everyday absurdities we’ve somehow agreed to live with. Subscribe if you’ve also suspected that normal life has some explaining to do.

Tony

I have been attending science fiction and fantasy conventions for the better part of twenty years, some of that as a fan, most of it as a guest or panelist. I have seen every kind of cosplay the human imagination, a sewing machine, and hotel lighting can produce: scantily clad Ariels, Snow Whites of multiple genders, more Doctors and companions than one could shake a dozen sonic screwdrivers at. But nothing fully prepared me for the sixty-year-old man in a Harry Potter robe standing on the convention floor with his wand and crystal balls exposed to the public.

He and I made eye contact.

I am certain my face said, I was not emotionally prepared for wizard nudity.

His face said, First time at AfterDark Con*?

* Not its real name. But close enough for a man making eye contact with wizard nudity.

We nodded at each other and moved on.

And that, gentle reader, was the least surreal thing that happened to me at the kink convention I attended a couple of weeks ago.

I knew the writing track director from another convention. We’ll call her Trinity, because that is not her name and because it gives the story a little Matrix energy, which feels right considering I was about to find out how deep this particular rabbit hole went.

Trinity asked if I would be interested in attending AfterDark Con.

I said I didn’t really write erotica. Most of my fiction fades to black before anyone has to remove complicated clothing.

“You don’t have to write erotica or romance,” she said. “They just want working writers to discuss technique. And you can talk about podcasts.”

Technique, I could do.

Technique was safe. Technique had structure. Technique wore pants.

So I said yes.

She sent over the forms, and near the bottom was a line that told me everything I needed to know:

You will see nudity. Don’t make it weird.

Now, I am a grown man whose sense of humor has not changed much since middle school, so telling me not to make nudity weird is a little like handing a hungry 12-year-old boy a debit card and saying, “Be fiscally responsible in the snack aisle.”

Still, I told myself I could handle it.

I am an adult. A mature professional. A man who has spent decades around fandom, theater people, horror writers, and hotel bar conversations that should have required waivers or, at the very least, an NDA.

Besides, people are people. We are all equipped with roughly the same factory parts, arranged in different ways depending on model, year, options package, and maintenance history. I go to the gym. I have seen plenty of men in locker rooms strutting around with the confidence of retired Roman senators.

Parts is parts, right?

That was my theory.

Then I arrived at AfterDark Con and learned that context matters.

Because parts in a locker room are one thing.

Parts attached to clamps, holsters, pins, leather harnesses, or, in the case of Harry Potter Man, performing a full Wingardium Dangleosa in the Author Alley section of the convention?

That is a different syllabus.

Check-in was deceptively mundane. A lobby. A pool. A few cheerful signs reading: Common Area: No Nudity.

Fair enough. That sign is probably necessary at more hotel pools than we like to admit, especially during spring break or anywhere in Florida.

After check-in, I was directed to the lower level, and that was when reality started to tilt.

The glass doors were covered in butcher paper—the brown, heavy kind butchers use to wrap your meat, which felt both practical and a little too on-theme. A fully clothed security guard checked my badge at the entrance. Another checked it again once I was inside.

This was a 21-and-over convention, and we certainly didn’t want a twenty-year-old sneaking in and seeing…

Honestly, I wasn’t sure what.

On the way to my panel room, I saw a few skimpy costumes, but nothing you wouldn’t see at a larger con after dark.

That was the trap.

It lulled me into a false sense of “this is just like Dragon Con.”

The panel room itself was cozy, about 20 chairs for attendees and a panel table at the front of the room. A standard convention setup. I like smaller rooms at cons this size, about 2,500 attendees, because you don’t feel like you’re in a cavern if only 10 people show up to your panel.

I introduced myself to the other two folks on the panel who were already there. We were all dressed in T-shirts and jeans; standard attire for most convention guests. Since I was moderating, I had my questions loaded on my iPad and was trying to look like the sort of man who had everything under control. I was only half paying attention to the conversations around me.

Until one of the panelists said, “Damn, I missed the masturbation panel this morning.”

Panelist number two replied, “Oh yeah, I saw that on the schedule. It was at 10 o’clock. How does that work? Do you do yourself or does someone do you?”

I did not catch the answer because a man wearing nipple clamps and a Speedo asked me if this was the writers’ panel. I assured him it was. A quick look around the room told me I was the only person who had registered the nipple clamps as noteworthy.

The panel went well, which at a convention means everyone found the room, no one weaponized the microphone, and people applauded at the end. They took the giveaways the guests brought. Mine was a Cold Cuts bookmark featuring QR codes leading to this page. Hello, AfterDark Con people.

I saw Trinity after the panel, deep in discussion with some folks about important convention director stuff.

A side note here: most of the directors at any fan convention, kink or not, are unpaid and do it for the love of the fandom. BE NICE TO THEM.

As it turned out, Trinity was discussing important convention director stuff, just not the kind I expected. Specifically, how she planned to suspend a human being by metal hooks the following afternoon. For the unenlightened—a group that, at this point, very much included me—hook suspension involves placing sterilized metal hooks through a consenting adult’s skin and then lifting that adult into the air using a rigging system that looked like something assembled by NASA, a circus, and a fishing supply company.

For the record: Trinity was the person installing the hooks.

She explained the suspension process. There can be blood, but not very often. Safety and consent are paramount. The hooks, she told me, are not the strangest part.

The calm is.

Apparently, when you are dangling by metal, the human mind may respond with peace, focus, even euphoria. I am going to trust Trinity on that one, because my own mind responds to bloodwork with, “Are we dying? I feel like we’re dying.”

Then she asked if I had been to the dungeon. Of all the sentences I never expected to hear at a convention, “Have you been to the dungeon?” was absolutely in the top three.

I told her I had not.

“Come on,” she said. “I can get you to the front of the line.”

I certainly did not want to line-jump a bunch of people who had planned their evening with far more confidence than I had planned mine, but Trinity did not seem to think it was a big deal.

She spoke to the dungeon director—dungeon master? dungeon foreman? assistant manager of consequences?—and asked if we could do a walkthrough. We were not going to participate. This was my first time at AfterDark Con, and she wanted to show me the dungeon.

The director was a topless woman who explained the rules with the relaxed authority of a Southern woman sipping mint juleps on a veranda.

No gawking.

No touching.

No shouting, “Oh my God, that’s not gonna fit.”

And absolutely no photos.

We showed her our phones were off, and Trinity led us inside.

The dungeon looked like a metal shop project that had gone wildly out of control. Or maybe it had followed the perfect blueprint. How was I supposed to know? I was new here. I still thought a suspension bridge was something you drove across.

There was a man on a device who appeared to be learning about leverage from a determined woman holding what looked like a piece of medieval plumbing equipment.

According to Trinity, the dungeon was about three large hotel conference rooms wide and nearly as deep.

The floor was covered in plastic, with a walkway marked off by taped-down butcher paper.

We stayed on the walkway.

That seemed important.

Around us, slaps cracked like gunshots. Moans and groans echoed off the hotel walls. Somewhere nearby, someone was either having a transcendent experience or losing an argument with furniture.

Possibly both.

After the tour, I thanked Trinity and told her I looked forward to seeing her at the next, far more mundane convention we both attended.

As I was leaving, a woman stopped me and asked a question about an earlier panel I had been on. We spoke for a minute or two. Nothing makes you question your cultural calibration like having a sincere professional conversation with a skyclad stranger and realizing she is, by far, the most socially comfortable person in the interaction.

I met and spoke with so many people at AfterDark Con who were less judgmental, more articulate, and better informed than half the corporate conventions I’ve attended. Which, to be fair, is not always a high bar. I have been in hotel ballrooms where grown adults nearly came to blows over microphone placement and the correct pronunciation of “Tolkien.”

