Meanwhile… #2: What Lies Ahead?

This Is The Current State Of Things:

• General News:ÂI’m still on my annual holiday at the moment, so it should be quiet in here a while yet – at least until I go back to work on the 10th of February.
  That’s one side of the story. What’s going on OUTSIDE is obviously another! Yes, it’s pretty shocking isn’t it? That said, while the US burns (and burns all its remaining bridges) I’m frankly sick and tired of feeling compelled to talk about it – especially to say “I fucking told you so!” There are days, I can tell you with conviction, that I wake up wishing I didn’t live in South Africa – the whole “publishing is so much easier in other countries” schpiel etc. Then I think “Wait! I could’ve lived in the USA!” and then suddenly I’m immensely grateful I stayed right here in good old South Africa – and thank FUCK for that! All that depressing stuff aside, there’s still a bit of news regarding some of my writing experiences to share with you, which if you don’t mind, I’ll be  getting on with post haste.
• Current Writing Projects: “Flushed” (book 5 in Panic! Horror In Space). I’m still busy on the first part of this book, so it will be some time yet! Also working on “A Nine In Time” (book 10 in Quantum), also still some long way to go. There are others as well, incomplete in-process projects that are on the back-burner for now, but I’ll keep you updated as time goes by.
• Tribel Is A Lost Cause: You may recall that I had issues with my LinkedIn account late last year? Well I’ve had ZERO assistance with that problem from LinkedIn, and so I’ve just left it as is. I can’t log in to delete my account either, but it’s still on there. In the meantime, you may also recall that I joined wannabe Facebook competitor, Tribel, some years ago in an effort to expand my social media reach. My experience there over that time has been rather disappointing, because while I posted regularly between 2022-3 I received ZERO interactions (no likes, no shares etc.) Just recently I popped in there again and made a new post, sharing my latest YouTube video on my page – only to discover in the next few days that I’d been locked out of my account. Unable to log back into my Tribel account despite resetting my password, I sent their helpdesk messages requesting assistance – to which I have received ZERO replies in several days. I finally posted on their Facebook page a request to just delete my account and data, if it’s not too much trouble. Arseholes.This sort of lacksadaiscal “management” makes me wonder wether these days social media owners don’t just set up there platforms to run automatically without any human input at all, and just walk away to reap the benefits of selling user data and paid advertizing? It really seems increasingly likely that this is why this sort of obvious lack of concern or interest arises.
• Patreon and Buy Me A Coffee: You’ll probably notice that the buttons and mention of these “creative support” services have disappeared from my new website. There’s a very good reason for that – I’ll be putting up a video about my experiences and thoughts about them soon, so I’ll save it for then.
• An Unexpected Outcome Of My Academic Writing:Between 2013 and 2023, some of you might know, I wrote and published six interlinked academic papers on the subject of Satanism, Paganism, vampirism and the occult, and specifically on matters affecting these religious beliefs in a South African (and partially international) context.These have received quite a lot of attention over the last decade as it turns out. I’ve received a lot of supportive and positive comments from academics in various fields on these works, and these papers have been cited in something like 400+ papers and studies by others so far, with them collectively having over 1200 readers on the academic site where they’re published.However, I’ve been getting some other, rather strange messages about these papers, and believe me when I tell you, that some messages can be pretty darn strange! I feel I should share something with you – not the messages themselves, but rather the overall gist of them and what they seem to indicate: there’s been a little misunderstanding, at least between a few of the people who have read my papers, and myself.It’s become apparent to me that, at the very least, some people seem to have misunderstood my purposes or motives in writing and publishing academic papers demystifying occult religions, subcultures, beliefs and practices, and criticizing self-appointed or otherwise perceived external experts on those occult beliefs and practices who speak critically from a lack of experience and knowledge in those particular specific fields; my intent in doing so has NEVER been to promote or proselytize any of these religions to anyone – nor, as some have expressed to me in private messages, to provide instructions on HOW to establish occult organizations or groups of their own.I can’t believe I’m having to actually SAY this – but to be blunt: no, I’m not going to help you start your own cult!Rather, my intentions have always been to study and research, to understand these things better for myself – and my involvement in them has been to further my knowledge and experience, the drive behind which is to right wrongs, correct misunderstandings, and to speak out against slander, false information, mischaracterization, defamation, persecution – and for want of a plainer description, blatant lying and fraud committed by individuals using religions other than their own as scapegoats and as the object of witch hunts for whatever nefarious purposes befit their personal agendas.If ANYTHING at all, my personal motives for working to understand religion is to illuminate pathways to help people kick the crutch and to contribute, in my small way, towards the ultimate ENDING of religion, not to favor any one religion over another, nor to perpetuate the pervasiveness, painfulness and continuation of same.

