Hotel Paintings

2025 in Review

2026-01-01T00:00:00Z

What a year! I was able to have a sizable holiday break and didn't travel at all during it, either, but I still feel kind of wiped out. I lost a tooth! I got my first (three) tattoo(s)! While I didn't make any big, visible moves like I did in 2024 with releasing my novel (which is now available as an ebook), I do feel like I kept kind of too busy. I finished writing/revisions on a subsequent project known as Novel(la) 2 for now, and am in the early phases of writing the concept that came to me and took over to be Novel 3.

Plaintext Distro also had a great showing this year. We tabled at zine fairs in Glasgow, York, Edinburgh and (our first international event) Dublin! There's also SEVEN new zines by myself and others that the distro stocks this year. But doing so many events was really tiring and also flagged issues I hadn't foreseen on years where we did fewer and smaller events. So we may opt for a slower year in 2026 in terms of events, but maybe do more with sending stuff to stockists? Hmm...

We went to a lot more gigs and tried some new foods (finally finding some decent tacos in the UK!), basically just trying to enjoy the finer things in life more. I also gave a talk on the uncanny abundance of noncommercial games at Glasgow Games Soapbox and later added a cleaned up version to my writing portfolio... this was just before the attempt to rebrand YIMBY shit as "abundance" was kicked off but it seems like those guys fell off the edge of the Earth shortly afterwards and no one cares so I refuse to change my own terminology.

Glasgow Independent Games Festival was a treat this year and will hopefully bring a lot of deserved buzz to the city. I wrote about the highlights of the festival selections for me here. It was also cool to be invited to Melos and Liz's Unearthed Treasure Room stream, where instead of the same 5 boring games everyone's going to be talking about regardless they showed video clips with critical essays for games from the past few years that may have been overlooked. I had fun talking about fotocopiadora's greasemnk.

While I enjoyed myself a lot, and also put myself out there for a lot of new things, I was definitely toying with burnout and exhaustion more. The long tail of the company I work for being bought out by Americans finally hit, and now what was once a boring job, but at least related to a particular task, is now a disorganized mess where I have to battle to get anyone to explain anything to me or provide even basic training in the name of "breaking up silos" lol. So that has definitely contributed to burnout but, hey, if you need anyone with my bizarre combination of writing/editing/CMS/light coding skills... I am going to start really looking for a new job in the new year.

And now… onto the main sections:

Books Read:

You can find full reviews for all the books here in my #books tag! As usual, an asterisk (*) means I especially recommend them.

The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil (*)
Gabriel Knight: The Beast Within by Jane Jensen (*)
Mario and the Magician and Other Stories by Thomas Mann
Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come by TJ Clark (*)
The Saucerian by Gabriel McKee (*)
Comedy Against Work by Madeline Lane-McKinley
A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes
The Foundation Pit by Andrey Platonov
Sleep Has His House by Anna Kavan (*)
We Always Treat Women Too Well by Raymond Queneau (*)
A Single Man by Christopher Isherwood
Spring Flowers, Spring Frost by Ismail Kadare (*)
Nosferatu The Vampyre by Paul Monette
Swann's Way by Marcel Proust (*)
Jakob von Gunten by Robert Walser (*)
Beyond Black by Hilary Mantel (*)
Flight to Canada by Ishmael Reed (*)
A Pictorial Tour of Unarius by the Unarius Educational Foundation
Marat/Sade by Peter Weiss
The Aesthetics of Resistance Volume I by Peter Weiss (*)
Women's Rites by Jeanne de Berg
Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard
Vineland by Thomas Pynchon (*)
Inland Empire by Melissa Anderson
Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon (*)
The Planetarium by Nathalie Sarraute (*)
The National Telepathy by Roque Larraquy (*)
A Breath of Life by Clarice Lispector
The Hole by Hiroko Oyamada
Please Kill Me by Gillian McCain and Legs McNeil (*)
Berlin Stories by Robert Walser
Within a Budding Grove by Marcel Proust

That's a lot of stars... and even then I had to be pretty strict on enjoyment criteria to not just like... star everything haha. It was a really good year for reading (my thirst for large modernist tomes remains voluminous) and the only book that didn't really work for me as much as I wanted it to was Comedy Against Work.

I read a combination of fiction and nonfiction that I thought would get me in the stylistic and thematic headspace for novel 3 (the Mann short story collection, Beyond Black, The Saucerian, A Pictorial Tour of Unarius, Heaven on Earth and A Lover's Discourse... phew!) with other books that just kind of caught my fancy. I cracked three massive modernist projects: The Man Without Qualities, The Aesthetics of Resistance and In Search of Lost Time, and finished one of them. I also read a lot of stuff in translation. Roque Larraquy's The National Telepathy was a total surprise that lived up to the crazy pitch, and my main rec from this year if anyone asks me for a random read. It was, of course, an uncharacteristically lively year for Pynchonians and I found the two relevant works of his I read, Vineland, loosely adapted to film, and Shadow Ticket, his new one, to be vivid, hilarious, and politically relatable books for "the current moment" (or forever), whether they're set in 1985 or 1932.

I have a feeling Lanark is going to be the next big book I try to conquer, but I also have The House on Via Gemito as well as Doctor Faustus, as loath as I am to deplete the number of "major" Mann works I have left. I'll continue on to Volume 2 of The Aesthetics of Resistance and Volume 3 of In Search of Lost Time eventually, but I kind of need a break from serial works that require you to remember a ton of people lol. I have some Bernhard novellas and the reprint of Robert Gluck's Jack the Modernist that I got from my partner lying around for immediate reading.

Gigs/New Music:

The full list of gigs I went to this year with sample tracks of the music is in my #gigs tag. But here are some highlights:

It was amazing to start off the year with a Spirit of the Beehive gig, a longterm fav band of mine. Erotic Secrets of Pompeii was one of those bands I went to go see on the strength of the name and a single, but it was an amazing night. Their latest full album is also out now and worth checking out! DITZ was the highlight of the core. festival billing for me. OSEES over the summer was also a great night and fantastic way to check off a bucket list band. Bikini Body, Negative Blast and Party Dozen were all new-to-me bands that blew me away.

As for new music I didn't get to go see, Guerilla Toss returned with a new album, and I'm praying for UK tour dates next year. The incredible P.E. (featuring ex-members of Pill), also returned with a new one, but since it's their "last" I'm not sure they're touring (RIP). I have been listening to Media Puzzle, Greg Wheeler and the Poly Mall Cops, Selfish Teammate, Segundos Auxilios, Self Improvement and Good Ramen nonstop thanks to recs from the see/saw newsletter. I'm also looking forward to Earth Tongue and Together Pangea (who I will forever regret skipping a UK gig back in 2015) putting out new stuff in the new year.

Best New Watches:

I still love watching movies in Zone every week. It's crazy it's been running for over five years now, basically uninterrupted. This year I had a pretty clear list of top 10 new watches that came together in my mind, plus 5 I wanted to give an honorable mention. You can see the list here. It's pretty evenly split between ones I first watched in Zone and watched on my own or with Stephen.

I've been thinking a lot about Slacker for how it presents a world where almost everyone has their own intellectual or creative project going on, but also the sense in which that is a world of precarity and threat at the same time, Excalibur in terms of theatricality and melodrama, and To Live and Die in LA for just... well... going for it. Alligator meanwhile is just a huge winner in terms of giving you exactly what you want from a film about a giant alligator eating people. I also really loved the intensity and unconventional animation style of 100 Meters. And like I would be remiss not to mention the new Pynchon novel, it was also exciting to see another master return to full length films with Koji Shiraishi's Kinki.

Domino Jams:

In April, Domino: Declassified dropped. For this jam, I worked with Freya on IT CAME FROM THE ORGONE CHAMBER, a dual-perspective visual novel that was influenced by the look of old PC-88 text games like Mirrors and gave me the chance to use the cool retro text game-y engine Freya develops, Videotome. Given the theme of aliens and the unknown, plus having the music video for Cloudbusting on my mind, we decided the plot would be something like, how weird would it be to go meet someone you were dating's parents and one of them is like, a hardcore orgone believer or something. I don't want to give away much more of the plot from there except to say that I wrote the hapless girlfriend who's embarrassed by her weirdo father side of things. It was really fun! I liked passing scenes back and forth with Freya and figuring out what was going to happen, plus I think Videotome is a really great looking and easy to use engine too.

And then in October the games for the appropriately-spooky Boneyard Jam were revealed. For this one I tried making a ridiculously ambitious combination visual novel and janky powerwashing simulator parody that was exploring some ideas about utopia and the role of culture that had been kicking around in my head, especially with being exposed to the joyously bonkers work of Charles Fourier. The result is ECART ABSOLU: Domino X: A New Soap. Stephen helped me a lot with Godot dev and programming since this was my first time working in 3D. We also both got sick towards the end of it which explains a lot of the slapdash elements in the final product that might have been quick fixes had we had a little more time or been less foggybrained. I think it's cool how it turned out, but I also totally wore myself out in the process, and unlike the Videotome game I made with Freya, I think it has some clear limitations and bugs. Still, I put a lot of personal passion and interest into it. I might make a cleaned up and web-embeddable version in the new year. Please give it a shot!

2025 Resolutions:

My resolutions for 2025 were to refurbish my website by changing up the formatting and adding RSS, practice skating more, practice drawing more, and do a collab for at least one Domino Club project, since I always felt a little jealous of what other people could accomplish and the fun they seemed to have collabing.

For the first one, I didn't do a ton of work on my main website, but I did totally revamp this blog with Strawberry Starter and made it RSS compatible. I've taken the slightly lazy solution of linking to this site as a RSS feed for my work, since whenever I add something new there I'm likely to post about it here, and I'm thinking of transitioning that site to more of a static writing portfolio than blog.

I'm still not, like, good at skating lol. I got to practice a bit when it was nice out this summer but I think I need a place that is both smoother and has less foot traffic than the street in front of our flat to really improve. It's hard because I also don't really want to practice when it's rainy or cold, which, well, Scotland, lol. But I did give it a good try.

Regular drawing nites with Stephen (and then we go out to a pub after!), really helped me to start getting a handle back on my drawing skills this year. I enjoy doodling a lot more, feel like I've visibly improved a bit, and also was able to draw all the sprites for our Domino X project. We're going to try to keep this up in 2026 as well!

And I exceeded my final goal, both of my Domino Club games were collabs! But still, they kind of felt in both cases that they got away from me a bit with the scope of the writing and came down to the wire anyways. Ha Ha. Oh well, it was still a fun experience even if it wasn't like, yay half the work, or I don't have to do the tricky parts.

2026 Resolutions:

So what are my resolutions for the new year?

For one, I'd like to try to post something in the #zines tag I added at least once every other week. While I love slinging zines as Plaintext Distro and volunteering at the Zine library, I have a growing stack of zines I've acquired in purchases or trades at events, and I want to highlight some of the cooler things that are out there.

And second, a big one for my long-term sanity, is to set aside time to look for and apply to new jobs once a week. I gotta do it, because I think it's wearing down my ability to do anything else to stay in my current job.

Third, and this may be a risky one to make, but I do want to try to get to a beginning-to-end draft of Novel 3 by the end of the year. I've been dreaming and researching a lot, but I still don't have a complete throughline yet. I feel like this will require making sure I set aside regular time for writing and thinking of writing. Which leads into the next one...

Finally, kind of a counter-intuitive goal, but I want to skip a Domino Club jam this year. Or at least skip making something new for one, since I still love playing what everyone makes and participating in the awards show. But there have now been 10 jams and I've made something for every single one! I always talk about how I love the flexibility of the group, how people can make stuff as they feel or not, and now it's time for me to put my money where my mouth is, I think, since I really want to make serious headway on Novel 3 this year.

So ends another year-in-review blog. I really like writing these as a sort of ritual to both remember everything about the past year and set my priorities for the new one. There's been a lot more discussion of the Return of Blogging and I have to say I basically endorse it at this point because Bluesky is lethally stupid, no one seems to want to put effort into using Mastodon, and even the worker owned, co-op, whatever sites will not actually discuss anything that falls too far from the commercial art slop of the week trough.

But you've already heard all this from me a million times. Still: let's all blog! It's so much more interesting. Using a static site generator and template like Bagenzo's Strawberry Starter has made managing my blog so much smoother and fun to fiddle with and add features to. Bimbo may be offering some features in the future that make it even more easy. Let's all blog!

Ok, that's all from me... thank you for continuing to read my blog! Hope you had a very restful holiday season and see you in 2026!

‘Horny’ is not sufficient!

2025-09-26T00:00:00Z

This blog post is a slightly refined version of thoughts I've been feeling out in local-only posts on timetheft.social. Part of these thoughts/frustrations obviously come from trying to sell stories/a novella with sexual-but-not-sexy content in the current insanely competitive paid SFF publishing market (though if you are interested in that, hiiii); so yeah, maybe my work does just suck lol. That's a possibility. But I also see this a bit in indie games (a field I am totally outside of paid/publishing opportunities for) and do kind of feel like I'm giving something no one really wants in a different way than putting out work without this content, so I thought I'd try to articulate that. Anyways:

One of my favorite obscure theory beef stories is related in this LRB article about Alain Robbe-Grillet:

At the party for Barthes’s 1977 inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, Foucault confronted Robbe-Grillet: ‘I have told you this already and I will say it again, Alain: when it comes to sex, you are, and always have been misguided!’ Barthes rose to his defence, reminding Foucault that Robbe-Grillet was, at the very least, a pervert. Foucault replied: ‘Ça ne suffit pas!’

This is funny to me because while I get where Foucault is coming from as like an intensely practicing gay guy, I actually do think it can be sufficient to be particular types of pervert. As others have infamously noted, it's a position that implies a unique and intense form of attention that exists outside norms or acceptability. And that's cool and interesting to me, it often "brings the juice" to a work of art/literature/etc/whatever. But one thing I have started feeling is insufficient in the sense Foucault means here is the concept of "horniness."

Generally, I think the parts of both SFF publishing and indie games that I feel most adjacent to in terms of like, friend groups, media we talk about, places I submit my work etc., consider themselves very socially liberal and chill about sex and sexuality. And I think that's true in a sort of, representational variety of characters sense, but sometimes it's frustrating how it doesn't go deeper than that.

I feel like there's still a lingering anti-porn, sex-negative reactionary "feminist" influence on "socially liberal" spaces that makes more grounded and ambivalent depictions of sex lives feel inappropriate or excessive or "problematic." Or maybe it's also a reaction against seeing the golden age style horniness/sex scene in SF as corny, gross, objectifying, dudebro. (In a way, strictly negative experiences feel more acceptable so long as they're properly morally framed.) It's too risky or too potentially gauche to pay for, at least. But we don't want to be prudes either, so the safer stand-in for this stuff is horniness.

Contemporary SFF and indie videogame scenes are alike in kind of creating fanservicey characters across the spectrum of gender and sexuality that they know people will have a horny response to and present them in a way that encourages that. It feels like this is where a lot of people stop and think that's representing sex or sexuality.

One step further, there can be like, eroticized metaphor in a speculative context (magical fusion, knights stabbing each other etc) that's idealized to the point of being near-jerkoff material too, and that's also mistaken for sexuality. Not to say either of these things are wrong or "bad writing" or whatever, I like some stuff that fits the bill. But when any realistic or grounded depiction of sex seems basically absent, they start to stick out as insufficient and annoy me.

I write characters who have sex for reasons that are maybe a little unusual by these standards and not life changing or total devotion or True Love. And the sex itself can also be like, clumsy, weird, underwhelming etc rather than this beautiful expression of poetic intensity and fire/ocean wave metaphors. Because that's what's interesting and specific about relationships to me, it's not just you find True Love and then everything about it is Perfect... (and the expectation of that can ironically be a form of pressure that ruins relationships!)

Sometimes it feels like you're only allowed to use those really one-note depictions of idealized/abstracted sex or sexuality, and people who are satisfied with it don't really understand how that's eliding or excluding a lot of the narrative/character function of sex and relationships... but then I may be expecting like, Pynchon-style characterization and symbolism and psychology via weird sex from a commercial/entertainment context.

But like, isn't that something to aspire to?

Trying to sell stories/a novella that has some pretty banal sex scenes in them to establish character psychology and relationships to SF markets right now kind of feels like being in this disorienting situation where it's totally ok to be like "This character FUCKS, they are HOT and they're always HORNY and talking/thinking about what they like" but as soon as you describe n non-hotties in an emotionally ambivalent situationship where any number of them may kind of suck you're some kind of pervert forcing your seedy porno on people. And don't get me started on how no erotica/off-page only clauses on submission guidelines make me feel, ha ha. Though again, disclaimer that my work may just suck.

But, ok, my larger point completely removed from the quality of my own work (though if your curiosity is piqued by this blog post: hello). This kind of stuff being represented is what I really like about Domino Club and many free itch VNs that have come out recently but there is, tellingly, basically no market for anything like this, outside of skinny depressed heterosexual women doing it tremblingly in lit fic. And I'm here to say: THAT IS NOT SUFFICIENT!! To me :)

Glasgow Indie Game Fest Highlights

2025-08-17T00:00:00Z

GIGF returned this year, bigger than before, and in a new venue, the Barras Art and Design center in the middle of the Barras market. And it was crammed! The venue had a great bustling energy all day like the market just outside, and all the talks and workshops were in high demand, so I skipped some which I knew would be popular (like V’s Downpour workshop), to make sure everyone got a go. It seemed like almost every game was also busy the majority of the time, so some on my list I only had to go off watching someone play.

It was a really great day that also reminded me of something James (who is part of the GIGF team) and I talked about after a Games Soapbox event earlier this year, that Glasgow is one of those places where it feels like so many people you talk to have some sort of creative side project, whether it be games, writing, or music, and the city also has so much infrastructure, like Good Press for print distribution, its many many music venues, and Glasgow Zine Library, which makes these projects feel like they can exist in the world and have an audience. GIGF and the Glasgow Games Soapbox and meetups now join all these other things in my mind.

But the other thing about Glasgow is it can kind of feel distant from “arty” “capital” cities, and, generally, people don’t seem to pursue their projects out of the desire to “move up” or catch the attention of more “official” culture. This is good, in the sense that it feels lively for its own sake, rather than just to decide who “makes it,” cashes in their local clout and moves to the big city, versus who doesn’t. It’s a drawback in the sense that I think, because we don’t tend to act like we “need” anywhere else, it also makes Glasgow quite underrated. I’m over going to London for things, but people don’t seem to know why they should come to Glasgow, lol.

GIGF used to be the Southside Games Festival, which was held in a pub 10 minutes from my flat, which probably had room for about 20 people. Now that it has developed into something way bigger, I hope the buzz will make it an event more people are willing to travel for, while still retaining the unique focus. I think this focus is epitomized by the games that stood out to me from this year:

Asterism - Claire Morwood’s talk on using craft materials for game graphics was really informative and inspiring, and you can see the great-looking results in Asterism. The structure of the game is a collection of scenes that use the different craft mediums, ranging from crochet to paper collage to clay, with each set to a music track from an album released alongside the game. I love this sort of gameplay/music synchronization and the visual style is very fun and unique too.

Daemonologie - When the trailer for this one showed that the Witchfinder’s two options for interacting with any character was either TALK or TORTURE I was kind of sold, though it also really amps up the creepiness factor with body horror inflected, stop motion style cutscenes between each day. I ended up handing over the guy I found most annoying to the hangman, and the ending didn’t offer much resolution (probably how it played out many times in history lol) but the game seems to encourage multiple playthroughs to fully understand the situation, so I’m excited to go back and explore it more.

Faceminer - This is a really unique and stylish incremental game that definitely nails both the Windows 95 aesthetic and mind-numbing automation-adjacent job mechanics. While you start out manually facilitating automatic face detection, your operation gradually expands to automating both the classification and generation of face data, pouring your own pay back into PC upgrades and power costs to underwrite working even more. It’s a fun take on the dynamic of so many shitty jobs that maay just also be shitting up the planet…

Ginger - This is the kind of game I would usually say seems like a risky choice for an exhibition or showcase, because it’s so huge (a whole dictionary to page through!) and so opaque in terms of what you’re meant to do. The controls simulate a granular control of parts of the mouth and breath, and more unfolds as you manage to pronounce words from the dictionary. I think it really is a merit of GIGF not only that they’d show a weird game like this, but that the attendees were really intrigued and eager to engage with it. Another example of how you can get away with more than you think sometimes.

How a Body Sounds - A game about performing a strange ritual in a quiet little town that uses the Game Boy Color’s visual and audio limitations to great effect. This one was my pick for the best game of the show, because it gave me that wonderful sense of mystery and dream-logic that I love so much about games, which I can only sum up as “chulip-like.”

I Write Games Not Tragedies - I didn’t get to play this one because it was busy basically the whole festival! But what I did get to spy over people’s shoulders was a hilariously on-point VN with occasional rhythm game interludes that’s not just a nostalgic look back at the dramas of growing up in the early 00s, but also a reflection on the intense emotions and experiences of your teen years that can feel equally a relief to get away from and inaccessible as you get older. I’m excited to play the whole thing when it’s out!

Rainy Day Racer - This one I had played a bit of before the festival. I am totally shit at driving in games and in real life so I really can’t pull off any of the best times or more nimble drifts you can do in this game, but I do love the feeling of just driving around in the rain, seeing a low-poly but super characterful version of Glasgow go by.

Next year, there’s tentative plans to have the festival over multiple days to expand the program and help with the demand issues, which I think is awesome. I’m looking forward to it a lot, and if you’d like to come along too you can sign up for the newsletter on the GIGF website!

And in terms of housekeeping around here, I’ve also been adding things to the #books mini feed as well as the most recent gig I went to. I’ve also added the first issue of the ZINE REVUE to the #zines feed, just one zine mentioned this time but as I work through the stack of ones that have been piling up next to my desk hopefully each entry will include more! Laterzzzz

Eroticism Forever!

2025-07-28T00:00:00Z

Wouldn’t it have been interesting if instead of delisting anything tagged “adult,” “NSFW,” or “erotic,” regardless of whether it was commercial, PWYW, or free, itch.io had decided to avoid payment processor scrutiny by pausing payments for everything that has a set price? Of course, by now it’s too commercialized as a site for this to work, but it’s not like there’s no precedent for this.

I joked that what we really needed as a contingency plan against this was a Philome.la for Videotomes… but given how many noncommercialized sites and hobbyist communities have played a real role in keeping controversial work alive, it may not be a totally dumb idea…

My games that got got by the delisting are all through Domino Club (which you can no longer access the itch page of in the UK, a really hilarious compounding incident), none have been straight up removed yet, though I’m aware of it happening, and for pretty arbitrary/benign stuff. The thing that unites all my games that were delisted seems to be just using the “erotic” tag, which is interesting; for me it is more an indicator of the tone and sensibility of the work than whether it has real or simulated nudity or sex scenes.

I picked the “erotic” tag for games like Choir Medals to get at the feeling & context I’d like people to approach it with, how to consider how it deploys sensory detail, for example, and also to signal that it’s for a more adult audience. Vault 819, Underground and Horses are now Obsolete have more explicit references to particular fetishes, despite being mainly goofy or introspective. But again, sometimes desire takes these forms. Perverseoverride has the roughest and most explicit sexual content, but even then, it’s “just” a linear text game, you’re not enacting or seeing any of the sexual content.

Compared to other Domino Club games that got delisted, I sometimes feel like I’m jumping into the fray on this a bit selfishly; why had I even put an “erotic” tag on some of these in the first place? They’re not graphic and most only have like, a whisper of sexuality compared to other Domino Club games. But I also find the “Huh? My thing didn’t DESERVE this!” response kind of tedious. Because what is “actually deserving” honestly usually has more value to me.

I’m defensive of fetish art specifically because it often seems like the purest expression of someone pursuing something out of their own fascination (and fighting uphill to distribute it!) in a context where creativity is increasingly encouraged to conform to financial and algorithmic incentives. You wouldn’t want to be a loser putting stuff out no one will see or pay you for, right?

Payment processor regulations also make fairly arbitrary fetish content (which may not even involve, for example, penetration or nudity) much more regulated than the tasteful normie sexuality expressed in a glimpse of boob or sex scene of a mainstream film. And why? Well, because religious authoritarians (who may or may not couch their objection in terms of a “feminism” that seems to only extend as far as claiming a paltry feminine expertise on disgust) find it basically gross. There’s all sorts of social motives for this disgust, from invisibilizing queer people to cutting back on sex ed until more people end up pregnant younger and stuck in unhappy normative relationships and plenty others, I’m sure.

Fetishes and the erotic are very rarely about or encouraging the so-called “sacred” procreative “purpose” of sex; some themes, like incest, especially how it appears in gothic contexts, force our attention to how the family structures society and our lives, often by literalizing or perverting its ideals. To me, work that confounds the dreary view of life and pleasure handed to us by religion, the state, normative gender roles etc., is the art that allowed me to build a life worth living.

It’s work that’s compelling because it gets at unknown horizons of desire and pleasure that reiterate alternate possibilities. Of course this work often expresses pain that goes overlooked by mainstream culture (and this is what many have said in defense of games that are, for example, a serious take on the aftermath of sexual assault), but it is just as much imagining an alternative future where this pain becomes speakable.

But… just don’t tag it “erotic,” right? See what you can get away with. There’s been a lot of tactical discussions around tagging and content warnings in the wake of this stuff as well, especially since it seems like the tag system determined which games were delisted and additional scrutiny has been on the basis of keyword searches, ie, the most well-intentioned “CW: incest.”

In an ideal world we’d all tag and CW with shared understanding that this would mean it was easy for everyone to avoid things they didn’t want to see or find things they did. I’ve put CWs on some of my Domino Club games, and we’ve even gotten into the philosophy of CWs as “advertising” for the true sickos. Most of the time it does feel like a nice gesture, but it’s also being used to target work for this type of censorship and harassment. People who are the most careful are also the ones who leave themselves open to be the most punished.

It’s hard to express complicated feelings about CWs out of the idea that you’re amorphously harming or upsetting someone by excluding them. That said, I do think I am mentally moving away from them. I decided not to have a CW page for my novel, for example… there’s some potentially upsetting elements but, in the case of Martin’s father, who is implied to be an alcoholic who resents being stuck with his son while also having a pattern of making inappropriate passes at his girlfriends, this is layered in with memories and dialogue relating to things happening “off-screen,” rather than being directly depicted in a culminating moment. It contributes to the overall uneasy tone of the book but is hard to define. There’s also parts that are a bit gross, but a CW for “gore” I felt would misrepresent their surreal and monster-movie inspired qualities for something more Saw; the other thing about CWs is they kind of make you imagine the worst possible form of what could be a minor or passing element of a narrative.

Plus, I think it’s kind of impossible to predict what will get to you most about a work. Even though there’s only casual drinking in More Bugs, over the process of writing it I did end up having a serious moment with myself about how I used drinking as a form of masking or numbing in social situations, not at the levels of alcoholism but definitely in a way that was causing me emotional self-harm. I only realized this by examining what I had written in the book. I don’t think it’s the kind of thing you can CW for unless we’re going as overprotective as the ESRB.

Similarly, in my review of Beyond Black I wrote about how I found the constant belittling and bullying the main character faced for her weight to be really upsetting and bring back some of my own experiences vividly. In a way, because Al was so humanized and we stuck close to her perspective for the whole book, this repeated pattern hurt more than the dismissive way an incidental fat character is typically written about in litfic, and that I can usually dismiss as being skinny metropole woman nonsense. Two very different effects.

I feel uncomfortable coming up with a CW list for my current novel as well, because it feels like so many of the descriptors will just… validate? provoke? people’s existing discomfort with descriptions of explicit sex acts, rather than “dragon and dolphin” style scenes as romantic climax, especially in a field as crazily sex-negative as SFF publishing, where most submissions calls are several degrees more exclusionary and discouraging on “controversial” content than even the most uptight payment processors.

For Plaintext distro's zines, I basically have a sign when we table that says some zines have adult content, and to ask if you’d like to avoid them or have any additional topics you’d like to avoid. That’s pretty much how I feel, I think. I’m happy to have a good-faith conversation with anyone about what is in my work and how it’s depicted, but trying to fix that back-and-forth into a public, contextless list of “risky” or “upsetting” things in my “product” seems like an impossible challenge to fully succeed at, as well as a vulnerability.

With all the above thoughts swirling around in my mind, I felt super stressed out the entire back half of last week. On Saturday, I had a volunteer shift at the Glasgow Zine Library and made a display about the history of sex work, erotic art, and alternatives to commercialized online distribution. It was interesting to pull these threads out of the collection and feel like I was expressing something about the moment. It made me feel a bit better to realize this was part of a larger fight and that we do have resources and alternatives.

But most of all it reinforced how important zines are to me, that I should spend more time making them, distribute them more, and spend more time reading them! Square’s not looking over my shoulder the same way they are for a fully tagged game in an online storefront for a £2 “zine” transaction, for now anyways. And there’s always cash, or dropping them off at local consignment shops. It’s an immediate way of getting writing out there that doesn’t have to work around algorithmic or payment processor rules. And I find the feedback and conversations I have at zine fairs to be some of the most exciting and validating.

I have a big stack of recent zines in my “zine inbox,” a box next to my desk where I put zines I get in person or online before I have a chance to read and catalog them in my big spreadsheet. The FediZine 2025 envelope is sitting pretty on top! I’ve been reviewing books and gigs on this blog, but I think this is a good opportunity to start a zine review tag too. Stephen’s post about the itch.io situation brings up the importance of peer relationships, especially where little or no money is involved, and I want to help build that, wherever I can.

Anyways, I’m off to get another tattoo tomorrow! So it may be a while. But now that I’ve posted about it on my blog I have to do it at some point ;)

Poptimism and the eternal High-Low problem

2025-05-13T00:00:00Z

See, I will read your newsletter posts, if you don't use Substack! I found this one by W. David Marx to be thought provoking, though I don't agree with all of it. I ended up feeling like breaking it down a little though, because I feel like aspects of the argument he makes are interesting/original enough.

Generally I'm pretty comfortable saying that narratives of cultural decline are basically reactionary. What works are mainstream, canonized, or what infrastructure there is to support artistic work, can be much less subjectively regarded and analyzed (and reconsidered and rewritten) over time. For me, I always care about infrastructure... It's hard not to because it's so obviously bad right now and always seems like the money and resources are all going to precisely the wrong things. If you read my blog you're basically aware of my position on this I think (lol).

Some people bemoan the loss of a centralized or mono- culture due to "the internet," streaming services, social atomization, whatever. But I think the culture that is discussed publicly now is more of a monoculture than ever (and the consolidation of cultural discussions on the same awful engagement-driven platforms where everyone is talking about Star Wars is a large factor in that). This monoculture is also extremely self-affirming, through incestuous references, crossovers, bonus scenes, lore, etc, and extremely self-satisfied. While the characters may reiterate the arguments you just saw on twitter about some social injustice or interpersonal faux-pas (categories that run increasingly close together as platforms are tuned for rage-bait and endless arguments), the celebration of conformity to format, professionalism, polish, etc. is its main message (subtextually, but also sometimes as text, particularly in Netflix originals).

So yes, there is basically little to no public expression of the social value of experimental or idiosyncratic art now, outside of the people (and I mean individuals-- even the "middle way" of podcasts or independent sites have almost completely abandoned actively looking for and presenting new work to their audiences, which is something I consider, predictably, also a problem) making personal cases for them. And anyone who has at least identified this as an issue of infrastructure, resources, analysis, and/or the current structure of the "mainstream" is someone I want to agree with, definitely more than the linear "doom" narratives, which I don't want to be true of course but also... they are just not true because of the interesting work I'm able to find, despite pretty much everything being set up to discourage looking for it.

Poptimism was kind of functionally like dumping zebra mussels into any watershed they're not native to. Of course the work that already had resources and networks of advertising behind it to artificially pump it into ubiquity for maximum profits would outcompete any other set of values or approach to working when we pretended that they were all "equal." It makes total sense to me now, but I think I needed that essay to clarify it so precisely. It is an idea that wipes out the relevance of all other values besides popularity, conformity to marketable expectations, or speculations on how well it'll sell... values that have almost no relevance to how I discuss the work across history and in the present that has value to me.

Similarly, the optimism that creativity and culture can be found "anywhere" is twisted to only reinforce the mainstream and mainstream values-- you can be the most visually interesting or incisive video essay about Andor, or make the funniest or most definitive posts about what's wrong with the MCU. Whatever, so long as it contributes to this economy of advertising, directed attention, and neglect or exclusion of alternatives rather than threatening to become its own thing. Emily (in Paris) always finds a simultaneously creative, praiseworthy and self-fulfilling way to do her job by posting, and basically every Netflix original romcom is resolved with some sort of perverse synthesis of romance and (re)productivity into some kind of small business or property owner solution that comes along with true love's kiss. Retch!

So I understand wanting to temper/reject/slam the lid down on these phenomena. And of course they move in almost perfect step with global neoliberalism seeing everything in terms of “market solutions” (resulting in brutal arts funding cuts and the privatization of education, etc etc), the consolidation of media epitomized by the extremely crap internet super-platforms the majority of these discussions take place on, and the general precaritization of lifestyles where you previously might be able to work a part time job, pay rent, live cheaply, and spend the rest of your time writing about culture or doing your own work. Hell, you might have even been able to have a job writing about culture.