AfterDark Con is absolutely not for everyone. I understand that. There are parts of it I am still processing. But if you do go, you may be surprised by what I was surprised by.

Not the nudity.

Not the hooks.

Not the dungeon.

The manners.

The amount of consent.

The weirdly impressive logistics.

The fact that the person explaining the rules of the dungeon sounded less threatening than the average HOA president.

And the realization that the strangest thing in the room might not be the person hanging from the ceiling or the topless woman calmly discussing safety protocols.

It might be you, standing there with your phone turned off, your eyes forward, your worldview making dial-up noises, trying very hard to act like a seasoned professional while every part of your brain is screaming:

Sir, this is not Dragon Con.

Cold Cuts is my weekly column about culture, memory, technology, and the everyday absurdities we’ve somehow agreed to live with. Subscribe if you’ve also suspected that normal life has some explaining to do.

I used to believe in the monoculture the way people believed in landline phones—permanent, reliable, and so embedded in daily life it was impossible to imagine a world without one.

So when my kids were young and impressionable, I made sure they got a proper cultural diet.

A little Looney Tunes.

Some Star Trek.

A healthy dose of The Three Stooges.

And, because I wanted them to understand that intelligence and nonsense can occupy the same space, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends.

When they asked why—and they eventually did, usually mid eye-boink—I told them:

“These are our cultural touchstones. The rest of your life will point back to these.” That felt true then. It sounded like something an adult who had the weight of inherited wisdom would say. Turns out, inherited wisdom is just false certainty wearing a Member’s Only jacket.

There was a time when most people were pulling from the same cultural shelf.

You could walk into a room, make a reference, and not have to explain it like a footnote in a college paper. The joke landed because the audience already had the setup.

But more than shared cultural vocabulary, those old shows snuck in life lessons while you were laughing.

Bugs Bunny taught us the joke was usually on the system, not the outsider. Authority figures were pompous, hunters were idiots, and the smartest person in the room was often the unassuming guy eating a carrot.

Half the country grew up watching opera parodies, drag disguises, and chaotic identity swaps before breakfast cereal and somehow survived just fine.

Spock represented a time when we shared not merely references, but questions.

What does it mean to be human? Can logic guide us? Where do we belong? How do we balance duty with emotion?

Star Trek was philosophy wearing pointed ears.

And somehow we managed to explore identity, difference, tolerance, and belonging without turning every conversation into a loyalty test.

The Three Stooges weren’t just slapstick. They were a warning label—and the reason modern instructions read like a legal document written for someone holding a toaster near a bathtub.

The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends wasn’t just a cartoon. It was satire wearing a paper hat and pretending to be harmless. Beneath all the bad puns, flying squirrels, and villains named things like Boris Badenov was a steady drumbeat of jokes about government, media, politics, and authority.

Long before most of us understood what satire even was, that show was teaching us an important lesson: Adults are making this up as they go along.

The reason it worked is because the jokes operated on two levels at once. Kids laughed because a moose had crashed through another wall. Adults laughed because the narrator sounded exhausted by civilization itself.

Probably most importantly, Rocky and Bullwinkle taught an entire generation to side-eye official answers before we even had the vocabulary for skepticism.

I am not saying the old shows were better, I loved Animaniacs and Rugrats. Freakeazoid! was awesome. The difference was coverage. Fewer channels. Fewer choices. More overlap. I grew up in a market with seven channels; most folks had three.

We could speak to each other without a translator. Mostly.

I remember visiting family in Jersey one year when someone brought up the poem Footprints In the Sand—you know the one. Two sets of footprints in the sand become one, and the message is that during the hardest times, Jesus was carrying the narrator.

I casually mentioned that it also could’ve been because the Sand People always travel single file to hide their numbers.The fam looked at me like I’d announced the Pope was secretly a Sith Lord. Well, they would have, if they knew what Sith Lord was.

In fairness, most of my family are sports people, not Star Wars people. The only person who laughed was my nephew.

He’s a stand-up comic.

Which, honestly, may explain more about the family dynamic than I intended.

What I didn’t account for when I believed in the monoculture—what most of us didn’t—was what happens when the number of channels goes from a handful to effectively infinite.

The monoculture didn’t slowly fade away.

It got hit by the Death Star.

And like Alderaan, the pieces just kept breaking into smaller pieces.

Now my kids have their own touchstones. They’re just invisible to me.

A YouTube creator with an audience the size of a small country.

A joke that exists entirely inside a Discord server.

A sound clip that dominates the week and then disappears like it entered witness protection.

And here’s the part I can’t really argue with:

It works.

For them, these things do exactly what Bugs Bunny did for me. They signal belonging. They compress meaning. They let you say a lot with very little.

The only difference is range.

My references used to travel. Theirs mostly stay local—by design.

The pitch I gave my kids was… optimistic.

“These will matter for the rest of your life.”

What I should have said was:

“These mattered for a long time to a lot of people, and that used to be enough to keep them alive.”

That’s not the same thing.

We confuse durability with importance.

Something lasted, so we assumed it deserved to.

Sometimes it did.

Sometimes it just didn’t have any competition.

For a while, I thought I’d handed them a museum. A nice, well-lit collection of things they were expected to respect but not necessarily use.

That’s not quite it. What transfers isn’t the reference. It’s the structure underneath.

They know how a joke is built.

They know how a character signals who they are before they say a word.

They can feel when a story is setting something up versus cashing it in.

Future generations may not recognize Rocky and Bullwinkle, but they have Community and parts of the YouTube ecosystem.

The monoculture didn’t die.

It just got smaller, faster, and a lot less patient.

We still have shared moments. They just don’t stick around long enough to become landmarks.

They flare up, burn bright, and disappear before anyone can build a statue.

We didn’t lose culture.

We lost persistence.

And without persistence, nothing gets the chance to become a reference everyone agrees on.

So what was the point?

I still think those classic shows matter.

Not because my kids are going to spend their lives quoting them. But because they now know what it feels like when something clicks across a wide audience—when a joke lands without explanation, when a character becomes shorthand, when a story echoes across generations.

That feeling sticks.

It teaches you the difference between content and culture.

And if they can recognize the moment something stops being disposable noise and starts becoming shared language, they’re already ahead of most of us still pretending the old landmarks are the only map.

Besides, they also learned an important survival rule passed down through American media history: If someone smiles, says “nyuk nyuk,” and reaches for your face—

you move.

Some things don’t need to last forever to show you how things last.

“Hey, Rocky… watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat.”

There was a time when you didn’t have to explain the trick.

Cold Cuts is my weekly column about culture, memory, technology, and the everyday absurdities we’ve somehow agreed to live with. Subscribe if you’ve also suspected that normal life has some explaining to do.

Tony

(Photo by Ana: https://www.pexels.com/photo/vintage-television-sets-on-industrial-shelf-32559667/)

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I am honestly a little surprised my generation survived adolescence.

We drank raw eggs because Sylvester Stallone did it in Rocky. We swallowed liver tablets the size of roofing shingles because Jack LaLanne and Joe Weider said they built champions. We mixed wheat germ into shakes that tasted like wet drywall and sand.

None of us knew what we were doing.

And yet somehow, we absolutely believed we did.

Back then, fitness wasn’t science. Fitness was mythology.

The old, let’s call it, Mario’s Gym, had cement floors, cinder block walls, and exactly two showers, both of which produced water just slightly warmer than an Arctic stream in February. The benches looked like they had been welded together after a minor industrial accident. There was always at least one retired giant sitting on Bench #3, whose name may have been Sal or Vinny, delivering unsolicited wisdom between sets.

He never seemed to actually work out. He simply existed there. Like a retired warlord guarding sacred knowledge. If you were lucky, he spoke to you. If you were unlucky, he noticed your routine.

