While We Wait: Wine and Entertainment Around Substack
The big rebrand is still percolating, so in the meantime....
It’s easy to fall into the mindset that you can’t post small things until bigger things are “ready”.
A thing being “ready” is kind of a Platonic ideal, something that’s never actually true, a state that’s never actually reached. You can be too unprepared, certainly, but you and that thing, whatever it is, will never be “ready”, full-stop. I have to fight that mindset so, so hard.
Now, we don’t actually have our new podcast ready to air - that’s the too unprepared part - but I can definitely still post about what other people have been writing while I’m working on my own shinola. So here’s some of the best stuff on Substack, at least in my opinion, amongst what I read this past week and change:
How Neo-Prohibitionists Came to Shape Alcohol Policy
at writes about possibly the biggest news currently hitting the alcohol industry and notably wine in particular:Right at the top, Tom posts a link to Felicity Carter’s mind-blowing work of old-school journalism: How Neo-Prohibitionists Came to Shape Alcohol Policy. Here she lays out how global policy on alcohol suddenly and bafflingly became something the sciene around the subject doesn’t support: that no amount of alcohol is safe to drink.
This flies in the face of the “J” curve of cardiovascular health benefits of low-to-moderate alcohol comsumption, where the line of complete abstinence is less safe than when you drink in low to moderate amounts.
Teetotalers have overall less life expectancy and health than those who drink some. The line dips down, and only as regular consumption of alcohol increases does it hook back up and rise, eventually passing the neutral level of teetotalers and then getting worse as alcohol cosumption becomes high/abusive.
In recent years, the World Health Organization started showing the above graph with the bottom part chopped off, showing only where the line rises, on the right-hand part of the above graph, saying this was all that any alcohol consumption did.
The WHO also raised the spectre of alcohol potentially causing certain cancers, which is true, it can cause cancer, though as far as we know only in extreme consumption and only in some cases. To present this as “no amount of alcohol consumption is safe” is simply not something the sciene supports.
So where was this new stance and message coming from?
Felcity unraveled and reveals the group behind this new messaging in her article linked above. It’s depressing, at least mildly shocking, and you should absolutely read it. You can also listen to her talk about it in full on Elizabth Schnieder’s WINE FOR NORMAL PEOPLE.
How a Comic Writer Talks to Their Artist (and Vice Versa)
There’s been a fair bit of controvery going on in the Comics landscape recently, too, though nothing as crazy global as the bloody WHO coming after anybody. But lots of conversations about how to behave as a public figure and icon, how to behave as an outraged social media public, how to talk about and deal with an act of suicide - truly, it’s been a few weeks in the comics world.
On a somewhat lighter but connected note: someone on social media tried to call out a popular DC Comics writer for being lazy. They showed a page of his somewhat svelt script next to the same page of the finished art, claiming that the artist was doing all the heavy lifting.
Indie Comics guru and comics writing machine
wrote up this glorious post on how writers and artists communicate, how a comic scipt is a note to your artist. It will be robust or slim, detailed or sparse, entirely depending on the project, your artist’s preferences, your dynamic together, and/or if it’s a first issue of a brand new idea (which requires a lot more detail) or a whatever issue of yet another Batman (which requires very little, most visual ideas have already been estabilshed.)Chianti vs. Chianti Classico
One of the my fave educational posts about wine this week was
’s write up about Chianti over at her .I went a looooooooooo(*breath*)ooooooong time not realizing that “Chianti” and “Chianti Classico” were two different things. Or, well, they’re the same thing, but two distinct versions of that thing, from two distinct regions. The short of it is: Classico is the OG Chianti. When the region exapnded to meet increased demand, the new areas - which were not as optimal for growing Chianti-style Sangiovese - were called simply “Chianti” (no “Classico”).
So is regular Chianti worth it? What really is the difference? Check Eveline’s post to find out!
Lastly! DAMSEL: Movie vs. Book!
Have you seen the NETFLIX movie DAMSEL yet? The female Dragonslayer, as many think of it? Starring Millie Bobby Brown?
Did you know there was a novel, too? That was written after the screenplay?
wrote the novel for Netflix to coincide with the movie, but interestingly, Netflix believed that the novel could be its own thing, a version of the story that worked best as a novel, while the movie could be a version that worked best as a movie.The result was a film and novel that are remarkably different from each other even though the screenplay came first. Evelyn wrote all about the experience of writing it and the reasons for the differences in
’s :Th-th-that’s all, folks! I’ll be back with announcements later this week!