The analysis of why these are the outcomes of poptimism make sense. However, I also don't really think the high-low divide actually "works" as a solution from our current vantage point. A major point of contention within the article for me is the assertion that works received as almost penetratingly "bad" by the culture which produced them, here Plan 9 from Outer Space but for me the works of infamous contemporary shit-tuers like Neil Breen or David DeCoteau also come to mind, are, well, simply bad, and efforts to articulate their effects, their intrigue for audiences even after they have been broadly panned is just ridiculous contrarianism. For me in their obvious strangeness and awkwardness these works have far more sensibility (and therefore are worthwhile/interesting!) than the latest hyper-designed and utterly mid pop nepo-baby debut-- I would define those as "simply bad."

The high and low divide in itself was a result of historical conditions not just about how art was analyzed and discussed but how it was made (ie, in the academy). Only in a moment of early erosion of the high-low divide, and with his work discovered by specifically-placed individuals could someone like Henry Darger, for example, have an afterlife of infiltrating the "high culture" contexts of art galleries and scholarship. I don't think these conditions can be straightforwardly reinstated, nor do I think a reinstated high culture would be able to pick out today, for example, George Kuchar, Gregg Araki, Flann O'Brien, kikiyama, Sonic Youth, Sarah Jacobson... on and on the list of figures whose work I find formative, experimental, mind-expanding, but who also had an ambivalent or difficult or nonexistent relationship with "official" mainstream or high culture as they worked.

The pandora's box of all-culture-made-elsewhere has been irreversibly opened, and also has changed the way we look back on history, and think of what might be missing from it. While of course resources and infrastructure will play a role in how people who care about culture are able to communicate this against the flood of work that is simply financed into ubiquity hailed by poptimists as "the will of the people," we also have to exercise our aesthetic vocabulary to express and make arguments for how what we can't foresee strikes us.

So this impasse feels kind of similar to my intuition that dismissing gen AI outputs as just "slop" isn't an effective critique. It's kind of a deliberate abstention from making an aesthetic claim, even a negative one, and demurrs from identifying the ways the same logic (of polish, of predictability, of satisfying the listener/viewer/player/prompter) has the same schmaltzy, trite, manipulative-feeling and boring outcomes in homegrown organic human-made pop culture as well. There's a lot of canonized high culture that I also find insufferable, cliche, bland as any Taylor Swift song, and many tastemakers in the echelons of high culture, like art galleries and literary publishing, which were plopped into the role more by money or family lineage than critical insight. Making these critiques, whether publicly or in my own head, is what informs my subsequent aesthetic values and work. Drawing a high v low or AI v human line can't do this for you.

Aesthetic value is a type of excessiveness, which contributes to how it comes across as dubious or suspect in a hyper-quantified cultural context. If we think of morality in the old-fashioned terms of the act that is always good and always repeatable, aesthetics is the place where this doesn't apply, where repetition is not necessarily good or necessary or good. What works is indeterminate, and the challenge of aesthetics is to make a case for it anyways. The avant-garde has been described as making the leap into a practice for an audience that you don't know whether or not it exists. I think this relates to the role of the critic as well-- you have to assemble the audiences that could be, and they won't look like any that have come before.

Strawberry Upgrade and Domino Revealed!

2025-04-22T00:00:00Z

I have been Bagenzo's guinea pig for some forthcoming features of Strawberry Starter, and now that they're all tested and ready to go this blog has some fun new parts! The main thing is:

Mini-Feeds

YES, you can now keep up with the short reviews of books I'm reading, my gig diary, and my experiments with tarot draws and interpretations (most recently using Suzanne Treister's fascinating Hexen 2.0 deck) by clicking on the tags at the top of the page. They will not show up in the main RSS feed of the site, which will continue to just be the main blog posts. HOWEVER, I made this site's theme look cool and I think it's fun to click around on, so actually looking at the website will always be imo the "correct" way to read it.

The update to Strawberry Starter will also make adding comment boxes easier, though I choose not to do that. The CSS is a bit nicer to work with and backups are easier to do with a built-in function. I am having a lot of fun setting up the feeds, tweaking the layout for my own purposes, and coming up with new mini-feeds to add (good food I ate? a zine digest? so much more!). Strawberry Starter is a really handy template and great for making a flexible static site blog. Obviously I highly recommend it, even moreso when these features will be public!

In other news, The Domino: Declassified awards were this weekend! I was able to reveal that I co-wrote IT CAME FROM THE ORGONE CHAMBER with Freya, which was a really fun experience that I think turned out well! I wrote up more on my process and stuff for the other Domino Club members but I'm not sure if it's interesting/coherent enough to be worth posting here... All I'll say is I was glad to be working with someone because between revising novel 2 and life stuff I was totally tapped out on writing a whole story. It fulfilled my new year's resolution to try collaborating with someone on a game, and in the end I think the two halves of the story plus the Mirrors-like presentation in Videotome works really well. We won the Johnny 5 award "for looking after a precocious being desperate for input." You'll have to play the game to find out what that's about... hehe...

AND I put an edited transcript of the talk I've been giving up on my main portfolio site. It puts a pin in my critical writing there for the time being; I'm much more on the practice end of things now and like using this blog for more light/casual writing that comes out of that.

Stephen and I are off to Dublin for May, so hopefully that leads to some interesting adventures! Hope you all have something nice to look forward to, too!

Selfsadist

2025-04-14T00:00:00Z

I got a tattoo two weeks ago today! That's right, on April Fools! I was anxious in the days leading up to it because I have a lot of anxiety around pain, or even just anticipating pain or unpredictable sensations, but it ended up being a really wonderful experience. Here's the design:

To keep the monochrome theme of this blog consistent, I'll simply link to where I've posted the finished version elsewhere. Anyways, my friend Tom got a similar insect tattoo and when I saw how his came out I had this sudden certainty... Last year I got my ear pierced as one of my new years' resolutions but, while I had always vaguely considered more piercings or a tattoo, I didn't want to make it a resolution because I wasn't sure what the next thing I'd want would be. But when I saw how Tom's tattoo turned out I was sure.

Natalia Rainy is a super talented artist and as soon as I saw the iPad sketch of the design I knew it was perfect-- an adorable design of an insect I'm frankly kind of obsessed with. I was so excited. I'd channeled my nerves into making sure I'd had a big breakfast that day, brought snacks and lucozade to the appointment, and was prepared for anything, but it was a relief of course that the design was even cooler than I could have imagined. I got the lineart transferred on to me and then soon enough it was time to start tattooing...

The first two or three lines after each break sting the most, but they were just that to me, stinging. Your body gradually adjusts to the semi-continuous irritation, and while the pain still registers, it's almost relaxing in the way listening to white noise or being under a really heavy blanket is. Weirdly, I felt focused enough to chat casually (and Natalia is super friendly!), or just chill out quietly, and I could pull myself into a relaxed state by moving my focus between the feeling of the needles in my arm and a heavy pendant Natalia was wearing that rested in my hand from the angle she had to lean over me to do the tattoo.

Time seemed to pass fairly quickly, I didn't get bored. But sometimes, after a while, and especially when filling in the colors with the larger needle, the pain would start to feel like a pressure pushing down my whole arm. This was the closest it got to being genuinely uncomfortable. When we took a break between phases of the lineart or different colors, and I got up to stretch and grab a bit of a snack, I'd have to go through the initial scratching pain again but soon would get back into the groove.

I pick at the skin around my fingers a lot, often absentmindedly. I seem to do it a lot when I'm bored, anxious or need to focus on something. It's like the slight pain and repetitive action takes up a bit of my brain that is usually too errant or unfocused, and sharpens it. This means a bit of me, even though I'm scared of and dread pain, also desires and enjoys a controlled version of it. Even though I was numbed up to hell and back for my unexpected tooth extraction, the unpleasant feelings and sounds that you don't really have any control over in the dentist's chair made it a miserable experience. The tattoo was quantitatively more painful, but I felt in control. I wanted to do it because I wanted to go through something positive to change my body in a nice way, rather than a scary and unpleasant change happening to me.

It feels weird to call this relationship to pain "masochism," which kind of implicitly refers to situations where you're getting off on it being done to you by a different person. It's more like selfsadism, I pick the pain and apply it to myself, and it can be clarifying, enjoyable, trance-inducing... which isn't to say it's all good. I'm desperate to stop the skin picking stuff sometimes because it gets bloody and too painful. But this definitely took my mind off it for three hours, and left me feeling strangely calm. Can I just doodle on myself?

What have I been up to besides that interesting bit of information about myself? During the month of March I did tarot draws from the recently reprinted Hexen 2.0 Tarot by Suzanne Treister. It's a very fascinating (and funny) deck that I think allowed me to really have some productive thoughts about my values and what I want from technology, amidst a period of strong (and understandable) pessimism about technology and "online." I hope to soon have a few features I can add to the blog that will let me include tarot posts but also the breakneck speed of gigs we've been going to, my book reviews, etc, alongside the main posts.

Domino Club has also just released its new jam games: Domino: Declassified!! I may have made or contributed to one or various of these... but can't reveal that quite yet ;) ... Still, check them out!

My first novel, More Bugs remains available in print at various bookstores around the UK or in electronic format through the publisher's site. If you enjoyed it a review on Goodreads, Storygraph or Bookwyrm helps it look "buzzy" if you have an account for any of those. I've also officially finished a full revision pass of Novel 2 (finally!) and am actively sending it off to publishers and agents now. It's good to mentally release it to an extent, because now I'm free to work on research and daydreaming for novel 3! Definitely let me know if you have any additional sources on hypnotism, UFO culture, or devil's threesomes... I may even try getting irl hypnotized for this skin picking stuff... can't hurt, right?

One year of WebWarlord at Neotitties dot org

2025-03-25T00:00:00Z

Sorry that every post is my tits lately; obviously I've been feeling some sort of way about them. It's been a year since I got a radical breast reduction surgery after wanting to do SOMETHING with them for at least a decade. And I can say it has basically been completely lifechanging (positive).

I wrote this zine about it shortly afterwards, combining the hang ups and anxiety preceding the surgery with the struggles of early recovery but also the novelty of having, well, a completely different body. That novelty hasn't worn off, though it's become more everyday-- I can dress how I like and buy clothes off the rack and like how they look on me, move with ease and struggle with significantly less neck and back pain.

But other stuff also happened. You can see some dark spots around the left nipple up there, which are scars from some latebreaking stitch sinuses I struggled to get to close from September to December of last year. That boob also had a small t-junction breakdown and an inverted nipple for the first few months of recovery, the latter of which I had to get a nipple suction bulb to gradually reverse... a truly dicey purchase to make in a world of presumptive ad data collection and grotesquely pro-natalist algorithms... LOL. Hopefully regular scar massage will bring them down in size and closer in color to the surrounding skin, though, even if my online shopping ad suggestions may never recover.

So, well WHY NOT TOTALLY FLAT? If you're so agender... Not like I have to justify anything, but I thought about this a lot myself. Even though, functionally, this surgery was extremely "gender affirming" in the sense that, holy shit, I'm suddenly NOT profoundly alienated by my body, and can enjoy existing in it, and enacting my own fairly creaturely/androgynous conception of gender, etc, etc... they are still visually basically "breasts," which is not the typical outcome for "gender affirming chest surgery" when the individual in question is starting out with huge boobs.

This change is already pretty dramatic for me, though-- I started out as one of those insane GHIJ onwards type sizes that sound fake... I hadn't measured myself in years because I was just wearing like, the "super barbell rated tittymasher 12 clasp sportswoman bra" or whatever because it was the only thing that like... minimized them. A binder was basically not an option before; it is now (well, now that the last of the super-tedious open wounds are all healed). Though most days I go without a bra and can now just go with one of the £12 M&S sports bras if I feel like the puppies need a little more compression.

I think I'm about a B cup now, though I don't actually need to know, and it's a miracle plus a testament to the skill of the surgical team (who also did a really nice job of putting me under, even though I was terrified lol) that my nipples are both fully intact and functional after such a sizable reduction. A kilo... A KILO! came off of EACH side, though they often felt even heavier than that. It's completely changed my embodied, day to day experience, but also, I can like, shop online and off the rack at thrift stores now, without having to think about how to work around or mitigate the one part of my body that was both HUGE and that I hated having.

There's so many more options for how I present myself, AND so many other things that I don't have to think about anymore. I do miss some charmingly androgynous hairs I had around one of my nipples that were sacrificed during the surgery, but yesterday in the shower I saw one faintly growing back, and well, there's always additional methods I can shake down for more...

In his fiction cum fetish essay Mae West's Reduction Mammoplasty JG Ballard describes how a two-phase surgical process is used in some cases to deal with the volume of tissue while maintaining nipple erection and sensitivity. Immediately after the surgery, I estimated my odds on doing the same to be 25% would to 75% wouldn't. Now I'm feeling more like it's 20-80, though it depends on how things go with mid to late life hormone changes and weight fluctuations. Maybe if we get around to overthrowing the government or at least giving them a good scare, I could get the second one (or hormones) for free rather than having to go private...

Sometimes they still feel big, in that "they grew back!" type dread, and I'm sometimes curious about how totally flat would look/feel, but also still enjoy having full nipple sensation and a bit to grab there, you know! And those aren't even gendered features if you're living rightly. Whatever my long term strategy is, this surgery has already been an enormous freedom in my life.

"death to 'healthy breast tissue!'" --The WebWarlord at NeoTitties dot org

March Poem

2025-03-16T00:00:00Z

I am Charles Baudelaire.

There is a noticeable shift not strictly represented by ambient temperature, more in the light and air, how people look at you when you're walking around, a split second longer smile, and, on your part, a crawling exploratory randiness for legs and ass, not even necessarily revealed (it is still cold after all), that announces the possibility of Spring. This takes place at a unique and different time in every place over the entire surface of the Earth.

It's not at all possible, and then it shifts to being so; this is how it will always happen, though we dither on whether to leave the heaters on or wear another layer under our jacket for some time still. It's incomplete, but this joy of Spring, coming to you in your particular place and time, can arrive like a great terror.

Every bridge or ceiling could fall in on you, every car could run you down. To want to live again provokes fear of dying where once you may have worked to gain total peace with it. Now, at every temporarily intolerable situation, the voice that says, inside, "now death? maybe death?" is met with urgency rather than gently rebuked, again and again, like an impatient child. There are some springs so great you never recover from.

Happy Valentines...

2025-02-14T00:00:00Z

First of all, for those who have been waiting, my novel More Bugs is now available as an ebook from the publisher! Because it's published through a UK-based micropress, and also due to Brexit and shit, getting print copies outside of the UK was sometimes costly or complicated in a non-ideal way. Based on how I read, I'm still biased towards the paperback, which I think is gorgeous due to the layout work by my publisher as well as the wraparound cover illustrations by Lily Blakely, but with an ebook you can instantly screencap or copy paste the parts that make you think I'm a literary genius, so who's to say which is better?

Valentine's day is of course a wonderful day of love, with extraterrestrial insect women and otherwise... I just finished having a glass of wine, some pasta, and mozzarella-smothered garlic bread from our local takeaway, along with some chocolates. A kind of low-key celebration because of all that's been going on (my tooth socket is not closed up enough that I could enjoy going out for a nice steak or something), but in a weird way going through so much expected and not body shit in the past year has made me feel even more secure in my relationship, even if like, the economy and world politics can feel very de-stabilizing. Stephen and I are getting increasingly esoteric in our ongoing rom-com investigations, recently watching Reelshort original Rock On! Band Beauty in Disguise, a film so cheaply and quickly made you cannot yet log it on Letterboxd. We have been watching a few of these, and they're gradually coalescing into Yet Another blog post about romance/eroticism inside my mind...

Valentine's day is also the day for Domino Club FANTA projects as well. This is a fun Domino Club tradition where as a sort of secret santa thing we're all assigned a random member to make fanart of one of their games. This year I got Emma and naturally made a Tamagotchi-style tribute to her character Pru from dithercore classic Stairdown!

And yes, because I've been practicing inkbrush painting, including using a Japanese ink stick and ink stone, I can put these black and white projects on my fussy little black and white blog.

Here's a few other doodles:

It feels good to doodle with the inkbrush, or even just make shapes and lines at random.

Over the next month I plan to do another revision pass on Novel/la 2, as well as work out my longer thoughts about the fallacy of "attention economy" and attending to excess in indie games and culture more broadly. I'll be giving a talk about it at the Glasgow Games Soapbox in March and then immediately going to a Machine Girl concert the next day.

So, hang in there, as they say, it takes a nation of millenials to destroy a nation of millions...

Starter Started!

2025-02-02T00:00:00Z

Hi...

January felt like such a long and chaotic month. Even putting aside world events (lol), Glasgow has been dealing with insanely crap weather, I broke a tooth on a piece of popcorn that's going to have to be pulled while I was playing Phantasmagoria, and as of this moment the water to our flat is hopefully being restored after being out all day yesterday. The train station nearest our flat is closed for the next few months for rail improvements, which is an extra layer of inconvenience, I'm trying to get rid of the plantar warts on the bottom of my feet, I picked up trying to learn chess due to reading March Comes in Like a Lion but gave up almost immediately. And I'm querying my second novel (more like a novella) so the grinding indifference of that process can also be exhausting.

A lot of good things happened as well, of course! We stretched the known limits of a thirtysomething year old body by going to a Destroy Boys concert on a Monday night, I met up with Holly, Tom, and Stephen's parents while they were in town, and I've gotten back on volunteering with Glasgow Zine Library, which is a lot of fun. I've been chipping away at The Man Without Qualities, though slowing down now that I "only" have 150 pages of it left. If you like this blog you probably have some appreciation for dithered art styles, so I was happy to play the new chapter of Misericorde too. And Phantasmagoria is ok, lots of crazy multimedia house to wander around despite not quite activating the same homoerotic werewolf obsession Gabriel Knight 2 did for me last year.

Left, my recreation of the locket in-game, right.

We're rewatching a lot of David Lynch stuff just because his death feels like a huge loss to weirdo culture. You can follow along on my letterboxd; most recently I was impressed by the anti-family articulations of Fire Walk With Me, and how Lost Highway, though not my fave, similarly captured the psychological impotence of jealousy and murderous possessiveness in a fascinating way, and served as kind of a simpler version (for me anyways) of the logic of later nonlinear plotlines and character doubles in his later work.

Of course, if you have already rewatched all of David Lynch's work and want something else that captures the rot of American society, there's always the bonkers shorts-style feature length film: Found A Homeless Billionaire Husband for Christmas, which me and Stephen watched this month. Or, if you need the reassurance that it was kind of always this bad, with a side helping of mild psychosexual toxic yuri/what are you even doing Ann, there's always America's Next Top Model's classic Cycle 3, from 2004.

Ok so, enough chatting. What's up with this new blog? This is kind of a test post, A) to make sure I have a good flow for posting with Strawberry Starter, the new template by Kate Bagenzo that this blog is running on (she also helped me with some CSS tweaks to get it looking juuuust like the old version, but also better!) and B) to stretch my legs wrt writing more and more freely on a blog again.

I stopped writing crit due to a combination of art/game world burnout, feeling basically like a marginal mascot rather than a serious writer to people who pore over the latest remake or whatever all day, but also going deep into the hole of long format fiction writing, drafting and editing basically two novels and bringing one to publication (Oma also wrote about my book in one of her sick zines, which is another inspiration for me to get back to both more freeform and critical writing). While I still kind of hate/resent gamescrit and the art world (in the art bookstore having a moment of vertigo upon seeing how many books come from repeatedly milking the same few people for overdesigned, wide-margined Beautiful Objects that come in at 180 spaffed off pages max) I still feel like I want to produce writing that is a record of my impressions, values and interests without being strictly novelistic.

Plus I was already feeling kind of down about how, through the lists and general site culture, it seems like Bluesky has basically speedrun to having the most boring, mainstream site monoculture possible. It's another truth that I stopped writing as much crit when I disengaged from Twitter simply because I saw significantly less dumb shit I felt compelled to respond to. But most of the stuff on Bluesky feels so centralized on the same networks, popularity, and networks of popularity that in general I don't really find much I care to respond to in the first place, lol. Sometimes I feel like I'm practically shaking people by the shoulders like, look at this! It's amazing! What are you playing Balatro for??? to completely zero response. Idk! Maybe I will "find my niche" there again but until then I wanted to give blogging a shot for my ideas about novels/games/films/aesthetics/ideas no one seems to be talking about.

And regardless, a new webdev hole is a way to fill time between now and Wednesday, when I'm getting my tooth pulled, instead of just freaking out and worrying over the broken bit... or what if I go to the "stooge dentist" and they take out the wrong teeth etc well... wish me luck! 🦷 ⃠

2024 Wrap up, Books, games, life, etc.

2025-01-01T00:00:00Z

As the new year rolls around and I’m stuck in the no-man’s-land between holiday obligations and actually going back to work, it seemed like a good idea to take stock of the past year.

The biggest thing is obviously: my book came out! Becoming a published novelist, getting to hawk my wares at Cymera and Worldcon, and, of course, getting wonderful blurbs, reviews and messages from people who read the book was a crazy/awesome ride. If you somehow haven’t seen it, I made a mini-site for More Bugs with blurbs, event details, influences, where to buy, etc! You can also check out the Goodreads page for a few more reviews… no dissatisfied customers yet! More events and an ebook version are forthcoming in 2025.

Plaintext distro made a decent showing this year, tabling at both Glasgow Zine Fair and Carlisle Zine Fest, where we made connections with zine heads from all over the UK. Our zines are now also stocked in Good Press and Typewronger, with more to come in the new year.

Stephen (who also had a major project release this year!) and I took a trip to Arran once that level of craziness had passed. It was surprisingly lovely for a last-minute and close to home trip that we took just because we realized we hadn’t really had a break all year. We really pushed ourselves with hiking and exploring the unique landscape but also made sure to enjoy some fancy food, improve our taste for whiskies, spot some cool sea birds and seals, have cocktails on the beach (apparently the only place in Scotland you can do so…) etc!

In the fall, I got to take the zine library to Trick or Retreat, which was fun. During the retreat I got a lot of good in-person zonie hangout time. I also got my annual dose of large-batch cooking, which I enjoy revisiting from my food service days precisely once a year, and made my first Downpour games. I hope to keep fiddling with this tool whenever I have random unexpected downtime throughout the next year as well.

Finally, I got to go back to the states and visit my family for the first time in a few years (and since their house move) in December. It ended up being a really nice Christmas despite over-indulging in all of the American foods I missed to the point of acid reflux lol. Stephen’s gift for me was the somewhat hard to find novelization of Gabriel Knight 2: The Beast Within, after we’d played it together and I got kind of obsessed. I also found this cool bug toy in an antiques shop:

And now… onto the main sections:

Books Read:

More in-depth thoughts on each of these books can be found in my 2024 #books thread. Here I’ve just starred the books that are highly recommended, and will put some general comments after the list:

Theodor Adorno - In Search of Wagner
Michael Azerrad - Our Band Could Be Your Life (*)
Percival Everett - Erasure (*)
Susan Sontag - The Volcano Lover
Elizabeth Mavor - A Green Equinox (*)
Italo Svevo - A Life
Chris Kraus - After Kathy Acker
Thomas Bernhard - Concrete
Sei Shonagon - The Pillow Book
Gillian Freeman - The Undergrowth of Literature
Lorraine Wilson - The Last to Drown
Jonas Eika - After the Sun
Asako Yuzuki - Butter
John Wyndham - The Chrysalids (*)
John Luther Novak (Christopher Priest) - David Cronenberg's eXistenZ
Jessi Jezewska Stevens - The Visitors
Robert Gluck - Margery Kempe (***)
Nikhil Singh - Club Ded
Thomas Bernhard - Correction (*)
Boris Groys ed. - Russian Cosmism anthology (reread)
Joris-Karl Huysmans - Against Nature
Anne Carlisle - Liquid Sky
Pier Paolo Pasolini - Theorem
Linda Rosenkrantz - Talk
Alan Dean Foster - Dark Star (*)
Irina Odoevtseva - Isolde
Samuel Delany - Dhalgren (*)
Domenico Starnone - Ties (*)
Sven Holm - Termush
Robert Walser - The Robber (*)
Adam Zmith - Solemates
Tanith Lee - Heart-Beast

I read a lot of fiction this year because I was mostly working on and thinking about novels… The nonfiction side of my TBR stack is beginning to pile up so maybe I’ll try to be more balanced in the next year, though I am still loving (and reading, and thinking about) The Novel. Another weird trend, starting with Stephen digging up the eXistenZ novelization for my birthday, was looking up and reading novelizations of sci-fi movies I love.

There were a few disappointments this year; Chris Kraus trying to write nonfiction she had a personal stake in felt not quite as sharp as her novels that I adore. There were also some high-concept novels that grabbed my attention with the themes and concepts they were working with but ultimately left me a bit cold in terms of their style or how they handled these things (Butter, The Visitors). The Volcano Lover unfortunately convinced me that Susan Sontag is too much of an essayist to be a good novelist. However the worst was definitely Isolde, which led to people not asking, but asserting, that there must be something wrong with the translation or something when I posted excerpts online. Maybe so! But the base material of the plot and characterization was also… not great lol.

However there were also (as evidenced by the many stars) a ton of books I loved. Robert Gluck’s Margery Kempe is the standout in that category, both sensorily rich and thought provoking while creatively reappropriating christian mysticism to write about your bad boyfriend as Jesus Christ. Tied for second place in a three way split has to be Erasure, A Green Equinox and Correction which are all great entries in the “alienated weirdo protag” canon that really got me thinking about structure, voice, and the tricks you can do with simple linear prose. Our Band Could Be Your Life was the one major work of nonfiction I enjoyed, though it draws on an almost novel-like store of personality and plot twists provided by many of my favorite late 80s/early 90s bands. Dark Star was the most unlikely-seeming and most enjoyable of the sci-fi film adaptation novels I picked up this year. Picking up Robert Walser, Samuel Delany, John Wyndham and Domenico Starnone for the first time this year was also a treat, and I can’t wait to dig into more of their work.

I hesitate to say what exactly my reading plans will look like for 2025, though. I’m ending the year 700 pages into the enormous The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil, and it is probably impossible to gauge what I’ll be in the mood for when I’m done with it.

Gigs/New Music:

Pissed Jeans… My surgery was bumped back so I was tragically still in recovery for their Glasgow gig. I really wish I could have gone because their new album is great and probably my favorite of the year. I too have seen some of the greatest minds stuck begging for money online.

Mannequin Pussy was the first gig I got to go to after my surgery, and they were great. I always end up crying at their shows… I love the feelings their music taps into and brings out so much. Compared to the last time I saw them in Glasgow, the venue was bigger but just as packed! Really different from their tour for Patience/Perfect, but also really good. The new album is I Got Heaven.

Seeing Ty Segall again, for the album Three Bells, was also a lot of fun especially since it's such a different album and live setup from the last time I saw him, for the Emotional Mugger tour in 2016. The Three Bells tour is kind of a jam band tour, but it works because Ty Segall is such a super nerd who has basically listened to and tried to play everything in guitar history, imo.

Core. festival was great fun, an all-day noise bacchanal with great vibes broken up by horking down a chicken shop sandwich halfway through. The highlight was of course seeing mclusky live, but I also was wowed by local band Kute. I’m so pumped to see what their programme is next year.

I went to go see Melt Banana a bit on a whim… turns out I was lucky there were tickets left by the time I made up my mind! It ended up being a packed and utterly euphoric gig, up there with Lightning Bolt when I saw them. Like Core. festival, the vibes were amazing, and the music noisy as hell. Their new album is awesome too.

Shannon and the Clams was my last gig of the year, and I was really happy to be able to take Stephen to see them. Their new album is wonderful and probably my second favorite of the year, and it was a great show with a really lovely and enthusiastic crowd!

Bands I didn’t get to see this year but got really into include Big Clown, who released an awesome live EP. The final Shellac album ended up being (sadly) an appropriate capstone for Steve Albini’s insane career, in music or producing or even just posting, it’s hard to think of someone as prolifically great while also maintaining a respectable ethos in a practical way the whole time. I probably put on To All Trains the most to work to this year, and wish it was longer every time. Spirit of the Beehive’s new one, YOU’LL HAVE TO LOSE SOMETHING, is also great, and I may get to see them in Glasgow soon!

Best New Watches:

I made a letterboxd list of these! Some brief thoughts on ones I’d like to highlight… Arrebato/Rapture is one of the most unique and memorable horror films I’ve ever seen… probably my top rec, though Ghost Dog and Smiley Face have also been very influential on me. La Chimera is the only one on the list that came out this year… As in books and games I usually prefer to come to things at my own pace rather than when they’re current, but I’m glad I went to go see a screening of this one, it’s so unique. Chameleon Street was another one that sucked me in from the jump and I never knew where it was going to go. Magic Crystal and TerrorVision are tied for most fun and ridiculous nonsense. On-Gaku will make you want to go to a gig immediately. The One I Love and Beyond the Infinite Two Minutes are both films where the initial gimmick spins out in totally unexpected ways before the end. Demonlover really locked in my current feeling of "eternal 2003". Finally Something In The Dirt was a great watch to me because it was the first movie that I felt really conveyed “the millennial situation” ie, that you’re precariously employed, stuck in a shitty rental, and your only friend is getting sucked down an evangelical cult pipeline.

Domino Jams:

There were two Domino Club jams this year! For the first, Bodies in Motion, I made a janky erotic qwoplike about how jousting is conducted in a post-horse utopian future called HORSES ARE NOW OBSOLETE! The jam ended up being mostly concurrent with my moved surgery and recovery period, so I relied a lot on Stephen to show me how to do things in Multimedia Fusion and also tweak what I did so it like… actually worked. But it was also fun to make something so silly and horny in a post-anaesthesia haze.

For the second jam, Tongues, I did a more ambitious interactive fiction piece. From the jump of the theme being decided I knew the sort of thing I wanted to do (with spam emails and romance scams and language) and wrote an outline during our trip to Arran that I filled out during the actual jam period. Like Vault 819, [EXTERNAL COMMUNICATION] is around 9k words long, and after dithering on the presentation a while I finally figured out a way I could make it work with Jupiter Engine (thanks again candle) and hacked it together. I feel really proud of it in terms of stretching myself conceptually and stylistically towards the type of sci-fi and interactive fiction I want to make in the future. :)

2024 Resolutions:

I had 4 resolutions this year: to get my ear pierced, to get The Surgery, to finish a draft of Novel 2, and to pick up rollerblading, which I really loved when I was a kid. The first one I polished off in the first week of January… unlike the crusty, miserable holes I got in middle school from a mall Claire’s and eventually let close, this piercing was practically painless and healed so well that it made me consider getting more in the future. I like having a little spiky hoop through my ear but also have an eyeball stud, skull, and dangly spike.

After some consultations and delays, I got The Surgery in March. Recovery has been a bit of a trial for someone like myself, who struggles with the vulnerability of not being at 100% and also always abstractly feels like they “should be doing something” (lol), but I’m so happy with the results, I can honestly say it was life changing. I put together a zine about it almost immediately afterwards and despite some minor complications/setbacks on complete wound healing, I have to say my feelings about it are basically the same. It’s wonderful!

Novel 2 juuust slid under the wire and is out to some of my beloved first-readers yay <3. I’m feeling alright about it… while it needs some tweaking I think the fundamentals (voice, structure, theme) are solid. It’s a little more thematically specific (about the impact of AI fauxtimation, precaritization, and work in general on how we treat our personal relationships mainly) and structurally ambitious (five different character POV sections) than my last novel, so I’m feeling pretty excited about it. But I don’t want to make any resolutions about getting it published in the new year. Revision may take as unexpectedly long as getting it written took, and it’s also in a really awkward spot (45k words in length, and also with a significant amount of sexual content) for sci-fi. I imagine it’ll be a hard sell, but maybe if I can pitch it as a porn parody of Orbital it’ll seem marketable???? I’m also shying away from making any resolutions wrt Novel 3 because I’m only just in the daydreaming/research phase for it, and something as constricting as “full draft within 365 days” can kill that enjoyment.

Picking up rollerblading is the one resolution I’m somewhat unsatisfied with. While I got myself the gear and went out a few times to practice in the little side-street our flat is on, Glasgow had a really damp and unpleasant summer (yes, even for Glasgow), and my surgery recovery also had its ups and downs then, so I didn’t have the opportunity to get confident enough on them while the weather was good. Still, three out of four isn’t bad…

2025 Resolutions:

Picking up rollerblading will carry over as a resolution from 2024, since I feel like, while I practiced a few times, I didn't really accomplish it to my satisfaction. Though it may be that Glasgow’s weather/infrastructure is not ideal for it in general. If it doesn’t pan out again this year, I’d at least like to find some sort of moderate exercise that I enjoy and can stick with, which has always been an issue for me. I love walking and already walk everywhere, but anything more involved than that I either dislike or have trouble sticking with over time or through life changes.

I would also like to check off something that’s been nagging me over the past year in 2025– I’d like to refurbish my main website. I already plan to formally archive the Low-Tech Webring page and replace its presence on the main page of my site with a button bar that will mostly reflect the same sites/ethos as the webring. Every time a webring gets slightly bigger, communication and updating becomes exponentially more work (or at least it feels like it, to me lol) which is why I’m making this change. I don’t think there’s anything wrong in particular with webrings of course, just that the planning and level of communication became, at a certain point, higher than an anti-social individual like myself could handle.

I also want to add RSS compatibility and a backdated RSS feed of all my pieces and updates, as well as just generally reformulating the site to suit my needs. It has a huge archive of my critical work, but that’s not really my focus anymore. I’d love for it to showcase my publishing and interactive fiction work better as well as incorporate the more casual/creative elements of ie this blog and my social media profiles.

