Letters From Nowhere 02/01/26

my favorite outdoors activity is going back inside

Welcome to Letters From Nowhere! My name is Laszlo Tamasfi, I’m a horror writer, translator, game designer, and I run the small press Strangers From Nowhere. Thank you for reading!

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TODAY’S MOOD:

Poking my head outside just long enough to make sure there’s still a world out there…

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Winter finally arrived, and while we didn’t have it as bad as some other parts of the country we still got a ton of snow.

Don’t tell anyone, but I secretly love shoveling snow off our driveway! We did four years of street parking in Chicago*, which was very competitive at a baseline and became really stressful during the winter months**. I used to daydream about having our own driveway so I wouldn’t have to stop traffic while I dug out a spot for my car!

*As much as it sucked it really taught me how to parallel park, and now I can squeeze into a spot that’s just half an inch wider than our car.

**The “dibs system” is immoral and anyone who does it should be ashamed of themselves!!!

CREATIVE WORK

>DOWNLOADERS is a DIY, no-budget, shot-on-a-cell-phone cyberpunk short film I’m currently working on. While parts of it might get recycled into a Kickstarter video for my virtual reality RPG zine, I’m just making it for the joy of creating something.<

I wanted to experiment with different practical filmmaking techniques, so I’m using miniatures, I’m currently building a set in my basement, and somewhere along the lines I decided to even shoot the title cards practically… This is just a few seconds of footage, so don’t expect miracles, but here it is. Made with glow-in-the-dark paint and UV light. Shot on a cell phone.

Sometimes I find it inspiring to put limitations on a project, and for Downloaders I set out to capture everything in camera. We’ll see if I can actually pull it off, considering that parts of the story take place in cyberspace! ***insert “why am I doing this to myself?!?!” emoji***

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Unfortunately I did fall behind with prop-making, it’s been so bitter cold that I couldn’t really spray paint outside. I used some fiberglass on something the other day and it took forever to cure and I’m still not sure that it will sand right. Bummer.

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On the publishing front: a fresh stack of Pod People arrived in the mail the other day, and I have to say that the printer did a fantastic job on a very quick turnaround time. I’ll be hitting the post office on Monday so the book should be back in stock at Indie Press Revolution by next week!

COLLECTING

I picked up a really interesting press kit for the French release of With Teeth:

Printed on glossy, heavy paper. While it’s technically not a folder, I wonder if it originally came with press sheets or photos, because this 4 page format is odd on its own. Either way, it’s a nice artifact of the old machinery behind the release of a major record.

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While I usually reserve this space for my Nine Inch Nails collection, I wanted to show off the Earthling promo baseball cap I scored:

Earthling is my all time favorite Bowie album, and sadly there isn’t a lot of merch to collect for it, and the few promo items that exist (I’m looking at you, full size record store standee) rarely hit the market. This is only the second Earthling baseball hat I’ve seen for sale, and the first one was outrageously priced.

OTHER

WATCHING

Purely out of morbid curiosity we decided to watch the 2009 remake of Night of the Demons, and it surprised us in the best possible way! We expected it to be an empty low-budget cash-grab, but the people who made it clearly cared a great deal… It was far from perfect, it often showed its low budget, but it still worked at the end.

We’re also comfort-watching Grace and Frankie, for the third time, I think. There isn’t a lot of good entertainment about old(er) people, and this one portrays them as three-dimensional characters with desires and humor and agency. It’s a miracle that this show exists and it’s an absolute joy!

INTERESTING THINGS I RAN ACROSS

Krabi (or The Crabs) is a 1976 science-fiction short film by Czech animator Václav Mergl - based on the 1958 short story Crabs on the Island by Anatoly Dneprov - about a military experiment involving self-replicating robots. It’s really haunting, and it’s worth watching just for the really imaginative robot-crab evolution sequence alone!

I mean, look at these guys!

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I’m not particularly interested in wild theories about ancient civilizations, because they’re often built on misunderstood (or false) facts and to make it worse, they often funnel people towards right wing conspiracy theories. So a quick disclaimer: this is not that kind of a video!

This feels like a really satisfying theory on how the Great Pyramids were constructed, presented by an actual architect. Highly recommended!

Dami Lee also has a very thoughtful video-essay about the architecture of cyberpunk cities.

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Trash Theory has a fun video about Hobo Humpin’ Slobo Babe.

Also, if you ever needed proof that the first half of the ‘90s was ruled by alternative music, this won Video of the Year at the first MTV Europe Music Awards! ***insert “clutching my pearls” emoji***

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And to completely change up the vibe, here’s something somber to chew on: what’s going to happen to the Voyager space probes once they leave our solar system? In short, they will keep drifting through deep space, forever, and they’ll most likely be the last bit of proof of our existence in the universe after we’re long gone, billions of years from now.

I find this thought strangely comforting and absolutely terrifying at the same time.

Which somehow seems like an appropriate beat to end this newsletter on, so… Thank you for reading Letters From Nowhere! You can find me here, feel free to follow me on social media and I’m always happy to hear feedback.

POST-CREDITS SCENE