“You call that heavy? My grandmother could do better and she died in ‘Nam saving an orphanage.” I was never sure if that were true or not.

Every gym had a Sal or Vinny.

He had forearms like bridge cables and stories that began with: “Back when Arnold came through…”

Whether Arnold had actually come through remained unclear.

What mattered was that we believed it.

This was before YouTube fitness channels. Before sleep tracking. Before “macros.” Before a smartwatch could notify you that your recovery metrics suggested you should perhaps not deadlift your own vehicle today.

Back then, information traveled through rumor.

You learned from muscle magazines, locker rooms, movies, and men named Rick selling supplements from the back of a Camaro.

Especially Rick.

Looking back, it’s astonishing how much trust we placed in a man whose business model appeared to consist entirely of a gym bag and confident eye contact.

The supplements themselves felt less like nutrition and more like a dare.

Protein came in tablets instead of powder. The consistency landed somewhere between Tums and drywall. Liver pills smelled faintly of road kill. Every product promised MASS, POWER, and EXPLOSIVE GROWTH in giant red letters beside photos of men who looked capable of bench pressing a ‘72 Oldsmobile Delta 88 hardtop sedan.

But, underneath all the ridiculousness was something sincere.

Men were trying to become better versions of themselves.

Stronger. More confident. More capable. Harder to push around by life.

That part tends to get lost now whenever people talk about old-school gym culture. The jokes are easy. The nutrition science was frequently somewhere between “raw eggs can’t hurt you” and “felony adjacent.” Half the advice sounded like it had been passed down from medieval alchemists.

But there was also community.

The gym was one of the few places where generations of men regularly mixed together. Teenagers lifted beside factory workers, ex-marines, truck drivers, and retired beasts who spoke entirely in max bench numbers and shoulder injuries.

You learned things there.

Not merely how to lift.

How to carry yourself. How to keep showing up. How to survive embarrassment. How to fail publicly without collapsing into dust. How to help somebody get one more rep without turning it into a motivational podcast.

Nobody called it mentorship.

It was just the culture.

Modern self-improvement feels different.

Now it arrives through algorithms. Productivity systems. Morning routines involving ice baths, twelve supplements, and a man on a podcast explaining masculinity into a $400 microphone.

Everything is optimized. Quantified. Tracked.

My generation’s version was:

“Sal says squats build character.”

And weirdly, I think Sal may have been onto something.

Because what those old gyms really sold wasn’t muscle.

It was transformation.

Not the glossy Instagram version. Not six-pack abs on a beach beside a caption about “grindset.”

Something rougher than that.

The belief that effort mattered.

The belief that you could build yourself into someone stronger than you were yesterday.

Even if the path there occasionally involved swallowing liver tablets that tasted like a curse.

If you’ve been reading along and enjoying these essays, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. No pressure—it just helps keep the essays showing up each week.

Tony

(Photo Credit: Shammah Njomo: https://www.pexels.com/photo/vintage-weight-plates-and-dumbbells-in-gym-setting-35651163/)

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One of the strangest things Netflix has done—outside of greenlighting twelve different dating shows involving emotionally unstable people trapped on islands—is accidentally become the greatest international horror video store in history.

Twenty years ago, if you wanted to watch an Indonesian horror movie, you needed a guy named Trevor.

Trevor worked at an independent video store with terrible lighting and a Criterion Collection shelf he guarded like a wizard protecting cursed scrolls. He wore fingerless gloves in July and spoke exclusively in phrases like, “The Korean version is better.”

Now?

You’re three clicks away from discovering that somewhere in Indonesia, filmmakers are making zombie movies that feel less like content and more like a warning from an angry god.

Which is how I ended up watching The Elixir on Netflix.

And within about fifteen minutes, I realized something important:

American zombie stories and international zombie stories are no longer interested in the same fears.

American zombie fiction has evolved into infrastructure horror.

We worry about supply chains. Government collapse. Prepper fantasies. Whether the guy with the tactical backpack and six hundred cans of beans secretly wants civilization to fail just so he can finally explain water filtration systems to his neighbors. Indeed, my own zombie story, The Skin Man, takes place as society is already eating itself and the reanimates show up in time for the main course.

American zombies are, mostly, logistical.

International horror still treats the undead like a curse.

An important distinction.

The Elixir doesn’t feel like it emerged from a Hollywood writers’ room assembled by algorithm to maximize “second screen engagement.” It feels sweaty. Uneasy. Personal. Like the movie itself might be carrying a fever.

And I mean that as a compliment. Seriously, this may be my favorite zombie movie in years. Though, I should note, nothing I’ve seen comes close to Train to Busan, probably the modern gold standard in the zombie genre.

The Elixir taps into one of humanity’s oldest bad ideas: someone invents a miracle cure and immediately discovers that the fountain of youth, much like printer ink subscriptions and Terms of Service agreements, contains hidden complications.

This turns out poorly for everyone.

As it always does.

Every civilization eventually produces a person who looks at mortality and says: “What if we disrupted this?”

The ancient alchemists tried it with mysticism.
Victorian scientists tried it with electricity.
Silicon Valley billionaires are currently trying it with blood transfusions, supplements, and whatever terrifying powder Joe Rogan’s guests are selling this week.

We keep repackaging the same fear in different branding.

The philosopher’s stone.
The fountain of youth.
Cryogenic freezing.
Then Silicon Valley briefly convinced itself eternal life might somehow involve buying a haunted JPEG.

At some point every generation rediscovers the same horrifying truth: the line between medicine and curse is often just dosage and marketing.

This film is not for the squeamish; packed with kills that would make any horror fan grin with deeply concerning enthusiasm while making casual viewers squirm and question the life choices that led to this moment. There’s even an amusing and graphic nod to Bicycle Girl from the pilot of The Walking Dead.

The Elixir understands something American horror occasionally forgets while trying to set up cinematic universes: Body horror works because your body already feels vaguely unreliable.

By the age of forty, every human being wakes up making at least one sound associated with a haunted wooden ship. Aging is already cosmic horror. Which is why immortality stories work.

International horror often plays this more directly than American horror does. Hollywood tends to cushion terror with irony now. Every third character talks like they know they’re in a movie, quipping through the apocalypse like they’re contractually obligated to have at least three “trailer quotes”.

But The Elixir has moments that feel genuinely uncomfortable in the way older horror movies used to.

Not “elevated horror.”
Not “prestige horror.”
Just: “Oh no. Something has gone catastrophically wrong and people are absolutely not emotionally equipped to deal with it. Not unlike the Windows 11 rollout.”

There’s also something refreshing about watching horror built from different cultural instincts. American zombie fiction usually begins with societal collapse.

International horror, like Thanksgiving disasters, often begins with family.

Obligation.
Shame.
Tradition.
Community pressure.
The fear that the people closest to you may drag you into terror because they cannot let go of something they desperately want to believe.

Especially after the last decade, where many of us discovered a shocking number of people would absolutely drink mystery supplements purchased from a podcast host standing in front of an elk carcass.

The older I get, the more I think horror survives by migration.

The genre has to keep traveling.
Country to country.
Culture to culture.
Otherwise it becomes trapped inside its own habits.

American zombie fiction gave us George A. Romero.
Then The Walking Dead.
Then approximately four thousand scenes of trauma survivors reinventing feudalism beside abandoned propane tanks.

Now horror is mutating again.

Korean horror.
Indonesian horror.
Spanish horror.
Folk horror.
Tech horror.
Tiny movies made by people who still seem genuinely interested in scaring you instead of launching a franchise roadmap.

Netflix may not have meant to build the world’s weirdest horror aisle. But it did. And right now, that aisle is more interesting than half the polished franchise machinery Hollywood keeps bolting together.

And maybe that’s the healthiest thing streaming accidentally gave us.