  So no, you guys can start your own cults if you want, you can refer to my work if you must (I can’t stop you), but I’ll only study the results, if any – and probably write about them in future as well.

• Hosting Issues:Back in January, I described how I had to cancel my webhosting and move my website to a free hosting service instead. While over the past few years I had no problems with the old hosting service at all, and found them to be quite accommodating, things changed once I’d cancelled my hosting service. I mentioned earlier that I’d sent an email to the old hosting service to ask them nicely to redirect the domain name I’d paid R400 for, just a month or two before I cancelled my hosting service with them, to my new domain, so there’d be a smooth transition period and traffic looking for my old domain would still find my new relocated website. It sounds like a simple enough request, don’t you think? Well, according to the response I got from Hostking, they won’t do shit for me since I’m no longer a paying customer. I basically have to open a new hosting account with them first, or otherwise I can just go fuck myself!To be blunt, they took my money, they handled the whole transaction to renew my old domain name – not me – and now they’re keeping the money – and while the domain name still has more than 8 months life left to it that I could be using, they’ve just washed their little hands of the whole thing. Too bad, move along, peasant. Kindly bear this smarmy attitude in mind if you have any dealings with Hostking in future.
• Cool Diorama Seen Brings Back Memories: So I saw this diorama in my social media feed this morning, and y’know, watching Magnum as a kid and dreaming of one day being a successful author like “Robin Masters” – who we never meet in the series and is somehow rich enough to let two of his friends live rent-free in his Hawaian mansion (though there’s a suspicion Higgins may actually be Robin all through the series) – I’ve grown to realize I’ll probably never reach anything close to that level of success.For one thing, I write scifi, action and thrillers. Sometimes a touch of horror. I even write non-fiction and academically from time to time. The market is FLOODED these days. It’s the 21st century and everyone has a story to tell and a computer, laptop or tablet to tell it from. Self-publishing is mainstream. AI has flooded the market further with unintelligible and disingenuous garbage sold as actual books, all working in concert to drown out the feint voices of real indie authors.

  

  

  

  Worse yet, it seems most people have stopped reading. Hard to tell, because it seems like I’m always shouting into the Void these days.

  So I write for my own pleasure. That is when I’m not too consumed by watching parts of the world immolate themselves.

  That said, I don’t want or need to become rich. I just want to supplement my income to a point where I don’t have to worry about making ends meet. Is that too much to ask? 🤔 I don’t think so. That said, I think this is a pretty cool diorama that brought back good memories of sitting on the floor in front of our old B&W teevee in the 80s.

  And now I come to the darker, depressing part – my thoughts on current events.

