Struggling to publish on discrete columns in a timely fashion? Just begin another!
I added a new section to my blog for many reasons. Let’s see if I can push through and explain some of them since I also considered naming this section “Digressions.”
Because Sounds are bad at literacy.
From now on, I will cease to use “American” regarding citizens of the United States. It’s asinine for US citizens and English speakers alike to prescribe exclusivity on a word that could also apply to citizens of the other twenty-two sovereign nations in North America. The fact that most US citizens only think of Canada, Mexico, and the US when asked to list countries in the continent is indicative of said literacy crisis. Someone has to claim Central America and the Caribbean cuz South America ain’t.
I’m well aware that the pervasiveness of “American” borders upon irreversible, but if we were able to correct gender-exclusive language such as using “humanity” instead of “mankind,” or “firefighter” instead of “fireman,” and so on, then it is possible to adopt…”USian”?
That’s pronounced “you-ESS-ee-an.”
Ehhhh, maybe not, lol.
But I Digress….
I considered naming this column Digressions. I needed space for things I want to write about that don’t neatly fit into the preexisting categories. Thanks to my wife, I will go with “But I Digress…” because she’s usually right. It fits after all; look at where I am right now: I started with blogging, moved to literacy, transitioned into USians and now I’m ideating about blogging again.
I’m saving “I’m Neurospicy!” for another blog entry.
To wrap up the “blogging” idea, yes, that is what this site is: ran by an individual, comprised of largely informal “posts” even if what I write becomes essay-length, and displayed in reverse-chronological order. “I blog” sounds banal and amateurish, yet professionals and amateurs alike write good stuff in their “blogs,” so here we are. 2012’s B.I.T.C.H.: Bayonetta in Total Control of Herself was seminal for me, and that came from a blog. Actually, Obligatory Spider Queen would be the inspiration for me to start writing outside of academia.
Since this blog entry is a soft relaunch, I’ll offer further thoughts on why I call it “Blerd Beats.” It makes sense in my head because of two definitions of “beat”:
A route or area assigned to a police officer, guard, etc., to patrol, esp. on foot. Also in on the beat: on duty patrolling such a route.
and
Chiefly colloquial. More generally: an area regularly walked or frequented by someone, esp. in the course of their job; (figurative) a person’s usual or habitual sphere of activity.
Blerdom is my domain, which means if I need to add another category/column—because I still like to call the different sections “columns” as they do in journalism—I will. Speaking of the columns, I may not have coined the original Reel Talk, but I love it far more than I ever cared for Silver Screenings. I don’t feel married to neither Slipstreaming nor Japanophilia, but we’ll see what my brain comes up with in the future. Except for Reel Talk, Comix Zone, and Backloggery Beatdown, I’m not married to any of those columns, okay Sega?
So yeah, the purpose of So I Digress…? Ideation.
Let me finish my thoughts on literacy.
US slave laws kept my ancestors from literacy. The penalties for a slave caught reading ranged from flaying to amputation to death. I hate clichés and try to avoid them in my writing at all costs, so I’ll negate deploying one with an idiom: “knowledge is power,” and “we are losing recipes.”
Post-Civil Rights Era Lost Cause tactics such as redlining and gerrymandering accelerated educational discrepancies in the US well before W’s perfidious “No Child Left Behind” policy, with USians fetching already unimpressive numbers in literacy. But now? With Elmo, Zukbot, and—I haven’t thought of a funny name for Larry Ellison, but I’m entertaining offers—monopolizing the ownership of social media (protect blackskyweb.xyz at all costs!) and bombarding us with AI, everyone is getting dumber, not just USians. Unique to USians, however, is the censorship. MAGAs think of censorship as the deterrence of a knuckle sandwich to the mouth for calling me the N-word or getting “canceled” for similar offenses. When I think about censorship, I think about banned books. We don’t even have to worry about Fahrenheit 451-style book burnings—though that has happened too—because USians don’t read.
Maybe because they can’t?
I became a reader when my mom made me accompany her while she was grocery shopping. I loathed those trips until I found the magazine section. Then it became a challenge: read the latest issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly, GamePro, GameFan, Tips & Tricks, and PC Gamer, before my mom finished shopping—before they started shipping them in bags because of people like me, lol. I also became a comics reader, but because the way Marvel would split stories into several publications, I focused on Archie’s then-new Sonic the Hedgehog comic series in 1992. I eventually subscribed to several of these with my $5/week allowance money so I could focus on reading more magazines during these trips.
Unfortunately, none of these gaming publications exist anymore.
In fact, EGM recently launched a Kickstarter for nostalgia purposes rather than archival. But I’m glad they did so people will get a chance to read it. And that’s key: we encourage people to read by providing them something that’s provocative enough to put eyeballs to page. Or in my case, their screens. Again, I appreciate accessibility and encourage the differently abled to consume audiobooks. I absolutely prefer that people listen to audiobooks over, ugh, podcasts. Yet, reading is better for learning and retention than listening; that link also says that reading a physical book is better than digital, but what can I do, lol?
The problems with literacy in the US are institutional and multifaceted. Unfortunately, as Bannon and his ilk have proven over the past twenty-five years, USians are more susceptible to propaganda than any other “Western” demographic. The ambivalence toward, or outright thirst for white supremacy is the not-so-secret recipe. With the addition of AI voice generation and videos—because while I have been discussing literacy, the concept is not limited to literature—the degree of difficulty for discernment is even steeper!
As techbros push AI to replace writers, I feel that maintaining this blog has become eminently important. In fact, I finally started a ko-fi in case anyone was interested in giving me incentive to publish more often than “whenever I feel like it.”