This is kind of an odd resolution but I’d also like to collab for at least one of the Domino Club events in the coming year. I always think of doing it, but either chicken out or self-sabotage by not coming up with a plan until it feels too late to ask. I worry that I’m too much of a control freak and would be hard to work with, but at the same time I also assume that writing is similar to being the “ideas guy” on a project… the art and actually figuring out how the thing will look/work is the “real work.” I still have this doubt even though I’ve heard so many times that other members of Domino Club find the writing hard and simply enjoy doing the art or interface part more. The collabs are great, and I envy the angle and skills of many other Domino Club members. So this year it’s time to overcome the doubts and procrastination and make it happen!

Finally, so we keep it to four, since four was also a good number for last year, I’d like to improve my visual art skills a bit as well. It’s something I always admire in other people, and I can think of a lot of both silly and more productive uses for improving it! Stephen has been doing some ink brush painting, inspired by Lynda Barry, and I tried a bit of doodling with the leftover ink he had a few times… I’d really like to develop that and pursue it on its own, so I can maybe have some stuff to show off here as well :)

That's it! Hope you are all having a restful start to 2025.

Solstice Report

2024-06-23T00:00:00Z

It's been about three weeks now since my debut novel, More Bugs, officially "came out," though in many cases this means copies are still travelling through the postal system, making their way to smaller shops, sitting in people's to-be-read piles, etc... In one sense it's been huge and exciting: my first big festival event! Reviews and ratings starting to come in! Seeing my book face out or on the table of local bookshops! But also, because the process of reading a novel is far from instant, it can also feel weirdly quiet.

As before, the book is available direct from the publisher, through Bookshop.org, and by request at any chain or indie bookstores in your area if they don't already stock it (which also helps by demonstrating interest in a small press' new release). The Goodreads page is also up and running now too, which is a great place to leave a rating or nice comment if you liked it (and I won't suggest any action if you hated it, lol).

Some more blurbs and reviews have also come in since last time:

An insightful and thought-provoking portrait of suburban alienation and longing with a delightful dash of body horror. Through engrossing prose, Reed stealthily weaves the impossible and everyday to reveal the suffocating dread of our personal histories. -- Eve Harms, author of Transmuted

With relatable characters and subtle speculative and horror elements, More Bugs intricately explores the isolating feeling of returning home as a stranger. As the seemingly suburban tale unravels, the book takes a satisfying turn into the surreal, delving into the dark desires that come from being tempted by the uncanny and unknown. -- Lyndsey Croal, author of Have You Decided on Your Question

But I was most moved by someone expressing their appreciation through my website's old school guestbook:

Cymera was great! The panel I was on tied together some really interesting work thematically, and I got to talk a lot about the inspirations for setting and character in More Bugs. I also got to sit in on some other interesting panels on sci-fi and publishing. Having my first signing was a little awkward... there's actually a bit more to think about then just putting pen to paper. But I did get an insect stamp set to add a little bonus to any future signings:

The next confirmed event for the book will be at Knight Errant's table in the Dealer's Room at Worldcon, where I will intermittently be present to sign books. There will also be some more events and bookstore signings later in summer/fall, so keep an eye out for more emails about that!

Otherwise, things are going well! My partner's major project for the last four years, Anthology of the Killer, has been released and is getting lots of positive buzz. We also got to go to MP's fantastic Glasgow gig. I've been spinning their new album, as well as the new stuff by Shellac and Shannon and the Clams.

The last three weeks have also been a huge improvement in recovering from the radical reduction I underwent earlier this year. I feel a lot less timid about moving my body around, the scars are chilling out, and my energy levels are, well, better than ever! Even though I described it as an instant improvement, I feel like I'm just now beginning to appreciate life with just over 2 kilos off my chest.

Anyways, because you read this whole thing, here's a sneaky link (that's what you call it nowadays, right?) to a PDF of the zine about my reduction that I debuted at Glasgow Zine Fair this year. It went over really well so is technically out of print for now, but I'm still proud of it.

It's halfway through the year! My resolutions this year were to take care of the surgery and get my ear pierced (done and done) but also to finish a draft of my second novel and pick up rollerblading again. I haven't done the last two yet but plan to dig in to at least one this evening...

Hope you are all well, and thanks for reading!

The Big Announcement! My Debut Novel

2024-05-14T00:00:00Z

I'll cut right to the chase and reveal what has been in the works for the past three years or so: my debut novel will be published by Knight Errant Press, and is now up for preorder.

Even if you've mainly liked my critical writing and essays, I think my general sensibility is fairly consistent across fiction and non-, and there's hopefully enough intrigue to tempt you...

The extremely sick cover was done by the comic artist Lily Blakely, whose graphic novel Gristle has the same tone of ominous, encroaching, and maybe weirdly appealing grossness that I was trying to go for, so I was really thrilled when she agreed to do the illustrations for front and back.

Here's the back-of-book blurb:

Dumped, broke and stranded at her mother's house, Amy has few options for escape. Hanging out with her ex comes with getting to know his new girlfriend, someone who looks suspiciously like Amy's younger, straighter doppelgänger. Strapped for cash and desperate to be out of her mother’s home, she ends up babysitting the UFO-obsessed kids of the hot working mom down the street. Over a dull, torrid summer in the Pennsylvania suburbs, strange lights linger on the horizon, and subterranean connections reach out their tendrils in the dark, signalling another, otherworldly possibility...

To me, it's a book about the transformative power of seeing the world in an alienated way, but also how cool aliens are. My partner very generously describes it as "Clarice Lispector's Teenagers from Outer Space," and when I've been looking at it too long I just start thinking it's some bog-standard romcom. The truth is probably somewhere in between. Here's some other great quotes from early readers:

With a handful of characters, More Bugs portrays the alienation and agonies of returning to small town suburbia with a constant cynical love and wit, mixing observational comedy with a sprinkle of science fiction juice.
— Freya Campbell, author of Winter, The Tower, and Good Writers Are Perverts

More Bugs never stops being first and foremost a slow-paced, melancholic, existentialist character study about what it means to feel alienated as a human being, and how important it is that we reach out to one another even though true understanding may remain forever beyond our grasp.
–– Briar Ripley Page, author of The False Sister and Corrupted Vessels

...a well observed and smartly droll novel about stagnation and growth, pleasure and self; about the trembling sensitivity of everyday alienation... and maybe some actual aliens too!
— Jennifer Giesbrecht, author of The Monster of Elendhaven

I made a goofy minisite to collect all the info on the book, preorder links, and the upcoming events, like the Cymera festival in Edinburgh where the book will be officially launching, and WorldCon 2024 in Glasgow, where the press will have a table in the Dealer's Hall. You should also be able to request the book at any local bookshop (in the UK anyways) if you have a particular favorite.

OTHER STUFF:

Plaintext Distro had a great day out and successfully debuted four new zines at GZF this year! I will be dropping some of our spares off on consignment at Good Press and Typewronger over the next month, both of which do mail order, in case you aren't lucky enough to live in Glasgow :)

Domino Club also had another rather sporty outing, with the Bodies in Motion Jam drop of games hitting the web last month. My own entry, Horses Are Now Obsolete, won the PETA award for "A Humane Alternative to Equestrianism"... Guess you'll have to download and play it to know exactly what that means.

In general, life is good! I am still recovering from my long-awaited radical breast reduction in March, though it's mostly managing frustration that my energy levels and range of motion don't suddenly match how much more natural my body feels. Last weekend was the first hint of genuinely warm weather to hit Glasgow, so we hung out with the cows and tadpoles in Pollok Park and went to go see the IMAX 3D mushroom documentary narrated by Bjork at the science center, both activities I would highly recommend!

Lately I have been listening to Big Clown (in terms of new music) and The Velvet Underground's Loaded (in terms of old stuff). I've been reading a healthy mix of Thomas Bernhard and Sei Shoganon's The Pillow Book. The most recent movie that blew me away was Chameleon Street, which we watched in Zone.

I did it!

2024-04-14T00:00:00Z

Things have been quiet here, I haven't written a personal post in a few months, but mainly because I've been super busy in the new year! When 2024 rolled over, I wrote down four resolutions for the year in my planner:

Get my ear pierced
Get The Surgery
Finish my second novel
Pick up rollerblading again

Now it's April, officially a third of the way through the year, and I've done the first two!

I got my ear pierced in a highly impulsive yet businesslike transaction at Blancolo, which is located under the Glasgow Central railway station bridge. It was basically painless, and after six weeks of waiting around with a plain stud I can stick in a variety of hoop/spike/skull/eyeball related options.

After that, I also visited Stephen in Colorado for a week, since he was staying there all of January to cat-sit and also spend some time visiting with a friend. We ate tacos from a nearby place pretty much every day, one of the main things I haven't found a suitable substitute for in the UK. I also really enjoyed the landscape, which was so different from anywhere else I'd been in the states. It was lovely!

Shortly after coming back I had a consultation for The Surgery (ie, seeking a radical breast reduction), and unlike several other places I'd approached, I felt really good about it and like they'd give me what I wanted.

Stephen came back a few weeks later, and by then I'd gotten a letter saying my surgery would be scheduled for March 6th, which was eventually pushed back to the 25th... On the day of there was also a lot of nerve-wracking back and forth over things running behind and it was uncertain if it'd happen but! one timeslot later than planned, I was put under and three hours emerged extremely loopy and with A cups... "nearly a kilo" taken from each side.

Recovery has been kind of crazy. I feel like I make huge leaps, and dealing with the pain per se hasn't been so bad, but I can still often feel surprised at how delicate I feel, how uncomfortable the on and off swelling can be, or how easy it is to go lightheaded when I have to check my surgical wounds. Taking a shower is a crazy production and I don't leave the house much except to go for walks around the neighborhood. But in other ways it doesn't feel that different, like it just feels like my body matches my self-perception now rather than having this huge, annoying "extra" on it.

After I recover, I want to do a big spring cleanout of clothes I don't wear anymore, and make sure what I have still suits this change to my body. I also want to be able to walk around pollok park and get an ice cream cone carefree, without feeling fragile OR self-conscious about my chest. I have to be patient and know it'll happen eventually.

Even though the month when it took place was crazy due to surgery prep and recovery, I did manage to get in a submission for the most recent iteration of DOMINO CLUB... though I can't reveal which games I had a hand in yet. >:) I've also been working on a zine about my breast reduction (of course) that will likely be among the new stuff Plaintext Distro will have on sale at Glasgow Zine Fair in May. I'm still taking submissions this week if you also have something new you'd like us to distro!

I've been reading and napping and just chilling a lot since the surgery, but I feel like I haven't really been in the right, energetic sort of mindset to keep going with writing fiction, not quite yet anyways. Novel 2 is significantly done barring the last section, which still needs around 5k more words by my estimate... it would be nice to get it done soon. And by then, the weather in Glasgow might be good enough to invest in a pair of rollerblades...

2023 Roundup and Books I Read

2023-12-28T00:00:00Z

2023 was a mostly internally-developing year for me. Shifting to longer-form, fictional writing for the most part, alongside having a full time day job, meant that most of my time writing and editing was for things that are still a long way off and not announced yet. It feels slow, but compared to short form writing, it means I'm still doing a ton.

There are a few things worth highlighting though! First, I wrote about my favorite David Cronenberg films for the free Murdered Futures zine. This was a really fun topic and the other art in the zine is gruesome and lovely. I also introduced a few more zines to the Plaintext Distro catalog, and tabled at Edinburgh Zine Fair and Glasgow Zine fair this year.

I released two more abstract narrative games through Domino Club, and stretched myself by working with new engines or using ones I'd worked with before differently. The first is Choir Medals, a shoegazey museum-date-crawler and my first experiment with the first person 3D features in RPGMaker MV. The second is Dust Breeding, an atmospheric linear VN about obsession, body horror, and gross romance.

On a personal level, I was really happy to take my first proper, traveling vacation in years this June; my partner and I went to Crete, and got to swim in a fantastically clear ocean, see some amazing archaeological sites, and eat excessively basically every night for a week :d . In general, I'm trying to take more time off and be more protective of time spent both on straight up resting and also refilling my mental energy, which reading a ton, especially more fiction, has been an important part of.

I round up my reading list on my masto account as well, if you want to keep up in real time from now on. Here's what I read this year:

Tomihiko Morimi - The Tatami Galaxy
Paul Lafargue - The Right to be Lazy
Italo Svevo - Zeno's Conscience (*)
Ann Druffel and D Scott Rogo - The Tujunga Canyon Contacts (reread)
Alessandro Delfanti - The Warehouse (reread)
Clarice Lispector - An Apprenticeship or The Book of Pleasures
Fritz Leiber - The Silver Eggheads
Henry SF Cooper Jr - A House in Space
Chris Kraus - I Love Dick
Alan Dean Foster - Nor Crystal Tears
Peace Camp Members - Faslane: Diary of a Peace Camp
Melinda Cooper - Family Values (*)
Jodi Dean - Aliens in America (*)
Alasdair Gray - Something Leather (*)
Raymond Radiguet - The Devil in the Flesh (*)
Andrea Lawlor - Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl
Thomas Pynchon - Gravity's Rainbow
Alasdair Gray - A History Maker
Kathy Acker - Empire of the Senseless
Izumi Suzuki - Hit Parade of Tears (*)
Tom McCarthy - Satin Island (*)
Alasdair Gray - Poor Things
Clarice Lispector - The Apple in the Dark
Thomas Mann - Lotte in Weimar
Robert Chapman - Empire of Normality (*)
Georges Perec - Things/A Man Asleep (*)
Dorothea Tanning - Chasm (*)
JG Ballard - Crash
Thomas Bernhard - Woodcutters (*)

(*) denotes particular standouts to me

Year Trends

The Good: I read a lot of fiction I really enjoyed in the latter half of the year; Satin Island probably being my favorite. It was what I needed at the time, having a crisis of confidence over writing with my own ranty, pedantic weirdo voice, but also a rangy and hilarious book in itself. Chasm is the one that also stands out as a potential favorite. It unpacks the dream imagery of surrealist art so well without ever becoming overcooked or flowery, and maintaining a bizarre yet edge-of-the-seat plot on top of it. I was also really happy to revisit Izumi Suzuki's short fiction, as well as getting to read Alasdair Gray's interconnected short story collection Something Leather in its originally designed form.

In nonfiction, Melinda Cooper's Family Values was a great critique of how the nuclear family (as opposed to "individualism") is the actual social form reinforced by capitalism, and the role this plays in gender role enforcement, heteronormativity, and even expanding consumer debt. It's fantastic and a great response to growing trad impulses stoked by how communitarianism can offer a conditional, limited response to precarity. Aliens in America was also a fabulous, wide ranging study of the variety of narratives and ideologies underlying the millennial alien media boom, and Empire of Normality was a great combination history of mental health and disability activism as well as a thorough rebuttal of shallow anti-psych and naturopathic perspectives on the topic.

The Bad: This year had less standout stinkers than the last one; I don't think I genuinely hated any of the books I read. The Right to be Lazy was an interesting historical text but too short, combined with other less relevant texts to pad out the length, and full of niche inter-european racisms I hadn't previously encountered for it to have much worth alongside existing anti-work books. The Silver Eggheads was also basically one of those sf novels that were obviously spun out of the 30 page short story that makes up the first chapter or two and so feels kind of pointless past the concept setup, even if finding a book about procgen writing putting authors out of work from the 70s was pretty funny. I finally read I Love Dick, which was fine, but kind of hampered by being Chris Kraus' first novel in the sense that a lot of the ideas that are more idiosyncratically and deeply explored in her later work kind of stop short in the land of borderline cliche here. Similarly, I thought the overwhelming focus on gender norms in The Apprenticeship made it some of Clarice Lispector's limper and less-inspiring work, especially alongside reading the I *heart* SUBMISSIVE MEN fest The Apple in the Dark was later on.

The Forthcoming: I have a further stack of novels to get into in the new year, including some Gore Vidal, John Wyndham and Pier Paolo Pasolini... all authors I've been meaning to get around to for a while. In terms of nonfiction, I'm also excited to crack a natural history of slime molds that I picked up, and Jenny Diski's Stranger on a Train, at the recommendation of my partner and also the strength of some of her old essays on the LRB website (I have to do SOMETHING at work, after all!) even though I am usually a bit of a memoir hater.

Well, that's all for now! Happy New Year!

On Audience

2023-12-04T00:00:00Z

What's wrong with art today? A growing number of essays and general complaints are taking this question to the source: the audience. Or at least that seems to be the primary focus of these pieces; the most compelling problem is the uniform psychological profile of the audience, who is "baby-brained," censorious, prudish, squeamish and reveling in their own political ineffectuality to go beyond the most basic critiques or superficial representation, blah blah blah.

Obviously I don't find this idea very convincing, though it seems very easy lately to write an essay about this, bonus points if you hail back to a supposed lost golden age of maturity or liberty in the 1980s or 90s, have it go mildly viral, and then go on with reviewing the latest netflix originals, or whatever. It's become a sort of abundant meta-sludge for people already hooked up to the content sludge pipe. Like a lot of online discourse, it spends most of its time reading bad faith motivation and evidence of the fall of civilization into observed, perhaps mildly annoying behaviors. The "everyone-screaming-in-one-room" format of centralized social media also means there are abundant behaviors to observe and get mean about 24 hours a day.

I mean, in what other era would unattached adults have access to, ie, parents' opinions on what cartoons their children are watching alongside or within their "cultural feed," or at all? Still, I'm sure my mom must have had them, and I'm sorry for insisting on renting Rock-a-Doodle so many times, the real tragedy being that I don't remember any of it. Things and people that existed before are pathologized as unique symptoms of our age, by whatever shoddy logic, for substack writers to be the Sole Voice Crying In the Wilderness about, and if you liked it, consider subscribing.

I have two points to make, besides that I'm kind of sick of this. The first is that I don't think this attitude about audience is realistic or productive. I don't really think about "an audience" in this way when I write, nor do I think about morality, or beauty, though usually a few political ideas are informing how I write. Writing is something I am rarely, if ever, paid for and yet mostly starts somewhat involuntarily for me; I always come back to it in some form, (criticism, blogging, fanfic, narrative games, novels) no matter what else I try to do with my life. I realize stealing time from a desk job to write this, purely because I want to, makes me "lucky" in certain respects and maybe pitiable in others. Who cares though, what matters is it mostly works, more than trying to make writing my job would, anyways.

So I don't think of my audience as being a uniform, slightly dim mob that I have to impress my superior ideas or sensitivity or morality or aesthetic judgment etc on. If I think of audience at all, it's my own singular experience of encountering a Chris Kraus book or a Hito Steyerl essay or a Thomas Mann or Pynchon novel for the first time, feeling a connection across time and space, the world newly legible in an unexpected way, purely from linear text, and I hope there's a line or two in my own work that hits someone that way. I think if you get trapped in the other mindset, you make boring work; the firebrand "everybody's thinking it" takedown writers rarely last long before becoming a stultified element of the establishment themselves, unless they can form an actual critical angle of their own, beyond "It's their fault! The audience is too stupid!"

But "the audience" doesn't make, "the audience" doesn't distribute, at least not at scale. This audience-focused critique, ironically, reinforces the rather corporate idea that commercial ubiquity responds to and fulfills actually existing audience desire. At best, "audience" "desires" are obliquely represented in metrics where it's big enough to be framed as demand, and little else if not. Acting as though "the audience" is stupid comes as an uncontroversial, natural conclusion is a kind of mental back door people seem to use that can justify both graceless and unambitious clumsy obvious allegory, as well as depoliticized lowest common denominator comfort food. And a lot of these critical essays, while clearly believing themselves to be transgressive, are basically in the allegorical style, a useful role in creating a narrative which serves the attitude of grim realism that surrounds the inevitability of underwhelming commercial work.

So my second point is significantly more obvious: these essays lack a structural critique, of course, except in vague, faulty terms of broad, predetermined "downfall of civilization" rhetoric, which is certainly shareable and makes you seem briefly smart; who doesn't feel like civilization as-is is quite... bad? But things like the determining power advertisers and payment processors have over content rules for online distribution platforms, or the homogenizing impact of everyone-in-one-place algorithmic feeds that bury niche content, shrinking free time and the aggressive professionalization of previously accessible formats like games, home video or comics are apparently not nearly as worth mentioning as "the audience" simply having an unchill vibe now-a-days.

Zine fairs, small presses, weirdo distributors and local film festivals, if they're brought up at all, are talked about as utopic relics of the past; but they're still here, somehow surviving the booms and busts of online attention, and they have multiple and varied audiences of their own. Of course, my eternal frustration is that the margins of the critic who hitches themselves to a metrics-based online platform are deliberately never generous enough to take their eyes off the slop chute of the algorithmic feed, to look at the environment around them. If it's not put in front of them consistently like jangly plastic keys it's stopped existing, to the point where critique just degenerates into fractally more minute and paranoid meta-discussions of scene or audience... Then the work they're supposedly looking for also vanishes.

Well, in the end, sex can become just as rote as sexlessness. A particularly annoying trend on Indie twitter this week seems to be saying devs will add "sex" (whatever that entails) to a game, if some pathetic beg for followers or likes is reached. Similarly to people for whom sex functions as just a giddy provocation or transgression (usually with a heaping helping of the most amateur, rather than fun, Evil Bisexuality), people who only want to do it if they get enough "likes" are some of the last people I want actually depicting sex in the first place. Again, the abstraction of "audience" must be deferred to, again it can be blamed for producing something likely pretty mediocre. But if you want some games made by people who put sex stuff in out of pure zest for life, there's always the new Domino Club drop.

Brief thoughts on Horror for the first day of Halloween

2023-09-01T00:00:00Z

Stephen was showing me some Backrooms videos earlier today, and it was interesting to me how they kind of borrow from both Unity horror games (as, I've argued, the predecessor genre to walking simulators) and found footage horror (with its deliberate blurring of sources, the real vs the fictional, and often multimedia character ie Noroi) as sort of omnivorous, uniquely post-digital approaches. And, additionally, I also saw (on this first of September; the first day of the Traditionally Recognized Halloween Period) a comic artist talking about how one of their characters now shows up as a purchaseable mask on the Spirit Halloween Stores website, without any of the typical liscensing, recognition or even communication you might expect had it been a "deal."

Of course this isn't notable, it's really common in horror media in particular. The discount shops in town always have a rotating cast of offbrand stuffed toys from a recent viral horror game or video or creepypasta meme in their front window, and you can find an even bigger selection on Alibaba (imo someone should rip off character designs from Stephen's games in this manner). It's interesting to me that horror is a place where the veil between the public domain and intellectual property, so to say, thins, and you end up with something that is kind of half-open, and so contributes to really interesting and enthusiastic creative work (yume nikki fangames, SCP wikis, etc), but a field that is also still entangled with the enclosed, ownership-oriented approach of capitalism, so people still end up getting exploited along predictable lines.

I don't know if I fully have a theory of "why horror" to begin with, though. I think attributing it to a presumed lineage with folklore and therefore this sort of innocent, idealized image of vernacular storytelling makes what I call the "chess error" which is a common rhetorical move in game studies: asserting videogames are like chess because it is one of the oldest or most famous things also called a "game," rather than drawing significant practical points of resemblance. An analogy between oral traditions and the hyper-flexible mass manufacturing factories that make bootlegging so speedy and profitable or online platforms that allow for viral broadcasting combined with the ability to ownership- and medium- agnostically mine whatever cultural artefacts and technological resources are at hand is kind of tenuous, or uninteresting.

It's also not exactly the same as a genre understanding of horror, when what comes out at the end is equally likely to be recognizeable as narrative prose or an A24 film deal, as a clipped and recontextualized meme joke or nameless children's toy. Is it more like a sort of target feeling? A set of relationships that is more blurry or dialogical than, for example, the Viewer to Voice of the Franchise relationship in streaming TV? A type of attention that incorporates a meta-awareness of communal "source," digital tools and methods, etc? IDK! It is hard to put my finger on, but it feels notable. I especially find the looser, lay understanding of creative ownership which is much more flexible, both hungry and willing to share, that proliferates there (and is sometimes enclosed or halted by capitalist interests) to be an interesting counter argument to more mainstream formulations of IP and copyright.

w/ women like these who needs patriarchy

2023-07-17T00:00:00Z

This article is very stupid but I think useful in that it articulates the angle of fundamentally reactionary, sex-binary-conformist feminism in a clear way by applying its two contradictory stances on gender nonconformity... to the same person (Radclyffe Hall), arguing that A) Gender nonconforming women are functionally men, or want to be men, are doing "toxic masculinity" or are only nonconforming to cope with sexism... but also B) Trans men and other gender variant "biological women" (what editor did that get past..!?) have to be reclaimed as women, which is what they "really" are, regardless of their self-identification or extent of their gender nonconforming behavior.

In concert, this basically works to ensure that only fully conforming (~biological~) women are the object, concern, and correct "enactors" of feminism, because there is always a sense in which category A or category B need to be "corrected" and brought back into the fold. The obvious end of this line of thought is to stitch gender roles back together with the sex binary by pathologizing any difference; the only reason anyone I think should be "a real woman" thinks otherwise or does not comport herself in a sufficiently feminine manner is because she's mistaken, politically suspect, has something wrong with her, is not healthily coping with the world etc. Everyone AFAB really does like wearing dresses, being called Maugeritte, or going to condescending dinner parties deep down inside, or would without the messy externalities. Of course being a self-proclaimed "invert" does not map 1:1 to our current sense of completely being a trans man or being a lesbian; however the angle the author takes interestingly ends up drawing on both transphobic and homophobic tropes even more than insisting on one would by simultaneously trying to treat its object as both.... lol

Less obvious but also indicative of this attitude is the line where the writer stops just short of calling the other subject of the essay a faghag, not just for being into "homosexual" men but "effeminate" men in general, which in the author's eyes may as well be the same thing and is an obviously doomed and embarassing endeavor, which can only be discussed in a sort of salacious, leading way... Surely no "normal" or even "self-respecting" woman would lower herself to hanging around other gender mis-fits; again, something is wrong with her. Maybe if she'd spent more time going to dinner parties with people who obviously didn't respect her preferences (by addressing her as Mrs. (Husband's last name)), instead of hanging around with effeminate guys she would be more ok with herself, which, from this biologically deterministic angle means simply silently bearing any desire for life to be different in service of a united front glorifying normie cis womanhood.

Like idk overall it's just very revealing of a weird jealousy this strand of feminism seems to have over its increased irrelevance as it focuses only on the status of normative womanhood, where the things meant as just thought experiments or evocative theorizing are actually being done and won by expanding models of queerness. That men are responsible for less housework in a society that reproduces itself via the nuclear family, even when he and his wife have the same jobs, is too much of a boring, obvious observation that feminism still beholden to naturalizing this divide inherently cannot do much but armchair psychologize about. Anyways. Wonderful things happen when weird women and effeminate men get together, sexually, emotionally, politically! Imo.

Tags: #hiiiiii #just wanking #lee lozano you were so right

Books read this year (2022)

2023-01-01T00:00:00Z

It's that time of year again! I round up my reading list on my masto account as well, but I still enjoy looking back at what I enjoyed or didn't, and reflecting on broader trends in what I'm reading.

Alasdair Gray - 1982, Janine
Chris Kraus - Torpor
Alessandro Delfanti - The Warehouse
Thomas Pynchon - Bleeding Edge
Akiyuki Nozaka - The Pornographers
Jeanne Thornton - Summer Fun
JO Morgan - Pupa
Jeanne Thornton - The Dream of Doctor Bantam
Elfriede Jelinek - REIN GOLD
Olga Ravn - The Employees
Chris Kraus - Aliens and Anorexia (reread)
Edmondo de Amicis - Love and Gymnastics
Lucy Lippard - I See / You Mean
Merlin Sheldrake - Entangled Life
Jenny Hval - Paradise Rot (reread)
Steven Angelides - A History of Bisexuality
Vladimir Nabokov - Despair (reread)
Thomas Pynchon - Inherent Vice
Nathalie Sarraute - Tropisms
Ann Quin - Three
Ulrich Haarburste - Ulrich Haarburste's Novel of Roy Orbison in Clingfilm
Bram Stoker - Dracula
Thomas Pynchon - Against the Day

Year Trends

The Good: Getting into Pynchon was huge for me this year, dazzling and humbling, amazing in ways I totally wasn't expecting. (His mainstream literary reputation is, basically, wrong. He is That Good but not in the way people tend to talk about him. Don't be scared! It's funny and sexy and very easy to read on a prose level, actually!) Bleeding Edge was one of the novels this year that went straight to my top ten of all time (alongside Torpor and 1982, Janine), I wasn't AS impressed by Inherent Vice though the prose style was still hard to argue with, and Against the Day was just a total Experience; it's probably the most you can fit into a novel and have it still be coherent, period. I remember last New Year's Eve I was finishing up Tom McCarthy's The Making of Incarnation, which I enjoyed, but was the sort of novel that felt attainable, you know? The type of work that you feel you could make something on the level of. This year, I was blazing through the last 100 pages of Against the Day and experienced the sort of opposite effect, it was an expansive work, a daunting work, a work that reinforces that I will always have a long way to go.

Getting familiar with Jeanne Thornton's work was great, and gave me a good comp for my own writing, I think. Both Nathalie Saurraute's Tropisms and Ann Quin's Three are a bit more stylistically experimental than I usually go for on my own, and were handed to me by my partner, but how they handled particular emotional states in such a surprising and vivid way really stuck with me. Lucy Lippard's lost 70s multi-pov novel is surprisingly contemporary, and pretty easily outclasses similar recent ultra-hyped novels with similar conceits, which was a fun surprise. While I read less nonfiction this year, I really enjoyed how both The Warehouse and Entangled Life well... ENTANGLED the factual core of their research with the emotional and cultural baggage the subjects (alienated, automation-heavy workplaces or... mushrooms!) carry with them. A History of Bisexuality was also a great book for any polymorphous pervert who feels like most of the "discourse" about terms, orientation and so on, are just totally missing any sort of truly critical point. Super refreshing.

The Bad: Pupa was by far the main disappointment among this list... How do you make bug people so drab and joyless? Well, failing any other ideas the typical form of the Quaint English Small Town Novel will basically kill any speculative concept VERY VERY dead for you. I really want to read The Chrysalids by John Wyndham because the concept appeals to me there as well, but the similarity in voice and sensibility really has me putting it off. Blech! The Employees was also kind of a letdown in the sense that the whole sci-fi workplace setting, which, again, I am really conceptually interested in for reasons, is just kind of muted and unaddressed. You don't really get a sense of what it's like to work and live there, the interpersonal drama, the office politicking and so on, besides the light touch implication that it kind of happens, alongside kind of tiresome passages of ~imagery~ and all the various perspective characters' monologues so weighted with poetic ~meaning~ that operates in kind of an undifferentiated and predictable way. NOT WEIRD ENOUGH! on both of these. REIN GOLD was also, basically, fine for what it is but not really my type of thing, or at least not at this length, lol.

The Forthcoming: WHAT on earth do you read after Against the Day? I feel kind of stumped. I read a lot of novels this year, because I wrote and was revising/shopping around my own novel. I revisited work that I was comping to (Paradise Rot and Aliens & Anorexia) and tried to read other work that was suggested by friends or pitched as similar to this and my forthcoming projects. There was also stuff like being exposed to Pynchon and Alasdair Gray that made me feel like I am playing baby blocks level of prose writing right now and need to become more and more ambitious! I will probably start in on some nonfiction since that's stacking up for me, and I'm not really sure, going into another round of revisions on one project and trying to get to a full first draft of a second, if challenging or relevant-but-attainable fiction is a better choice to read at this juncture.

Well, that's all for now! Happy new year!

What Does Generated Art Do?

2022-12-16T00:00:00Z

My partner and I came to a sort of collaborative epiphany last night. A not-insignificant part of the appeal of generating art from large data sets seems to be, weirdly, producing visual content without the trouble of subjectivity or desire creeping in. It's kind of like this classic John Baldessari painting:

...though I guess you would have to add "large breasts trending on artstation" to the end of it. And of course play it straight, removing the ambivalent critical function of the work.

Artists have used generative techniques as a part of their practice for a long time, and this has been as interesting as the Surrealist's excavation of randomness, dream imagery and chance, and as banal as Damien Hirst's proto-NFT spot paintings. But this doesn't seem to be what people find both exciting and threatening about art generators.

In this case, it's much more of a consumer-tech impressedness with the shallow, beautiful surfaces of the output. None of the outputs stand up to much scrutiny on their own, full of blurry bits and errors, but they're convincing at a glance, which is, functionally, what most art has been enlisted to do under capitalism.

Compared to, I dunno, fantasy game concept art, sameface moba girls, and the general content of a Greek Statue Avatar Guy thread, etc, people seem to find it unconvincing when I say the Baldessari painting above is more beautiful to me by far. Within an across-the-political-spectrum anti-intellectual treatment of culture that we've been in the midst of since perhaps 9/11, the appreciation of art that is exciting and produces novel aesthetic experiences and consideration of the world beyond the serene and overwhelming triteness of beauty-which-speaks-for-itself has been only legible in bad faith, as "ironic" or "pretentious."

Conceptual Art of the 60s and 70s is such a touchstone for me not in some insecure bid to look smart (what equally-insecure one trick figurative ponies tend to frame it as), but because it is concerned with moving the viewer internally, rather than imposing an external aesthetic experience. Like the best novels, the text and scenario provoke by their own unexpectedness and perversity, light up your inner life. What the above Baldessari painting does to me is: it makes me think of how I've looked at every painting, every image, I've seen before and inserts something, a new feeling and new tool for thinking into that well-worn circuit. It's stylish, it's affronting, it makes me laugh. "Beauty" is perhaps a far too cheap word for it.

