[DIGEST] Maasai guys (and women and nbs, too)

Your weekly stackable roundup

July 29, 2023

I’ve been reading Life and National Geographic since I was a kid, and I remember being transfixed by photos of the Maasai from the first time I saw them in a magazine. I used to be a professional photographer, and my specific love is portrait/fashion photography. So, when we had a chance to visit a Maasai village, I was so frigging excited. I also have complicated feelings about the voyeuristic implications of a colonial power invading another culture’s space and making them perform for our education, but I can’t deny that it was a childhood dream come true.

If you want to share how you are doing this week, then there are two ways to interact with this post.

1 - If you don’t want to say anything, or bristle at identifying yourself, then you can reply with this nifty poll.

2 - If you’re feeling very brave, then reply below and tell us how you are doing right now on a scale from 1-5.

I was recovering from SDCC this week, and I was really tired. So, I think I’m a 2.5. I had such a great time at SDCC though. I brought my migraine glasses and it literally changed everything about my experience. It turns out I was suffering from headaches at basically every show I’ve done in my career.

What I wrote on Substack: This week I unveiled the longest-researched article I’ve ever done all about how to create a world-class Substack.

A new chapter of Magic also dropped this week. This is the start of a whole new story, and a great jumping-on point if you held off from starting to read in the middle of a story.

Back in school, we had learned about physics, Isaac Newton, and the stupid apple that fell on his dumb head. Centuries later, Albert Einstein came along, and his theories and scientists were sure they knew exactly what made up the universe—then came 1964, and Murray Gell-Mann discovered quarks. Little tiny particles smaller than atoms that broke everything humans knew about the physical world. Particles that didn’t act like anything else in the universe. Particles that acted like magic.

I always knew that the universe was chaos. I often felt like one of those quarks, unstable and unpredictable, going strange when I should go charm, and up when I should go bottom, affecting the universe in uncharted and often unwanted ways.

I supposed we were all chaos agents to everything we touched. Anjelica was surely that for me.

New chapters are free, but paid subscribers can access the archives. You also get access to a bunch of free books and stories from my back catalog.

Upcoming article: Next week, I’m going to be taking a break from helping you build your author business to talk about one of my favorite topics…my safari. I’m doing a deep dive into everything you might want to know about my African photo safari in Tanzania (with loads of pics).

We have been planning a safari with my wife’s family since 2018. We originally planned to go in 2020, but…well, the world exploded and we had to put off our plans, which meant we have been talking about this safari for five years. I should clarify that by we I mean my wife’s family that planned it all. I mostly showed up and took pretty pictures.

Even though I didn’t spend hundreds of hours planning this safari, I did spend at least dozens of hours talking about it and mulling over option. Additionally, I did spend a ton of time thinking about the gear I would bring to the safari, so this roundup is going to be a little bit of reporting what I learned from my in-laws, a decent amount of first hand experience, and a whole lot of information about the best vacation I’ve ever taken in my life.

Before I dig in, I’m the first person to admit that there’s a massive amount privilege in being able to even go on a safari, and being tended to by local porters in tents made me feel more like a colonizer than anything I’ve ever done. If you feel some sort of way about safaris, then I get it. I had a lot of reservations going into this, but even with them, I still had a life-changing experience.

Additionally, while I have included a lot of pictures here, they are not fully processed. You might find some where the horizon isn’t level or could use a little color correction. Since this was a fun trip, I decided not to spend countless hours mastering these images before I showed it to you, as they would likely never be done if I waited that long. Good is the enemy of great, but great is the enemy of finished.

If you want to go on safari, this should be informative. If you just want to see cute pics of animals, this article will delivere. If you just need more time to process this week’s epic article, then I have you covered there, too.

Roundup: Here are some of my favorite articles of the week.

If you like what I’m doing around her and want to check out the archives, you can do that with a 7-day free trial, or simply go straight to being a paid subscriber. You also get access to my seminal comic book series, Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter.

Ichabod Jones: Monster Hunter is a dark fantasy horror comedy graphic novel series that flips the chosen one narrative on its head. It deals with redemption, mental illness, and sacrifice. It is very violent.

Ichabod is a mental patient who has been convicted of killing many innocent people, but when he awakens in the Apocalypse he may just be the best hope for humanity to survive. If only he knew whether the Hell beasts he slaughtered were real or existed only in his mind.

Can Ichabod become the hero the world needs even after society decided they didn’t need him? Or will he devolve into the animal people always accused him of being? Enter the madness and find out.

Paid subscribers can access the entire archive of this series from the beginning, along with other series and every article I’ve ever written. If you aren’t a paid subscriber, you can access the archive for free with a 7-day trial.