Not infinite content, but new nightmares.

Because eventually every culture invents its own version of the same bad idea: cheating death. And horror exists largely to remind us that this tends to end poorly.

The Elixir is streaming on Netflix. I give it five undead out of five and highly recommend.

If you’ve been reading along and enjoying these essays, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. No pressure—it just helps keep the essays showing up each week.

Tony

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I usually write my first drafts in a notebook, in cursive, with a fountain pen. Which, depending on how you measure progress, either makes me wildly romantic… or wildly inefficient.

It also runs directly counter to every piece of feedback I received in Catholic school—Our Lady of Perpetual Crankiness—where one of my teachers looked at a page of my handwriting, paused, and said it resembled “two chickens fighting on the page.”

This was followed by the helpful prediction that, given my penmanship, success in life would likely remain… aspirational.

Which, in fairness, is a tough note to carry forward. Not “you might struggle.” Not “this could be a problem.” Just—your thoughts, as currently written, are so structurally unsound that they may prevent you from becoming anything at all.

So naturally, I doubled down and bought a nicer pen.

I am aware there are faster ways to write. I own several of them. My MacBook can process more words in a minute than I will write in an hour, and my phone will transcribe my thoughts without complaint or judgment as I walk, drive, or torture myself on what is, for all practical purposes, a Victorian punishment device for debtors.

Yet, when it comes time to start something that matters—or capture my raw thoughts—I reach for a notebook.

Why? Not because it is more efficient. It isn’t. But because cursive (or my odd hybrid of cursive and print) won’t let me cheat.

I cannot easily jump ahead or clean up as I go. Deletion isn’t clean; it’s messy—like a mob hit, full of slashes and arrows. I can only write slower than my brain can process the words. But that gap, between brain and hand, is where the thinking takes place.

When I type, I can easily outrun myself.

I can get to the end of a paragraph before I’ve fully understood what I’m trying to say. The words stack neatly. The sentences look complete. It’s an illusion of progress that comes from seeing clean text appear on a screen, even if the idea underneath it is still half-formed. It feels finished long before it actually is.

That doesn’t happen with cursive.

If a sentence isn’t working, I feel it immediately. My hand slows down. The line wobbles. I hesitate. My brain knows before I do that something went sideways. And when I cross something out, it doesn’t disappear. It stays there—a visible reminder that I tried something and it didn’t land.

There’s no undo button. No clean version waiting underneath the mess.

Just the work.

We’ve spent a lot of time, as a culture, trying to remove that kind of friction. And in most cases, that’s a good thing. Friction slows us down. It introduces errors. It makes simple things harder than they need to be. So we’ve built systems that prioritize speed, clarity, and efficiency.

We moved from cursive to print. From print to typing. From typing to tapping. From tapping to talking. Each step faster, cleaner, more scalable than the last.

And each step a little further removed from the act of thinking something through.

This isn’t a complaint about technology. I love technology. I rely on it. This essay, at some point, will leave the notebook and live in a format that has nothing to do with ink or paper.

That’s not the problem.

The problem is what we decided wasn’t worth keeping.

Cursive didn’t disappear because it failed. It didn’t stop working because it didn’t fit the wetware. We stopped teaching it because it didn’t fit the system.

It’s slower. It’s harder to standardize. It doesn’t scan cleanly. And yes—OCR software hates me. The last time I tried it, the output looked like something that would require the Warrens and two gallons of holy water. It doesn’t translate well to machines. It requires practice—and worse, patience.

And patience is something we’ve been optimizing out of almost everything.

So cursive became optional. Then unnecessary. And now, for a lot of people, unreadable.

That part doesn’t get talked about much.

There are letters—real letters—written not that long ago that a growing number of people can’t read without effort. Not because the words are complicated, but because the form is unfamiliar.

We didn’t just simplify writing. We simplified what we expect from the person doing it.

Now everything is clear. Everything is legible. Everything arrives quickly and looks more or less the same. Your notes look like my notes. Your emails look like my emails. Our thoughts show up in the same font, the same size, the same structure as everyone else’s.

Clean. Efficient.

Interchangeable.

A signature used to be something you developed. It took time. It evolved. It was, in a small but real way, yours. Now it’s often a formality—something you approximate once and then reproduce as quickly as possible, or replace entirely with a checkbox.

“I agree.”

We’ve reduced identity to compliance.

And again, this isn’t a call to bring back cursive classes with the urgency of a man yelling at clouds. But maybe we should.

Most people will be fine without it. Most people are also fine without knowing the Pythagorean theorem, and we still teach that. The world will continue to function. Emails will still get sent. Documents will still get signed.

But something has shifted.

When I sit down with a notebook, I’m thinking. at the speed of my hand. With no shortcuts. No clean version waiting on the other side.

Just a line, followed by another line, followed by the slow realization that the thing I thought I understood is going to take a little longer to get right. It is, by almost any modern metric, wildly inefficient.

And it’s also the only part of the process that doesn’t let me pretend I understand something before I actually do.

If you’ve been reading along and enjoying these essays, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. No pressure—it just helps keep the essays showing up each week.

Tony

(This used to be punishment. Now we pay a fee to use it.)

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If you’ve been reading along and enjoying these essays, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. No pressure—it just helps keep the essays showing up each week.

There’s a machine at the gym designed to simulate walking.

Not enhance it. Not improve it. Simulate it.

You get on, you start moving, and after 30 minutes of effort, you look down and realize you have gone… nowhere. Which, historically, was considered a problem.

The treadmill didn’t start as a fitness tool. It started as punishment. Prisoners were put on early versions of it—giant wooden wheels—and made to walk for hours. It was described, at the time, as “grueling” and “spirit-breaking.”

Now it has cup holders.

We took something once used to discipline criminals and turned it into something Chad from accounting does between meetings. “Gonna hop on the punishment device for a quick 25 before my 1:00 with finance.”

The worst part is that Chad’s not wrong.

The treadmill works. You sweat. Your heart rate goes up. Your watch gives you a small digital thumbs-up like you’re a Labrador who figured out how to sit. But there’s something a little off putting about the whole arrangement. We’ve built an entire industry around recreating movement… that used to just happen.

(Corporate wants you to find the difference between this picture and the treadmill above.)

Take the Stairmaster.

This is a machine that gives you an endless set of stairs. No building. No destination. No reason. Just step after step after step like you’re being gently punished for a debt you don’t remember incurring. It’s the Long Walk again. There’s no top. No moment where you push open a door and get a breeze and maybe a decent view.

Just… more stairs.

Somewhere, a Victorian guy from 1890 who got locked up for unpaid taxes is watching this and thinking, I knew it. I knew they’d make you pay for it someday.

And then there’s the elliptical. Which feels like walking, but smoother. Too smooth. Like your body is buffering. You’re moving, technically, but you’re not entirely sure what kind of moving it is. Running without impact. Walking without commitment. It’s the LaCroix of exercise. Technically there, but spiritually questionable.

Here’s the weird part—

We probably don’t need most of this.

Not the optimized incline percentages. Not the heart rate zones broken down like we’re preparing for a NASA launch. Not a watch to confirm we are, in fact, alive and mildly exerting ourselves.

We just need to move more than we sit.

That’s it. Or it used to be.

Back in the day, strength training looked like this:

A pole and two cinder blocks. Maybe a tire if someone in the neighborhood had recently made a series of poor decisions.

You picked it up. Or you didn’t.

That was the entire data set.

No one tracked your zone. No one asked if you were optimizing your posterior chain. If you lifted it, you were strong enough. If you didn’t, you had some work to do. Too easy? Add some more blocks.

Movement wasn’t scheduled. It was just part of living.

You walked because you had somewhere to go.
You carried things because they needed carrying.
You got stronger by accident.