So I don't feel like what I value in art, which seems to evade generators because it requires the newness and intent of a particular angle, experience or desire driving it, is terribly threatened by these things being able to create gradually more coherent images. A lot of professional artists would disagree with me! Professionalism elevates the beauty of surfaces because that's what it needs; the professional has already turned themselves into a sort of machine-for-hire as virtue, displaying how well they can fulfill briefs and push products over the finish line. The areas that seem most "at risk," glossy mag editorial illustration, nepo-baby sci-fi novel covers, prestige-streaming series and AAA games, are areas of culture I can't imagine panicking over the demise of.

The anxiety over an artificial replacement for this inherently alienated situation makes me think of Zizek's fuck-machines, the mechanical simulation of penetrative sexual intercourse you put on in the background to be free to enjoy a date with someone. Of course the small, and already shrinking parcel of money that's spent on these genres of art and design being yet another piece of the pie that goes to techbros fucking sucks, but I think it would be nice, and allow for much broader definitions of aesthetic success, and perhaps even free artists from being compliant little professionals, if the idea that they could be one of the few people precariously slotted into one of these remaining opportunities would just die.

A commercialized obsession with the beauty of surfaces shapes what is aesthetically acceptable in ways beyond putting professionals at an extreme disadvantage. It makes all of our lives dimmer and more boring. It says conceptually daring kitchen sink novels are too hard, what we really need are pared down little bourgeois marriage plots where the characters occasionally handwring about online porn or single-use plastics; it says that the best thing to happen in years is a proliferation of Disney+ IP to the point where one happens to match your personal politics. I mean seriously, I cannot emphasize enough, fuck that, man! Who cares?

I can feel bad about this stuff to the extent that it takes away some existing paychecks that allow some people to do other things with the rest of their life that isn't devoted by necessity to propping up this insult to the whole-cloth concept of human culture. But I also have to refuse to speculatively act like this "culture" as it is has to be preserved, that we have to ensure humans are going into this immiserating meat grinder via tools that only reinforce the hegemony of stagnation and corporate IP, like copyright. We can see the 1000 identical "girl from disney brave oil painting style forest huge cans bare feet" etc outputs, and decide that this is a perfectly fine thing to walk away from, or better yet, to see as a challenge to become even more illegible.

Starving at the Banquet of Sex Writing

2022-11-09T00:00:00Z

I really liked this article. It's easy to pounce on the cliches of any literary trend, and many examples of articles doing so, and well, are cited in the article itself. But I think this one very clearly ties together some threads on why, despite allegedly being amidst a banquet of sexually frank writing, a lot of it leaves me cold and unimpressed! Two things, mainly, I feel like I want to elaborate on from the observations there:

I. (Barely-disguised) Sexual Conservatism
II. The Function of Bisexuality

The constructed anecdote the article starts with is fairly illustrative of the first, and basically interchangeable with many many representations of sex in a lot of recently-viral "millennial" works. The idea of erotic desire is kind of absent in any representation of wanting or pursuing sex; it's towards some other end, always, ultimately, somehow "bad" for you, whether *gasp* kinky, emotionally abusive (less horrifying, of course) or just some sort of political or ethical compromise (practically inevitable). Further, the characters themselves and the logic of the entire novelistic worlds they inhabit are so under-developed that any alternatives are simply not addressed or discarded outright as delusional.

With any other meaning to sexuality and desire in general shut down, a text can only really be functionally conservative, regardless of how gonzo reefer madness etc it goes with showing repetitive depictions of bad, alienated sex. Erotic desire is never enriching or motivating or interesting on its own... well, to look at that too closely may be lending your ear to the Devil. And I feel like this spreads to the kind of constipated relationship a lot of these texts have with depicting desire despite, in back of book blurb anyways, being about it... In place of any type of desire or motivation, many characters tend to talk like they have some sort of self-help blight in place of thoughts and herd like lemmings towards practically identical "bad objects" (enough Ann Summers high street masochism! I thought you all hated 50 Shades!) regardless because them actually wanting something specific wouldn't play out in such a pat way.

But there's the other interesting, especially to me, pattern the essay identifies: that the protagonists of these stories are, well, much more often bisexual women than would emerge from like, a random sampling of the population, or even women. They're usually what I call "notatively bisexual," not just or even specifically in that any non-heteronormative desires are, well, surely happening just off camera, but that the whole of their desire is always extremely unconvincing in the first place.

Meshing with the sexual conservatism of the first point, they're almost all relatively aimless in articulating their desires for their life in general, and the central sexual desire is for some fairly standard masculine/dominant men with few other traits of note. It's almost like the desire is for the subjection of "bad" sex more than the person. And the strict gender conformity of both female protagonist and male object of desire maintains the pervasive and ridiculous myth of some sort of intractable difference between men and women.

It's hard for me to relate to, even as I'm being, demographically, represented. The understanding of bisexuality here seems to be gender conformity both ways, drawn towards men as the domineering masculine and, to a lesser extent women as the safer feminine same, obviously with less glorious frisson because us girls just hang out and braid each other's hair or whatever. Like, where are the girl boyfriends? The cads, horndogs, and losers? The ones who tend to freak other women out a bit? And where are all the other types of men there are, from pathetic to gentle to anything in between depending on how you're looking at them? Where are the people, basically?

To me, realizing my bisexuality was not just expanding my sense of possible relationships to also include an alternate script for women, but to question that there is or should be a difference in the first place, and beyond that, to become aware of how desire and pleasure is threaded throughout my life, not just something a singular, or varied, mechanical sex act can dispense to me followed by an appropriate bit of contrition. Even before I had fully figured this out, in the pits of my most cringe-inducing-in-hindsight heterosexual adventureism, I loved and felt intensely... I'm glad it happened to me and I know exactly why it did, because I wanted it, and while I may have been hurt by how it played out in the end, I never felt "bad" about it.

Contrasted with this, it's easy to see why the Bisexual Woman as a current cultural archetype is not even just a tropey character that becomes an inadequate, cliche representation... on an even baser level than that, she's less a flat character, and more just a narrative tool: bi women show up here so often because we are a special type of pervert, who, even more than straight women, are not just "up for anything" generally, but more specifically are expected to enjoy basically anything a man could do to us (this is the underlying feeling of pretty much any bisexuality "discourse," by the way). This conveniently dodges having to develop a bi character's interiority, work out anything particular or interesting about her desires, and also gives her a heightened degree of sexual abjection, perfect if you're looking to write stories that can only circle around a fundamentally negative, scaremongering, and conservative perspective on sexual desire.

Well, I refuse to be such a tool. lol. I try not to have my moves dictated by my cultural, political, aesthetic, etc., enemies, but a lot of how I decide to depict sex, erotic desire, and desire in general in my own work is a response to this... Of course I hope it's also coherent in itself too. There are plentiful great touchstones for alternatives, just off the top of my head, from things I've re/read this year: Jenny Hval's prurient fascination with piss and mushrooms, Chris Kraus' sex "lacking gender polarity" and like "a bear having sex with a raccoon," any of the many many Devil's Threesomes in Pynchon's body of work, the way 1982, Janine is all one long, heart-wrenching genderweird wank dream, the entire Domino Club, and on and on.

But this is not mainstream stuff; or if it is, not the angle from which that stuff tends to be framed (Sidenote: Pynchon is fun! And sexy! And hilarious!). I feel like it's pretty clear why the style of work I'm complaining about is hegemonic, even as it attempts to masquerade as "transgressive," it's simply by people who have incorporated themselves into a professional and artistic environment where insecurity and conformity are more motivating factors than one's own pleasure. I guess fear and distrust of pleasure is a broad political problem due to the general omnifuck of capitalism, or whatever, but what's the point of simply reporting it, the same way, over and over, besides piano recital applause? If anyone is putting serious thought into making culture, and we tend to consider novelists pretty high on that scale, can't you hope for some... likeee... imagination?

..... Ok ok. Finally, a brief point III... Well, maybe I'm not flexible or creative enough, but how is one both spread eagled and on their knees at the same time?

Winter Closing In

2022-11-07T00:00:00Z

It's been a while since I wrote, and I'm at the phase where just thinking of how long the days were for the person writing 3 months ago could make me froth with envy, lol. I have fortunately been reading much better novels in the meantime, which I will mostly keep discussion of for the end of the year book round up post.

I think it's a relevant life update though, to say that I've started Against the Day, Thomas Pynchon's 1200-page brick on the chaotic soup of New Types of Guy that is the emergence of historical Modernity. I'm a quarter of the way (so basically a whole normal novel) in, and loving it. Stephen always kind of has to shepherd me towards longer books, I think I've been burned in the past, but he got me to read The Magic Mountain which got me thinking heavily about visual novel structure, funnily enough, and now this one. Maybe he'll get a Ulysses read out of me someday too!

I've also been watching a lot of films, with recent little-known standouts being Frederic Hobbs' Troika and Trompe L'oiel shown at Weird Weekend III in Glasgow. I also saw Penda's Fen for the first time in Zone and really enjoyed it, and Stephen and I watched Twin Peaks The Return at last, which was like, a text so dense and rich you don't have any room for dinner (being able to sleep after watching and episode.) I keep track of movies more proactively on my Letterboxd account if weirdo cinema interests you...

Zonemeet in Porthmadog, Wales this year was lovely. Just hanging out watching movies and eating snacks with everyone ~in the flesh~ was a great vibe and we got to check out the weird village from The Prisoner, plus ride a train from the 1800s. On the last day I did some emotional processing in a seaside arcade that I made a Bipsi game about.

Zonemeet was kind of an unofficial warm up for the new Domino Club... I felt a lot of pressure going into it to make something amazing and then got kind of depressed about it and took it down, changed it, put it back up... I was really happy that people seemed to get a kick out of it though, and got into the characters. You can look at all of the games here (I reccomend them all, obviously) and my own submission this time was perverseoverride. In all cases, do mind the content warnings... :sickos: Maybe I'll summarize my backend chat about the game and put it up as a postmortem on here later.

Finally this weekend I went down to Bedford for Trick or Retreat, providing selections from my zine library. It took me a bit to warm up to being around so many people, but in the end the food and conversations and bonfire was all lovely, I got to hold a giant millipede, and I'm always happy when people get something out of browsing my zine collection too... I applied for Plaintext Distro to table at EZF in February, but I'm not sure if I'll get in or how competitive spots are, here's hoping though!

So, even though I don't have much news on the novel publishing front (yes, I'm still trying for that...), I've been really busy, and felt basically at capacity the past few weeks... that my job threw some curveballs and deadlines at me and has been asking me to do stuff that is, imo, above my position and pay grade lately also didn't help. However, I now have 4 friends who have read my full novel draft, and one more in process, which makes me feel positive about it despite the lack of interest so far. I know it's a hard sell. But it's because it's good!

I know I also said this last year but I really want to wind down and have a chill last two months of the year. I'm not doing NaNo, instead working more casually on a shorter, maybe novella-length project I want to get to a full draft and otherwise not taking on much more stuff. There's games I waited for forever either out (like Funny Walk or coming soon, so I also want to catch up on those as well as just enjoying more films, novels, music (the Bjork album I alluded to in the last post turned out to be really good, and there's like, suddenly three new King Gizzard albums to get at...)

However, an important part of holiday relaxation is making and sending cards to everyone! If you read this blog and would like a card, the form is here, please fill it out by the end of the month :)

The recent Twitter exodus has made mastodon a bit more lively, and it's where I post, for example, images of cool mushrooms I find on weekend expeditions to Pollok Park, as well as more up-to-the-minute book reviews and progress on creative work. If you're interested in that, it's here. Frankly I'm glad for this stuff to get more decentralized and weird. Twitter is zzzzz.

Well, there you go, I thought I was just going to do a really quick update post at the beginning of the week, but I've gone on for ages, lol. I should remember to keep up with this one a bit more too!

Writing thru/via Alienation

2022-08-22T00:00:00Z

1982, Janine is such a hot, tender, intense, Modernist novel because it is the rough, crass, slippery back and forth of the self turned against itself, the self with no options, or only bad options, the self that denies itself or acts against its desires. It expresses this mostly through the medium of pornography, or, no, imagined pornography, a lurid soup of the worst genre excesses with telling caesuras where individual psychology peeks through, a startling headlamp pair of eyes, hello! And thus the book flips, introspection becomes the instrument to examine the porn, to break the hapless heroine out of her fetish dungeon of neoliberal state immiseration, which is to liberate both of them, together. Jock quits his job.

When I read a review of a recent novel that chided it, in a formula that has become basically one of the dull "types" of narrow media crit options, as "too psychological" in opposition to presenting a solution that was, of course, some completely abstract and purely notative idea of "solidarity," basically presenting having interiority and political consciousness as a conflicting binary, I had to conclude, this person just does not like novels. Psychology is one of the finest materials you can use in fictional prose; it's like making a film without visual pleasure or a videogame car that can't jump. If you really insist on it, why are you even here?

It's not even to superficially place the two next to each other, or attempt to synthesize them, but more to look at how one is always in the other anyways; the experience of political economy creates particular psychological effects, relationships to the self, Jock eroticizes the very security complexes he works as an inspector for and torments his soul in its barbed wire; political possibilities emerge from the scope imagination is allowed. And this is the charge of reading theory to me, it is a tool to better think about what I want and what I have in common with others, in a context of constrained alienation.

So this is what I try to do with writing, blogging, but also fiction. My novel is about identification with/across the alien as an escape route from normative social structures in a broad sense, and the more sf-oriented work I've been doing with Red Futures has been trying to crack more into the particulars of alienation via work, which I of course have a lot of material on, and have also read a lot about.

I've done three so far! The first is a bit about encountering the naivete of people who are still sincerely "into" their work, see it as a sort of non-antagonistic situation that allows them to "use their skills" and "pursue their interests," as well as the proximity of roles that burn through that goodwill at different rates, and the awkwardness that can result in, plus the role of cultural heritage, IP and academic study in perpetuating industries "as is." The second was responding to the idea of "utopias," so I turned it around a bit and had a literal alien discover a bit of their ideal while trying to understand the superficial rituals of office work.

The most recent one is specifically responding to how relationships are metricized and instrumentalized by capitalism, it's a sort of nightmare scenario that did indeed come to me in a dream that combines the dehumanization of social media surveillance and personality tests with the dystopian concept of a "work wife." And of course, I had a blast writing it. If you care to check them out, I hope you enjoy them!

With another volume of Domino Club on the horizon, this post is mainly just to put the writing I've been doing in the meantime here and spitball a bit about my intent and philosophy towards it. Regardless of what I'm doing for a day job, producing writing, sometimes a huge amount, seems inevitable, it basically has been since I was young, but I think the line being clearly drawn now, that work is totally separate from what I write, has made me a lot more explorative and excited by what I can do with my own writing. I found out recently that my art historical role model, Lucy Lippard, also wrote a novel that has been reprinted recently; I'm very excited to think through that!

Also did you hear, Bjork is going to release a "mushroom album" filled with gabber beats and bass...

Massive Pan! Pupa by JO Morgan

2022-06-15T00:00:00Z

I have mostly been enjoying the novels I've been reading alongside working on my own; standouts include Torpor, Bleeding Edge, 1982 Janine and Summer Fun. However this one was so bad and I could go on about it so long that it didn't fit in my masto account's #books thread. So here it is, for all lovers of hatchet jobs:

#books -- Pupa - JO Morgan: I am not happy to give this one an almost total pan. The guy manning the table at the small press fair was so nice and I want to be able to find something in common with other treatments of the bug people genre wrt my current novel draft. Unfortunately this is actually just a Very British Novel, therefore I am destined to despise it.

It's obvious on the thematic level, which demonstrates such a suspicion of pleasure and transformation that you have to wonder why the author even decided to write about bug people in the first place, and naturally this plays out in the most predictable and gendered way possible. It's billed as an atopia in the back copy, but really just applies some superficial insect qualities to small town Britain, that sort of imposed dreariness that becomes so mannered it ends up just as twee as the dreaded other end of this spectrum, trite tea and biscuits landed gentry antics.

The world-building is therefore both laid on thick and alternately unconvincing or incomprehensible. The transformation to adult and resulting sex life of the insect people is treated as completely mysterious and unknowable at times, fine. While sex education is notoriously insufficient in real life, the level of complete secrecy in the novel seems to possibly get in the way of this society lasting very long, especially given how common the "destruction of eggs" is (nice metaphor!/s).

But in other scenes, it's something that government services are oriented around, pamphlets are handed out about, and, in one especially cringeworthy instance of videogame style audio logs leaking into other mediums, the BBC seems to hire someone to go on the TV and read the in-universe equivalent of the Wikipedia page on Sexual Intercourse, in case you haven't gotten what's obviously going to happen at the end of the book by page 30. This is funny, perhaps unintentionally (there's also another part where an old woman "larval" delivers a cackling Bloodborne NPC level paragraph of clumsy exposition) but come on, it's got to be one or the other in many of these cases, right?

None of the insect elements are really doing anything in the narrative beyond some dull gross out moments; don't expect anything nearing the ambition or rigor of Cronenberg. It could really be any of the thousands of existing stories about how having sex makes your eyes empty and your hair color dull and wrecks your abject body, if you're a woman, anyways.

So that was disappointing, but on a stylistic level it also resorts to many of the obvious tricks of Very British Novels that are as easy to notice as what an unpracticed is-this-your-card street magician is doing once you're aware of them. The dialogue is clipped and repetitive in the name of stand-in realism that actually ends up sounding robotic and hard to follow, and the omniscient narrator occasionally indulges in mild editorializing or ambivalence to offer plausible deniability that the author is just bashing you over the head with their fusty moralism the entire time.

Boring, boring, boring! No mystery, no delight. But I do want to say the paper stock and cover design are very nice, so I don't feel totally ripped off. Eye catching on the shelf, and then you can have a stimulating conversation with any guests about how much it sucks.

The Unsimulated Sexual Act (Short Story)

2022-05-09T00:00:00Z

“Well, if we ever want to know where all the bodies are buried,” Sean cut in, “We’ll ask Kathleen. Since she’s been with the company ever since the start.”

Delivered in his droll meeting voice, this phrase made my ears prick up, and I tabbed back out of what I was doing into the Zoom call. Everyone else, a 12-grid or so of familiar faces from similar angles in similarly poorly-lit, cream-walled rooms, was politely laughing at this so I did the same, and then took a swig from a mug of coffee on my desk to let my face change.

“Speak of the devil,” someone else said. Another box opened up in the grid, and Kathleen appeared, then opened a view of her computer screen that shoved all of us off to the side.

“Sorry, had a lot of emails this morning,” she said. “How is everyone?”

I tried to look engaged, nodding and drinking from my mug again, but as Kathleen began going over the benchmarks for the week, even my false attentiveness strayed. I tabbed back to the browser window I had open, where I was leisurely scrolling down a Wikipedia page titled “Unsimulated sex.” The bulk of the page was a long table, populated with mechanistic descriptions of moments from schlocky Euro cinema, entries that crawled with body doubles and purported, unconfirmed acts, like a dream recollection from the psychiatrist's couch. It was, repeatedly, unclear if any of the main cast members were involved in hardcore scenes.

When the run-down of pending tasks and in-progress work started to sound familiar again, I tuned back in, and briefly turned on my mic.

“I’ll just be QCing the new second edition texts for the eighth and ninth chapters this week,” I said. Easy.

Though in hindsight that was the first moment I had my doubts. I was still thinking about what Sean said. Despite it being a figurative comment, it pointed to a long term context completely outside of what I knew of this job, started remotely, going on remotely. For the rest of my coworkers, it was made up of interpersonal dramas and grievances, however petty, done in the flesh. Maybe I didn’t really understand my role within the company, and maybe this whole work from home thing was a blessed interval before the axe would fall. My ability to hold an actual job long term in normal times had not yet been tested. Maybe I wouldn’t be able to cope, face to face.

At the end of the meeting, as everyone was about to wave and turn off their cameras, Kathleen said: “Oh, wait, one more thing!” She opened her own screen again and pulled up a PDF document she had minimised from the toolbar. “Ta-dah!”

“Castle Party!” appeared in the company’s soft and unseriffed branding font, underneath a blobby and purplish depiction of a cartoon castle. Skimming the schedule underneath the logo revealed that it was not really a party in the strict sense, but a day-long programme of corporate pep talks and team building activities set upon the glamorous stage of a historical country house turned event venue, far out in the miles and miles of countryside surrounding the city. All catered, of course. Well, we were all so excited, weren’t we? I did my best to seem pleased, but I wasn’t so sure.

👁

After work, I brought the trip up to my boyfriend, who I had moved in with just before all this began. Very luckily, we were still getting along well. Working from home and eating meals in the same small room, then going to the adjacent room to fuck and sleep made it feel like we were the only two passengers left awake on a long haul generation ship, resting our heads on each other’s shoulders in the middle of an infinite void. We sometimes let things in, packages, takeaways, and other times ventured out, for groceries and other errands, but this would be the first major event to pop this bubble in months. I wasn’t sure how he’d take it.

“The CEO is American, since they were just acquired, and she’s like, really excited about the whole castle aspect, I guess,” I said, to conclude the explanation.

“Mm,” he said, not indicating much.

“It feels a little weird to go,” I added, hoping this would clarify that I wanted his input.

“It runs longer than your usual hours?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m sure they can’t legally require it, then. Just tell your manager there’s some reason you can’t.”

I stopped to think a second. I’d have to be more direct.

“So you don’t think I should go?”

“Oh, I thought you were asking me how to get out of it.” This made me smile. I appreciated his conscientiousness and principled resistance to doing anything for a job above the barest minimum that could be gotten away with. As charming as that was, it wasn’t what I wanted this time.

“No, I’m not sure.” I said this in honesty, but knew after it had left my mouth that it had become a bit of a lie. I would go. The castle party was a parcel of tantalising novelty that risked too much trouble and disappointment to refuse, even if I wasn’t totally convinced this novelty would be all good, or even a good idea.

👁

When I arrived at the intersection where the chartered bus would pick us up, I felt immediately over and under-dressed. I had taken “smart casual” more seriously than most of the men present, who were largely wearing the same flannel shirts or hoodies over tees they did in the Zoom calls. No other woman was dressed like me, collared shirt under a sweater. They had all gone for cinched dresses or trendy, colourful blouses; some had even brought a change of outfit for the dinner and music scheduled for the evening. From both directions I felt like a bit of a freak, and so tried to get a window seat near the back of the bus when it arrived, after stiffly greeting the few people I was able to match with how they appeared on a computer screen.

The mood on the bus was not unlike a school trip crossed with early pages of “The Masque of the Red Death.” When we had all boarded, the CEO did a head count and shouted a joke about super-spreader events over her face mask, which was met with polite laughter. I watched as we pulled away from the city, on highways that passed suburbs, and then narrower roads, which wound through one last small village before all we were surrounded by were rolling hills and sheep fields. I kept my eyes peeled for the last bus stop we passed, tried to estimate how long it took from there to get to the venue, but, losing track, my verdict landed on “pointlessly far.”

Of course, the castle was impressive; usually what was done there were weddings. I was hardly devoted to this job, still I mimed clapping at every happy announcement or recognition of achievements that mostly preceded my presence at the company that made up the CEO’s introduction. We were sorted into groups, approximately by department, and made to compete in a series of absurd activities– paint-by-numbering a poster fastest, documenting a scavenger hunt with posed photos, pooling answers on a list of trivia. In each activity I hung off to the side like a wooden prop, like the fake crowds they had tucked into rows of seats at football tournaments, and wondered how I incidentally appeared in all the photographs that existed only as documentation of an artificially competitive activity, never to be looked at again. Probably unhappy and strange, I thought, unable to project even the barest sense that I belonged there, and certainly no clue what to do with my face.

With the schedule of activities completed, we sat down in the main hall for dinner. Unless a vegetarian meal request had been logged in advance, a bleeding steak was brought out for each valued employee, so soft in the centre that they started to deform into pulp as we cut pieces off of them. I looked around, feeling bad for the waiters who circled, all wearing face masks, refilling wine glasses perhaps a bit too attentively, while the rest of us were yelling conversations over poor acoustics and a house band whose mics were set too loud, in a seating arrangement that deliberately grouped us with people from completely different departments.

I was sitting next to a guy who did front-end development for the company’s public-facing site, which, of course, was different from the interface content and editorial would use, but like any two members of the human race, we approached conversation certain we could find some commonality. He told me that his home town was small, but not so bad, really, and I wondered if that was anything I’d ever say about my own. To evidence this claim he detailed what days had the best drink specials due to the local university.

When I had worked through the difficult steak and my third glass of wine, I excused myself to go to the bathroom and Kathleen, watching from the adjacent table, followed me, talking fast over the blaring cover band music.

“You should really make more of an effort,” she said. “You seem so tuned out.” It dawned on me, with some chagrin, that this was what kind of drunk she was, completely incompatible with the kind I was. I mustered all of my addled capacity to be gracious.

“Sorry,” I said. “I’ve had a bit too much, I think.”

“You’ve hardly had anything. Be sociable. Act like you’re not miserable to be here.”

“Kathleen,” I said. “It’s work drinks. Please let me go.”

She had looped around, putting herself at an angle between me and the bathroom door handle, cornering me against the adjacent wall.

“No, I really think I have to clear the air about this.” She looked at me, really serious this time, and it felt like I snapped sober. “Remember when you said in the interview, that you were glad for this job, as something you could do until hiring picks up in your field again?”

“Yeah, well, I’d like to use my degree for something, someday. Can I please–”

“So, what? You’re too good for all this? You think you’re smarter than everyone here?”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” I said. All I had done in the interview was spoken honestly; my degree had been the only thing in my life I felt good at, and then I was shot into a shut down economy where it didn’t seem to matter what you knew. While I was happy for the pay, my job now was to squint for typos in PDFs and move status changes around on spreadsheets all day, for fuck’s sake.

“You need to be more bought in,” Kathleen said. “Or you’re risking letting everyone down. And you won’t stick around long like that.”

I swallowed the indignity, that I was now officially receiving some sort of dressing down at my first work party, and tried not to betray any emotional response.

“I’ll try. I’ll do my best,” I said.

“It’d be really helpful for you to open up more.” Her voice went low with a lot of implication, like I would know what to do, but I didn’t. Neither of us made a move. Far away the house band was playing one of those songs that I had only ever heard snippets of walking through shops.

“For example,” Kathleen continued. “What part of yourself do you think is the most vulnerable? What do you feel most protective of?” I couldn’t follow if this was some kind of motivational speaking thing, to try and get me to unblock my mental guard around the rest of the team somehow, or a cursory sift for emotional blackmail she thought would be fruitful after a few glasses of wine.

“I don’t know,” I replied. “In what way?”

“Like, do you have nightmares about a particular part of your body getting injured?”

“My eyes,” I said, considering a long time. “A lot of times it seems like something is trying to stab into my eyes, I guess. If I had to say.”

Kathleen circled around in front of me. I flinched like she had reached up and put both of her hands on either side of my head to hold me still, but she was just looking at my eyes, leaning in close.

“That makes sense,” she said. “You think of them as a whole, intact organ, but what really makes them work is the hole…”

I tried to follow her point, and realised she had me momentarily transfixed.

“Did you ever think about it like that, huh? A few things you can learn from us, if you put in some effort,” she went on into my silence, after drawing out the pause. It would have been the perfect moment for her to sink a concealed steak knife into my gut, for the whole hyper-managed corpo event to explode into an unrestrained orgy of bloodshed. Instead, the cover band ended their set and someone else got up on the stage.

“Alright, now, who wants to try some ceilidh dancing?” the next act asked, into a booming microphone. Kathleen broke away from me and went into the women’s restroom like nothing had happened. Amidst the sound of a fiddle tuning, I forgot why I had even gotten up to walk over here.

It seemed to be the thing to do, so I wandered out onto the floor and formed up in one of the groups being rushed together throughout the hall. We were told to line up, man woman man on one side, woman man woman the other, but it hardly mattered. The confusion of the Dashing White Sergeant obliterated the play acting of sex difference, and the horseplay escalated as the music transitioned to a completely gender-shuffled Strip the Willow. A woman who would have never otherwise touched my body nearly chucked me across the room with the momentum we spun off of each other, the music wound down to silence, and eventually we were all trundled into the charter bus home, dropped off in the city centre to stagger into late night buses and taxis. From the point Kathleen let me go to the point I landed sideways on my pillow at home, it all seemed to progress very fast, compared to how the day dragged, like something underground had lurched into motion out in the country, and we had all attuned to its inevitability.

And then, I somehow woke up a few minutes before my alarm, boyfriend in bed next to me, face tender and completely blank, breathing softly in his sleep with a bit of an early spring allergy sniffle. I sat in the grey quiet of our bedroom, staring at the blank wall. A thin stream of sunlight was leaking through where the curtains met, projecting the dappled green imprint of the leaves outside onto it, upside-down. I decided that I would just have to believe that being inside for so long had made everyone a bit weird. My phone alarm shredded through the silence, the light shifted, the camera obscura effect vanished. It was what I had to tell myself to face another work day.

👁

Domino Club III - Vault 819, Underground Postmortem

2022-04-03T00:00:00Z

Vault 819, Underground is obviously an insane, near future sf 1982, Janine pastiche, though I appreciate it's probably not obvious if you haven't read the novel. Written by Alasdair Gray following his debut Lanark, the book was fractiously received at the height of the so-called "porn-wars" era of regressive feminism because the main character's interiority is mainly conveyed through narrating his own sexual fantasies, for the first third or so. Obviously anyone who got mad about this didn't finish the book. Which is a shame, because it's a wonderful kitchen sink sort of novel that combines erotica with ime shockingly affecting passages on gender with cold war era political commentary and tragicomic life writing etc etc... it's the kind of novel you don't want to read while working on your own (oops!) because it really jolts you and makes you think of what the hell you think you're doing. I loved it and still think about particular passages every few days. I highly, highly reccomend it.

I actually started reading it when the discussed theme was circling around the idea of tunnels, subterranean bunkers and so on. I guess I imagined it would involve more busty women squirming through dire prison break scenarios, but there's only a little bit of that. Regardless, crossing it with the institutional prison of the art world (hyper-secure storage of financialized art assets) still produced a lot to work with. In terms of putting the game together, I worked with fellow Domino Clubber Candle on the Tape Window System style display. It was a demo they'd had sitting around for a while to mimic the style of The Silver Case games (called, in-game, the "Film Window System") in a browser format. It looks great, and is all CSS and HTML tweaks under the hood, for me at least, which is what I'm already comfortable with. It only took a little bit of back and forth to get most of the effects I wanted and some I even figured out how to do by myself!

The main challenge and time sink was writing! I knew how I wanted it to look from the start and Candle was able to make a working version of what I was envisioning before I was even ready to use it, and (building on Flesh/Circuit), I wanted to hit on the use of stock/repurposed imagery even harder for thematic purposes, and also because of the condensed timescale combined with my inability to draw. In the end, the text is around 8,000 words, making it about as long as Flesh/Circuit as well. A lot of my attempts at "short fiction" have come out to around that level recently, which makes them hard to place. Idk! I hope someone makes the time for them and likes them, I suppose.

The police station setting of the sexual fantasies in the first half of 1982, Janine sets up the psychological landscape of the main character: being a middle aged Tory, or petty, un-glamorous fascism. Over the course of fantasizing, the inherent contradictions of this position break through and break down his mental routines. Obviously this is a really ambitious premise for a novel where the functional action is this guy getting drunk and jerking off in a hotel room after work. That's what happens here too, except it's a woman I guess... the hotel room description is taken directly from an unnerving EasyHotel experience I had in London (where else?). There's also the joke about the Festival of Brexit oops I mean the Festival of Britain I mean the Festival of Great Britain and Northern Ireland I mean I don't fucking know Something About Creativity as the most garish recent example of watered-down "culture" and "creativity" (by committee of course) being used to shore up increasingly violent, immiserating nationalism, but the entire structure of art patronage and ownership, even/especially when the state is your patron, is a sort of metaphorical imprisonment and punishment zone for the spontaneous generativity of human consciousness. (Also I did not know that the festival had been rebranded in exactly the way The Artist proposes as the foreplay scene's punchline, in real life, at the time I wrote it. But I guess it was the most obvious gag.)

Even while the main character in my adaptation is not the openly conservative security system inspector from (the start at least) of 1982, Janine, she still has an element of squeamish conservatism in the sense of working for and wanting to be a success in this area, despite a comprehensive awareness of its stupidity and the total lack of dignity it's come to offer for anyone except profoundly mindless ex-MP hirelings and the like. Similarly to the novel, the process of undirected fantasizing eventually cracks through this deluded "realism," leading to epiphany and denouement. I'm interested in the role fantasy/imagination plays in "real" life, how it can be coerced or primed, how it can defer certain things, how it ultimately remains unruly and unpredictable... This is also why I selected "X Offender" as the song Janine sings at karaoke, which I previously had discussed in the context of romance fantasy-contra-reality as it shows up in Chulip, though I also briefly considered both "Caroline No" and "Picture This."

Now to be a peevish little Adorno, there's also the element of algorithmically generated/augmented reality fantasy that is alluded to through the visual interface, and is the main element of speculative world-building IMO, because I see personal tech changing a lot more over the next few decades than art storage or the economy of art production. It's the main new element that doesn't appear in 1982, Janine, when I had lifted so many more (college flashback, dead friend with vaguely homoerotic entanglement, Trident and space exploration references, quitting letter, gender ambivalence, did I mention how desperately I reccomend this novel, etc). I guess I've been interested lately in how algorithmic legibility constrains both what we do and what we want. A lot of people seem stuck in pitching work towards palatable categories or not knowing what to do with work that doesn't go into any of the ones currently in play.