• Watching the world burn: Briefly, since it’s been just nine days since orange Hitler took office in the US, his influence has unavoidably rampaged around the planet – demonstrating for every American who ever questioned foreign critics of US governments previously for not minding their own business – WHY and HOW whatever happens in US politics affects everyone else on the planet in some way or other, and to varying degrees.Thanks to Trumps brutality, and some might say evil(that’d be tempting, wouldn’t it?) people all around the world find their lives in upheaval. Trump Tariffs and threats have escalated into a clearly apparent global tariff war that will likely see the collapse of several countries economies, the USA included – especially with the surgence in BRICS members and countries (even including Japan) seeking actively to de-dollarize their economies to end their dependence on the USA and its whims and imperialistic fantasies.But that’s not why you’re here, is it? You’re here to get news about books by Christina Engela, or about my life… and well, right now – just like everyone else on the planet (who isn’t fighting for their actual survival in one of the many looming regional wars), I’m keeping an eye on the news, watching with fascinated horror, the fall of the American Empire. And make no mistake, the USA is an empire, and again – make no mistake – it is falling.That said, thanks to Trump’s spiteful lashing out like a temperamental fucking toddler who’s been told “no” too often, people all round the world – and even here in South Africa – who were receiving medical treatments via clinics operating on USAID and similar humanitarian funding projects, namely transgender patients, HIV treatments and MSM – have now been abruptly cut off. Clinics have closed. People aren’t receiving treatment, and few have the money to fund paid alternatives. Patients with HIV are likely to develop treatment-resistant HIV if their treatments are disrupted, and will likely develop full-blown AIDS and die as a result – but does the new ‘god-king’ of the USA care? Of course not – he hates not only LGBTQ+ people, but also brown people, foreigners and also his own critics both foreign and domestic everywhere. The only hope in this regard now, is that these individual countries will pick up the slack and assist those in need, indiscriminately – though at short notice, this might still take some time.An oligarchy of servile tech-bros and yes-men now runs the USA, with Elon Musk being the most prominent – even after that shocking display at Trump’s inauguration where he kapped the classic Nazi “sieg heil” salute on stage before the audience – not once, but TWICE. For those of you who may still have some room for doubt (I do not) that what he performed was a Nazi salute, or that Musk is in fact an actual Nazi, you may want to use that computer in your pocket to catch up on the international news and videos covering his recent (thankfully unsuccessful) visit to the UK to meet with British neo-Nazi leader Nigel Farage while looking to sponsor his rise to power there; and his even more recent supportive address given to a congress of the AFD (the modern equivalent of THE actual Nazi party) in Germany.With ICE stormtroopers rounding up and deporting not only so-called “illegals” or undocumented immigrants, asylum seekers and migrant workers – and EVEN actual US citizens (including native Americans believe it or not), and efforts to immediately throw the entire country into total disarray and absolute chaos, the message is clear – this is a blatant grab for absolute power. President for 4 more years was never his goal, because he knows if there were another change in administrations, he would very likely not be able to stay out of jail. So Trump is going all or nothing – he is a man who would be king. At any rate, regardless of which way this goes, make no mistake folks, the USA is really solidly fucked right now.

  In just nine days since taking power, the USA under Trump has alienated all their allies, made enemies of almost the entire world, and sowed the seeds of their complete destruction as a world power. As the country turns its ire inward and vents it on scapegoats such as immigrants,  “liberals” and transgender people, they have ignited a witch hunt that will burn through their society like the Los Angeles wildfires. NINE DAYS and they already have concentration camps – and Trump’s already looking at ways of “deporting” AMERICAN CITIZENS as well. Think for a moment how any country can DEPORT it’s own citizens to other countries. It doesn’t work that way. I’m sure your thoughts right now are probably lingering on the darker possibilities that come to mind – and like you, I think that’s exactly what they mean. Time will tell, of course.

  I’ve been telling everyone on the Nazis shit-list to get to Canada. Right now.ÂUse it, don’t use it… it’s up to you.

  On the international stage, it’s obvious that nobody respects the USA anymore, literally no-one – and aside from reservations about their latent nuclear capability, I doubt anyone will fear them for much longer. It takes resources to wage wars after all, and above all, money – and while the USA is one of the richest nations on the planet, they’ve actively cut their own throats by falling out with every nation that supplies them with the resources they need to remain powerful economically or militarily. It’s pretty obvious that they’re not really much of a “nation” anymore. The divisions run too deep now, and they’ve deepend more than ever over the last decade. And with Trump tariffing the fuck out of his own country’s population on the lie (or misconception) that it will somehow punish other countries, he’s simply isolating his own economy into a corner. It won’t be long before their armies, ships and aircraft are called home, never to leave again. It may have taken another three decades since the fall of the USSR, but the USA’s imperial period has finally reached its end.

  With other nations now feeling less threatened to speak out more openly about US bullying tactics, coups, assassinations and manipulations to suit their own interests carried out on them in the past century, the public realization on the ground that the USA isn’t the good guy it pretends to be – and never was – is finally moving from ‘private sentiment’ to being put on public record.

  The USA is in the throes of a fascist takeover, a white supremacist, totally anti-democratic revolution filled with threats, petty bullying and illegalities. As procedural push-back and resistance becomes increasingly difficult under Trumps efforts to remove all avenues of peaceful resistance to this brutal takeover, this situation may yet boil over into a counter-revolution.

  While I reserve my opinions on which way this will go, or if I think it would be a good thing, let me just say that even if it does, I don’t really see how the USA could ever really recover from even the last nine days of damage – it hasn’t even recovered from the effects of the previous 4 years under Trump yet, and I doubt it ever really will. Since 2016, the USA has been increasingly a pitiable laughing stock, and never more so than when it put the same people responsible for that back in power for a second term.