Now we isolate movement like it’s a lab experiment. We schedule it, measure it, upload it. Then we review it like game film.

“Let’s take a look at that 12:17 incline decision. I think you left some effort on the table there.”

And again—this all works. That’s what makes it tricky. Chad and Jennifer are doing exactly what they’re supposed to do. They’re consistent. They’re disciplined. They have shoes engineered by people who probably also design astronaut boots.

They are doing everything right.

They are also walking very hard… to nowhere.

At some point, the tools stopped helping and started replacing.

Walking outside became walking inside on a moving belt.
Lifting things turned into lifting very specific versions of things that don’t exist anywhere else in the world.
The randomness got engineered out and replaced with something smooth, controlled, repeatable.

Old movement had friction. Uneven ground. Awkward weight.

New movement is efficient. Predictable. Clean.

Also a little… detached.

The body doesn’t care if the weight is a kettlebell or a sack of feed. It doesn’t care if you’re on a treadmill or late for something important.

Movement is movement. Your heart will beat either way.

And no, this isn’t an argument against the gym. I go. I use the machines. I have walked miles on a device that would leave my grandfather scratching his head. This is more of an observation.

Somewhere along the way, we took a basic human activity—move your body—and turned it into something that requires special shoes, a dedicated outfit, and a monthly fee.

We removed it from life… then built a room to put it back in.

Which is how we ended up here—

Standing in place.
Climbing nowhere.
Walking very hard… just to get back to where we started.
Makes you wonder what else we pulled out of life… just so we could sell it back to ourselves.

If you’ve been reading along and enjoying these essays, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. No pressure—it just helps keep the essays showing up each week.

Tony

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For those who haven’t read The Long Walk by Stephen King, it’s about a group of boys forced to keep moving at a steady pace. No stopping. No slowing down. Keep going or you’re out—which, in this case, means a bullet to the head.

It’s not really about distance. It’s about what happens when you keep going long after it stops making sense.

This is not that.

But also… it kind of is.

There was a time when walking to the break room meant exactly that. You stood up, walked down the hall, got your coffee, and came back. That was the whole story. Simple. Clean. Civilized.

Now it feels like a continuation of something that started much earlier… and for reasons no one can quite explain without using words like alignment and visibility.

Because the walk doesn’t start at your desk anymore. It starts with the alarm clock. It starts with traffic. It starts with tolls and gas prices that feel like they were set by someone who hasn’t driven in years. It starts in a parking lot designed by a man who believed, deeply, that you should start out your morning with distance and a low-level obstacle course.

It starts with carrying a laptop into a building so you can open it… to join a call… that could have happened anywhere with Wi-Fi and a halfway decent cup of coffee.

By the time you get to your desk, you’ve already done a day’s work. And none of it counts.

We didn’t come back to work. We were already working. Pretty well, in most cases.

We came back to the appearance of work.

You drive somewhere to open the same laptop you use at home. You sit in a different chair to join the same meeting. You nod at people in person… and then message them a few minutes later on Teams because that’s still how anything actually gets done.

There’s a rhythm to it. Not a good one. Just a familiar one. Everyone in the same building, performing the same routine, quietly agreeing this part matters more than the part where anything actually happens.

And then, at some point, you need coffee. Or a Sprite Zero. Or a bag of chips you didn’t want until you realized you had to walk to get it.

So you make the walk.

The break room isn’t far. A hallway. A turn. Another hallway. A couple of minutes. But distance changes when it’s attached to everything that came before it.

Because this walk didn’t start at your cubicle. It started in your driveway. In traffic. Somewhere around the moment you realized you were going somewhere to do something you could already do perfectly well right where you were.

So the walk feels longer than it is. Not physically. But in a way that’s hard to measure and easy to feel.

None of this is hard. That’s the interesting part. If it were hard, you could complain about it. If it hurt, you could point to it.

But it doesn’t.

It’s friction. Small. Constant. Unnecessary. A pebble in your shoe. The kind of friction that doesn’t break you—just slows you down a little. Adds weight to things that used to feel light. Turns a normal Tuesday into something more complicated than it needs to be.

To be fair, there is value in being together. Some conversations don’t happen on a screen. Some ideas only show up because someone said something offhand and someone else catches it. There is a version of the culture that actually requires proximity. That part is real.

But so is the other part. The commute. The cost. The lost time. The unspoken understanding that we’re all gathered here to prove something that didn’t need proving. So you make the walk. You get your coffee. You come back. You sit down. You open your laptop.

And everything looks exactly the same as it did at home. Same screen. Same meeting. Same work.

Just… better lighting and worse coffee.

Maybe the problem isn’t the walk. The walk is fine. People have been walking to get coffee for a long time.

Maybe the problem is realizing we didn’t return to the office.

We returned to the performance of work.

And like most performances, it looks convincing from a distance. Up close, you start to notice things. The set pieces. The reused lines. The parts where everyone knows what’s happening… but keeps going anyway.

Because in this version of The Long Walk, you don’t get eliminated for stopping.

You just get noticed.

And that’s worse.

If you’ve been reading along and enjoying these essays, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. No pressure—it just helps keep the essays showing up each week.

Tony

Photo by Stan: https://www.pexels.com/photo/car-side-mirror-showing-heavy-traffic-191842/

CAP: Clancy sits in quiet judgement.

Do you remember when you thought your dog tilted his head because he was confused?

He’s not.

Or at least… that’s not the most interesting explanation anymore.

There’s research suggesting dogs tilt their heads more when they’re actually paying attention—especially when they recognize words or are trying to process what you said. Not random. Not static. Engagement. (Buckley et al., 2025, published in Animals)

So that little head tilt?

That might be focus.

Memory. Maybe even actual thought. I know. Same reaction.

Because we’ve all been walking around with a very comfortable assumption: the dog tilts his head because he doesn’t understand us. Which says less about the dog than it does about us. We like our intelligence cleanly defined. Human on one side. Everything else on the other. A nice, tidy line. But the head tilt doesn’t quite fit that model.

It may look like confusion. It might be closer to translation.

Some dogs may tilt their heads for simpler reasons—trying to hear better, or see your face around their snout. Less philosopher, more furry satellite dish locking onto a signal.

But even that’s interesting because it still assumes attention.

It still assumes the dog is adjusting itself to better understand you.

Not zoning out.

Not ignoring you.

Adjusting.

And that’s where this gets uncomfortable. Because humans have a long history of anthropomorphism—assigning human meaning to animal behavior in the most flattering way possible.

Dog tilts head = emotional connection

Cat knocks glass off table = performance art

Rabbit eats carrot = “what’s up, doc?”

We tell ourselves stories that make us feel like we’re the center of the interaction. Meanwhile, the dog is trying to figure out why you said “bath” like it’s a reward. Or why you’re explaining your day in full sentences to someone who, five minutes ago, picked a fight with their own reflection.

Or—this is the one that lingers—whether what you’re saying even makes sense. Because if the head tilt is processing… then there’s a non-zero chance it’s evaluation.

Not confusion. Judgment.

We’ve all seen that look. The pause. The slight angle. The quiet recalibration.

That’s not a blank stare. That’s a system taking in data. And if we’re being honest… there’s a decent chance we don’t always pass that test.

So enjoy the head tilt. It’s still adorable. That part hasn’t changed.

But there’s at least a small possibility that, in that moment, your dog isn’t trying to understand you. He already does.

He’s just not impressed.

Source: Buckley C, Sexton CL, Martvel G, et al. (2025). What Does That Head Tilt Mean? Brain Lateralization and Sex Differences in the Processing of Familiar Human Speech by Domestic Dogs. Animals.

If you’ve been enjoying these essays, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. No pressure—it helps keep the writing coming each week… and keeps Clancy in premium treats.

Tony

There is a particular kind of optimism that shows up as you learn a new system or process.