I hate feeling mis-recognized by stuff that's supposed to be "for me," the uncanny ads platforms serve me, the artificiality of stock image representation, and the idea that ie thinkpieces on how I should be excited about twee sapphic new traditionalism aesthetic trends would make me want to do anything other than throw a broom at someone. We all hated when "algorithmic curation" was introduced to platforms that were previously chronological but now that there's one that originated that way it freaks me out that people are seriously like "this is the good algorithm actually" before showing me even more superficial, shallow, bloated and impressively unfunny content than I've ever encountered before. So I guess all these negative feelings towards everything friendly and supposed to be "for me" was the most driving aspect of both the visual format (unnerving and ironic "results" being thrown up to illustrate the internal fantasy) and cynical emotional tenor of the game.

Domino Club is "anonymous," though my work was really obvious in this case and is usually at least "somewhat obvious." I see it more as anonymity to the public, so that it's possible to stumble on these things as mysterious, or make something that goes against public personal "branding," etc, and also share it collectively, as a "look at what all of us did," as a community of like-minded peers with similar priorities and interests, rather than the absolute logistical misery of group projects. This work is totally against what the algorithm favors, hustle, what you can turn into a portfolio piece or somehow monetize etc and I think that's good... it's easy to forget when so many things are put in front of you as "important" or "popular" for some reason or another that things can just have value and be compelling in their own right, in a way you can encounter completely accidentally. I find working in this way, among the other Domino Club members, extremely inspiring and worthwhile!

I've talked a lot about my own submission here, bc this is the postmortem blog post, but obviously you should check out and play all the other Domino Club games now, if you haven't already.

Been a bit!

2022-02-25T00:00:00Z

I suppose I didn't have a ton to say after my last post... Honestly things have been the same for a while here, but not necessarily in a bad way. Glasgow winter is still rough, so damp and dark and cold, but I'm hanging in there.

February was actually kind of a packed month for me, surprisingly. Since mid-December I have been consistently working on revising the novel draft I produced during NaNoWriMo, and am about 75% of the way through that first pass. So far it's been a really exciting and interesting process that's gotten me even more invested in thinking about the characters and working out the themes I want to touch on... I'm kind of obsessed! So anything else (including writing update blog posts) I've been slacking on.

But aside from that there were also some other writing things I had to finish this month for non-novel purposes. I ran the annual crit writing jam I've done for the past six years now (woah!), UNDO! Jam, and as you can see we got a lot of interesting entries, even though people in general seem to be (understandably) really tired out right now.

I've also been revising and writing some short sci fi fiction, both to submit to some magazines and share with a leftist sci fi writing group I joined. I haven't had any luck with the magazines so far, which is disappointing because I thought some were a particularly good fit, but it also makes me wonder if that's really a productive venue to share my work. I've been enjoying reading stuff people just casually post online, like this story by Splendidland or this one by Marina Kittaka, so I may set up an additional zonelet to do that eventually. Or maybe going to the group discussion this weekend will give me some additional ideas. I have a longer story I've been thinking of distributing as a zine, and GZF applications are up...

I also finished a catalog essay(!) for an exhibition publication that should come out sometime this year. I always feel really excited and like I can let loose a bit when I'm writing about games for a contemporary art perspective, whereas I find responding to the assumptions of academic game studies really grating and stultifying. The piece will still go through a few rounds of editing but I'm excited to see the feedback I get on it! Even though I feel excited now it did seem like a larger scale opportunity than I'm generally used to and I was kind of nervous about it, so put off putting any of the ideas I was thinking over down. So it was sort of hanging over me all this month but I finally got it done.

Finally, in terms of personal life I had a nice Valentines Day with my partner. It's kind of one of the things we celebrate as an anniversary, since we never really had a specific moment of "starting dating," "getting engaged" or even "getting married" so far, lol. But Valentines Day 2017 was when we worked up the guts to move from emailing to text chatting, which quickly became regularly meeting up in person, and the rest-- Well anyways, we got a big, hearty takeout meal from a local Greek restaurant and watched an appropriately trashy and insane romcom (My Life in Ruins, great).

We're also looking at new flats, and have made our first application for one, so, fingers crossed! And I guess the last thing I want to wrap up before the end of the month is reading over the first three chapters of my novel draft again and sending it off to some manuscript competitions that are currently open.

Other things that happened since my last post, in brief

Started playing and then mourned Wordle when it became part of the NYT site
Movies: I rewatched Moonstruck and My Own Private Idaho, and watched The Living End for the first time. They're all excellent.
I also watched Dying for the Crown for the first time and watched it again. It's not good but it's really fun.
I read Gaming the Iron Curtain, which I found very fascinating and inspiring, and got to interview the author, Jaroslav Švelch, for an upcoming episode of the Critical Distance podcast that I'm excited for.
I also read the novel 1982, Janine by Alasdair Gray which was so good it nearly killed me, gave me a crisis of confidence about my own novel, and immediately inspired my next Domino Club project.
I noticed that the Homebargains near my flat had started selling Among Us crewmate shaped stress balls, and bought one.

See ya!

Why write for free

2022-01-07T00:00:00Z

If there's one thing that's more irritating than being asked to write for a site for free, it's when sites that insist on going on existing, despite their fees likely coming out to an equivalent of sub-minimum wage when divided over research time, writing, the editing process, and the additional costs of being a freelancer, make a big self-indulgent fuss about how THEY pay writers, as if it's some sort of favor.

Aside from being written in the fawning, self-conscious language of the Consummate Professional, there are two things that are extra-irritating, and also ironic about this letter being positioned as some favor or service to writers. One, as implied in the first paragraph, based on Who Pays Writers entries, it seems like CA's current rate and rate for the past 5 years or so has been $150, via paypal, for works between 2000-3000 words.

Let's say I am having an absolutely, insanely brilliant and productive day and write that in one 8-hour go, and also don't need to do any research for it. This already kind of constrains what sort of content you can feature, but just use it as a hypothetical. 150/8 = $18.75 an hour, tantalizing if I was still in high school working a no-tips gas station job. But the process of writing for a publication also usually involves at least one editing round, maybe give me half a day for that. 150/12 = 12.5/hr, looking slightly less peachy but still more than I got for toting around leaky trash bags, and I can do it from home.

But that's the thing as well, freelancing comes with a bunch of fees inbuilt, things like paypal fees and self-employment taxes, insurance etc. not being included in the rate... well, I'm bad at figuring these things out exactly but I think 30% off the top is a fair guess. So I have to put around $50 of this payment aside from the jump, $100/12 = 8.33/hr and that's leaving aside the time I have to prepare a pitch in advance of any of this happening, and the fact that pitches may not even be taken, so let's just put a 50/50 shot modifier on this, plus the possibility of late payments or payments I have to chase up multiple times to actually receive... Anyways, Rutter's is not looking so bad.

It's really humorous to invoke minimum wage and wage theft when your rates are so dire, and hardly stand up to serious scrutiny. And of course $150 is a "good" or "middle of the road" rate rather than simply a "bad" one in my particular area of writing, on games. And even then, this is all based on the assumption that I can research and write the piece, off the top of my head, in a single day. Maybe I'm just too committed to a universal work-life go-slow, but that would not be my best or most interesting work, which is of course what these publications say they want and flatter themselves into believing they're supporting. They wouldn't stop you from putting more work into a piece, in fact they tend to stroke your ego to get you to do so, so they can get a better deal. But really, what am I meant to say at this as a "better" alternative, an "opportunity," them acting like they're doing me some kind of principled fucking favor? Thanks for only stealing like half the wages I should get for this, rather than all of them???

Which plays into the second thing that is especially ironic about this grandstanding: CA recently refused co-ownership with its writers, because it didn't match the editor's "vision" for the publication. Of course, it's "complicated," but self-aggrandizing apologia like this really highlights the fact that, historically, wages are only ever an inadequate and compensatory substitute for actual ownership of the context and output of one's work.

Getting fed up with how little I got in return for changing the focus of a piece to make it more saleable or seeing it spackled with ads for things that I think actively worsen culture and human flourishing, like Amazon Prime deals, or military shooters, or whatever is why I don't freelance and don't try to professionalize my writing, because it is a ripoff, and these sites don't help, they just maintain the bottom step above falling into completely non-paid and non-owned work, total dispossession, and demand you thank them for not pushing you off. They directly contribute to race-to-the-bottom rates. They can't afford us, just as much as the people asking for free work can't.

I write on my blog for free because I think professionalization discourses that revolve around negotiating only better pay, or pay in the first place in this case, but are still subject to the terms of platforms, owners, shareholders, advertisers, etc, are limp at best and encourage unquestioning complicity with the needs and values of capital at worst. There's no way to make yourself more marketable out of a fundamentally exploitative relationship, and often times these ideas shutter the horizon more than they open it up by presenting doing anything outside of capitalist relations as a threat to their position to begin with.

Obviously this isn't to say "write for free for a site you don't own," I would literally never do that. It's also not to say that you should never write for a paying site either, but that you should treat it as it is, an antagonistic relationship, no matter how "nice" they are, no matter how much hot air they blow up their own ass about how paying contributors is a "priority" etc., and in general be more critical of what your work and perspective has to lose (as well as open and engaged culture in general) from people who exhort you to professionalize to the standards of closed platforms, subscription services, advertisers and so on as some sort of progressive strategy.

Game Jolt started a massive deletion campaign against games with even a whiff of "sexual content" in them this week, these are the works and histories this ideology will relentlessly steamroll in the interests of maximum marketability, or even just some bozo with platform ownership's "vision." Anyways, I made a mini-site about it, building on Oma Keeling's video work "Who Plays Unspeakable Games?" That's all I've got for now, back to killing time at my day job, lol.

Books read this year (2021)

2022-01-06T00:00:00Z

A simple one, what it says on the tin. I round them up on my masto account as well, but wanted a way to list them all together and make some broader observations about what I've been reading!

Max Haiven - Revenge Capitalism
Jenny Hval - Paradise Rot
Jenny Hval - Girls Against God
Hiroko Oyamada - The Factory
Chris Kraus - Summer of Hate
Elif Batuman - The Idiot
Gregory Sholette - Dark Matter
Thomas Thwaites - The Toaster Project
Thomas Mann - The Magic Mountain
Mike Phillips - The Dancing Face
Izumi Suzuki - Terminal Boredom
Hildegard of Bingen and Huw Lemmey - Unknown Language
Chris Kraus - Where Art Belongs
Byung-Chul Han - Shanzhai
eds. Catherine Grant and Kate Random Love - Fandom As Methodology
Ian GR Shaw and Marv Waterstone - Wageless Life
BS Johnson - Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry
Ali Smith - The Accidental
Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer - Towards a New Manifesto
Graciela S Daichman - Wayward Nuns in Medieval Literature
Dave Beech - Art and Postcapitalism
Clarice Lispector - The Hour of the Star
Clarice Lispector - The Passion According to GH
Kathy Acker - Great Expectations
Tom McCarthy - The Making of Incarnation

This year I kept up with reading some theory and nonfiction, but I feel like I have shifted over to reading a lot more fiction as well. Part of this is probably from throwing in the towel after 2 years of trying to find something to do in the miserable pandemic arts/academic job market, so I feel less pressure to be pursuing new stuff and staying sharp in this area. Getting a "regular day job" from July onwards has occasionally been annoying or frustrating, but it also is a lot less leaky, in that I know what hours of the day I'll generally be free to pursue my own ends (and can even snatch a bit of time during the day sometimes, as I'm doing now). In those cases, I've mostly been making games or writing fiction rather than any academic-adjacent writing, and I feel like if I'm writing fiction I also should be reading it, to keep my ear for voice and style active (honestly that is one of the things I struggle with the most, just getting into a sort of mental mire where I'm not sure if my own writing "sounds good").

The Good: Max Haiven's theoretical contributions are still something I will read "just for fun" because they are so current and creative/generative, the main theory books I disliked that I read this year (Wageless Life and Art and Postcapitalism) mainly were underwhelming because they did not have a good technical or structural understanding of the current situation in art or technology, and/or relied on the sort of "everything is exactly the same" prescriptive application of Marx's original writings precisely to shut down additional analysis, rather than to inform their investigation, while also drawing on the actual context.

I love love loved Jenny Hval's work, and it was exactly what my dark mood needed going into the new year: a rousing dose of introversion and negativity in a crowd of contemporary novels where characters seem to be obsessed with self-improvement narratives and being a normatively "good person" (dull!). Summer of Hate will also really stick with me as a novel highly attuned to the consequences of ambiguous or fluctuating social/economic status that pulls off this devastating analysis like a thriller. And The Idiot was also great, full of subtle surrealism, unspoken horniness, and white-knuckle email correspondence, basically a book made for me.

This was the year I read The Magic Mountain and also had a really great time! My partner sold it to me as a sort of dating sim, in the sense that Hans Castorp is a sort of sympathetic everyman who ends up getting isekai'd (by a lung infection) into isolated and special circumstances, where a variety of character "types" essentially try to seduce him to their own ideological commitments. Described like this, there's the risk that it could come off a little stiff, but it's still very emotionally rich, full of surrealism and irony, and I'm surprised how much it's stuck with me and informed my work already. I have to be less afraid of the huge tomes going forward, I think, as will reflect in my forthcoming reading plans.

My partner also gave me his Clarice Lispector books after reading the first few chapters of my novel draft, and I basically zoomed through them. The Passion According to GH especially made an impression on me, not only for its elaborate and borderline erotic regard of cockroaches but also in terms of representing a character's thoughts or internal monologue in a way that doesn't become self-indulgent and annoying lol. I was really excited reading reviews of Tom McCarthy's The Making of Incarnation; it's a bit of an espionage thriller but in the context of industrial design, simulation and movement studies, following employees of a CGI company currently working on a big-budget sci-fi film (complete with overly complicated zero g sex scenes) who become entangled with how these industries inform surveillance, drone warfare, and so on. While the ways some of the characters' stories were wrapped up were disappointingly quick or overly pat, I did really like the thought and technical expertise that went into describing the technology, making it feel very real and full of thought provoking stuff to someone adjacent to that type of work...

Anyways, the rest of the books were pretty good/enjoyable in a "does what it says on the tin" way (aka I don't have a ton of thoughts about them but would reccomend them) unless I mention them in the section below, lol.

The Bad: Like I mentioned above, Wageless Life and Art and Postcapitalism both sounded like, conceptually and in terms of the targets of their critiques, right up my alley, but their argumentation was really harmed by either a total misunderstanding of the relationship between labor and automation in the case of Wageless Life or in the case of Art and Postcapitalism a sort of paranoid prescriptiveness against reproduction theory as a supposed rival trying to overwrite what already (maybe, in a fragmentary and overly naive good-faith reading) exists in Marx, rather than something that I find is often building on and enhancing Marxism. And the author also seems kind of clueless about the nature of work in the arts as well, ie presuming that public arts funding bodies are not "capitalist" institutions even though they usually operate as and/or favor charities/nonprofits and artists who shore up a neoliberal sense of national identity, a critique Claire Bishop made over 10 years ago now, etc. Just really drab, easily avoidable errors that unfortunately kind of dominate the structure and argumentation of the book in both cases.

Unknown Language really underwhelmed me unfortunately. I really enjoyed the early parts that took place in the city, and the depictions of weird angels and religious visions, but it just became a bit overwhelmingly twee once the character gets out into the countryside, especially encountering a very grating, mostly non-speaking Noble Primitive type she travels with. Like it just seemed over the top given that the "apocalypse" only happened a few months ago and she was only out of the city a few days by foot, to expect me to like, accept this would be a reasonable character to encounter rather than something on the level of like, contrived moral thermometer Love Actually moppet child.

I also found myself wanting more from Shanzhai, like, the philosophical justification for work breaking with traditional ideas of "originality" or intellectual property regimes was good, but there was very little about the actual tech manufacturing culture the title was taken from, and overall the book just felt like a padded-out single essay than a full volume. The fandom based research anthology was similarly really uneven and some of the arts practices discussed were a bit cringy in the sense that they seemed to be putting most of their effort into "elevating" the idea of fandom individually rather than exploring or understanding the concept. Though, despite all this pain and disappointment I have to say the quotations that leaked into reviews and discussions of the new Sally Rooney novel were probably the most dire sentences experienced this year, lol.

The Forthcoming???: I am starting the new year with a reread of Vladimir Nabokov's Ada, because a friend finished it recently and is desperate for someone to talk about it with. This'll be my third go, lol. Lately I've been feeling the need to revisit books I really enjoyed in my early 20s, when usually I didn't see myself going back to re-read (or re-watch etc) stuff I already knew I liked. I wonder what I'll get out of it this time! I also have a handbook to monastic life and architecture that seems fun, and Thomas Pynchon's Bleeding Edge, as well as another Chris Kraus novel, Torpor which I was kind of on the fence about based on the back blurb, but I have loved them all so far, so thought why not? And of course, I'm reading these alongside revising my own novel for the next few months, which will naturally color what I get out of them as well. Basically, I'm excited to have more time to read in general!

Form & Nihilism

2021-12-12T00:00:00Z

A lot of people who make "creative work" broadly (contemporary fine art, writing, videogames, etc), especially those operating at the highest, most extraordinary levels of success in that area, retreat to an apologetic mode either in their work itself or when discussing or presenting their work. "Novels/videogames/art/etc don't/can't 'do anything.'"

But the simple formula for the moral value of a work is the more people it can reach, the better, right? So why does there seem to be an inverse relationship between the "power" someone has as a creator, and the power they attribute to their own work? By using the term inverse I mean I also find it important that at the other end, people doing more niche, unpopular, de/un-professionalized, etc work, often without any stability or monetary reward and significance only among a small community or peers, seem to have much more of a sense of their work "doing something," because there would be no other reason to do it.

When you look at the people who tend to be most convinced that a particular medium is formally incapable of "doing anything" in the "real world," their work tends to be, also, work that has levered some form of cultural reward by tapping into popular sentiments of aesthetic beauty, craftsmanship, and generally of being "of its time" or "what we need right now." How can it be so suitable and also not do anything? Well, being recognized in one's time so expediently generally relies on hopping through a very narrow opening. The base of a pyramid is wide, the top dwindles away to nothing, so it's very "logical" even if it is not "true" for people who have either climbed or stumbled their way to mass, hegemonic distribution to feel like they have a very narrow set of options, and that these affordances are the whole of what a particular medium can do.

So maybe, the problem is not any particular form. Maybe the problem is, across form, "beauty." By "beauty" I don't mean my own subjective positive response to things, some but hardly all of which fit a general casual usage of "beautiful." I mean a sort of generalized commonsensical feeling of normative formal pleasure, appropriateness, quality, and relevance that is the fig leaf stand in of the argument for why culture that is not doing anything, and in fact strips itself of its sense of ability to do anything, remains dominant, ubiquitous, inescapable, and oppressive to any other alternative tendencies. "Beauty" is rarefied sentiment, kitsch and normativity heightened into charm offensive. It is not just ahistorical but anti-historical. How could "the good" be otherwise?

"Beauty" as basically ideological self-delusion appears often in the sentiments of individuals working in the apologetic mode about what work really counts, by which I mean their values seem to be very cottagecore. It's always something like the humble, authentic, working man of the field who has been missing since approximately Millet completing The Angelus in 1859. The long-suffering bus driver or harried data entry worker etc of modernity never appears in these fantasies, nor does a whiff of current industrial farming practices, and how the immortal image of the humble family farm is politically mobilized in that realm. Et cetera.

On top of this, it is hardly worth pointing out that as much as some people can wring their hands and gnash their teeth about their own "sincere" belief in their existential inadequacy, they also will never take a different job, and their output will also usually not change so much, since they're mostly drawing on the same old past beauties rather than engaging with the uncertain and undecided terrain of contemporary production.

So, while it's hard to argue that "food" in general is a less immediate need than public transport or functional ways of organizing information or human culture in general, they all kind of structurally work the same way, and also we want a life that includes all of them to appropriate degrees. (Adorno: "Productivity in its genuine, undisfigured sense will, for the first time, have a real effect on need: not by assuaging unsatisfied need with useless things, but rather because satisfied need will make it possible to relate to the world without knocking it into shape through universal usefulness.") While the picking of an individual orange, the fate of a single farm, or even the rate of success of most non-staple crops in a particular season does not "change the world" by itself, the distributed production of food/transport/information systems/culture maintains it in its current form, for better or worse.

Developing a sense of culture working this way can contribute to an understanding of culture that is, like all other areas of human activity, collaborative (in the neutral sense) and historical. There is the idealization of "great works" or even "great individuals," but also all the work that goes into making these peaks legible, and a lot of this work happens at the lower and lowest levels. Dali could only become ubiquitous and kitsch because the surrealists, pre-surrealists, dadaists and pre-dadaists, etc, existed, working in multiple media and at many levels of culture, finding hand-holds on popular and unknown works and influences alike. (Dali also had a notable fixation on The Angelus.)

And this idea also applies to media broadly, and what they do, in fact, "do." A medium only emerges because it is filling some sort of legible cultural role. With novels and oil paintings and videogames alike, there are elements of this function that can be motivating to artists, individually or collectively liberatory, unique and full of potential; there are also always elements that are pretty clearly normalizing and shoring up existing hierarchies and relationships with culture. But the point is that these things are not set: the point of utilizing a medium is not to do it "well" but to expand or change the direction of how it can be done.

Basically, the idea that a single instance of a medium must "do something" without any of the surrounding context is too much pressure (and pressure of the wrong kind) to put on form, but also a sort of nihilist dismissal of the fact that media emerge because they are doing something, and that thing is historically situated, able to always be nudged in new directions, and never set. Of course work made in this defensive and/or resigned mindset is boring, because it closes off the interesting potential of culture and cultural analysis that has to be kept open. Is it possible to be a beauty-despising formalist? Because I think that's where I might be.

Here is where I'd put the Tumblr tags, I guess: #spitballing #I hate media as a plural for medium can someone change this?

NaNoWriMo Wrap up

2021-12-01T00:00:00Z

I did it! Over the course of November I took a story idea I had around 12,000 words in draft and notes for and built it up to a full draft of around 65,000 words. Last year around this time I finished up the first draft of a visual novel script, and was talking about my intention to return to fiction writing after taking a break from academic work and job applications. Since then, I've finished some short narrative games and two short stories with a lot more in the pipe, and I did NaNo again for a traditional prose novel!

Raw Stats

Final word count: 64,881
Approx words per day: 2,162
Title: initially simply saved as "more bugs.doc," now, tentatively Involuntary Movements
Genre: Voice-y, dallying dark sf of the banal (think: Liquid Sky, Repo Man, Dark Star, but also Paradise Rot. Elif Batuman's The Idiot meets Gregg Araki's Nowhere, Aliens & Anorexia if the alienation was literal (not quite, but the pun (and the spirit) is right-on).)
Current structure: 12 chapters, prose
Working playlist?: fine, here

What do you mean by full draft?

I usually describe these as the "everything happens" drafts. The plot has been moved from point A to point B with all the things I think need to happen between the two occurring in some sense. Like anything done to a time limit, there's things I had to go over more quickly and in less detail than I wanted to, or realized would probably be expected by a reader. Taking a bit more time also means you can develop the existing themes and make them more coherent, and also make a note of the pacing and adjust when things happen and where a bit more hang time is needed, etc. That's the kind of work I expect to do before arriving at a "first draft I'd let other people see."

So what happens?

The main plot of the novel follows the protagonist returning to her parents' house in her small, poorly-connected hometown after going to art school for college and failing to scrape by as an artist in the city for a few years, which reached a breaking point when her girlfriend who she split rent with dumped her. Trapped without a car in an endless housing development, her only options are babysitting for a widowed mother down the street, and nagging her ex from high school, who she unintentionally re-connects with, for rides to the nearby Target/strip mall.

She finds Jessica, the woman she's babysitting for, to be improbably kind and understanding to her, and her ex's new girlfriend, Mollie, to look improbably similar to her, but like, a normal straight girl version. Well, no point in holding off spoilers here, they're both insectoid aliens of a species who have lived alongside humans on earth as mimics for an undisclosed period of time and to an undisclosed extent. Their life cycle, and need to regularly shed and rebuild their skin in secret, usually benefits from a sympathetic human companion.

On top of the erotic power play/dependence of entering this sort of relationship with Jessica, the main character also has a lot of time for introspection while watching the kids (the actual human children of the woman Jessica is impersonating, who suffered from severe depression impacting her ability to care for them after the accidental death of her husband/their father). The older son maintains a (possibly fantastical?) belief in UFO sightings as a way to cope with his absent father, and the protagonist relates to him while being forced to confront her own strained relationship with her mother and similarly absent father (not dead, but became increasingly eccentric and left under mysterious pretenses while she was in high school).

At the same time, she also has to deal with her lingering affection and curiosity towards her ex, and the unresolved mutual shunning that ended their relationship in high school that they're both dancing around. Plus Mollie kind of provokes her insecurities and gendered hang-ups just by existing, through no real fault of her own. Ultimately the plot doesn't really work towards any specific "event" so much as the process of the main character thinking through these relationships and expectations and trying to think of a way of living and course of action to take that can avoid being/feeling trapped or predetermined by them.

But what's it ~about~?

Well, I think the main question the protagonist is asking is something like, "to what extent can you escape something that seems to exert an enormous amount of gravity on your life?" For her, what her hometown represents becomes entangled with her own sense of ill-fit on the grounds of gender, orientation, sociability, interests, etc. The outsize impact of something, like your childhood, your family, gendered expectations can have on your life can make them feel smothering and like a trap. How can you live or re-make your life in a way to get out? Obviously the shape-shifting aliens are initially an image of idealized capability to change and escape, but they end up with entanglements of their own.

I wanted to write a story about "going home" which avoided sentiment about family or community or authenticity etc. related to the place where one grew up. This piece is kind of cringily peak 2015 (in hindsight, funny that it is passed off as critique of pandering), and the beginning talks about, not exactly, but somewhere that is recognizeably close to where I lived. Even though it doesn't paint a flattering picture of the place, it still comes across as tropey and sentimentalized; it's "real" because it's so "murdersome" (allegedly). It rings true to how people who have grown up in cities react to fairly regular things I say about my hometown. Life adjacent to such deleterous pits didn't offer me much in the way of sophistication (it was merely hickish and boring) but also none of this edgy "down home" authenticity I could exploit if I cared to fake it. Like, we had a Target, a Borders, etc., it was banal. It was a place and life to make you feel isolated and trapped, especially if you were in any way weird, and I didn't want to let the nuclear family/community/locality/consumption-heavy lifestyles off the hook as constituent of that, and the resulting alienation in general. I also didn't want to do a bunch of twee descriptive work about like dairy farms and the amish and centralia and the york fair etc. lol.

The working title comes from what I think is a recurring theme of things done consciously/unconsciously, chosen or against one's will. A list of phrases I have relating to the theme in my notes document includes a dictionary definition of the autonomic nervous system and what follows:

Inability to cry/Inability to sleep/Inability to speak
Vomiting/not vomiting
Salivating/Nausea
Life cycle/Self-fashioning
Going home/Going anywhere
Sexual desire/Sexual differentiation

Um, building on these recurring themes/images, the protagonist is heavily written as (but not outright stated to be) both bisexual and autistic. It's goes unspoken not because I think it needs to be "subtle" or whatever, but because at the character's age, I also didn't really have a sense of those aspects of myself and how they related to my feelings about gender and interpersonal problems. It's not really anything the entire emotionally-constipated cast of characters would even say out loud. Plus I am kind of sick of affirmative representation anyways, so much of which is based on like, a heartwarming arc of the supposedly representative character becoming socially integrated and accepted as normative or normative-adjacent through effort, wacky striving, positivity, charm, fighting for justice, etc...lol and groan. That's not really my goal in real life so why act like it in fiction?

The main character is a lot like me, the hometown is a lot like my own, and I only started really synthesizing the threads of the story (based on a sf novel I wrote in high school, a short story I wrote during college, and a game idea I was idly screwing around with but decided had no point being visual or interactive), after I had to move home to live with my parents for a few months due to visa issues. Unfortunately the alien insect milf is mostly from my dreams.

But this brings up kind of an interesting element, which is, while this character, and the perspective characters in most of my fiction, aren't "me," they do kind of represent and facilitate my own thinking through of these issues. In that sense, I also feel like a lot of the writing, in terms of voice, omnivorous breadth of topics, and layering experiences with memories, takes a lot from what I like about Chris Kraus' and Jenny Hval's autofiction.

Autofiction? But it's sci-fi...

I was thinking about this as I did one of my first revisions after finishing the draft: I had to expand on the detail that the main character went to art school from the very superficial mention of it I did the first time around. I had her remember a conceptual art piece she put up for crit in art school which didn't go over well (which is also a description of a stunt I did, not in art school), and led to her shift to video-based work. Over the course of the draft she now cites Chris Kraus twice, as well as Adrian Piper and Lee Lozano's conceptual art practice, so as a character, who is not me (but shares some of my interests in art and theory), she still has a post-autofictional self-awareness, and is narrativizing and applying theoretical/philosophical meaning to her life in such a way. hehe :P

What's good?

So far, I feel really confident about the "four" "main" characters. They're all very specific, weird, irritating, charming sympathetic, etc., they're fun to think about and keep thinking about. I think the arc of where the plot starts and stops, and what happens on the way, makes sense, though the pacing probably needs some rethinking. I'm also happy with how the themes came together, though they might need more meat. I love some of the more gruesome, weird and erotic scenes I just get to make happen, like the way John Carpenter does the best laugh on the commentary track of The Thing when the chest mouth thing happens.

What's not so good?

I feel like I've kind of implied everything I'm dissatisfied with above, but to put it all in one place, the things I feel less confident on right now is the pacing and detail needed for certain scenes and themes. There's a few things that I worry might happen too soon or too late, so the emotional timing feels wrong, or it just doesn't "work," even if it's what needs to happen for the plot it doesn't fit yet. I also know there's spots where I felt a bit insecure or uncertain about what the voice of the book was or what it was meant to be doing, and I'd usually lapse into describing like the light in the room or the sky or something... euugh. I want to give the non-main characters a bit more, so they don't just feel like "roles." I want it to be funnier/have more jokes!

How was the process?

I mostly enjoyed writing, had (most) steps in the plot planned out from the start, and didn't have any major writing block hangups, though I did slow down a lot in the last third or so just because there were less things to jump around to if I was at a scene I was struggling with. Being able to break up scenes and move them around in Scrivener was VERY useful. As always, the hardest things were character names and the title lol. I got what I wanted out of the process, which was a solid "everything happens" draft that I can clean up and beef up in a more methodical way later.

What next?

First, I want to do at least one full revision, reading through and trying to beef up what I think is currently weak as best as possible and also making sure everything is as typographically sound and has good continuity to the degree I can figure it out on my own. Then, I'll probably let a few people read (maybe YOU?) just for general feedback on what worked and didn't work for them to guide additional changes. I don't know the first thing about publishing a book beyond that, though it may be something to look into after the next few months? I feel like it's interesting at least, and I want to share it once I'm a bit more confident in it, but this feels like as far as I can plan now that it is still in a very WIP stage.

Return of the Domino

2021-11-10T00:00:00Z

Domino Club is back! This is a bit of a postmortem of the game I ended up making this time, as well as an update on what I'm working on now, mainly my NaNoWriMo project.

The Game: 10,000 SEX ARSES STUCK AT CALAIS

The game itself takes about 5-10 minutes to play and runs in-browser, so what follows will probably make a lot more sense if you just play it now.

The title is from a joke tabloid headline about unanticipated knock-on effects of Brexit, but I also thought it sounded a lot like a Sun City Girls album title. Like FLESH/CIRCUIT, this is a game about a sexy robot (and it also shares one character with that VN), but also using that premise to think about unconventional desire/sexuality/self-presentation, and the nature of individual consciousness as it subjects itself to and is transformed by labor and social reproduction. Also my partner had a really weird interaction with our electric company's customer service line recently. So those concepts brought the general idea together, and the first thing I did was write the script.

Using RPGMaker (MV in this case) for an actual project I'd release, rather than just noodling around in it making maps and little guys and stuff, was new to me as well. Basically, instead of having no direction and letting myself get pulled down whatever capabilities of the engine and base assets that take my interest, I had something specific in mind I had to figure out the best way to articulate.

Not to say that this is necessarily a better process, I think the sort of aimless wandering can also produce really cool work, and I've been working on a longer post about the "texture" of these sorts of RPGMaker projects and why I find them so artistically interesting, with a focus on ones like Yume Nikki, February 2003, and Song of Homunculus. It's been on the back-burner for a REALLY long time because I REALLY want to get it right, similar to my other pieces on Visual Novels.

Anyways, the game is mostly dialogue events and timings, with one battle. There's two possible endings, and I tried to signal the difference between them very clearly because I figured people would either overwhelmingly do one or the other without a sense of what "changes" it. Overall, I think the way the game "works" feels good even though it's quite basic and linear and carries the story along.

