Xplisset Substack Sunday Rollup

You People Ruined Me Again. Now Look What We Built.

I did not wall off the free publication. I added rooms to the house.

I’m still a retired Black cop with a keyboard.

No, not the keyboard Stevie Wonder uses. The QWERTY one. I know some of y’all were waiting for the callback. See? I remember the lore around here. This thang got lore now. That is part of the problem.

Back in April, I wrote a Sunday Rollup called You People Ruined Me. I Thank You For It. I meant every word of it. At the time, I thought I was writing a community update, a thank-you note, a nervous confession, and a little XVOA status report before somebody hit the cringe alert button and dragged me off the stage.

Now it is June, and I have to admit something worse.

You people ruined me again.

Because this is no longer behaving like a little Substack project I can keep describing as some retired cop yelling at the news from a keyboard. This thing has started acting like a publication. A desk. A newsroom without the marble lobby. A Black-led memory machine with jokes, bruises, receipts, source notes, bad nerves, good instincts, and a working theory of American power.

I did not dream this thang would be here in one year.

I did not dream the readers would start expecting the work to show up. I did not dream the comments, restacks, paid subscriptions, Coffee support, livestreams, essays, daily briefs, economic audits, author updates, cultural projects, and late-night “what in the entire hell is this country doing now” dispatches would start looking like one living operation.

But here we are.

And I need to say something clearly before I say anything else.

I Did Not Put A Tollbooth On The Free Side

When a publication starts creating paid sections, people get nervous. I understand that. Folks have seen this movie before. One day the thing you loved was free. The next day somebody in a blazer invented “premium access,” locked the doors, dimmed the lights, and told you the crumbs were still complimentary.

That is not what happened here.

I did not take the rooms you were already walking through for free and suddenly put a tollbooth at the door. I did not shrink the free side. I did not wall off the work that brought you here and then act like I was doing you a favor.

I added rooms to the house.

The public side of XVOA is still alive. Blackout Brief Daily is still the front desk. Public essays are still part of the record. Notes, clips, public livestream energy, media critiques, cultural arguments, political dispatches, and the free-facing XVOA desk are still part of the work.

What changed is that the house got bigger.

Paid subscribers are not being charged for what used to be free. Paid subscribers are making possible the work that would not exist otherwise: the deeper source rooms, the economic audits, the transcripts, the afterwords, the extended receipts, the Author Room dispatches, the Director’s Cut records, and the projects that require more time, more risk, more attention, and more room to breathe than the public feed can carry.

Nothing got stolen from the free side.

New rooms got built on the paid side.

That distinction matters to me. Trust matters around here. If I say the public desk is still the public desk, then the public desk is still the public desk. If I create paid rooms, they need to be additional value, not a ransom note.

So let me show you what this house is becoming.

What XVOA Has Become Since April

In April, I was still trying to explain the pieces. Now the pieces have started explaining themselves.

Blackout Brief Daily is the wire service. It is the daily read for people who want the machinery behind the headline: what mattered, what got buried, who benefited, who paid, whose pain got translated into paperwork, and whose power got described as “just process.”

This is not a vibes newsletter. This is not cable news with better seasoning. This is the daily desk where American power gets read from the underside of history.

Blackout eCon Weekly is the paid economic power audit. Not the stock market. Not CNBC. Not “the economy is strong” because somebody’s spreadsheet had a good morning. This is the economy as experienced by Black folks, workers, caregivers, tenants, public-sector employees, women, LGBTQ people, disabled people, rural communities, and everyone official economics keeps treating like background noise.

The economy they report and the economy people survive are not always the same country.

That is why this desk exists.

I Hate The News remains the pressure valve. Public. Sharp. Disgusted. Funny when the country earns it, which unfortunately is damn near every day. That section is where the absurdity gets named without pretending any of this is normal.

Because sometimes you do not need a sermon. Sometimes you need somebody to say, “Do you see this mess too?” Then show you why the mess keeps happening.

The Xplisset Director’s Cut is becoming the room for the full record after the public feed moves on. Full replays, readable transcripts, chapter markers, source notes, afterwords, and the parts of selected broadcasts that need more context than the clean platform version can carry.

Some conversations require a paper trail. Some require a source room. Some require the version that does not have to pretend YouTube’s nervous little copyright gods are the final editors of Black cultural memory.

That is what the Director’s Cut is for.

Author Room is where the novels stop hiding in the drawer. That room matters because XVOA was never only about the news. The fiction is part of the same operation. The news desk reads the machinery of American power. The novels carry the ghosts, the families, the wars, the memories, and the people who have to live inside that machinery.

So yes, the house has rooms now.

That was not the original plan.

But apparently, y’all do not care about my original plan.

The Fundraiser Is Basically Finished

Now let me deal with the operating gap plainly.

The current XVOA fundraiser is down to $10 left towards the goal of $1200.

UPDATE: Goal met. 1200 raised. Thank’s everyone.