It’s the this optimism that convinces you this time will be different. This time, you will not wander around in the cavernous tunnels of your mind hoping to stumble onto your story’s structure because now you have the torch of a proven system.

My torch in this case was a beat sheet.

Specifically, one of those “this must happen on this page” kinds of beat sheets. The kind that promises if you just hit these moments at the right time, you too can produce something that feels like a story instead of a collection of scenes that occasionally make sense.

And on paper, it made perfect sense.

I had a workable idea. An autistic cosplayer discovers a body at scifi convention and, through their knowledge of the culture to identify the killer. There’s tension, stakes, moral ambiguity. The kind of premise that makes you think, okay, this one has it all.

So I sat down with the beat sheet.

Page 1: opening image.

Page 5: inciting incident.

Page 25: things get worse. Character A must say “shimmy shimmy ko ko bop” to character B.

Page 60: things get much worse.

Toward the end: resolution, but meaningful.

It was all very clean. Very organized. Very reassuring.

And yet…it felt wrong.

Not broken. The scenes were there. The structure was there. Technically, everything was happening where it was supposed to happen.

Problem was, I wasn’t telling a story so much as assembling one. I had a checklist and I was making sure each box was properly ticked. The characters weren’t doing things because they would do them. They were doing things because it was page 25 and something had to happen.

That’s bean-counter story telling.

It felt forced. I wanted the torch to show me the corner, but it kept pulling toward the ceiling.

I was managing the story instead of flowing with it.

Before all this, I didn’t start with page numbers. I started with a question.

Wouldn’t it be funny if Mrs. Loggins actually murdered Mr. Messina because of a completely avoidable misunderstanding involving recycling bins and escalating eye contact.

And then I followed it.

Not perfectly. Not efficiently. But honestly. The story moved because something in it wanted to move, not because a framework said it was time.

But, the system wasn’t the problem.

The system worked in the way systems work. It created order. It reduced uncertainty. It gave me a map.

What it didn’t do was give me a story.

And if you’ve spent any time in business or fitness, this will sound familiar.

In business, there is always someone you can emulate. Someone who has a system. Follow these steps, adopt this mindset, replicate this structure, and you too can build something successful. Tony Robbins built an empire. Company X scaled. Therefore, if you do what they did, you will get what they got.

Except you won’t.

Because you are not Tony Robbins. Your company is not NVIDIA. Your culture, your constraints, your weird collection of decisions and accidents are not theirs. You can borrow the structure, but you can’t duplicate the context.

In fitness, it’s even more obvious.

You pick up a magazine or scroll through an article and there it is: The Workout™. The exact routine that built Chris Evans or Chris Hemsworth. The exercises, the reps, the schedule. It’s all laid out.

All you have to do is follow it.

Ignoring, of course, the small detail that their body is their job, and your job is to build Excel spreadsheets and occasionally remember to drink water.

The system is real. The results are real. But the translation is…questionable.

And that’s the thing about systems.

They’re incredibly useful right up until the moment you mistake them for answers.

The beat sheet wasn’t useless. There were parts of it I liked. The subject headings. The way it framed certain moments. Those are tools. Those are helpful.

But the page requirements? The rigidity? That’s where it started to feel less like guidance and more like Mother Superior with yardstick. (Probably shoulda had a trigger warning up top for my Catholic friends).

Creativity doesn’t do well with compliance.

It tolerates structure. It even benefits from it sometimes. But it resists being told exactly when and how it should show up.

Which is frustrating, because a system would be much easier.

A system runs like a machine.

Stories don’t run. They wander. They double back. They get lost. They search the dungeon. They occasionally surprise you. And every now and then, if you’re paying attention, they find something you didn’t know was there.

You can guide that process.

You can give it shape.

But you can’t fully system it.

Systems are fine. I’m not suggesting you toss them all (you’ll never take my seven-act structure from me). What I am suggesting is this: take what helps, and leave what doesn’t.

And if you find yourself hitting page 25 because you’re supposed to—instead of because something actually happened—put the checklist down.

And follow the thing that moves.

If you’ve been reading along and enjoying it, paid subscribers get this a day early. No pressure—it just helps keep it showing up each week.

Tony

(Photo by Photo by Shivansh Sharma: https://www.pexels.com/photo/abstract-spiral-staircase-with-geometric-design-29068281/)

There’s something quietly funny about the fact that we built an entire digital ecosystem—devices, apps, subscriptions, audiobooks read by celebrities with voices smoother than bourbon—and then, as a society, collectively said:

“Yeah… I’ll take the paperback.”

According to Pew Research Center, most Americans are still reading. Which is reassuring, considering how often it feels like we’re all skimming life at bumper-sticker speed. What’s more interesting, to me, is how they’re doing it.

Print didn’t lose.

It didn’t even stumble.

We gave ourselves options:

• Carry 1,000 books in your pocket

• Listen while you drive, walk, or pretend to exercise

• Sync across devices like a productivity wizard

And yet, most people still reach for something that:

• has weight

• takes up space

• and cannot, under any circumstances, update itself

That should tell us (and the techbros) something…

We’ve been told—repeatedly—that convenience wins. That the smoother, faster, more optimized version of a thing will eventually replace the original.

Sometimes it does.

And sometimes… it doesn’t.

Because reading isn’t just consumption. It’s an experience—and not all experiences benefit from being optimized, digitized, and productized into something efficient but hollow.

A paperback doesn’t ping you.

It doesn’t recommend something else mid-sentence.

It doesn’t quietly pull you into three other apps before you finish a paragraph.

It just sits there.

Patient. Slightly judgmental.

Waiting for you to come back.

Even audiobooks—arguably the most “modern” form—haven’t replaced anything. They’ve just become another lane. Useful, flexible, great for long drives and ignoring the dude who wants to tell you about his weekend in the Keys (again).

But they didn’t kill print.

They joined it.

And maybe that’s the real story here—not that technology failed to replace books, but that it couldn’t fully replace the kind of attention books require.

We keep building better ways to read.

And then, when it actually counts, we choose the one that asks us to slow down.

There’s probably something in that worth paying attention to.

Or at least… underlining.

—Tony

⸻

P.S. These essays are free, every week—but subscribing helps keep them coming (and occasionally funds the coffee that powers them).

Source: https://www.pewresearch.org/?p=298755

Photo credit: Alex Quezada: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-room-full-of-books-and-stacks-of-books-27938545/

For those who prefer their complaints narrated with appropriate suffering…

To Whom It May Concern,

I would like to formally lodge a complaint regarding the continued existence of stairs.

Following a recent leg workout—undertaken in what I can only describe as a moment of misplaced confidence—I have discovered that stairs are no longer a mode of transportation, but rather a coordinated attack on my inner thighs, dignity, and future mobility.

Each step is a negotiation with the void. Each descent is a gamble with my brittle bones. At one point, I considered setting up permanent residence at the top of the staircase to avoid further incidents.

I request that all stairs be replaced with:

Ramps

Slides

Or a respectful escalator system

Until such time, I will be taking all movements slowly, dramatically, and with the audible groans of a man betrayed by his own muscles.

Respectfully,

A Formerly Mobile Citizen

There is a moment in every man’s life when stairs stop being infrastructure and become an adversary.

It happens without announcement or ceremony. One day you’re bounding up them two at a time, maybe even carrying something heavy just because you can. The next, you’re standing at the bottom, staring upward and considering abandoning the second level of your home.

This week, I found that moment.

I’ve been getting back into working out. Not the way I did at 20. Not even the way I did at 40. This is a more… negotiated arrangement. A 20-minute truce between me and a collection of machines that all seem designed by medieval men who want me to renounce chocolate cake in the name of health.

And then came leg day.