The hardest thing about RPGMaker MV was honestly paring down the massive amount of stuff and options it gives you to know what I actually needed to get across what I wanted. I added character sprites and portraits from elsewhere (mostly charas) because while RPGMaker MV comes with a pretty decent sci-fi interior set, it hardly gives you any options in terms of characters to believably populate it with. Once I narrowed things down and made the few things I needed on top of that, it was mainly a matter of learning the grammatical quirks of how to talk to the event settings, which my spouse who has a lot more RPGMaker experience patiently attended to any questions on. :>

The static overlays and robot design I did myself basically fooling around with built-in image editing effects and my marginal art skills, though the main image is an Anatomical Eve sculpture. I love how the robot turned out even if it's kind of janky. They're really beautiful. The Sun City Girls songs I used are called "The Multiple Hallucinations of an Assassin" and "Plaster Cupids Falling from the Ceiling," and they're just fucking gorg. I hope they don't mind that I've added their songs to the proud tradition of just throwing MP3s that rule into your RPGMaker project.

Ok, so what now?

Against my better judgement, probably, I went right from finishing up my Domino Club game to working on a novel for National Novel Writing Month. Actually, there was a period that they overlapped, and I was feeling guilty for not working on my game, because I ended up working out about 12k words of drafted scenes and notes before November even started.

This novel doesn't have a title yet, because I'm absolutely rancid at titling things. It's kind of a synthesis of a story I wrote in college about a kid's experience of UFO sightings, and a mystery/paranormal VN I briefly considered making about a girl who goes back home after college to find out what happened to her missing father and also deal with all the awkwardness that comes from moving off to the big city with the aim of getting a fancy schmansy art career and then, entirely failing to do that, coming back a significantly different person.

Anyways, in this case, I decided to make it a largely regular prose novel because I did a VN script last year (which is still sitting on my hard drive, neglected, because I've had no time or confidence in myself to make the assets it'd require) and I realized I had a pretty coherent idea of what I wanted the story to be, it didn't really need the mediation or branching affordances of a Visual Novel Presentation. Thematically... man. The story is about a lot. This is a running pitch summary I have tucked away on a Scrivener note:

Having run down her luck and the patience of her ex-girlfriend trying to land a fancy job in the big city after college, an alienated young woman moves back to her hometown for the summer, sharing a house in a half-empty suburban development with her cold and demanding mother. There's no place for cultural or intellectual kicks in semi-rural central Pennsylvania, so, riding on a nostalgia trip of boredom and stagnation, she agrees to babysit for a local mother as a tentative step one of her escape plan. Already not terribly confident in her childcare skills, she gets more than she bargained for when the son has a strong conviction about local UFO sightings. Reconnecting with her ex from high school, who seems to have his shit together and is dating a new girl who seems like a doppelganger from a different life further complicates the situation.

I also have a list of terms I think of the story as being "about," which includes: babysitting, bisexuality, gender, doubles, autism, extraterrestrials, alienation (literal), film appreciation, reaching ordinary unhappiness (in the Freudian sense), and the inadequacy of family/nation/normalcy. But the one that's been sticking in my mind most is "misrecognition." A lot of the characters' problems come from not only misunderstanding what other people are and why they're doing certain things, but also internalizing these misperceptions when they're aimed at them. Even though the main character is very self-aware and spends a lot of time in her own head, she's still often just reaching around in the dark.

As much fun as I'm having working on the novel now, I have decreed December a month of NO PROJECTS beyond ensuring we have a constant stream of holiday treats and making my annual lino card design. If you'd like to get a holiday card from me, I have this Google Form I use to determine how many blank cards to order at the end of November, so feel free to put your details in there if we've interacted on the zoniverse or elsewhere.

Ok, back to (other) writing!

Fallow Periods

2021-10-25T00:00:00Z

I've always kind of conceptualized myself as someone who has pretty obvious periods of high productivity and accompanying fallow periods. It's always disappointing to feel stuck in a long one, which I have for the past few months, but in hindsight I always realize how much they help me build up to periods of getting a lot of inspiration and a lot of work done. I have been slowly working myself back up to primarily using my free time to write, think about, etc, fiction, after so much of it was taken up by academic job apps and freelance work that leaked out of a 9-5.

I feel pretty adjusted to my 9-5 work now, and thankful for it. It gives me a lot more felt autonomy I think to just be able to close out of everything at the end of the day, have dinner, and still feel pretty fresh for the next few hours. It was an adjustment that took some time, because the onboarding of a new job is always kind of demanding, but things feel a lot more structured and less pressurized now.

So, what have I been up to? I'm making a short RPGMaker project for the next secret Domino Club drop that'll be happening sometime in early November. I hope to finish the project up this week so I can fully commit to another year of NaNoWriMo. Last year I wrote a draft VN script that I haven't really had time to revise or make the necessary visual assets for (or work with someone else on that... frankly my preference), so this year to potentially maybe have something more than my pure passion for the concept to show for it, I'm just working on a regular novel.

I have around 10,000 words of drafted scenes and notes right now, (as well as a working playlist) and the goal will be to get to a full draft, regardless of what the final length ends up being. It's drawing really heavily from both a sci-fi novel I wrote in high school as well as a short story I wrote in college, it's also about having to go home last year due to a visa-related issue and getting stuck there for a few months due to covid lockdowns. A lot of it is revisiting both nostalgic and not so great things about where I grew up (an emerging suburban development in mostly-rural central PA), and processing a lot of my child/teen/early 20s experiences and frustrations through the lens of an older self who understands herself maybe a bit better.

Oh, and I also got Scrivener to help organize my writing projects and generate manuscripts a bit better, since Open Office is unfortunately kind of useless for that. I really respect it as one of the few remaining tools where you pay once and get a piece of software that just works lol. I've submitted fiction to 4 or 5 different publications now, though they tend to take a really long time to get back to you. I'm excited enough about one of the stories I've finished to consider drawing a cover for it and publishing it as a zine (through plaintext? if I ever get stuff together to table again...) if no immediate interest crops up.

What else? I did write a blog post on my main site reflecting on a book I was excited for but found kind of disappointing, and I also use the opportunity to talk about themes I'm getting at with a lot of my writing lately. Recently, I read Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry by BS Johnson, which was a load of fun, and have started The Accidental by Ali Smith which I think is probably good for turning the corner into a huge volume of writing. The new Tom McCarthy novel also sounds great, even has a sex in space scene, so it's really aimed right at me, but I'm waiting for it to come out in paperback bc hardcovers are usually just too much for my tiny hands.

Oh, I also played Mirrors, a late PC-88 era visual novel style game where most of the image assets are like... photos of David Sylvian and Depeche Mode from fan magazines. It's really awesome! It's amazing how much they get out of the hardware of the time in terms of visuals and audio, and the plot is really fun too, like Dario Argento took a more new wave than proggy bent for a bit.

Other than that... well... I'm enjoying the Halloween season, watching the leaves change, enjoying the brisk days, and eating lots of chocolate. :d And I'm honestly glad that this will probably be the routine through the end of the year! I'm really happy to both have a niche to work on more creative projects and also be entering a phase where I feel enthusiastically capable of filling that temporal niche.

No More Subtext, in Passage You Should Be Able to Beat Your Wife to Death

2021-08-24T00:00:00Z

Just what is it that makes today's wives so ubiquitous, so dead? The wife in a wife game does not have to be strictly dead, though she is always locked in a state of subterranean regard of her own animate corpse.

This is a sort of death that has to be experienced over and over, unfortunately, and we feel properly maudlin about it even though the sentence "What should be a romantic evening with your wife turns into a nightmare when a police detective breaks into your home, accuses your wife of murder and beats you to death" is like a cross-breeding of the opening of a Kafka novel with the slapstick ultra-violence of deathmatch pro-wrestling. It takes a high level of sophistication to take seriously.

The most cutting edge research in experimental and artistic game design has by now comprehensively defined the possible fates of wives. If you are a wife, you can expect to see yourself as:

Physical hurdle and/or barrier, who lies on the ground or stretches herself between previously passable gaps
A spiny, vibrating spike-trap
Wailing and hysterical, thrown into the spikes
A faraway presence either eviscerated before the protagonists' eyes in flashback or implied to be getting slowly lowered into a giant in-sink erator somewhere
A dishwasher that has, for some reason, been given arms and legs and the ability to walk around, serving as a suitable vehicle for recombinatory capabilities enabling increasingly complex rube goldberg cum time loop puzzles

The tragedy of Vertigo is not that big, dumb Scottie watches Judy fall from the bell tower, but that their social positions and neuroses have made repeating this terrible act inevitable. Videogames advance the narrative form with indefatigable affordances for choice, customization, and repetition, allowing solemn acknowledgement of this fact to develop to a completely new level, reaching new audiences in more affecting ways than ever. The proposed name for this innovative and unique quality of gaming is Farce 2.

The wholesome and pro-social alternative, a pushable block you can both apply elemental properties to and fuck, is the ideal horizon beyond even Farce 2 that will hopefully bring an end to this unfortunate mutual debasement.

You Thought I Was Disgusting

2021-08-17T00:00:00Z

(Click for musical accompaniment)

"I can't believe I've always had such awful taste..." This week, my brain has been furiously consumed with the release of Fairy King Oberon on the JP server of my favorite mental poison, Fate/Grand Order. His personality and play style can only really be described as "humorously bastardous" and the character art by manga artist Chica Umino is so beautiful and cute in a kind of awkward and scumbag-looking way that I couldn't even wait patiently for his arrival on the English server... reader, I made a JP account for the anime boy with chubby cheeks, a horrible smug grin, and Literal Bug Feet.

But that's always been my type. Or rather, I have a variety of "types" but also always find attraction to be more complicated than simply something "being attractive." Why do I keep going back to the most withholding and infamously player-hostile gacha titles when there's tons of Wholesome Indie Titles that let me have elements of romantic frisson with a bunch of people who just look like, basically, Target underwear models? Well, the answer is kind of in the question. The closer someone, a person or a character design, gets to being unambiguously "attractive" the less interest I can sustain in them, and this seems to be something seedy BL games and certain gacha promotions have a better handle on than self-consciously pro-social content.

There's an obvious draw in disgust, assholishness, "unconventional features," the weird and the perverse that I wished more things tapped into freely in general. In this case Chica Umino gave her fairy king a round face, lazy-looking eyes, a wide, frog-like mouth, a garish outfit, probably covering up a pretty undefined physique, and even grossed herself out studying photos of bugs to complete the design. Fan art making him buff, giving him model bone structure, etc is completely unappealing. Go back to Howl's Moving Castle you philistines!

Anyways, based on how much I loved the design, I was also inspired to revisit Chica Umino's slow burn josei dramedy, Honey & Clover, which follows a group of art school students at various stages of their college experience, attempting to start their careers and figure out their own life goals amid a recession while also getting into a variety of love triangle scenarios. While the central romance is pitched as the one between Takemoto and Hagu, who are complementary in the sense that their main character arcs are both figuring out what the fuck they actually want to do with their (up until that point, largely predetermined) lives, the unrequited love between Yamada and Mayama is one of the parts of the series explored in the most brutal detail.

Mayama is always aware Yamada is in love with him, and he's not emotionally unavailable, he's actually only just emotionally available enough to never definitively shut down the possibility of returning her feelings someday. This is because he's obsessively attracted to Rika, an older woman he works for as an architect-in-training who is recently widowed and very obviously has an entire life and history of her own that he's not a part of, and he similarly can't definitively distance himself from her. There's a brief moment where he shows his hand in the situation rather than being oh-so-mysteriously aloof-- when a womanizing colleague of his seems to become genuinely interested in Yamada's ceramics and offers her work furnishing some of their firm's designs, he interferes. It's a truly petty and ugly impulse, and yet... it doesn't even give the romcommy satisfaction of building up into a realization then declaration of true love for Yamada, he just doesn't like the thought of her having the option. It's a scenario that hits very realistically for anyone who's only had a guy decide maybe they like you, or at least like the idea of you liking them only after a series of visceral humiliations.

Reading romance stuff generally makes me feel sweeter on my current partner who makes life easy, which I think is a good sign. But it does also make me a bit nostalgic, now that I'm Old and Married, for the emotional extremes this longing, prostration and humiliation offered (maybe I need to exercise more then). I call my late-teens/early-20s heart-rending experiences with particularly flaky and inconsiderate guys my "heterosexual adventurism" period, because in hindsight it seemed like throwing myself at scenarios which could only go wrong just for the experience of them, but this sort of exultation/devastation roller coaster has been one I've also been on with women and maddeningly respectful men as well. In general any crush is kind of putting out a small bit of yourself in anyone's hand, and seeing if they'll destroy it. Feeling hot is a bit sexy, but there's something that really gets me sweating and gets my heart racing about the game of chicken where you try and find out how much someone really likes you or just likes someone liking them, what parts of you they'll respond to with annoyance or repulsion, what about you will pull them back into your orbit with fascination anyways, and how this can feel like intense series of psychological victories and defeats, to the point that it can become as addictive as gambling or sports (especially if you have little else to do). It's true death-drive wrangling.

And yeah, unfortunately I guess this post is also a bit of a Sally Rooney Take. It's in the air! I guess I find her a bit fascinating because elements of her work seem like they would be catnip to me; painful romance, "weird" girls, bi characters, lives of precariat cultural/intellectual workers, etc. But in each case these things are inevitably kind of glossed on or disappointing in execution. Characters are notatively "bisexual" but seem to have no concept of non-heteronormative desire even while mentioning past same-gender relationships, nor do they seem to have any self-consciousness or baggage about being, in essence, polymorphously spinning compasses in a social context still very attached to the metaphor of a "true" "sexual orientation" as a part of one's core identity (my guess is it appears again and again because it's just something "interesting" and "contemporary" like glam rockers).

Characters are also notatively "mentally ill" but are fixed through CBTing themselves out of low self esteem or simply removing the unambiguously toxic people, abusive family, boyfriends into BDSM, et cetera, from their lives. Characters are notatively "unpopular" and "struggling" but always manage to become thin, attractive (everyone agrees!), and inevitably successful in the most boring ways (literary magazine features! NYU MFA!) while employment and cash flow cause surprisingly few speed bumps in the plot. They don't have many friends because everyone around them feels like transplants of illustrative unpleasant Twitter personality archetypes, so who in their right mind would anyways? (For an author who always talks about how offline she is in interviews, she sure loves staging Iconic Stupid Twitter Argument moments for her characters to win or lose at.) Et cetera.

In almost all cases, and early word about her new work that notes the recurrence of "bay leaf bisexuality" (lol) and neat platitudes about idealized family relations and religion, doesn't fill me with confidence that her forthcoming book is not basically a doubling-down on these ideas: that "healthy" heterosexual femininity, the idealized loving nuclear family made up of The Couple and their biological offspring, and religion, specifically Catholicism (lol), tend to work as uncomplicatedly good and normalizing forces. Becoming normal through these means is often depicted as a sort of religious epiphany and functions as self-actualization in a way that not only feels uncritical and unambitious for supposedly "literary" works, it gives them the elements of neatness and didacticism that place them firmly in the "YA" category vibe a lot of people detect coming off of them. (It's not just the romance themes or the idealized characters, in my opinion, basically. Selin from The Idiot, for example, or even the characters in Honey & Clover are often prodigies who secure rare opportunities and experiences as well, but their characterization is much less, well, juvenile.)

I found Normal People the most compelling and least frustrating of her work because at least the first half of it seemed to open the door to being and staying truly "weird," and elements of the second half, while a lot weaker in characterization and a lot more tidy in narrative arcs, has parts where it does try a bit maybe to work out some psychological and practical problems that come from normal-izing oneself. My embarrassingly huge meta post on autistic interpretations of the characters goes into this in more detail, but to summarize, what attracted me to Normal People the novel (which the TV series necessarily excludes), and made the first few chapters of it honestly kind of enchanting and hot is that it deals with specifically romantic attraction/disgust, and from a male perspective.

Marianne is not only a social outcast at her high school for her anti-social behavior and general "bad vibes," she's kind of gross, "grimacing" in photos and often getting yogurt or stick deodorant on her clothes. And yet, Connell is pulled to her in a way that makes him kind of uncomfortable, and eventually quite cruel to her. That's the interesting premise, past that, everything kind of proceeds like an overly-neat fairy tale. They go to college and Marianne Gets Hot and gets a boyfriend to ensure Connell's interest and jealousy, and the weirdness and ambivalence of their relationship beyond romcom-esque miscommunications and failure to embrace that They Belong Together mostly goes into the background, beyond some references to how the friend group Marianne ascended and then fell out with were kind of shallow assholes. But not her, of course, haha. While she loses her hot friends she does not lose any of her own hotness or loyalty to the ways she otherwise conforms to upper class campus life. In this context, the hotness and power plays and push-pull of desire that makes their relationship interesting end up ringing hollow. The door of a life and desires outside of normalcy tragically swings shut...

Basically, these stories are inevitably disappointing to me in the last third in ways that other stories that let themselves focus on the draw of disgust and the humiliations and failure of romance are not because they seem to say "by god, if you can become normal, then BE NORMAL!" Of course (and maybe more annoying than the normalization impulse of your typical low brow rom com), "normal" is also ubiquitously recognized as pretty, thin, intellectual and successful ideally all before turning 30 (alternate thesis of Normal People: maybe the Forbes 30 under 30 list DOES have a point!). This is the clever trick of normalcy, or maybe the banal carrots it holds out in front of us. What are the options for those of us who can't and/or don't care to be normal? Well, for now, I'm developing increasingly sophisticated tastes in bug boys, but I still have to say that within literature, that form that can so economically offer a point of sympathy and understanding across time, the glorification of the socially "normal" seems like a pretty narrow and uninspiring area to cover. More disgust please!

Anyways, in other news, in case this wasn't a massive enough can of psychoanalytical worms for you, I released my first bipsi via DOMINO CLUB, it's called The Dream Sequences and is a collection of (sliiightly fictionalized) dreams I had during the prolonged social distancing this year.

1147 PM on August 2nd a Monday

2021-08-02T00:00:00Z

I have like a half hour of not much to do at the end of the evening now, so I suppose I'll rattle off another post. I got a shout-out in Marina's talk as the "most prolific zonelet," after all!! (please, I invite anyone to steal my crown)

Work goes well! I got my first paycheck and cleared my probation period! They seem to be impressed by my work, which, since it is so XML heavy is definitely in part due to the time I spend doing stuff like this lol. My manager has even mentioned getting me more involved in schema development and layout type stuff for the Middle School science curriculum content we're currently working on. I'm also doing a QC round on a MASSIVE textbook section on how fossils are formed. It's fine but I definitely find the XML work more interesting so hopefully I get to do more of that instead.

I submitted to story I posted a snippet of last time to a literary magazine! And turns out their response time is 3-6 months which can be typical in this field.... womp. I'm kind of just proud of finishing something, though. I'm also planning out the project I want to work towards a full draft of during NaNoWriMo this year. I like writing fiction a lot.

But I also wrote a new blog post on my main site! It's more about Visual Novels and ways for them to better "fit" into a "Game Studies" perspective, because I find how a lot of people in the field just dismiss them to be really frustrating! It's closely related to other stuff I've written on VN structure and perspective.

This interview I did about my ""setup"" also went up. Enjoy the jank, lol.

And I've been having fun screwing around in Bipsi.

I got my second vaccination on Friday, and it kind of wiped me out! Overall though I've been feeling a lot more easy on myself, productive and imaginative now that I have a more regular work schedule and don't have to look at an application form until at least the end of the year. Speaking of which, I've already gotten Stephen a Christmas present, or at least pre-ordered it. We also watched One Cut of the Dead on the first to start our annual Halloween film season which is naturally August, September and October. Maybe I should start thinking about my Christmas card design soon, huh?

WIP Story Excerpt and Thoughts

2021-07-10T00:00:00Z

I'm feeling a bit shy about this! Over the past few years I've written tons of fanfic under a pseudonym but this is the first time in a while I've completed a whole draft of a piece of original fiction writing that does not have being made into a game with visuals and music and everything to distract you. Anyways, I am still figuring out my comfort level on where/how to share this (I mean, uhhh if I want to get it Published I cannot print it in full on my blog!! Of course!!), so I am just putting a little excerpt for now alongside some thoughts about the influences and process that went into it.

“Let's all sleep together in the middle of the ship,” Tam suggested as the artificial sunlamps began to dim, denoting the arrival of another “evening.” I thought: isn't that what we've been doing for ages now? I felt edgy and sarcastic because the fact that we were on the downhill slope of our journey was getting to me, time was slipping by. Some days went by so agreeably they were impossible to distinguish or reflect on, other times a handful of hours could take on the feeling of immovable monuments each conscious thought was bashing my head against. We'd long ago worked ahead through the end of the training manual exercises, and I felt like I had wrung The Magic Mountain dry by the third time I reached Hans and Cavdia meeting on Walpurgisnacht. I knew it all by heart then, I think. Past this point you are consigned to the oblivion of the ocean of time. I didn't want to go on.

Sometimes when I thought about how the ship had fake sunlamps instead of windows we could see through I would be seized by an animal panic. But then, because I wasn't alone, I could look across the cramped ship and only a few feet away Owen would be lazily tugging at the stationary rower, Ange napping, Tam stretching and blinking. I could see time tied to the processes of life continuing around me, intimately close. It was such an unremarkable and subconscious process that I didn't write about any of these things; most of the pages of the journal remained blank. I only recognize them now, longing for them in hindsight.

I shrugged and said, “Sure,” kicking away from the wall. I unzipped my jumpsuit and tied the arms around my waist. In the lightly circulating air between the sleeping bags, as the false sunlamps dimmed, we clustered together, leaning on and holding each other in a subtly shifting embrace of forms in space, like prehistoric land masses gathering and coming apart. I looped my arm around one of Ange's legs to angle my torso up from the floor. I nudged my foot against Owen's, who was floating aloofly. My head bumped against Tam's midriff and they moved their arm down to rest on my shoulder.

“Goodnight then,” Ange said, rolling over, despite there being no bed or blankets that we were strewn across.

Something between an awkward and ceremonial silence took over. I watched as our bodies moved in the dark, hooked onto one another, pulling each other back together, and I didn't feel tired at all. I thought about how otters hold hands with each other when they fall asleep in a stream. I thought about how I didn't know off the top of my head how many days were left until we arrived at Callisto but also that it wasn't many. I looked at Ange, who had curled away from me, in a perfect silhouette of someone sleeping cosily on a bed, but with no bed at all. I started crying.

Tam had been right, it was awful. The tears collected in a giant pile, right on my eyes, rather than going anywhere. They began to sting, and it was impossible to see, but I didn't want to lift my arms to wipe them away; this would just smear them all over. I felt a helpless whimper collecting in the back of my throat, saliva and mucus kicking up, gurgling, my breathing catching, I didn't want to sob. I stiffened as I felt Tam's hand twitch alive and brace against my shoulder.

“Hang on,” they whispered. I saw them kick away in the dark and return with something in each hand. As their face drew close I saw they were cleaning the tip of their suction bulb with their mouth, then thoroughly drying it off with a towel. “Sorry,” they went on, just as hushed. “No worse than anything we've done to each other before this, though.”

They began sucking the tears from my eyes and squeezing them out into the towel. This left a dome over my eyes that never spilled over, like I could hold the tears back forever. Tam went about this quietly and persistently, as I continued to weep. Feeling the tears, constantly on the point of trickling over, I understood why they had not simply thrown me a towel to bury my face in and make a spectacle of myself. I continued crying but a trance-like relaxation also came over me. Yes, I had missed this.

---

The general background: this story takes place in the same boring dystopia style sci fi setting as my VN Flesh/Circuit, but is more focused on human crewmembers working and living together under space corporate contracts. Because it's the future, moving workers around to make a lunar mining colony on Jupiter look fully autonomous is done as cheaply as possible, so that means minimal space, no simulated gravity, and barebones amenities. To cope with the crazymaking drudgery and lack of privacy of being in basically the megabus of interplanetary transport for four months, the main character has proposed they take a sort of deliberately group attitude towards sex and intimacy. This is towards the end of the trip, where they're about to transition into a multi-year work contract, and the coming change in their relationships is encroaching on the main character, who also realizes that while she's brought about and been the object of a lot of weird, libertine sex, she's still fairly emotionally constipated.

I drew ideas on this from a lot of places, namely a conversation in the candle cove discord about how likely the official NASA line that No One Has Had Sex In Space could be, and also how feasible a variety of sex acts would be in zero-g, which is an environment that apparently does a lot of weird/gross things to your body in general, in close quarters a degree of intimacy with bodily functions usually reserved for, idk, a many years married couple becomes a demand. Like Flesh/Circuit, it's also a bit about the concepts of workplaces and contracts and how they extend to control more and more of our time and embodied existence, since the characters are bringing sex into what is, implicitly, a professional workplace.

A lot of how I decided to write the sex and the main character's feelings about it in particular were inspired by an essay by the film critic Noël Burch called "The Sadeian Aesthetic" which I cannot find online but it appears in a collection called The Philistine Controversy. Anyways, the interesting thing about his analysis is that, while many characterize him as a "libertine," Sade's descriptions of orgies are, formally, depersonalized and highly repetitive and monotonous, basically schema that people are stuck into by a top-down "will," and Burch characterizes this as pretty conservative and fascist. So the main character is kind of aware of the potential to power-trip in this situation and perhaps maybe even a bit too careful about it, but also formally, I wanted to present well, basically group sex but in the opposite way of that.

I'm also kind of entertained by the ways sex either appears or is scrupulously removed (Interstellar lol) from sci-fi media. Like, either universal/utopian/compulsory Free Love is like a magical or alienating part of the future to show how different it is from now, or it's just not really there at all. I liked the film Aniara but felt like I wanted to see more about how things went from like, some people deciding to be a little slutty and have a lot of hookups on the spaceship, to like full on group sex cults. Like ok, it will be different in the future, but what are the emotional and social negotiations and midway points to getting there?

And in general, a lot of the themes revolve around bodily autonomy, gross intimacy, self perception and perception by others not matching up, how much life and freedom you exchange for whatever a job gives you, and being stuck in the same tiny space for ages... obviously all themes that have been on my mind a ton. The whole story itself is 7500 words or so, so it's kind of an awkward length since most sites I've found have a cut off of 3000. It's also doubly vulnerable for me to put it out there because it is so sexual, and there's basically very weird baggage about writing sex in a way that is any more risky or weird than the utterly impervious MFA style Then He Was Inside Me and I Had Some Depressing Thoughts etc. lol. I have no idea what to do with it! But it's a whole story now, and I wrote it.

MAY THE AESTHETICS OF PRODUCTIVITY (one day) BE REGARDED AS A STRANGE 21st CENTURY CUSTOM

2021-07-07T00:00:00Z

Or: first week at the new job midweek report

I say this to bring it into the world. The idea is floated by a disnovation.org essay about the aesthetic illegibility, weirdness and “failure” of many shanzhai mobile phone models (accompanying their larger exhibition project on the subject), but only when compared to the sleekness and increasing uniformity of mainstream smart phones. Shanzhai is a term with an evolving and contextual meaning; in general I became aware of it being used to describe Chinese goods that copy and remix Western Brand Imagery in highly idiosyncratic and basically preposterous (within the Western IP System) ways. Friend of the blog candle has also recently been investigating it as a concept that that can feed or inspire their remixable/user-servicable tools practice, and the general ethos of freely adapting/re-using/combining parts to suit when it comes to imagining new ways of using and relating to technologies.

I, like many others, as candle noted, can only write about shanzhai as an outsider, relying on a variety of English-translated sources about the concept, which ends up having certain biases and limitations. But it's a concept that has a certain appeal alongside the pirate, the clone, the copy, the shovelware, the asset flip, the remix, the homebrew, the mod, the rip, the gray-legal etc. as locations where professionalized production cannot meet desire, and bends or is bent to the wilfulness and whims of smaller scale preference, production and aesthetics, as well as alternative models of both cultural ownership and cultural contribution.

This is not to say that shanzhai is liberatory, “the little guys coming together and using their creativity and salt of the earth know-how to reject big tech and do better” etc (which just seems to be a highly reactionary and recuperable narrative in itself). The same disnovation.org report notes that many of the factories were such poor working environments that moving to a Foxconn factory job could seem like a step up, and their rapid, strange iterations also meant a lack of concern for any sort of environmental or safety oversight. Jaime Chu also critiques the use and misunderstanding of the term by touristy silicon valley authors who want to use it to present the possibility of a superficially defanged version of the tech industry or validate the impetus to constantly “innovate,” vanishing all of the bad and using it as a convenient and exotic ideal.

In essence, none of these practices that I find compelling on their own can, by themselves, defeat or even evade systems of capitalism, property relations, and the cult of productivity even locally, even if they may succeed at spitting in one of its many horrible eyes or scratching back some unexpected joy and possibility. That they provoke questions and leave alternatives open, alternatives where the minimalist, sleek, ascetic hyper-productivity aesthetic of unrestrained technocapitalism becomes “cringe” and having a purely pleasurable phone, unconcerned with scheduling meetings or fitting into the pocket of a blazer cleanly, and which doubles as a dolphin figurine or cigarette lighter or portable stereo becomes “cool,” for example, is their value to me.

I think the “aesthetics of productivity” is more than just something for selling phones and laptops and so on, things that are at least in part Tools For Work, it leaks into how we go about leisure and expressive cultural practices. It's how some videogames are basically a job, or, alternately, sold to you in a purely self-improvement-oriented argumentation. So much art is oriented towards, or worse, sold as, self-help and self-improvement. Are the characters likeable, ie, do they act perfectly how I would want someone to act to me in real life? Does it give me more Empathy, does it have an Important Message, is it The Game We Need Right Now. Etc. Basically I find all of these things irrelevant to anything being interesting or valuable to me (sorry!), so in general it feels like it's a bad time to be seeking out anything else “from media.”

I have been thinking recently about how I have less and less faith in like, “good curation” or “being a less shit polygon” fixing whatever is wrong with indie discoverability and sustainability. Those structures still, at the very least, seem to rely on browbeating people into eating their broccoli because these are the Good Games that make you a Good and Discerning Game Player... It's overwhelmingly easy to find stuff that is fascinating and exciting to me that isn't saleable in that way; the sell they make is actually being ambitious and unusual in a way that expands my sense of form. Is there any memory around most of the things that sand themselves down to the point of getting blurbed as legible by a Gaming Site anyways? We don't need more curation in the sense of seeing yourself as a little biennale guy tastemaker, we need more curation in the boring sense of hyperspecializing, learning historical context and preserving a specific area of this stuff!

I have a new job now which is a 9-5 only vaguely related to my “passionate” interests. Productivity feels good, in a shallow and immediate way – something less hopeless to explain to my parents on the phone! Telling an HR person my bank details and getting pamphlets on extra healthcare stuff I can get refunded and the company pension plan etc. Not feeling the crushing weight of not doing enough, not doing “anything”... these are all obviously socially coerced desires, though... the cudgel of the coercion is ofc Money and Property and how it is stupidly fatal to not have enough. These are the Aesthetics of Productivity that are divorced, I think, from what is actually productive about the job, that on a basic level I am part of a long supply chain that makes flexible digital versions of educational material previously formatted as print textbooks, which, you know, if it makes things easier for distance learning or kids with vision or motor skill issues etc is probably a basically fine thing to be entangled in. There's also the satisfaction of the systematic thinking and precision and occasional mild problem solving the role entails, which is low impact but feels good for my brain to do in the same way that going for a leisurely walk that maybe has a bit of a hill in the middle feels good for my legs to do.

I guess all this is not to say that aesthetics are “superficial” or “merely decorative” but that they are “the how” and the ideology of how material reaches us. Ultimately the instagrammable home working setup, aspirational diets, dress, pastimes, the Just Do X Y and Z, pet the doggo and have the three different genres of wish fulfilment as romance options, write like an Iowa Writer's Workshop grad strung out on True Detective for “characterful” “prose” (or just hire the most insufferable guy from Mad Men to VA), all these Authoritative Advice Threads and the boring games they trickle down to, blah blah blah etc etc and your work / you will be both Successful and Worthy, these things all serve a remarkably palatable social function, because they are easily reproducible, consumable as a multivitamin, and keep you on the treadmill towards “happiness” which will CERTAINLY come when you X Y Z... Unfortunately I have lost faith in that and cast my lot with more interesting forms of dissatisfaction!

As a counterpoint to productivity in the Official sense-- the social and cultural productivity inherent to time theft. I am timid and unpracticed here (I say, squirrelling away notes for this blog post on the clock) but this is something that seems to sprout at the point where the aesthetics of productivity squelch, hinder or pervert the productivity we can actually feel on a material, social and expressive level. Is there anything more tender than running off shoddy copies of a beloved zine or out of print publication for someone from the workplace xerox machine? They soften and blur each time, as if you've been panting against the glass. They come out warm. It's a love letter written on the clock that manages to steal a little toner, a little paper, a little intellectual property in addition to time. Social Reproduction! Everyone I've ever bootlegged a zine or academic book chapter for is my offspring, in part, and I felt cared for when a rare film connoisseur started up their torrenting application of choice after hours of dead air and started passing bits of a rare David Cronenberg TV short to me personally, because I wanted to watch it on my birthday.

Ok well, to be slightly less polemical, I like the idea that candle tentatively proposes in their post, for a strategy that can find shanzhai or the potential it represents interesting and informative without resorting to essentializing generalizations about China or pure innovation-will-fix-it utopianism, which is to situate this historically among other practices that operate outside of or differently to IP law in the present, and see IP law as a historical anomaly, the ultimate disruption to how people relate to and participate in culture broadly, rather than a norm or crown jewel of progress for us poor creatives (lol), and I will actually pursue further research along these lines and have acquired a copy of Piracy: the Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, which I will hopefully read and develop more thoughts on soon :)

Flick me a Guy

2021-06-24T00:00:00Z

Flickguy (warning: decidedly non 1 bit content ahead) has been a runaway success (imo) over the past few days. There's already a ton of different guymakers (as you can see in the background) and even some versions that incorporate modifications and hacks like this 1 bit setup (phew!).

