Hello there, friends and fans! 
It’s June 25, 2025– and here are some things that happened in the meantime!
This Is The Current State Of Things:
General News:I am still awaiting feedback on my Research Proposal handed in two weeks ago. I have an appointment with the Prof on Google Meets this Thursday – and to be blunt, I feel a bit like I’m blundering into a minefield! Yes, it’s nervewracking – but I’m sure it won’t be as bad as my runaway imagination seems to think! I’ll likely be given a list of changes to make, and after another round of editing (and hopefully not complete re-writing) it should be ready for formal submission. Meanwhile, I’ve been working on a few more book reviews to use in my thesis! Exciting times! This is a once-in-a-lifetime journey, and although I’m stressed out, I’m doing my best to enjoy every minute of it!
Current Writing Projects: With my time now fully occupied with research assignments from varsity, I’ll have no time available for writing fiction for the immediate future! At least not until I’ve handed in my PhD thesis sometime next year! (It still doesn’t sound real to me, but yes, it really is happening!) So yes, I decided to give it a rest until I’m done with that whole PhD project. In the meantime, if you like, you can catch up on books you may have missed (there are over 40 of them!) or keep up by bookmarking What’s Brewing?
There we are, all caught up! 
Other Stuff:
Pure Astatine!
So today it arrived…. drum roll please… I hold in my hands actual hen’s teeth… dragon’s gold… pure astatine!
This is the infamous, *almost* impossible to find “special community edition” of the SA Police magazine “Servamus” from 2000.
It may not look like much, but this dreadful magazine was cited in numerous SA papers in criminology, psychology etc. to link occult religions like Satanism and Paganism with criminal behavior, drugs etc. and conflating the two (and other) religions together without supporting evidence.
Anyway, so as this particular magazine was so useful in helping to spread moral panic and undermine religious freedoms in SA, that I wanted to do a review of it to include later in my thesis, but it’s now 25 years old and super rare, and nobody I know or asked, had one.
Anyway, by a stroke of sheer luck and after calling in a few favors from one or two old gods I know, I now have one… and I didn’t even have to bump off that many people to get it! It’s in mint condition too – there’s hardly any blood on it at all!
I’ll be doing a critical review of it soon.
Careful What You Wish For, Kid
Many years ago when I sat playing with my toys on the floor as a child, I was surrounded by stories of war.
I listened to my dad’s recollections of his dad’s experiences in WW1, he fought in Namibia when South Africa took it away from Germany. An uncle of mine ran away from home to join the army during WW2, but just missed the war, never realizing how lucky he was. Another uncle retold his own experiences as a soldier fighting through North Africa into Italy during WW2, traveling on two ships that both got torpedoed in the Mediteranean. A fellow alcoholic friend of my dad’s had been a gunner on a Stuka, and was suitably scrambled – and an upstairs neighbor had grown up during the Blitz in London. There were plenty of good stories to go round.
At 8 years old, I used read war comics and wondered if there would ever be a third World War in my own lifetime. I used to think I could be a hero, if given the chance.
Honestly, as an innocent child playing with plastic toy soldiers, tanks and model airplanes, the prospect seemed thrilling. My own stint in the army was, fortunately, without much incident – though it was during a difficult time in our history.
I’ve always known that war is chaotic and messy, but I never thought that watching the next World War unfolding on live social media feeds would be so predictably dull and yet seem so ordinary.
That said, none of what I’ve said makes any of it less disturbing or less terrifying.
Missed, Amellicano!
The development of the U.S. Air Force’s most advanced bunker buster, the GBU-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator (MOP), cost over $500 million, and it has a very suggestive and impressive sounding name.
This figure covers research, design, testing, and refinement of the weapon, which is engineered to penetrate deeply fortified underground targets – and probably in a very satisfying way. At least, according to all the marketing material.
The manufacturing cost for each GBU-57A/B MOP bunker buster bomb is estimated at around $3.5 million, according to reports from 2013. Bear this figure in mind – it’s going to be important in a minute.
On the US’s recent publicized raid on Iran this past weekend, the bombers apparently dropped 12 of these massively expensive fireworks – at a total cost of $42m. That’s just for the twelve bombs themselves alone, not factoring in the cost of fuel, salaries and deployment monies for the pilots, and ship’s crews for the carrier fleet that brought them to the Middle East.
The US dropped these bombs on what Donnie claimed were “nukular enfrisfhment” centers making nuclear weapons – which not only did Iran not have, but never intended to make in the first place. At least, not until now. Now of course, they’re looking for nukes – and who should blame them? After all, the US would never have the guts to launch a war against a country that DOES have nukes. But again, with the orange buffoon in charge, who knows?
The best part of this whole drama is that the US spent $42m supposedly trying to bomb the enriched nuclear material – which the Iranians had already relocated to somewhere else in March. Aside from barely causing any worthwhile damage, Donnie, the very “stable genius” that he is, sent the US military to bomb something that wasn’t even there.
Imagine the chutzpah it takes to drop $42m worth of military ordnance trying to bomb something that doesn’t exist – and then claiming what a huge success it was anyway.
According to Donnie, “no other military in the world could have accomplished what the US military did” – and he’s quite right. You’d have to go a very long way to find an outfit as inept as that. Somewhere, in a parallel dimension, Star Wars stormtroopers are pissing themselves at his expense.
The weird comedy aside though, imagine what $42m could’ve been used for, other than wasteful destruction on a fool’s errand, to glorify some bloated orange fool’s ego? Something useful – like feeding or housing homeless people, for instance? But who’re we kidding – Donnie doesn’t care about the homeless or the poor. Hell, he doesn’t care about anyone but Donnie.
The End:
As always, I’ll keep you posted about any new developments. Until then, be kind, be strong, take care of each other, and all the best!
Thanks to all of you for your support (you know who you are)! ❤️❤️❤️❤️