Leg day, as it turns out, is less a workout and more a declaration of war. Not in the moment—you feel fine in the moment. Strong, even. This leg press machine ain’t nothing. You think, I still got it.

You do not still got it.

What you have is a delayed response system. A body that takes notes and tracks every rep. An internal accountant wearing one of those visors and a change maker on their belt who makes notes in a ledger of every increase in reps or weight you had no business attempting.

And then, 24 hours later, he sends the bill.

My inner thighs, in particular, have unionized. They are no longer participating in day-to-day operations without protest. Standing up from a chair requires planning. Sitting down requires commitment.

And whose idea was it to put toilets so low to the ground???

Walking is now a series of carefully negotiated steps between what I intend to do and what my body is willing to allow.

But stairs… stairs are something else entirely.

Stairs require trust. Trust that your legs will lift when asked. Trust that they will hold when you descend. Trust that halfway through, they won’t simply decide they’ve had enough and this is where we live now.

That trust is shattered like so many dreams on the leg press machine.

In its place is a cautious, sideways approach, one hand firmly on the railing, the other holding onto what remains of my pride.

And here’s the thing: I’m going back tomorrow.

Not because I enjoy this. Not because I talk about ‘the burn’ like it’s a personality trait.

This is how changing my shape from round to human starts again; show up, make a series of decisions, keep in mind I am not 20, and deal with the consequences one stair step at a time.

I used to think getting older was about wisdom.

Turns out it’s mostly about learning how to sit down without making grunty noises.

If you’ve been reading along and enjoying it, paid subscribers get this a day early. No pressure—it just helps keep it showing up each week.

Tony

(Photo by cottonbro studio: https://www.pexels.com/photo/man-in-back-vest-wearing-green-cap-5920857/)

For most of my adult life, I believed in the garage.

Not literally, of course. Garages clearly exist. I’ve seen them. Some of them even contain rakes and boxes of Christmas decorations.

No, I believed in the myth.

Somewhere out there—right now—was a guy in a garage building the next billion-dollar company.

Jobs and Wozniak.

Gates.

Zuckerberg.

Pick your flavor of hoodie-wearing tech messiah.

The story always had the same moral: one brilliant idea plus a little grit equals a billion-dollar company. If you were smart and ambitious, you should probably be chasing that idea.

Rags to riches.

The American way.

So I did.

For years I chased systems, businesses, scalable ideas. I read books about entrepreneurship. I studied processes. I read Fortune, Tony Robbins, and every motivational and business process book I could get my sweaty little palms on. (I miss bookstores in the mall, don’t you?)

I tried to reverse engineer the formula that turned someone with a laptop and a dream into someone ringing the opening bell on Wall Street. And for a long time I thought I was being practical.

Because there was another thing I wanted to do. I wanted to write.

And writing, from a purely capitalist perspective, is a terrible investment.

Let’s do the math.

A novel can take hundreds of hours to write. Maybe thousands. Then you revise it, edit it, publish it, and market it. If you’re lucky—really lucky—you might sell a few thousand copies. If lightning strikes, maybe more.

But the odds of becoming a New York Times bestseller are roughly comparable to getting struck by lightning while holding a winning lottery ticket. From a strict return-on-investment perspective, writing fiction makes about as much sense as opening a lemonade stand in Antarctica. (Trust me on this; I made the data model in Excel.)

So my very practical, very capitalist brain made a decision.

Writing could wait.

The real work—the serious work—the capitalist work—was finding the garage idea. The startup. The scalable system. The thing that could turn into a company.

Now here’s the funny part.

During all this time, I was actually writing.

Not as much as I should have been, but enough that something interesting started to happen.

A little show called The Harry Strange Radio Drama began to take root.

One episode at a time.

It found listeners and built an audience.

People began writing to tell me they enjoyed the stories. Some even told me the show helped them get through long drives or rough days. One listener from Ukraine wrote to tell me he was practicing his English by listening to Harry Strange. I always wondered how he explained the word “toots” to his wife. But I digress.

If you’re a storyteller and someone tells you your story helped them get through the day… well, that’s about the nicest compliment you can receive.

And yet—even while that was happening—I kept looking for the garage.

Because the mythology runs deep.

Part of my brain kept whispering: Yes, this writing thing is nice… but where’s the real opportunity? Where was the scalable idea? Where was the startup?

Where was the thing that could turn into the mythical exit event where I suddenly become one of those people on a podcast talking about “my journey as a founder”?

The strange thing about myths is that you don’t realize you believe them until they start shaping your decisions.

Looking back now, I can see how that myth quietly influenced years of my life.

Writing was something I loved. But it didn’t pass the ROI test. And it didn’t look impressive on a spreadsheet.

So for a long time I treated it like a hobby. Something I did after the “real work” was finished.

Except here’s the truth I eventually stumbled into.

The myth was wrong.

Not just a little wrong.

Fundamentally wrong.

Because it assumes that every meaningful human activity must justify itself through money. That the value of something is measured by its market price. That if an activity cannot produce growth—exponential or otherwise—it probably isn’t worth your time.

That logic works pretty well for venture capital.

It works terribly for art.

Art has never obeyed the rules of scale.

Shakespeare didn’t have a product roadmap. Van Gogh didn’t optimize his brush strokes to maximize quarterly paint returns. Most of the books that shaped human civilization were written by people who never saw a dime from them.

And yet those works endure.

Because the real return on art was never financial.

The real return is something harder to measure.

It keeps you human.

Writing stories forces you to imagine other lives. You spend time inside the heads of characters who are nothing like you and somehow exactly like you at the same time. You wrestle with questions that don’t have neat answers.

You try to say something true about the world—even if that truth is wrapped in monsters, detectives, or strange folks named Harry… or Gareth… or Scarlett.

In other words, you stay connected to the messy, complicated, irrational thing that makes us human in the first place.

And that’s not something you can easily chart on a balance sheet.

These days I still appreciate a good garage story. Entrepreneurship can be a wonderful thing. Building companies creates jobs and moves the world forward. And I will never part with my iPhone.

But I no longer measure my creative life using startup math.

Because the older I get, the clearer something becomes. Not everyone is meant to build the next unicorn company. But almost everyone has the capacity to make something.

A story.

A song.

A painting.

A strange little audio drama about a supernatural detective wandering around Trail’s End.

Most of those creations will never make their creators rich. They won’t lead to venture capital rounds or IPOs. They won’t get covered by Bloomberg or TechCrunch.

But they do something just as important.

They remind us that not everything valuable in life needs to scale.

Some things only need to exist.

So these days, when the old capitalist voice in my head asks the familiar question—

What’s the return on investment?

The writer in me finally has an answer.

You stay human.

~Tony

If you enjoy these essays about creativity, storytelling, and the strange intersection of art and technology, consider becoming a paid subscriber. It helps keep the coffee flowing and the essays coming.

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(Getty Images)

I’ve spent most of my creative life with things that go bump in the night.

Nothing tawdry — just narrative night bumpers. I write horror. I write fantasy. I write stories where something ancient crawls out of the dark, or where a virus mutates the dead into something worse than dead. If I get stuck, I can introduce a demon. Or a flesh-eating monster from the deep. Or a morally ambiguous AI with a messiah complex.

Then I was hired to write True Crime with Alexandra Kane.

No eldritch fog (though there is a snowstorm). No ghosts in a gothic mansion (though there is a burned-out strip club). No villain who can be killed with holy water.

Just people.

And I’ll be honest — I wasn’t sure I could do it.

1. I Couldn’t Hide Behind the Supernatural

In horror and fantasy, the extraordinary does structural work. When the stakes sag, a creature can escalate them. When the mystery thins, a new rule can deepen it. When the antagonist feels small, you can make them part of a cosmic plan to consume humanity in nightmare pyres.

With Alexandra Kane, I had none of that.