Now back to ideation.
I’m experimenting with the “paragraph” block format (Gutenberg?) that WordPress insists that we use. A recent update to the “classic” format, which I have been using since 2014, now creates an additional window for editing. It’s an unnecessary step that the paragraph block requires. Yet ProWritingAid, the writing assistant that I use, apparently doesn’t work with the block format. Instead, WordPress appears to have deployed its own Jetpack AI assistant that’s probably causing compatibility issues. Welp, back to classic GoogleDocs until WP can fix it, I guess. Please excuse any grammatical errors I missed.
Now, as for my writing queue,
Digression and procrastination are siblings. Thus, I have developed a queue of unpublished items. As I become more comfortable with “blogging,” perhaps I’ll actually begin adhering to two of the posting patterns I’ve established for myself to
a. post once per week;
b. do not post in the same column in consecutive weeks.
As for a preview:
Backloggery Beatdown
Diablo IV—I actually played through DIV as a Sorceress during season one. Or is launch considered season zero? At any rate, it’s been so long, that the game is now two expansions deep. Furthermore, I have an itch to run the witch doctor in DIII as far as I can since I hadn’t touched that game since Blizzard added rifts. I asked my kids if they’d like to run a new toon with me and my youngest said he’d love to play with his dad <3
Baldur’s Gate 3—Game so good that I quit for a year before finishing act 3. It lives up to its reputation.
DotA 2—Yes, I know. I am ashamed.
The Last War—You know what’s more shameful than wasted playing Dota? Hours wasted playing a mobile game.
Homeworld 3—The fact that I played the long-awaited sequel to one of my top 3 all-time franchises and yet didn’t write on it speaks to the impression it made upon me.
Comix Zone
I’m so far behind with this column that I’ll likely have to knock out a bunch with a roundup to get back on track. Reading two or three graphic novels per week will accelerate the backlog.
Get Lit!
See: Comix Zone
Reel Talk
The Color Purple (2023)—A Black Pantheon entry that has been in drafts for a few years.
Coming 2 America—Another Black Pantheon entry that’s been overdue since December 2025
The Nutty Professor—Also a Black Pantheon entry, also from December 2025
Set It Off—Again, a Black Pantheon entry, but from March 2026.
Sinners—Everyone and their mother has covered this movie and I have yet to.
Tales from the Hood: “Hard-Core Convert”—I wrote a piece dedicated to this story, but it’s May. I’ll keep it in drafts until October when I go through some Black horror movies.
Additionally, I’ve created something of a curriculum of Black movies for the family. It’s not exhaustive, but it is fairly comprehensive. I didn’t want to subject my kids to more Tyler Perry, nor did I want to bore them with Paul Robeson or Oscar Micheaux. Carmen Jones (1954) is in color, and it’s impossible to take the history of Black film seriously without starting with Dorothy Dandridge, the first Black actor or actress to be nominated for an Academy Award for a leading role. Oh yeah, Harry Belafonte is in the movie too, and he ain’t no slouch in either the Black arts nor activism.
Pop Quiz!
Who is the first Black actor to win an Academy Award for a leading role?
Who is the first Black actress to win an Academy Award for a leading role?
The answer to the first question is why I am requiring the kids to watch In the Heat of the Night (1967) or A Raisin in the Sun (1961). They get to choose between the Slap Seen ‘Round Dixie or an adaptation of arguably the most significant play in Black culture thanks to Lorraine Hansberry. Penultimately, I will require them to select blaxploitation films which inspired the explosive saturation of Black directors and Black films that we see in the 90’s; Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song (1971) or Shaft (1971). If they pick Shaft (and I hope they do) and enjoy it, we’ll watch the 2000 remake (wife leans in to remind me that there’s a 2019 Shaft in addition to the 2000 movie, so maybe not, lol). Finally, we’ll round out the Black film basics with Jackie Brown, to dialogue on how white and white-adjacent directors like Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg (The Color Purple) encroach upon Black territory.
There are roughly nineteen weeks before my oldest returns to college. I will allow them to alternate between one movie in the past, so 90’s era, and one movie in the present, 2000s-present. At the time of this writing, we have yet to discuss the categorizations, though I strongly feel that modern Black film begins after Craig Brewer’s Hustle & Flo—-ironically another white director who has practically dedicated his career to Black film, such as the aforementioned Coming 2 America and the omitted Dolemite is My Name (2019).
Speaking of omissions, no we will not be watching the movie featuring the Black actress who won an Oscar for best lead. What she had to do to earn it is a cultural pall, and it’s best we forget it happened.
Slipstreaming
Witcher S4—I watched this the week it came out, started a draft, and stopped. Time to finish.
Fall of the House of Usher—My wife and oldest son all but demanded that I watch it because they thought it would appeal to my sensibilities. It did, but also reminded me why I find watching television excruciating.
I never got back to Cloak and Dagger like I promised, but I will.
And with the LoLakers swept, perhaps I’ll have free time to queue up seasons 2 of Paradise and Cross for the Mrs.
Japanophilia
Attack on Titan—I watched S2 and started a draft and didn’t finish. Lemmie get back to that before I encounter a S3 spoiler in the face.
Faith, Decolonized
I’ve been considering a new name for this column and boom, God gave it to me. I’m overdue with reading through New Testament in Color as promised during January’s Daniel Fast, and got distracted. Like Get Lit! and Comix Zone, the projects are piling up more rapidly than the production. Here is what might become the draft of a memoir, recalling the experiences of my wife and me and our faith walk. I would also like to start a “Beatbreaker” series, exploring Sho Baraka’s discography. I think our spiritual journeys share a lot in common.
Did I mention I had ADHD?