It feels like it's been around for a lot longer than it has (I have to keep reminding myself, just over a week), based on the features/modifications/creations that have come out of it. I feel some investment in following how it develops because I pulled together the drawn bits for the demo of how it works, but it's almost entirely been programmed by candle and was pretty rapidly spun out of their ongoing flickgame study project, and improved by feedback from the small tools and tool hack circles we're in.

It's really cool to me how fast candle has been able to build modular tools and functions like this, and how readable the code is even to a "non-programmer" (inasmuch as writing HTML and modifying other people's CSS and Javascript slightly is not really considered "programming!") like myself. I also like when these tools are in phases where they feel very permeable and fertile, when it brings out completely free creativity in a variety of people and keeps replicating itself into different forms, it becomes a very "organic" form of digital creation.

And like, functionally, this is how the web, and programming and games are at their most basic level, right? Their modularity and the ability to rip and re-use and so on, how it's not just easy but the first lesson you learn and the primary way to work in a lot of early computing history and hobbyist game design is what reinforces this stuff as still interesting to me (because it's fundamentally unruly and against any idea of ownership or scarcity) even as, in general, videogames and media art related stuff just seems increasingly removed from this quality of itself, and kind of locked down, cleaned up and trite.

Like I can't really bring myself to be excited about the stupid onboard pseudo-bitsy or whatever that's coming with the Playdate. Sure, that you can allegedly also run the maker in the browser and export... something (proprietary crank-based game format? lol) is better than the options for the same crap locked to the Switch, but beating Nintendo on something like this is a subterranean bar to clear.

And it's also a matter of principle, coming from a company that has an existing habit of steamrolling other small scale elements of the indie space that seem to be "in its way." The shady way they apparently "cleared" the project with the creator of Bitsy once it was basically done rather than actively involving or collaborating with any small scale developers is just another case of corporate swooping in to cherry pick the aesthetics and features that suit them while completely missing the point on what makes something like Bitsy, and its community of modders, hack collectors, enthusiasts, etc so valuable. Not that I'd personally want to work with any twee proprietary device advocates trying to forcibly enclose their little serfdom anyways, and would discourage pretty much anyone from getting involved if they wanted to make work they had long term ownership and access to, but lol. As soon as corporate entities try to put a lid on these things, to finalize them into a controllable little commodity, it becomes the slab lowered onto their own gruesome crypt. Web tools, hacks, cracks, mods and pirates will never die!

Anyways, starting from the 5th of July I have a contract job doing database and XML management for a digital textbook company. I'm glad bc A) grinding for job applications/freelance work has been exhausting B) I get to give my partner more time off to wrap up the first major arc of a new game project he's working on C) it makes immigration/taxes/proving residence stuff easier in the long run and D) whenever I have a kind of mechanical 9-5 day job the back of my brain is always kind of flipping over and storing new ideas, and I feel like I can write for pleasure when I "get home" (it'll be WFH for the foreseeable though) rather than having to wring Work out of myself at all times. It's six months for now, which will give me a chance to see how this type of work plays with my other priorities or if it burns me out similarly/more than freelancing.

I've also been writing some more fiction that builds up the world in Flesh/Circuit a bit more, though I'm not really sure how/where to put that kind of stuff! I was drawn to writing fanfic over the past few years because there's such a culture of independent sharing and discussing around it, idk if that infrastructure or culture is there for anything but the most big-budget ubiquitous original fiction. I've been thinking about making a separate zonelet to serve as a sort of chapbook-in-process, or maybe making a separate category for it here. I'm curious what people would think or if they have any experience with sharing/self-publishing/otherwise publishing original fiction nowadays, and since I have no comments, if you have any thoughts on this you can get at me on the Neocities backend, or email me.

Birthday!!

2021-06-05T00:00:00Z

It was my birthday on Friday! I'm now 30. (gaah haha)

I had a really good day, actually! While the morning and early afternoon were a bit crazy because I had to squeeze in facilitation sessions for helping most of the speakers for an online showcase I'm helping to run set up their presentation rooms and test any features they were planning on using, I got to bow out early to go get vaccinated!!

The nearest vaccination center to me is around a 40 min walk away, and it was one of the few sunny days in Glasgow. The walk was mostly pleasant, but the last stretch was up a kind of huge hill, so I was flushed and borderline feverish according to the heat sensor at the door when I got there. However, the nurse let me stand in the shade for 15 minutes and test again, and I was good to go in. haha... almost got in trouble there.

Once I was ok to go in the wait wasn't too long. I got the Pfizer vaccine and had to sit in the waiting area for 20 minutes to make sure I didn't have an allergic reaction, and then they said to expect a letter over the next few weeks that will tell me to schedule my next dose. Yay! In terms of side-effects, I did have a bit of chills and a headache around bedtime, but I made a lemsip for myself and bundled up a bit more an felt fine when I woke up in the morning. The only remaining thing is the injection area feels a bit tender, like there's a bruise under it.

So hopefully that's that, and I'll be able to finish up getting vaccinated soon. Even an extreme homebody like me has started to miss at least nearby day trips pretty strongly, and I'd love to do something like our little break in Sligo that we did in... uh... September 2019... again before the end of the year... I miss gigs a lot too, which was a nice part of being in Glasgow, this new live album by Ty Segall has been making me feel that especially strongly.

Everything else about my birthday was really nice. I watched some of my favorite obscurities with the zonies and ordered in some sushi for dinner bc I was feeling fancy. Stephen got me a cool trilobite fossil and an Ultraman monster figure for my desk and some old issues of Garo magazine to encourage me to get back on the (re-)learning Japanese habit. A package from his folks also got here today that had a birdwatching guide and a set of binoculars, which is a really thoughtful gift, especially since most of our fun has been discovering new areas to walk around and see birds lately.

The showcase I'm contracted to help out with wraps up this week, and I have a few subsequent bits of work that have been brought up in the meantime, so it's starting to feel like I've built up some momentum, and maybe freelance work is kind of possible for me? I dunno, this may be premature since the delay/uncertainty on when invoices will actually get paid is still a big issue... lol SIGH...

I guess this is just a general update, and I wanted to brag a bit about my birthday gifts lol. It's nice out so we're gonna give the binoculars a spin in the local park now.

Zine Revue!

2021-05-20T00:00:00Z

April was the month of Glasgow Zine Fair! Plaintext Distro tabled digitally, and after printing and shipping costs was able to make a donation to Remade Network, which teaches repair skills, refurbishes tech for the Glasgow community, and distributes free PCs to isolated individuals as well as local social initiatives. Thank you to everyone who made our first digital zine table a huge success, and if you're reading this let me know when your pack of zines reaches you!

I don't know when Plaintext will next table, either online or in person, but I'm excited to keep distributing this work and also take on new work. Definitely sign up to the newsletter linked on the site if you're curious about staying up to date on it.

Of course, the best part of a zine fair is not selling your own work, but getting to see a ton of other work! Here are some brief blurbs on the zines I picked up during the fair:

SYNDROME (A Reader) - at Sticky Fingers: This is a very slickly-designed poster and booklet with a fascinating meditation on the language of syndromes, bodies and wellness.

60 Second Pokemon Squad & Autumn Things - at Forever Temporary Press: I loved these two mini-zines of classic pokemon drawn from memory, and lovely impressions and associations with Autumn. Plus the order came with some lovely handmade recycled envelopes!

Lucid Chronicles I-III - at Team Trident Press: I love both the design and content of these very clever 1-sheet riso zines. Each booklet contains an evocative text about a dream environment that folds out to an illustration. They're very inspiring, both in terms of their content and as objects.

打工仔／ WORK WORK WORK - by Rachel Lau: This is a very interesting zine about Chinese overwork culture (which is comparable to the pressure to overwork, well, everywhere), which combines with some practical strategies for time theft and zine-making in the workplace. >:) hehe

Cats I've Known and Loved - at Our Victory Line: The type of data I am most interested in is A) names of cats and B) the colors and patterns of those cats and this mini-zine delivers.

Midnight Drumbeat & The Day The Mountains Move - at Stainperfect: These are some beautiful riso zines printed in unique and delicate ways. The first is a personal narrative comic and the second is a beautifully presented bilingual version of Japanese feminist poetry.

The Abolition of Work & So Unsexy - at Pen Fight Distro: Both of these zines are good cures for both the hustle culture and beauty culture (and hustle-beauty culture, haha) that seem to provoke people who should know better (including myself, sometimes) to locate a particular virtue in aggressive norm conformity.

Overall, it was an amazing selection of tables, and I had trouble making up my mind and deciding on these zines, but I'm also really glad I did!

I have been busy over the past few weeks which is why I've been scarce. Unfortunately it generally means a lot of freelance related admin stuff and not too much of the money actually hitting my bank account yet. I turn 30 in a few weeks and wrap up a big project that pays decently well around that time so I hope I can give myself a bit of time off then, to read more and also work on my own creative projects.

Introverse and Extroverse Works

2021-04-18T00:00:00Z

Obviously the argument that like a lot of the recent PS1-style indie games are only working in the spirit of and not the actual limitations or material conditions of PS1 developers is fairly pointless but I think it does reveal some interesting tensions around history and style in videogame discussions. A lot of the discourse in favor of "better" or "more authentic" PS1-style graphics tend to be working from examples like Vagrant Story, I would say the actual meaningful touch-points for many people who say they're making PS1-style games is something like LSD: Dream Emulator.

And what emerges here is kind of a divide between connoisseur, who seeks the refined formal "peak" of a particular medium or style or form or whatever, and maker, who is more about bending the affordances of the format to their needs, especially in an expedient way. LSD is as much a PS1 title as Vagrant Story, but its position is very different. Vagrant Story is a sort of hermetic masterpiece; as a work it's the image of the angel with a flaming sword guarding the garden of Eden after mankind has been banished from paradise, overwhelming glamour but also absolute power and aesthetic discipline that cannot let anyone in. Of course people have been inspired by these works, but there's a reason that making a full featured JRPG, even using the derided "shortcuts" of an RPGMaker type engine and resource ecosystem, is generally considered an insane and quixotic undertaking.

These are works that are primarily introverse, inward-looking and oriented, for a variety of reasons. They don't encourage everyday participation, in fact they fend it off. They also rely on increasingly insular formal values and components; you have to cultivate an appreciation of the PS1 library and its technical affordances, the history of RPGs and a familiarity with their typical structure and style to fully appreciate it in this way. It's catnip for guys who have hyper-specialized into arguing for a highly refined "canon" of "great video games." That games studies and games criticism spends so much time arguing about or attempting to create a reception culture for these self-evidently "major" works is imo a major element of why they are so obsessed with idealist concepts like "mechanics" or "immersion" and also so often completely out of touch with videogames as made and experienced.

If I sound like I want to eradicate all work of this type from the earth I don't mean to, haha, though I could really do without ever seeing the words "Dragon" and "Age" or "Mass" and "Effect" next to each other for some god-only-knows reason again. I like a lot of standoffish masterpiece work, and there are some contexts in which I find it genuinely impressive. I just think discussion around any form in general is overly tilted in the direction of this work, when extroverse work can be just as interesting and also serves a vital function.

There's the somewhat-apocryphal story about the Sex Pistols gig that produced about as many bands as there were groups of four people in the audience, and also the saying that everyone who bought a copy of The Velvet Underground's first album started a band (It's interesting that music is almost always the example to hand for democratized production). This gets at both a silent or shadow canon of comparatively outre or minor works that nevertheless have a major influence on the creators of a field, but also a way of working and presenting your work that says, alternately, come on in! This is not a cathedral built on the bones of generations of peasants or QA workers.

This is the category I would say a work like LSD: Dream Emulator is in. It's personal and seam-ful, interspersed with actual texts from a personal dream log, bits of FMV and animation that make no attempt to gel with the densely-textured low-poly appearance of the game space. As you play it, you can get a sense of how it's put together, and the graphics are creative and compelling without descending into techy look-at-me-ism. The use of sound, texture, and player affordances are economical but able to be recombined and toyed with. In the same way that everyone who bought a Velvet Underground album started a band, I'm sure a lot of people came away from LSD not just wanting to make a game, but thinking they could do it. VNs also play a huge role in this, I think. Just look at Higurashi. (You DO play Higurashi with the original sprites, right?) I think developers are gradually getting better at mentioning these types of works in their personal "shadow canons," which I hope will also lead into criticism and academia taking a more comprehensive historical view of videogames.

But, as the discussion I cited to begin with gets at, there is still resistance to talking about this work, saying it's good and influential and worth discussing without qualification, and putting it on the same level as the more standard "masterpieces." And what I get from this attitude in contemporary production, rather than looking back at historical canon, is also a sort of "yick" reaction to the idea of "badness," aesthetic failure, or even unconventional aesthetics in general. I was surprised when working on Trashzine that so many people took the associated moniker of "Trashgames" completely seriously, like we were literally saying our own work was bad, or inviting people to treat it as bad, when we should have been straightforwardly pursuing sincerity and respectability, or something?

It seems like most other forms are able to have a space for complex identification with and reclamation of the aesthetically outre, rejected, mass-cultural, whatever, without this sort of hand-wringing. Even as we accept smaller, shorter games there is still an impetus for them to be polished, palatable, non-abrasive, and most importantly, to show no seams, especially if you want to get on the App Store. But seam-ful art and art that directly confronts or disposes of insular aesthetic values, and embraces the ephemeral and experimental, and sometimes fantastically fails, plays an enormous role in both expanding the field, and not just lowering barriers to participation, but making it inviting.

Moral-- There was a Wicker Man

2021-04-08T00:00:00Z

I've been watching some horror films that play with the imagery of paganism/satan worship/cults recently and they're, well, as uneven as any horror genre. I love the goofy renfaire manifestation of the "divine feminine" cult in The Love Witch, and The Lair of the White Worm is just delightfully horny and chaotic with young Hugh Grant AND Peter Capaldi. I found The Devil Rides Out to just be extremely boring, and The Wicker Man was fun, but idk, I don't really get the common interpretation that the depiction of the rural cult (and the depictions of these pagan cults in folk horror in general) are meant to come across as like, somewhat interesting or sympathetic.

I've talked about it before, but a big reason why these depictions of cults are like, straightforwardly unsympathetic to me is that minus the public nudity they generally have the same racial and gender mores, conformity-oriented ideology, and hell, even many of the aesthetic fundamentals of like, an evangelical lutheran church camp (the overwhelming presence of sex is still there but purely as a shadowy set of implications that can only harshly punish or "reward"). It's not some "ah but, maybe would be nice up until the human sacrifice part" thing to me, it's like, a thing you can go do now, and I just got tired of it. It's kind of like how people said the satanists in Sabrina were just goth flavor Catholics, of course any effective cult would hit the same emotional and moral registers re: harmony and "the good life" as Christianity, which has generally been a widespread and reliable cultural scaffolding for manipulation and abuse.

Also any place where you can expect to encounter a live mournful acoustic ballad at any hour of the day is indeed my own personal hell.

I think the actually interesting thing The Wicker Man does is highlight how short-term these apparent "ancient traditions" are, and how artificially they were imposed on the population of the island, literally by the guy who owns it, as a way to keep them in line growing idk some form of mega-honeycrisp apple cultivar for him. This is what I think is the thing the movie really bashes you over the head with: this guy who literally, generationally owns the means of production, and creates an environment of unsustainable extraction and reduced contingency eventually has to come up with a plan to deal with some sort of disruption, depleted resources, slipping standard of living, etc. What he decides to do is obvious: convince the people he exploits on the island as a part of this system that they have to throw someone who questions or challenges his authority into a ritual bonfire for their island to "work" again.

"Market cosplay - a situation where the ceremonial performance of a phantasmagoric ideal market becomes more and more important as it bears less and less relation to real economic activity. I'm excited for the next step of just imprisoning people in a giant wicker model of the New York Stock Exchange and then setting it on fire."

I was recently re-reading one of Stephen's pieces, and while I always had a cultural background noise type awareness of what the Wicker Man metaphor he uses here was implying, I was surprised by how on the nose it played out in the actual film. Whether it's a question of God vs. gods or Science vs. Religion or whatever other dichotomies that occur so blatantly in the text is kind of irrelevant to me, because fables are never literal!

What's really interesting to me is that, when the main character begins to sense the increasing inevitability of being the human sacrifice for that year, he tries to save his own ass by proposing, both to the cult leader and his followers, that destroying him won't truly solve the problem; the people will turn on the leader at the next crisis. And this is what "revenge capitalism" consistently bets against. The masses will be satiated and conformity reinforced by spectacularized sacrifice of "bad actors" (via borders, the prison system, the disciplining and mockery of the gender non-conforming, encouraging self-blame over things like unwellness, lack of success, etc) rather than turning against their charismatic leader together.

Will they, when the next time comes, probably in around 6 months? Probably not. And this is probably why the ending is so bleak. The utterly deluded and conscripted life on island is "good," even as ie the availability of food slips it presents an overwhelming image of the pastoral, back-to-nature fantasy. But the fantasy of "going back-to-nature" is always darkly accompanied by how patently unnatural it is to act like you can, and how much it relies on the enforcement of a specific and historically contingent social reproduction of race, gender and class hierarchy as "natural," at the penalty of death. Plus the music really, really sucks. I've done my time with acoustic guitars and I'm not going back.

Very Very Very Straightforward Update

2021-04-01T00:00:00Z

I was so busy between my last post and now that I thought I might have brought burnout on myself just by thinking/posting about it. lol.

Alternative Ecologies Jam went well! It was a bit more stressful than the others I've run because just about as soon as it started I had a strong sense of how much shorter 3 days was than a week. So naturally, we got less entries and they came in a cluster at the end rather than throughout but I think the quality is overall really good! My entry is on the mildly-trolly mildly-serious idea of a "Proof-of-Rest" protocol. HM! I obviously had something on my mind.

I've also updated the Low Tech Webring, and left it open when/if I'll next update. It's a huge number of sites now, and while I find them all great and interesting and charming in their own ways, it's kind of become a huge endeavor for one person and idk if a webring is the best or most sustainable way to present all these sites together. I'm open to discussions on it!

Plaintext Distro is now open to purchases, and I will be mailing all the zines at the end of the month. Currently, it's just a way for me and a few low tech oriented friends to distribute zines in a very casual, at-cost way, but I'd like to extend it to feature a lot of different publications around those themes. It's a part of Glasgow Zine Fair which takes place over all of April.

The job interview went well, I've been invited for a second-round interview. Yay! I also have some paid writing lined up after much pain and anguish (turns out there are two outlets who will pay me a non-offensive amount to publish my work, remaining, on earth), and additional production/facilitation work to keep me busy through april/may (which is... convenient since that job would start in June if I get it!)

It's getting warmer here gradually and we've even had a few sunny days that got up to 15/16 C! But it's making me realize how much I miss walking into town, going to the local shops I liked, getting a bubble tea and sitting in the square, etc, all the things that have not quite become possible again yet due to COVID. I hope under 50s can start getting vaccinated soon here. I am planning to get a nice pizza from an amazing local place across the street tomorrow!

Other than that, keeping my head down revising my VN script and reading on in The Magic Mountain! Recently, I've enjoyed reading the new Low Tech blog post about wastewater fish ponds and Charmaine Chua's blog series about riding on a container ship. Yep, I think that's about it. Hope everyone is having a nice day and only getting fooled on in good spirits.

Linksheets

2021-03-22T00:00:00Z

Over the past week I did a guest talk on alternative game-making (and related activity) tools for a class my friend Claire leads, and another talk and Q&A about DIY online networks and spaces for GAIA. I'm filling back up my reserves now in the few days I get between another job interview and running a writing jam at Now Play This... On the one hand, it's really amazing how different online meetings/talks/whatever can be each time, even when you're using the same few types of software... there's always completely new forms of chaos, lol.

I also think I did alright given the circumstances, especially when presenting why these things are valuable (why use things other than Unity? why not just have a social media page or use a site generator?) can sometimes be an uphill battle where you feel people turn off like immediately. I got that from some people, but also think I got through to others, which is the best you can shoot for, really!

Lately, I've been making mini link pages to go with any talk I give, so people can find the things I'm referring to and also have an easy way to explore them more later. Here's the one for the Alternative Game Tools talk, and here's the one for online communities and social spaces. I use a modified version of the CSS for writing portfolio pages on my main site, and then make some adjustments to text size/border-style/generate a background in patternify and find some good images on gifcities to make the style fit the tone and topics of the talk.

It's really fun that I've improved so much in writing CSS and HTML since I started my site just over 2 years ago that I can now make a cute, simple page that totally satisfies me very easily. The more I do it, the more I value doing things in a lightweight and seam-full way.

I've also been reading a lot lately! For fun, I've gotten around 130 pages in to The Magic Mountain. My partner recommended it to me as being formally very much like a visual novel, and I totally get it so far. It's very funny and surreal, and I'm starting to think of the protagonist of my own (still rather speculative) visual novel project as a slightly older and more vulgar girl Hans Castorp.

I also read a bunch of Game Studies articles last week that like, sucked (trifecta of evil, ~game design~ people talking about visual novels, people with no arts background talking about art exhibitions, and well... "comfy games" lol). I knowwww there's good work being done in the area... well... I respect a very specific narrow band of my peers, lol, but it really is discouraging to see the level of uncriticality and lack of contextual references that apparently sails through peer review, especially when it comes to either arts-related discussions or non-anglophone game genres.

I did really enjoy this long and suitably grumpy essay on the history of the web by Olia Lialina, and I think if you're like... running a small scale blog on neocities in 2021 you will find a lot to think about here! I'm also looking forward to digging in to this volume on Game Production Studies (remember how I said I respect a narrow band of my peers?) which is, luckily for everyone, open access!

Blog theme update-- even more faster

2021-03-14T00:00:00Z

In the interest of speed, more consistent appearance,and just plain showing off, if you have a peek at my CSS for this site, you'll notice that all of the background textures are now generated with Base64 code rather than tiled images.

This cool thing is possible thanks to Patternify by Sacha Greif and is based on the dithering patterns provided by Strike. Thanks also to candle for giving me the heads up on this tool.

I still crunch images down to 1-bit with Ditherlicious. My original post on this blog theme (Stricken) is here.

Eros and Email

2021-03-13T00:00:00Z

It's almost a quaint, even nostalgic detail to appear in a romance story nowadays: they email each other! Amidst the improbable and effortless successes and so chilled out as to be content-less discussions of class in Sally Rooney's Normal People, the emotional involvement of sending emails, while only briefly mentioned, was one of the few things that struck me as “real” in the book. Fortunately, I didn't have to just stew in my disappointment, because I also got my hands on Elif Batuman's The Idiot, which turns on the axis of a painful, fraught, electrically horny series of agonized emails. While getting through Sally Rooney's work almost feels “compulsive” (a term many of her biggest boosters would agree on) but in an unpleasant way, like picking a hangnail or binging a Netflix original series, ill-advised pursuits that always culminate in an empty, gut-sinking sort of achievement, The Idiot was consistently a bit perverse, delightful, and seriously erotic... Maybe my position is, increasingly, if you're not doing that with the Novel, what's the point?

Set in 1995-6, the story has a bit of an advantage by placing itself in a period where email was kind of new and not mostly a stream of junk and work obligations, but, despite that, the experience of having a really good, baroque, wide reaching and almost naughty conversation over email is still pretty much the same when it does manage to happen now. Selin is a freshman at Harvard who uses her newfound affordance of connecting to the internet and sending email to send a spontaneous joke message to Ivan, a classmate in her Russian language class with whom she had to act out many of the awkward language learning scenarios in their textbook. That she decides to do this is lightly foreshadowed in the way the early, subconscious moments of a developing crush are often just paying slightly more attention, taking a remark or even an absence just a little more personally than you know you should. Ivan is a senior considering going to graduate school, so the majority of their initial conversation takes place in unexpected chunks as Ivan moves up and down the west coast touring mathematics departments.

“At three in the morning, I logged on and typed finger varga. I had never before been able to bring myself to use the Unix command “finger,” because it sounded so disgusting, and also the thing it did was shameful-- it showed you when and where another user had last logged in. A couple of seconds passed, and then the computer said: On since 02:43:10. It made me feel peaceful to see that he was online. I went to sleep and dreamed about a tremendously urbane guy call Phil Lang who had lustrous hair and didn't like me. It turned out he was the philosophy of language.”

There's an element of imposed coyness and playing with and/or feeling out boundaries; they speak to each other using the Russian names they took on acting out the language exercises. Yet what is said, pondered, agonized over, spat back at the author under every reply, is increasingly cryptic, emotional, intimate. It's also essentially unspeakable in person. Selin is such a great protagonist because she's fundamentally suspicious of and let down by language, and yet she is constantly having to make sense through it, it's her primary tether to others, no matter how problematic. Selin and Ivan agonize over how to reply to each other in the appropriately measured periods between emails, and any disruption to this process, taking too long or sending a follow up too soon, talking in person, or the horrible temptation to “finger” that Selin gives in to fails to clarify the situation, and only makes it more mysterious.

Selin staring down her feelings about Ivan, trying to process and respond to them, especially through the dizzying medium of asynchronous text starts to give you the same sensation Don Quixote must feel running at windmills. I've been there myself, at the absolutely sick, cold-sweat highs and lows. Twitter and similar social media don't quite feel the same way, they're too public and combative; everyone's expected to confidently present their best self which is usually totally at odds with the desiring self. Real-time chat demands, and becomes ephemeral, you can't read, and re-read, and adore and pull your hair out over paragraphs and plot out the time you should wait to reply in days. Emailing is tech-instantaneous, but the mail metaphor gives us permission to treat it as the maddening, heated exchange of letters over land and sea by post.

I think Hito Steyerl is getting at something similar when she writes about how the most effective romance scams still use email as their medium, even as more and more methods of communication over distance become available to us, and our inboxes become more and more crowded. I quoted this essay in a scrappy birth chart zine I did for the Love Letter virus, about the potential for erotic and emotional communication that is, by now, basically exclusive to more “old web” formats unless you want to go back so far as hand-writing letters:

“The combination of (almost) realtime communication and physical absence creates something one could call absense, so to speak. The sensual aspect of an absence, which presences itself in (almost) real time. A live and lively absence, to which the lack of a physical body is not an unfortunate coincidence, but necessary.”

Selin and Ivan's story doesn't end with any sort of resolution, nor do they even reach the point of having an awkward kiss or disappointing sex. Selin only really contemplates her physical desire for Ivan briefly, despite how the overwhelming physicality of her emotional state is described. There's a wrenching scene around halfway through where Selin crosses paths with Ivan on campus, and he casually introduces the woman he's with as his girlfriend. Their fraught email communication obviously falters past that point, but Selin is determined to stick with an English language teaching trip Ivan recommended her for that would mean she spends the summer in his home country of Hungary. In the remote village where she's expected to teach English, there is no Internet, and Selin and Ivan trip over more unreliable forms of communication, missed messages and indirect conversations in person. Ivan presumably goes to graduate school after they part and Selin returns to Harvard in the fall to change her major from linguistics. The whole book can come across as a sort of tease in this sense, but any sort of resolution, imo, would be an unreal and unhappy one.

DISCLAIMER: Content of this blog post may not be applicable to all readers because the author actually ended up marrying (one of) the people she had a highly intense emailing routine with.

You and your friends is just individualism 2

2021-03-12T00:00:00Z

The squad, the group chat, the enfants terribles wherever they are, girlboss mentors and whisper networks, the found family, et cetera. In a hypothetical context where you were grown in a tube and any other sort of activism, collective action or social infrastructure besides your nuclear family (who has to like you) and the people around you who happen to like you, doesn't exist on your radar, sure, I can see this seeming like some radical and novel way of organizing power. I joke, but this is also kind of the situation I grew up in, where the American school system, the nuclear family, and the church were basically the only three sites of social connection available to me.

So maybe that's why stuff like this seems especially bullshit to me, like, not only does it gloss over things like crypto, homesteading, and finance apps as... maybe good actually??? with the absolute minimum intellectual effort, it primarily coasts on the good feeling and clout distribution structures of the back end that sticks its face into public as so many niche meme accounts, podcasts, and like basically the whole publishing industry at this point fuck it lol, without much of a sense of what they could produce beyond in jokes and paypal pools. Behaviourally, it naturally prioritizes cliqueish (forced) harmony, there's no real plan for what to do if your squad tears itself apart for a variety of reasons, or if they're just kind of annoying, or suck.

These sort of groups are familiar to me, they're the shitty local MLM economy that pulls everyone involved deeper into debt and forcing useless tat onto their friends and family, the blatantly evil “prosperity gospel” church groups, the kids you self-efface yourself into a black hole to have someone to sit with at lunch. It's unhealthy, hierarchical, mean, and susceptible to becoming some sort of pyramid scheme or personality cult, precisely because all of its norms and rules are developed socially and largely only implied. And of course there's no easy escape route. Dependency is the whole point, and this is especially dangerous/effective at a time when more people than ever are un- or precariously employed.

As an antidote, Jo Freeman's appropriately scoldy The Tyranny of Structurelessness is brilliantly boring and basically correct. She aptly analyzes why so many women's groups floundered or even became self-destructive when they originated as vaguely-defined “consciousness raising groups” who, in bonding over their supposedly shared oppression would tend to produce an unspoken inner circle of people with the most in common, who would basically use the group as an extension of their personal socializing, while everyone excluded from this understanding had no idea what the fuck was going on. This was not a formation that could do anything other than reproduce itself, and it tended to have no interest in making broader connections or acting in solidarity with anyone. Of course, the solutions to this are boring and generally despised, transparency about decision-making, rotating roles, accessible information and ready diffusion of resources. They're not sexy, but they work.

I think it's important to think about this, because I've been primarily socializing in game dev communities or tiny, non-hierarchical online spaces like Zone, especially since the pandemic began. The history of forum drama is also a particularly depressing and reliable record of the way that any perceived clout in the water will literally make some people edge others out for it at any cost and start talking like some sort of Final Fantasy villain in the process half of the time. The lesson to take away from this is that these spaces need to be grown deliberately to avoid this sort of consolidation and competition, not try to act like it couldn't happen, like everyone can be the inner circle, or refuse to acknowledge it at all. Otherwise, what's the plan? To say “come on, we're all friends, right?” as a sort of veiled “shut up?”

One of the most beautiful moments of Ursula K Le Guin's The Dispossessed, to me, is Shevek eating by himself in a mess hall on Anarres. It's such a simple but moving scene. Shevek is a bit of a loner and an asshole, in the dialectical format of the book he represents the trouble an individual with outre or novel ideas would have in a collectively run society, and at this point in the book, he has pushed a lot of that society's limits. No one in that mess hall probably likes him terribly much, and on that basis, I'm sure a lot of people would argue he doesn't deserve to come in and eat a meal, no questions asked. But that's exactly what happens, because that's the society that has been built on Anarres. It's basically a non-event that simultaneously also reveals the hard-fought values of their culture.

No matter how much hyperbolic raving goes into the idea that your squad, your sisterhood, your whatever is a radical formation that will save you, we have to throw cold water on such an idea. Fascism is not purely individualistic, in fact, the protection of the family (or any other sort of imagined harmonious norm) has often been its base unit and building block. Family ties won't do, even if they aren't strictly by blood. As anyone who's had a job that's “like a family” been a part of a close knit friend group that schismed can attest, “family” in any context is a mad scientist's laboratory of normalizing abuse, manipulation, and social discipline, and it's indifferent to whether these connections are biological or not.

How I feel about what I'm doing now

2021-03-11T00:00:00Z

The roundup for the List Jam just went up on CD and the jam page for the Alternative Ecologies jam I'm running with Now Play This is live too. This is following on the Bitsy essay jam I did towards the end of last year; I also have some forthcoming teaching, facilitating and speaking roles while I'm kind of sitting on my hands waiting for either academic or cultural institutions to start actually hiring full time staff again. Yes, I literally finalized my PhD all of four months before all this shit kicked off, and we all became "online facilitators" because the jobs we wanted to do either contracted or ceased to exist.

This isn't to say I don't enjoy any of that work. Doing writing jams in particular and workshop facilitation in general often just feels like a way to get my friends to make cool stuff for me, or to meet other people that also make cool stuff I should know about, which I sometimes can get paid for. Production work also isn't too bad, when it involves putting together artists and themes in a way that totally clicks and leads to a really cool event. I have to say, all of the admin involved in getting, negotiating, and invoicing for these opportunities basically sucks though, and I'm completely dispositionally ill-suited to it in the same way I'm dispositionally ill-suited to take compliments or make my face look normal when I'm telling a white lie. lol.

But also, it really doesn't pay that well, which is why, in the immediate, I'd rather get a suitable full time job that actually involves writing or research in a major way, rather than these precarious, socially-intensive temporary roles that are like, doable but mainly using weird random tricks I've learned along the way, as if I'm a sheepdog getting by entirely through appearing to solve math problems like Mr. Ed or something. Unfortunately these have statistically been two of the stupidest things to be good at for the majority of my adult life, and are especially stupid now. Even when you can do them, they're ridiculously devalued. There's like, three sites to pitch to that say they'll pay you over $200 for a 1500 word plus article any more.