  So, as you can see, watching history in formation is a pretty fascinating pastime. Terrifying. Horrifying. But entrancing. And I’ll keep watching it until the US government drops a new Iron Curtain (there’s a term I’d forgotten and never thought I’d need to use again!) and pushes its own “official” narrative onto all the international news media it owns, bolsters censorship, cuts off swathes of social media and blocks people speaking out to tell the world what is really happening in the US – and to put a pretty face over the horrors that will unfold behind it, and as always, to try desperately to control the narrative to turn it in their favor.

  It’s already happening. And history needs witnesses, even from outside – for the time that comes after.

• Get Your Boots On: Lastly on this topic, it’s ironic – and dare I say iconic that a poem by Rudyard Kipling entitled “Boots” during his time as a British soldier in the Second Boer War here in , and used as an anti-war protest meme in 1915, is fast becoming a symbol of the contemporary American Resistance. Here in this video, it was dramatized still further with added sound for a trailer for the horror movie “28 Years Later”, making for a particularly harrowing listen. Yes, it makes the audience feel uncomfortable – as it is meant to. Please listen to it anyway.
• A few thoughts on the role played by religion in these bizarre goings-on:Religious fanatics are always the most dangerous – especially when combined with vindictive stupidity. Now however, we have religions fanatics in charge of the world’s most powerful military and the world’s largest nuclear (or is that “nukular”?) arsenal. But from one vision of Hell to another:The way Trump’s followers have so easily adapted their religious zealotry into a cult-worship of Trump, almost as “god” if not actually as, is pretty astonishing – and I think it belies their previous claims to have been Christians at all.(That is, if you pander to notions of whether any particular group has any real claim on who is and who isn’t “Christian”, since when you unpack and dismantle the entire construct of “legitimate Christianity”, there’s really not very much “stuff” to go on and the whole thing when viewed externally is pretty subjective. At any rate, this is just another example of what’s called syncretism – the blending of a religion with another ideology or religion, such as national-socialism for example – or churches that form part of the prosperity theology cult, and end up making something unique and different and akin to neither origin donor ideologies.)Suffice it to say, there’s no way a Christian – at least none I’ve ever known – would ever switch out the identity of their God as easily and as smoothly as these people seem to have – least of all would they exchange an intangible deity for a physical, mortal human being, and even less likely, for a capricious, dishonest and so monstrously flawed a charicature as Donald Trump.The Christian God isn’t the center of their faith any longer – at the godhead now sits Trump – not “sent by god”, as the object of their worship – but as the physical embodiment of their idea of “God”, whose actions match that which they would hope to expect from harsh, angry, cruel and spiteful “God”. And he’s a “god” who coincidentally happens to hate exactly the same things – and the same people – as they do. What a bizarre coincidence, don’t you think?Yes, the thought of this bizarre circus act – and of all the people over there, both the complicit and the innocent – caught in his path, makes my head want to explode.

  And at the heart of all of this absurdity lies the hijacked foundation of Christian teachings – particularly those of evangelical dominionist Christianity, which are relevant here – that no matter what sins you commit, no matter who you hate, no matter how cruel your actions or words, no matter who you kill, or how many – you can still ask forgiveness and you will be forgiven – implying that these people can do absolutely anything, no matter how vile, and be absolved of all guilt… So what is there to prevent them from doing the very worst to those they despise?

  As I’ve said before, the hateful mind can excuse anything.

  We’ve seen this sort of sickening shit before. I think we’re about to see something like it again.

  To close, this is exactly what you should expect to get when your education system becomes so broken that it fails to educate future generations in important subjects like history, folks.

  Class dismissed.

• Escalation of violence in the DRC: Just to say that while I abhor all war, I stand in absolute awe and admiration of the bravery and tenacity of our South African soldiers of the peace-keeping mission in the DRC.
  Staying and fighting and keeping cool heads while others cut and run? What courage, what determination, what dedication.
  No matter what politicians – or others – may say, I’m tremendously proud of you, and proud to be South African.

As always, I’ll keep you posted about any new developments – but bear in mind it won’t be on a regular schedule anymore, but as and when I have something to communicate. So until then, I wish you Auf Wiedersehen and all the best!

Cheers!