Yeah. Ten dollars.

I know that sounds almost too small to mention. But around here, facts are facts, and every dollar has been carrying weight. Ten dollars is not symbolic. Ten dollars is the difference between “almost closed” and “closed.”

This particular fundraiser was never about luxury. It was never about some influencer fantasy where I pretend a ring light and a Canva template turned me into a media empire. This was about keeping the desk from having to choose between producing and panicking.

Those of you who subscribed, gave Coffee, restacked, commented, shared, opened the emails, replied with encouragement, corrected something, challenged something, or quietly kept showing up: thank you.

Seriously.

That support gave this operation a floor when the floor was getting shaky. It bought time. It bought focus. It bought breathing room. It helped move XVOA from “can this keep going?” to “what does this become if it does?”

That is not a small thing.

So yes, if somebody wants to be the person who knocks out that last ten dollars, I am not going to pretend I am too dignified to say it.

UPDATE: Goal met. Thanks everyone.

I am a retired cop with a keyboard, not the ghost of J.P. Morgan.

$50 A Day Keeps The Panic Away

Once this fundraiser closes hopefully today, I want to move away from emergency mode.

Emergency mode is exhausting. It turns every week into a cliffhanger. It makes the work feel like it is always standing too close to the edge of the roof talking about, “Don’t worry, I got balance.”

No, sir. Get off the roof.

So the next plan is smaller, steadier, and more honest:

$50 a day keeps the panic away.

That is the working phrase. It may stay. It may get refined. But the idea is simple. Fifty dollars a day does not mean one heroic soul has to ride in and drop fifty bucks single-handedly, although I certainly would not mind if they did. It can just as easily mean ten people tossing in five dollars that day, or a handful of readers each carrying a little piece of the load. Fifty dollars a day does not make XVOA rich. It does not put a fleet of interns in the imaginary newsroom. It does not get me one of those glass offices where people pretend “strategy” is a personality.

What it does is create a daily operating floor.

It keeps the desk from living in panic. It helps cover the tools, subscriptions, platform costs, research time, production needs, and all the little expenses that add up while everybody on the outside is pretending independent media runs on passion and a Gmail account.

Passion is nice...ok? However....

Passion does not pay for online research tools.

Passion does not pay for software.

Passion does not cover production.

Passion does not keep the lights on when the work starts requiring the kind of consistency readers have every right to expect from a real publication.

So the primary ask remains paid subscriptions:

That is the best way to support XVOA if you want the full desk to keep growing.

And for readers who cannot subscribe but still want to throw something into the collection plate, the one-time backstop remains Buy Me a Coffee:

No slick pitch here. No fake urgency. Just the honest truth right here.

The emergency fundraiser is ending. The operating floor begins next.

I Am Not Abandoning The Readers Who Came Here For Sentences

Now let me say this because I know some of y’all have been side-eyeing the livestreams.

Hell, even I’ve been side eyeing the livestreams and wondering what on God’s earth am I doing in front of a camera. But I digress...

I heard you.

Some of you do not want video. Some of you do not want to chase a timeline. Some of you do not want to download the app, sit in a livestream, catch a clip, follow a Note, or watch me talk to myself while the viewer count acts like it got lost in the woods.

You came here for the writing. I know that. I respect that. And I ain’t abandoning you. The platform is pushing livestreams, Notes, clips, and all the algorithm-friendly tap dancing that makes everybody feel like they have to become a carnival barker with a ring light. Fine. I can use the tools. I can walk into that room, take what helps the desk, and leave the rest of it sitting there looking foolish.

I am a retired cop. I know how to walk and chew gum.

The video desk serves the written desk.

The writing remains the spine.

That is the rule.

Livestreams will help develop ideas. They will test arguments. They will create clips. They will bring new people into the room. They will let me work out loud when the moment requires speed, humor, anger, and immediate witness. But the serious ideas do not vanish into the video feed. The major ones come back to the page. They become essays, reports, source rooms, transcripts, afterwords, and records for the readers who still believe a sentence can do what a clip cannot.

Other people can abandon their readers to chase the glory of algorithm-approved livestreaming.

Not here.

Around here, the broadcast serves the desk.

The desk writes.

My Novel War After War Is Coming To The Finish Line

Before the one-year anniversary, I plan to finish War After War.

No Not think about finishing it.

No Not circle it like a nervous airplane over bad weather.

Finish the damn thing.

That means I am planning a one-week binge-writing sprint to push the manuscript toward the line. Daily updates. Process notes. Excerpts. The mess before the manuscript becomes the manuscript. The breakthroughs. The ugly parts. The scenes that refuse to behave. The sentences that show up like they have been waiting on me to stop making excuses.

That will happen inside Author Room.

Author Room subscribers will get the dispatches from the sprint: what I wrote, what changed, what surprised me, what fell apart, what finally clicked, and what kind of strange psychological weather moves through a writer when the book stops being an idea and starts demanding a body. Why? Because that is what a book does after a while.