Every problem had to be caused by human motivation, error, greed, or trauma.

Every solution had to make sense in the real world — not because a curse demanded it or a ritual required sacrifice, but because someone wanted money, power, leverage, or revenge.

When you can’t lean on the supernatural, the logic must be airtight.

Plotting — and yes, I’m a hybrid pantser/plotter — becomes critical. Who is the bad guy? Why are they the bad guy? Does the timeline make sense? Do the clues hold?

There’s no mythic fog to hide a weak joint in the plot.

Grounded mystery demands discipline.

2. Real-World Stakes Are Harder Than Monsters

In horror, death is expected.
In fantasy, destiny is expected.
In crime thrillers, injustice is the monster.

The core of Alexandra Kane wasn’t “What is the creature?” It was:

• Who was wronged?

• Who benefited?

• Who manipulated the system?

The villain doesn’t use spell books or ancient artifacts. The villain uses legal structures, financial instruments, influence, and silence.

That’s harder to write than a ghoul.

The ghoul just is. It doesn’t need motive. The system does.

When the bad guy wins in horror, it’s nihilistic.
When the bad guy wins in true crime, it feels uncomfortably plausible.

That required restraint. No theatrical monologues. No ritual chambers. Just controlled conversations, boardrooms, off-record deals, and quiet betrayals.

Subtle is more demanding than spectacle.

3. Impostor Syndrome Usually Whispers; When You Leave Your Genre It Uses a Megaphone

I usually move fast.

Give me a horror concept and I’m drafting in a couple of weeks. The voice arrives quickly. The tone locks in. The danger is immediate.

Alexandra Kane took months of whiteboards, notebooks, and scraps of paper.

Part of that was structural — a single, self-contained season of six escalating audio episodes is different from a novel or supernatural serial.

But most of it was doubt.

Can I keep an audience without a monster reveal?
Can I make a financial conspiracy as gripping as a skinless hybrid zombie?

When you jump genres, your instincts don’t always translate cleanly. You second-guess rhythm. You question tone. You revise more.

A lot more.

But here’s the important part: doubt isn’t a sign you can’t do it. It’s a sign you care about doing it right.

4. Noir Is Just Horror Without the Mask

This surprised me.

The DNA between horror and crime isn’t that different.

Horror explores what happens when something corrupts the natural order.
Crime explores what happens when something corrupts the moral order.

In both:

• There is rot beneath the surface.

• Someone pays for someone else’s sin.

• Truth is dangerous.

• The world doesn’t necessarily reward virtue.

The difference is aesthetic, not thematic.

In horror, the rot might be fungal and animate.
In a thriller, it’s legal and well-dressed.

But rot is rot.

Once I saw that, the shift felt less like betrayal and more like translation. After all, Harry Strange was an occult detective with a heavy dose of hard-boiled noir. I’ve been flirting with this territory for years.

5. Real-World Solutions Are More Brutal

In horror, you destroy the demon.
In fantasy, you break the spell.
In a grounded thriller, justice is messy.

The resolution in Alexandra Kane had to function within legal and governmental systems. It had to acknowledge that:

• Institutions protect themselves.

• Power rarely collapses cleanly.

• Even victories come at a cost.

There is no exorcism, but there is exposure. Testimony. Fallout. Consequences. And consequences linger longer than a jump scare.

6. Research Replaces Lore

When I write fantasy, I invent lore.
When I write horror, I invent rules.

When I wrote True Crime with Alexandra Kane, I Googled things that probably put me on a watchlist. A different one, I mean.

Things like: Financial structures. Shell companies. Jurisdictional turf wars. U.S. Treasury authority. Media influence. Political pressure. The deeply unsexy mechanics of how money actually moves when someone doesn’t want it found.

In horror, you build a system and let the dread seep in.
In crime, the system is the dread.

Grounded mystery requires less world-building — but far more world-understanding.

That’s a different muscle.

Mine is still sore; but in a good way.

7. Slower Doesn’t Mean Worse

This project took a couple of months before I found my sea legs.

For someone who usually sprints into a story like my dogs chasing a tennis ball, that was disorienting.

There were no monsters doing the heavy lifting.
No prophecy explaining why everyone was behaving badly.

I kept asking myself: Can I build tension without something clawing at the door?

Turns out: yes.

But it required patience and calibration. There’s a difference between being stuck and letting a story settle. One feels like failure. The other is discipline.

They look very similar at 2 a.m.

8. I’d Do It Again

Here’s the part that surprised me.

I’d absolutely write another grounded thriller. I’d love to do a second season of Alexandra Kane.

Crossing genres didn’t dilute my voice. It stripped it down.

It reminded me that:

• Suspense doesn’t require the supernatural.

• Moral decay can be as chilling as cosmic horror.

• Real-world systems are often more terrifying than demons — mostly because demons don’t have compliance departments.

Storytelling fundamentals remain fundamental: Character. Stakes. Escalation. Revelation. Consequence.

Those don’t belong to horror.
They don’t belong to fantasy.
They don’t belong to crime.

They belong to story.

I’m not abandoning horror. The monsters are still there. They’re patient. I have a story kicking around involving Morgana LeFay and...well, spoilers. But it’s gonna be awesome.

But stepping outside your genre removes your shortcuts.

And that’s more unsettling than anything with tentacles.

If You’re Thinking About Jumping Genres

Here’s what I’d tell you:

1. Expect doubt. It’s part of the toll.

2. Respect the mechanics. You can’t bluff your way through money laundering.

3. Keep your thematic DNA. Your obsessions travel with you.

4. Let it take the time it takes. Fast is a preference, not a virtue.

5. If you’re building something with series potential, you will never have as much time as you do on the first installment. Use it wisely.

6. Storytelling is universal. Genre just changes the costume.

You’re not abandoning who you are as a writer.

You’re stress-testing it.

And if you can build dread without ghosts…

You can probably build it with anything.

Even paperwork.

—

True Crime with Alexandra Kane is currently in production at the Radio Theater Project in Washington State and will be available in Q4 2026.

In the meantime, you can find my other work here:

• In the Shadow of Camelot

• The Skin Man

• Scarlett Hood

• The Lady Sherlock Mysteries

• The Harry Strange Radio Drama

~Tony

My audio play, In the Shadow of Camelot, is live on YouTube. Produced by Evcol Entertainment in the UK, this is my first international production—and I genuinely love what the team did with it.

The actors playing Gareth and Ember have chemistry you can taste. Fantastic casting and direction, with original music throughout.

We’re doing a soft rollout, and I highly recommend giving it a listen.

In The Shadow of Camelot on YouTube.

Evcol Entertainment

_________________

I’m finishing the final episode of TRUE CRIME WITH ALEXANDRA KANE, an audio-drama thriller about a true-crime podcast that helped put the wrong man behind bars—and the systems built to protect us that quietly made sure no one noticed.

For the record: this is my first thriller without a supernatural influence. That’s right—no ghosts, goblins, or ghouls.

Produced by The Radio Theater Project (who also produced my Scarlett Hood stories). Expect Alexandra Kane in 4Q 2026.

Scarlett Hood

The Radio Theatre Project

_________________

I’ve been haunting the interwebs the past couple of months.

Here’s a list of recent appearances. Watch them all and good karma will come your way. Probably.

Blades and Blasters Episode 682: The Skin Man

This Week In Indies for January 18th, 2026: Writing Serialized Fiction

This Week In Indies for February 1st 2026: Character Driven vs. Plot Driven Stories

_________________

And finally, THE SKIN MAN—a techno-horror delight of failing systems and body horror—is available wherever you buy your ebooks. Sleep is optional.

Available at:

Amazon

Apple, Kobo, Smashwords, others

_________________

Okay, folks! That’s it for this update. And remember, most of you should be writing.

Tony