It stops asking permission.

It starts knocking things over.

War After War has been doing that for a long time. It is time to stop pretending the knock at the door is background noise.

The Big Cultural Projects Are Coming Too

There are two major projects coming that I need to put on the record now. The first is the Lupita Nyong’o / Helen of Troy project. That is not the final title. Do not hold me to that title. I know better than to walk into a title like that without making it earn its shoes. But the project is coming. This particular one is about mythology, beauty, race, projection, backlash, casting, imagination, whiteness, Black womanhood, and who gets treated as universal when the old stories come back around.

Because listen, the fight over who gets imagined as Helen ain’t really just about Helen, it is about who gets to be beauty without apology. Who gets to be myth without footnotes. Who gets to enter the old stories without the gatekeepers acting like history itself has been vandalized. That one has both livestream and publication potential and listen, for those readers who do not like video, do not worry. The written version will matter.

The second project is the big one that has been sneaking up on me emotionally:

Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean performance at Motown 25.

This ain’t no little nostalgia post and this ain’t no “remember the moonwalk.” post. I am talking about the backstory, the production, the dance mechanics, the direction, the camera angles, the man clapping in the band, the audience, the timing, the glove, the hat, the freeze, the first step backward, the Black cultural memory, and the permanent mark that performance left on Black culture and pop culture.

That performance does something to me. I can watch it right now and get emotional. Tears. Dayum.

And I know why now. It’s because that was not just a performance. That was a threshold. A Black child star walked back into a Motown anniversary special and came out the other side as something America still has not fully figured out how to explain. The Jackson 5 portion says, “Here is where he came from.” Billie Jean says, “Here is where nobody can follow him.”

That right there is the moment. Motown brought America into the room for a celebration of the past. Michael Jackson used the room to announce the future. Not with a press release. Not with a manifesto. With a body so disciplined it looked like escape.

Around here, culture is not a break from power. Culture is one of the places power reveals itself. Culture is where memory hides. Culture is where America sells itself, disguises itself, congratulates itself, and sometimes loses control of the room.

If XVOA can read courts, elections, media, economics, and backlash, it can read a stage.

It can read a camera cut. It can read a moonwalk. It can read the moment a Black body on American television did something the country could not own, reduce, catch, or fully explain.

What Paid Readers Are Actually Funding

Let me say this plainly.

Paid subscribers are not just buying “bonus content.” That phrase is too small for what is happening here.

Paid subscribers are funding capacity.

You are funding the deeper source work. The transcript rooms. The afterwords. The economic desk. The Author Room sprint. The risky cultural essays. The livestream-to-publication pipeline. The archive. The receipts. The time it takes to make this operation reliable enough to be more than a burst of outrage with a logo.

That matters because outrage is easy to produce and hard to sustain. It burns hot, gets applause, and leaves people exhausted. Intelligence has to be built. Memory has to be protected. Receipts have to be gathered. Arguments have to be sharpened. A publication has to become something readers can trust to show up even when the algorithm would rather reward a clown show in a burning suit.

Paid subscribers are not paying for what used to be free.

You are paying for what would not exist without you.

That is the honest value proposition. Not perks. Not gimmicks. Not fake exclusivity dust sprinkled over stale leftovers.

You are helping build the rooms that let this desk grow teeth, memory, archives, and depth.

I Did Not Think Year One Would Look Like This

Here is the confession.

I never dreamed XVOA would be here in one year.

I did not think this thing would have sections that behave like departments. I did not think readers would start talking back to the work like they expected it to live. I did not think the Buy Me Coffee supporters would become a real backstop. I did not think paid readers would make new rooms possible. I did not think a daily brief, an economic audit, a cultural desk, a fiction room, a livestream arm, a satire valve, and a source record would start forming one operation.

I thought I was building a publication.

Turns out the publication was building me back.

Yeah ok that sounds dramatic, I know. Somebody hit the cringe alert button if you must. I can take it. I used to wear a bulletproof vest for a living. I can survive a little emotional honesty on the internet. But it is true and at some point, a man has to stop pretending the thing is small just because he is scared of what it might become.

This thing is bigger than me now.

That is not just false humility. That is the problem. And the blessing.

Because if it was just about me, I could quit on a bad day. I could fold it up, tell myself I gave it a shot, go back to whatever life looked like before this desk started calling my name every morning. But it is not just about me anymore.

There are readers here now. There are supporters here now. There are people who open the emails, reply in the comments, restack the posts, send the Coffee, pay for the rooms, and expect this desk to mean what it says.

That will ruin a man.

In a good way.

So here we are.

The “just” part of “just a retired Black cop with a keyboard” is officially under investigation.

Don’t Do It.

Do not restack just to be cute. Restack this if you truly belive in this work and want it to spread.

Subscribe to support the XVOA publication:

Or throw something in the one-time collection plate here:

BYe.