So I guess my feeling is primarily "mixed," haha. I see the value in what I do individually, which is nice, even if it's kind of disciplinarily kept cheap by capitalism so I occasionally get to phase into panic or feeling shit about myself, which pleases the overlords who would like to homogenize all art and culture. But the social element and the precarity of it wear me down and make every day feel like a hurdle course could spring up in front of me like, at the whim of my email inbox refreshing. I'm very lucky my partner with a maths BA can get a SQL job that basically covers us and exists anywhere we might want to live so long as we keep our expenses like, moderate, but I'd also like to give him more of a chance to be a house husband and work on his own (unsustainable, culturally devalued) creative projects, and, oh yeah, actually do the type of work I'm trained for and good at maybe in the process.

I'm also really lucky he's an EU citizen, which made living together after our relationship was recognized by The State (cringeeee) if not more straightforward, at the very least cheaper than the literally lifewrecking sized bills for people in the UK in general to let their partners come live with them. Though idk, this situation also made me immigration-status-complicated for the last year or so which ALSO made my job options a bit more narrow and I'm only beginning to try and see which pure "day job" categories won't just disqualify me out of hand for being maybe a bit more complicated to deal with than the other 100 ppl applying. Of course, it's always been Hell World in that area too where I had to f/take a personality test to work at a burrito place and working at a convenience store also meant having to become embroiled in the family drama of the scolding superego calling you and guilting you into coming in every time someone called off. Likeeee... I am Lucky! but also all of my options suck. I direct my rage at the joy stolen from me personally for little to no practical reason but also from everyone else in similar ways.

I feel happy, I have some "gigs lined up" and I live with someone who makes living with someone easy, which maybe I wasn't even sure was an option at an earlier part of my life, lol. But I also feel like over the next few months I'll reach full extension with this freelancing stuff and risk burning out, and my last scrape with autistic burnout (which was what led to me getting a formal diagnosis at age 27, again, lol) was REALLY not fun and I literally lost all of my social skills in a way I feel like I've only regained like, 50%. Like I was pushing myself and masking hardcore in hindsight, but looking back, that person feels totally different, sometimes in a better way? But also, looking back, I was fundamentally more unstable, more unhappy, etc, at all those times in my life where I think, oh, that's where I was the skinniest, or most productive, or most good looking, or socializing the most. Piss on achievement!

Anyways hmm... what's the point of this post? I guess I've had people ask me for "career advice" which means I'm projecting a type of success, though really it's only the kind that comes from compulsively writing and having no venue (with capital anyways) that values it, but I have made a lot of friends and gotten married from it, so if you're looking for that... maybe? Also this is my personal blog, so sometimes you just get FEEELINGS or a life update rather than extrapolating on art theory though I do really spend a lot of my time doing the latter. Finally, I've gotten an interview for a job that DOES fit the criteria above, and WOULD suit my needs and schedule, and I also think I'm one of the top people in the world who could do it. However it's also at a location that I definitely associate with the early warning signs of my autistic burnout crash, and which just might make me fully insane in the long run. Idk. I'm sure this will be entertaining and informative to look back on regardless of how that situation pans out.

This was meant to be a comment

2021-02-23T00:00:00Z

I am always glad to see more people blogging! and in the spirit of Pol's very good first post I want to point out that I mostly agree here, but as an aspiring IP law crank I find this bit troubling:

On the other hand, some will argue that a true radical game cannot be made through capitalist production processes (arguably true), and therefore call for gamedevs to make truly radical games: with no funding, with no IP/fully open source, not sold on the market. Such morality calls directed at people who make a living by selling games and also intend for people to play their games and have built a sense of their craft among a community of peers that is inseparable from the market are trite nonsense (imo!), and themselves a form of DISCOURSE that is more concerned with abstract morality posturing than the articulation of a political project with concrete impact and actionable steps.

I'd be interested, I guess, in cases where people are actually doing this? This sentiment feeeeeels in the genre of a variety of complaints I've seen recently that are aimed at free things, bad things, unmarketable things etc as either literally or rhetorically mucking up the works and deflating the financial/aesthetic/moral/political/etc value of the cultural field in general. I think this leans dangerously close to getting mad at something that basically does not exist in any empowered or meaningful sense (Jason Rohrer infamously tried to un-public domain work that he released to the public domain as soon as a port of his game for the Chinese market used the code and assets in question, which I think is evidence that in general people do not understand what working outside of IP law would actually look like).

Momentarily feeling this way is fine so long as you can localize it to one irritating person online, but framing it as a threat in terms of political inertia I think underestimates the degree to which the mainstream is oriented towards completely eradicating any free, non-professional, non-commercial, non-IP-oriented ways of making and distributing work right now. Which is to say my position is basically that we are obligated to assert the value of these practices, right now, regardless of how we personally get paid or the role IP and platforms play in our own work.

That it's not well understood how or why people do these things, and that simply asserting its value is often received as a radical statement of moral judgement against professionals is a symptom of how bad the situation is over the past few years, I think! These approaches have to coexist conceptually if we're going to move from one to the other (or even work towards a world where people have more of an option of doing so), and I don't think there's necessarily an ideological or political problem with that (I'm uninterested in morals in this case, lol).

It's interesting to bring up a sense of craft and community as something that exists and is developed in the professional sphere, since people like Lana Polansky have observed that the identification and consolidation of a variety of independent, artistic, hobbyist, etc game and software making practices into a homogenized "indie game" commodity that can be plugged into specific commercial storefronts as content has basically served to erase knowledge of and access to this particular moment's pre-history. In this case, the specific communities and approach to craft that existed in these different niches have all been shoved together, and the "community" and "craft" here are moreso received from the industry than emerging organically or situationally, even if it feels that way on the inside. It's very illustrative of what I mean.

I worry about people using the excuse of paying their bills or operating in a space of their peers (which again, are sympathetic and reasonable things to desire, I feel like I have to re-articulate because every time I bring this up people seem to act like by just broaching these issues I am taking an all-or-nothing position!) to become a bit too precious or sentimental about this situation in a way that precludes imagining anything differently and realistically engaging with those possibilities. I think pointing out that, for example, IP law operates primarily in perverse incentives that do the opposite of protecting artists' rights and rewarding creativity, or that currency is a sort of double-alienation which returns our innate capacities to us in an incomplete form but also a form only legible within capitalism is obviously very different from telling someone they HAVE to work a certain way, and even people making deliberately provocative statements along those lines are rarely in a position to do anything to you personally about it; it's most often people who have been excluded from commercialization and professionalization due to physical capability, social status, the nature of their work, etc, in the first place.

Arguments that critique (which is not necessarily moral culpability), especially from people who do not have access in these areas can meaningfully drag down people who are already working as professionals strike me as strange, like, if we're worried about inertia, isn't it typically observed to be the other way around? I think we need to let go of the prescriptiveness and defensiveness just a bit to really be able to examine what norms are imposed by professionalization, and existing distribution, education, community, criticism and IP standards, especially if we want to change them.

The Scam Which Dare Not Speak Its Name, On Social Media

2021-02-16T00:00:00Z

I wrote a longer piece about my feelings on crypto-art schemes and crypto/blockchain in general presented as a solution to current perceived ills around arts funding, artist ownership and control of their work, and DRM/"authenticity" of digital items. It started as a Zonelets post but it just got rather big and I realized I was putting a lot of my writing energy into making shorter things for this blog rather than essays for my main site, so I decided to go back to that for a bit. I also framed it as about provenance because even just mentioning "crypto" or "blockchain" or "bitcoin" on searchable social media platforms seems to bring a platoon of its defenders who are convinced you just don't get it and if they explain it the right way you'll tooootally realize how important it is straight to your mentions.

The thing is, I've had it explained to me a ton of times! I've been to a seminar for how art organizations could use blockchain, I've been to exhibitions of blockchain based works, I've read books and academic articles explaining its financial and social functions, and the one thing all of these had in common was profound ambivalence when it came to questions like: "Do we actually need this?" "Aren't there less complicated ways to do the same things?" "Do the possibilities really require the level of computing power and expertise?" It's like... ehhh! *Shrug* And this is a sort of broad-mindedness and honesty I almost never get from the hardcore blockchain evangelists, because for them it simply has to be revolutionary.

Several crypto-art schemes have started up or gotten some press in the recent weeks, which is what motivated me to write this piece. One of them offers the feature of contracted payouts to artists every time their work is sold for a higher price, and it also distributes these payments to each previous investor as a "patron" of sorts. But like... you know what this starts to look like...

In this case, despite some ostensibly-progressive words about artist ownership and control, it's not the artist who gets the ultimate payout, since they're only attached to the artworks they put into the system. Obviously the ultimate payout goes to the marketplace which is the tip of this pyramid, with its finger in the pie of every single artwork and transaction.

These waves of launches and waves of bitcoin evangelism are somewhat inevitable, and quite similar to the GameStop stock shakeup from a few weeks ago. The language of opportunity, democratization, and even sticking it to the man are enticing invitations to bring newbies into a hierarchical system they feel like they can win at, maybe for just a moment. As they buy in, maybe some find temporary success but the more significant returns of course always float to those already at the top, who have determined the shape of the system to begin with. And the shape is always the same.

Put aside the fact that blockchain is, for the most part, a massive waste of computing power and energy in a period where it's increasingly urgent that we use what we have efficiently and wisely, if you can. Even then, art markets on the blockchain only provide pretty decor for these systems of hierarchical financialization taken to its most extreme limit. "Art washing" refers to the role art has played in softening the reputations of institutions or wealthy individuals responsible for truly harmful and exploitative things. Like all other instances, I find this aspect of crypto-art to also be distasteful.

Why Everyone's Saying "Dudes Rock" Lately

2021-02-07T00:00:00Z

I like this video a lot. And I think the author of the tweet correctly identifies this as a sort of "dudes rock" content. I also really enjoy how it takes a lot of the emotional beats of like, a Lifetime movie, but translates them to encompass such dudely signifiers (the secret handshake, the bluegrass cover band, the check shirts and honestly just everything about both of their looks, etc). Starting out on an archetypically wholesome concept that emphasizes loyalty, tradition, down-hominess: these two dudes take a walk through their peaceful suburban neighborhoods to give each other a high five every week! But suddenly, (the high five journal is dutifully produced to sombrely reflect on what could have been their final high five...) a dramatic illness results in one of the leads being both dramatically bed-bound and amnesiac... At the darkest hour a fateful memory of The Customary High Five comes to the rescue, love saves the day, and naturally, they write a folksy ballad about it too.

This is a cool example of dudes rocking that seems oriented towards the emphasis on "positive masculinities" after "toxic masculinity" has become such a tenet of critique. But "dudes rock" has also become kind of a mantra during Zone's movie nights, especially watching films like Dark Star and The Lighthouse that are far less uplifting in that sense. "Dudes rock" still gets at something here, I think. Maybe it's a way of winkingly enjoying Highly Dude Shit without having to treat the connections these actions, aesthetics, attitudes, etc, have to masculinity as a sort of seeping toxin, an irredeemable aspect that makes these men themselves bad, rather than just people with uh... very interesting problems (in the case of the two films mentioned, anyways).

So I guess we can have "toxic masculinity" and, alternately, reformed "good masculinity" which follows it but it seems kind of incomprehensible, and probably even internalized-ly misogynistic of me to suggest the same process of categorization for femininity. I have a running joke to myself that women in tech initiatives make me internally misogynistic, because it seems like the rhetoric around these spaces so often justify themselves in terms of circular logic: femininity is good because it's the opposite of masculinity, masculinity is bad and therefore the way the tech industry currently operates is also masculine and bad, the way to fix this is to make it feminine, and therefore good. Taking issue with some of the assertions of things which are inherently feminine and therefore good (do not ever bring up Theodor Adorno's observations on Astrology...), certain elements of gender-complementarity or naturalizing sex-difference that come from these initiatives (why does it STILL have to be called XX-whatever?), or even just not being into them yourself (why are you wearing tech worker drag?) all become symptoms of internalized misogyny, aka a YOU problem.

But like, these sort of arguments are unable to fully escape the core issue that is that masculinity and femininity as categories rely on their supposed complementarity and opposition. They're a package deal. Trying to make one good and the other bad is like trying to get sour cream you didn't want out of a burrito. If masculinity is a stultifying, toxic fog then femininity is also an oppressive miasma that attempts to order human behavior; they can so often go hand-in-hand.

So I feel like when I say "this is Dudes Rock to me," I'm talking about how a specific thing epitomizes cultural masculinity in a context where I can consider and enjoy it, maybe squirreling some bits away, without feeling like I have to worry about whether this is "toxic" (it's either "wholesome" or so over-the-top bad that criticism of individual characters' behavior seems ridiculous) or that I have to go sombrely cultivate my enjoyment of something supposedly "feminine" in turn (because, of course, any man who wrote a novel during the 20th century is also a dudebro). Is it both internalized misogyny and toxic masculinity on my part to say that I experience gender mostly as someone trying to sneak two price categories of pick-n-mix candy out of the store in one bag (while believing in my anarchist heart of hearts that all should be able to partake freely and equally in the delights of fruit flavored tootsie rolls anyways)? That I don't want the binary opposition or good vs evil that is so very easy to attach any number of marketing grifts to? That I think to really make headway critiquing the social manifestations and hierarchy of gender we have to attack the idea that they're "natural" and/or "complementary" and/or "opposites" in the first place? I mean, so be it... I'll be cracking open a cold one with the boys (in spirit).

Is the Internet a Garden or a Junkyard?

2021-01-26T00:00:00Z

Pillowfort came out of closed beta this week, leading to a lot of people signing up in hopes of finding the magic of past, cozier and more hobby or community focused social media. But there were also, almost immediately, Twitter posts loudly drawing attention to bugs and security issues in the site. Some of these are, indeed, quite serious, while others are more amusing or inconvenient. But there's a sort of irony to these posts, often with the tone of making PF itself look unusable and unprofessional, largely appearing on a 240-character micro-blogging platform with fewer and fewer points of user control or autonomy.

“that’s the tragedy of the commons” - some fuck busy selling off all the commons, right? In this case it almost feels like these posts are doing closed, commercialized platform-holder's work for free, bringing news of horrible portents from an adjacent fiefdom to let us all sigh with amusement and burrow deeper into the increasingly restrictive and exploitative cocoon Twitter offers. It's disappointing to see non-professional and alternative internet platforms (who obviously can't afford the web dev and security staff of a gigantic corporation) put through the wringer on the same platforms they're trying to offer an alternative to when they open up for free but don't meet professional standards. It feels like alternatives are shut down in advance and the necessity of building an increasing amount of our lives in the shape of these harmful, top-down, corporate platforms is reinforced yet again.

I think it's worth noting, as someone who has been on the closed beta for a few months, that my experience of the platform was occasionally buggy, occasionally beset by growing pains, but also with regular updates and bug fixes originating from discussions in particular communities set up for that purpose. If there were complaints about the platform, they didn't take the form of literally going onto another platform to share increasingly petty exploits, or at least didn't reach the level of attention that they started hitting my TL on other sites. I'm all for alternative platforms improving, at the rate and in the direction that they decide is right for them. However, it's hard to argue that you just care sooo much about digital security if that's the way you go drawing attention to these issues.

Anything common is kind of based on the idea that people will generally act in good faith. Of course, there's certain things that are totally reasonable to do to protect or manage common resources, especially from nonhuman bad actors and forces of nature (rats, flooding, mold). Capital is the opposite end of this approach, which assumes that the base status of human nature is either exploiting or being exploited, and the correct order of exploitation must be absolutely maintained. Maybe the internet is "too big" now to expect that any space can be made without battening down the hatches for the worst possible bad actors as the first priority (closing off many other possibilities in the process). I hope this isn't true.

Maybe it's not a problem of "big," but how the Internet has grown. It feels like the increasingly conscribed and corporatized Internet has reproduced users that move from page to page and post to post in terms of exploitation. Everything is an act of self-branding in this landscape, so obviously using large, consolidated platforms that conform every user contribution to increasingly interchangeable bits of "content" is better than using unique or distributed platforms. Pointing out exploit points on a platform is, importantly, something that can be a brand-builder elsewhere rather than discussed among other users. But even beyond that, the urge to either act in the most bad faith way, or on the assumption that you have to prepare for people doing the same to you determines the majority of decisions made.

Of course, there's no easy or immediate answer to this; I believe in distributed, non-commercial, non-professional, user-serviceable platforms, and publicizing ways to exploit them to non-users on locked-down platforms feels like a way of explicitly discouraging their existence. Sometimes these "exploits" are even just the digital equivalent of behavior that is rude or inappropriate in most contexts, but important and useful in some. Yelling "Fire!" is, actually, a good example here. Why do we have no faith in being able to moderate ourselves in generally conscientious ways in a digital context? Does it have to be like that? At the same time, so long as we're in a system where my day to day survival involves personal financial management, I also don't want my credit card information stolen, and think that's a reasonable personal boundary, lol. Though I think it is worth pointing out that small or new sites are generally not the main issue here, there's also been plenty of far more consequential high profile security leaks.

Trying to foster the imperfect, the personal, the small-scale, and the idiosyncratic online feels like gardening to me, and as in the real world, increasing ownership and top-down regulation shutting down a sense of the common has made it a lot harder to garden, even if it once seemed like what this space was naturally made for. Scrounging for the bits of clout, attention or cash you can get away with on these dumping-ground sort of platforms just feels increasingly like raiding a junkyard for a few usable scraps instead. Of course, it's hard to garden in a junkyard, especially if people are always coming through dumping or scavenging things. But, even if you do make your own space, it's still hard to garden when people coming to your garden have been conditioned to only see junkyards.

So what is the internet, a garden, or a junkyard?

At Last, a Framework for Appreciating Evil Bisexuals

2021-01-19T00:00:00Z

Not much to this post, I just had a blast reading this 1997 article which offers a set of lenses and themes for reading a series of depictions of bisexuality in media that are what we would now likely call instances of the "evil bisexual" trope. I appreciate it because I find a lot of these characters thematically compelling in terms of what social anxieties and tensions they present around bisexuality, even if they are also typically unsympathetic and othering depictions.

"[The Hunger] emphasizes the physical disgust of vampirism, with Sarah's first sight of Miriam at prey represented in a jarring succession of close-ups, which show her elegant face smeared with blood, her hair disordered, her mouth snarling. What then makes possible the transformation into vampire is the suspension of this disgust -the same suspension which supposedly brings about bisexuality: popularly figured as undiscriminating, it is the desire for 'anything that moves'. Roger Clarke proposes that 'What people have always found baffling about the concept of bisexuality' - and we should note the casual universalizing gestures of 'people' and 'always' - 'is that there appears to be no disgust in it'. There seems to be some qualitative difference between the desires of the bisexual, and the desires of everyone else. The passions of both vampires and bisexuals are not containable within acceptable social structures. Between the two of them, they mark out the marginality of hunger which, in spite of an attempt... to define its apparent safety, remains risky.

Troy Bolton, based on my own reading, is kind of an example of the sort of conservative approach of bi representation the author discusses. While Troy's ambivalent and multi-directional desires create problems for himself and those around him, he is essentially able to "solve himself" in the end, always, coming to a conclusion that lands on a moderate, synthesized compromise between the battling desires.

However, just as many representations of bisexuals place them alongside other desires that are framed as immoderate and unacceptable. The argument of this paper is that characters with other unnatural or excessive desires are often made bisexual because it conveniently others them, allowing them to be later "put back in their place" for an, if not happy, "just" ending, rather than making these issues central and personal for just about everyone at various times.

I love evil bisexuals of all stripes, from the androgynous Miltonic Satan (done especially well in Devilman) who cuts across barriers of supposedly fundamental difference like gender or orientation to tempt and mislead anyone, to those who are simply flaky, chaotic, hard to deal with in their strange drivenness and their sexuality is inevitably an element of the drama and hassle they bring into "normal" lives. They mess with the "acceptable" and "natural" in terms of gender presentation and role, relationship formations, desires... in essence they're often dreamboats of utopian possibility that are righteously hammered down by a world that naturalizes denial, conformity and restraint. How can they not be extremely likeable, in a way?

Finally arriving at and accepting my own bisexuality was an enormous positive influence in my understanding and sense of self. It's wonderful to be able to embrace so many (even unnatural or undiscriminating) delights. I don't mean this in the most literal sense; like the "good bisexual" I haven't had the specific inclination to rack up a high score of sexual partners in my life, but in my subjective ability to appreciate, in every other context, I definitely enjoy exercising it fully. Even the loathed Freudian concept of bisexuality as lingering "polymorphous perversity," the lack of defining oneself in relation to a specifically gendered sexual object, is not that offensive or nonsensical to me in itself. Before I could make sense of my "orientation" and even now, it mostly feels like a lack of one. The moral component, of this relationship to desire being inherently under developed or immature compared to the other paths is the point worth teasing at, what moral, aesthetic and economic scruples around a directionless, boundless desire do we have? Where do they come from? How are they intertwined? and are they even really doing us any good? haha.

My New Year's Resolution

2021-01-12T00:00:00Z

⠀Mephistopheles.
⠀⠀⠀I am a part of that primordial Might,
⠀⠀⠀Which always wills the wrong, and always works
⠀⠀⠀the right.

⠀Faust.
⠀⠀⠀You speak in riddles; the interpretation?

⠀Mephistopheles.
⠀⠀⠀I am the Spirit of Negation:
⠀⠀⠀And justly so; for all that is created
⠀⠀⠀Deserves to be annihilated.
⠀⠀⠀'Twere better, thus, that there were no creation.
⠀⠀⠀Thus everything that you call evil,
⠀⠀⠀Destruction, ruin, death, the devil,
⠀⠀⠀Is my pure element and sphere.

--Faust by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Tr. John Stuart Blackie)

One of the most striking and “real” to me things about Jenny Hval's Girls Against God is the theorization of hatred as a provincial emotion. Not in the sense of the backwater racist, who doesn't really see themselves as particularly hateful, but the prickly negativity and anger you carry with yourself when you go anywhere else if you've grown up there. It's the clinging sense of ill-belonging, eternal cynicism you can't shake, because in a sense it was your security blanket, what allowed you to hold rejection at arm's length, and regard it as something chosen instead. The 90s southern Norway she describes is, quite literally, an ocean and a decade away from the south-central PA suburbs where I was a teen in the 00s, but feels unnervingly similar, the centrality of religion, conservatism, conformity, whiteness and straightness all holding hands in a tight maypole dance like one of those gruesome filmbro moneyshots in Midsommar.

The people who received that setting as some sort of darkly-appealing fantasy (“Obviously it's meant to be bad, but, ...haha!”) feel like they must come from a different planet than me. And, though I understand them maybe a little bit more, the general idea of a community that is, primarily, easy and harmonious in a more or less uniform way also feels alien. There's no sense of the way communities can push out, bully, hurt, alienate you and make you feel crazy in ways that inform your self-image and relationships for the rest of your life. “Community” as a sort of feel-good filler word representing warm harmony is the plasterboard front of the banal fact that it simply describes a nexus of relationships, without any particular determining force on the quality, health or value of such relationships. On an individual level often invisible in the zoomed-out view it can go as wrong or right as the moment the omelette is in the air.

This sort of bitterness and Mephistophelian negativity, this provincial hatred that Hval returns to again and again, marks you as an ill-fit even once you escape it. I only began to have a sense of my background as, like, hickish and uncultured once I entered higher education. If you always experience belonging it's easier to go on nodding; in my aesthetic opinions, though I leapt on the ability to absorb more art and literature and theory than I could have known existed from the one Borders in my hometown (RIP), I always felt provocative, ruthless, a troublemaker. Part of it was a bit of a front to pre-empt insecurity, sure, which is a textbook provincial move. But, in experiencing the outside, it's so much easier to in turn sympathize with and see the value in the excluded, the minor, the perverse. It's also so much easier to arrive at the big-deal Real Cultural Center Culture and say, underwhelmed, that this is bullshit.

The type of culture I've come to value is the type that is ill-served by Capitalism (of course) but also ill-served by the related idea of community and harmony at scale, the context where “it's not for everyone” becomes a remotely meaningful statement to make about anything at all. The main character of Girls Against God goes through a process of regarding her hatred and gloominess as a bit cringe, childish, something to put away to get along at the secular university in the capital, to become serious. But she wraps back around to seeing its value again when she rediscovers the sense of hope there is in every misanthropic rejection of conformity and compromise.

Of course I have to connect this to Max Haiven's observations in Revenge Capitalism. While capitalist destruction of ways of life, cultural value, the environment, everything, into the single-minded pathological reproduction of money is irrationally, madly vengeful in character, the coinciding neoliberal consensus on open markets being fundamentally rational, and the financial management of debt and enforcement of the law by the state frames this system as keeping irrational, individual vengeance in check. Haiven uses the depiction of revenge as irrational and absented outside of fantasy within capitalist cultures to theorize opportunities for collective vengeance, to bring people together and mobilize against systems that not only inflict enormous suffering, but also rob enormous amounts of potential joy from us continuously.

The first two theses he ends the book with are: “Revenge is the reckless determination that what you love has value in a world where it is rendered worthless,” and “When you live in someone else's utopia, all you have left is revenge.” In terms of art and culture we live in the utopia of winners at scale, the flat, the normal, the good, where the hailed and canonized get to dominate culture and become absurdly rich while the rest of us are, essentially, worthless. How can you not, as Hval repeats over and over, want to paint the whole picture black? Healing this alienation of living in the wrong world, in so many ways, will not come from incorporation into some idealized schematic hell where we all fit into the “normal,” but the vengeful assertion of so much outside of normal's grasp that it becomes utterly irrelevant, as impoverished of aesthetics and meaning as it always already was.

For the main character of Girls Against God, and myself, the Internet went from a sort of magic not quite portal, more potentiality, a place where the traces of some kind of culture away from voidland could leak imperfectly out, to a vaguely malefic panopticon that flattens and enforces the normal. Where do you find those strange connections-which-are-not-meant-to-be-made, the intermittent moments of community-for-those-who-fail-at-community that snap together like magic against God and the very laws of nature?

“In blasphemy there's a secret pact, a desire for a community that isn't rooted in the Christian, Southern spirit. Blasphemy protects us against the moral fables we grew up with; blasphemy renounces anything that requires our submission. It shows us a crack in this reality, through which we can pass into another, more open meeting place. Blasphemy has not forgotten where it came from; it maintains that defiance and energy. Blasphemy looks for new ways of saying we. And the band is a we, a community that happens without anyone asking. It's an unknown communal place, and impossible place. In a place like that, we can make art magic.”

--Girls Against God by Jenny Hval

I do not want to stop scowling, I want to make a place for all of the people I can scowl with.

Legibility and Illegibility

2020-12-29T00:00:00Z

I am enjoying having a lot more time to read over the break, because I've decided to not start up on any new projects or academic work until the new year! I finished David Graeber's Utopia of Rules, and am in the middle of Max Haiven's Revenge Capitalism. Graeber's work explores debt, financialization and bureaucracy, and how they mystify the violence and extraction of the capitalist system, and Haiven's work draws heavily on these ideas to develop a "radical imaginary" for alternate economies and forms of relations.

It's interesting to read these works alongside like, two very contradictory sentiments I see on Twitter like every other day. Like, A) this sort of moral impulse for small scale indies to professionalize and "charge properly" for their games, sometimes extended into the explicit argument that free games deflate the market or whatever, and B) "wow look at this cool game that's free on the Epic store today!"

lol

Like, obviously they go together. The games that are "free" from the Epic store are not really free, they're tantalizing snacks Epic hands out to try and skim off more people to be entangled in their storefront/drm apparatus. They've cut a deal with the creators to use them for this, and there's no worries about these games "lowering the standards" for smaller scale game making in general, because they're already legible as professional products. It's COOL to get them for free!

Everyone else is told to professionalize, though, on a variety of axes, charging what is judgily decreed the "right" amount for a game on the one hand, but also how to pitch yourself and your game, what degree of features it needs, how and where to market it, etc. Even in just the 5 or 6 years I've been focused on games it feels like there is much more of a shift towards doing these things "properly," (which is honestly, a lot of superstition, like all other capitalist enterprises you're essentially buying a lottery ticket) rather than like, actually fucking around and figuring out what your work is about.

And like, it honestly concerns me! I forget exactly where, but I think Lana Polansky aptly described a lot of this phenomenon as a type of "enclosure," where something that was oriented towards common use and common resources instead becomes commercialized and professionalized to make extraction at scale easier. It's no surprise it results in a lot of cliche or samey stuff, and attention centralizing even more on a few big winners; uniformity in terms of product makes this scaling up go much more smoothly.

But another concept that I realize pairs well with this is what Max Haiven describes as "punitive financial inclusion." There's two big historical examples he gives of this phenomenon. The first is discussing the shift in how wampum, purple and white beads that were used by Indigenous people for a variety of social functions(as gifts, as records of historical events and treaties between groups, in ceremonies and rites, as prizes for sports and games, etc., in essence a highly flexible, creative, and meaningful social medium) was used after European colonists misinterpreted it as currency. It then purely became a medium for enforcing and extracting debts, with the colonists exercising a sort of emergent power of the state to control its value and how it could be made. This directly led to many of the problems of impoverishment and disenfranchisement that still exist for Indigenous people.

Similarly, enslaved Black people who were emancipated after the Civil War were immediately turned into financialized subjects, similarly to the Indigenous people that had the concept of capitalist currencies and exchange forced onto them. Because they had been enslaved, of course, many of these people had nothing to their names and were immediately incorporated into the sharecropping system, which further prevented them from building up any sort of autonomy by always being in the situation of having to repay debt. This actual debt and sense of "social debt" also contributes to racialized images of "irresponsible borrowers" within the mortgage crisis and "welfare mothers" that persist until today. And of course the proposed solutions are always "better budgeting" or "financial responsibility" rather than pointing to historical and systematic reasons for these problems.

So these are two of the most significant historical examples, but I think this also plays out on a smaller level constantly, and in many areas. Becoming legible as a "financial subject" opens you up to an entirely new field of capitalist exploitation. The exploitation becomes completely individualized, you have to repay your own debts, and you're increasingly trained to see your future as a speculative asset that you can get the needed "returns" from if you are responsible. (Haiven also notes that the initiating event of this phenomenon in many people's lives is now taking out loans for higher education.) It has a lot in common with an "entrepreneurial" mindset. I think the point of entering a deal with a publisher, or even presenting yourself as an aspiring games professional, can also be a highly consequential "moment of legibility" and not in a necessarily beneficial way...

A lot of the work I love is completely financially illegible. It doesn't make sense as a videogame-as-marketable-product and is received by games press, criticism and academia that revolves around a commercial product, well, as you'd expect. It's completely illegible to them. But instead of trying to berate this stuff into becoming legible by being like, charge for your work! pitch! make a press kit! make a product! I really want to preserve their illegibility. I don't think it's somehow intrinsically "worse" in any way to distribute your games for free with a donate button, distribute your games for free and run a patreon, or put a specific price on your games... I think people are smart enough to determine what will have the best outcome for their project, and the best outcome is not necessarily the maximum exchange of currency.

And there's the additional issue of what kind of punitive forces distributing your work and your self as a "product" opens you up to as well. The more experimental your work is, the less dealing with complaints, storefront regulations, "bug reports" or demands for refunds becomes "worth it." The way these function, especially on places like Steam, are purely for pounding your work into the shape of a specific product and pushing it into the pipeline of gamer satisfaction Valve skims off of.

There's a sort of double-alienation at work here. First, the alienation in becoming recognizable as a financial subject (which is hardly a category that offers autonomy, though it dangles autonomy as the prize for playing the game correctly), and then the alienation in the returns for this practice of coercive and punitive reshaping being... just money. Money, as the ultimate abstraction and perversion of the inherent productive and creative capacity of humankind, the "false coin" that decides what labor is legible and worthwhile in the first place, locks us in a position where all we can ever get is sour grapes.

Of course, in the short term, people need the resources to survive and often the easiest way to hand them that is money. But I don't know if attempting to shift the limited ways that value is distributed is that inspiring of a long-term plan. It kind of seems like the worst of both worlds, blaming those who do experimental work or operate in alternative, illegible forms of economy for not being properly entrepreneurial in the present, while giving them no future to look forward to where their work as it is could be valued and thrive.

The Iron Hand in the Velvet Glove

2020-12-26T00:00:00Z

I made a Twine game about a recent leak of Nintendo internal protocol docs! You can play it on the itch.io page, or, I've also hosted it on this site if you just want the HTML document.

How Nintendo enforces its ownership of its IP is one of the most literal manifestations of the phrase "soft power," I think. Its reputation as a friendly, beloved company with many iconic characters (Mario and "our mouse" Pikachu, among others) have bolstered the reputation of Japan as a gaming and media powerhouse and made the country a glamorous destination for kids around the world. But for as "nice" as that is, there is also a definite power behind the facade that Nintendo hasn't been afraid to use against hackers, fan projects, archivists, and other initiatives that, in essence, emerge from and reinforce Nintendo's place in the public consciousness. They aren't afraid to use both "carrots" and "sticks" to maintain their position as essentially the king of Official Gaming Culture, as the document itself puts it.

This piece ended up being an interesting mirror of something I made earlier this year, a sort of speculative history of potential copyright reform. Both projects are dealing with my interest in IP law and copyright, and how in their current state they often inhibit culture and end up encouraging increased surveillance and overly-punitive "making an example of" random individuals.

Reading the document, I was also struck by how its structure was essentially like a CYOA or Twine game. This sort of agential, branching rule-based choice structure reoccurs a lot in corporate communications, whether in internal docs like these, or call scripts that get passed down to other workers, or even the hype around the "freedom" and "innovation" products that offer this sort of structure give to you, as a consumer. So of course, I had to see what I would find out making this connection literal.

Anyways it's also Boxing Day in the UK (what does this mean?) and I had a wonderful Christmas yesterday. My partner got me a HUGE anthology on Avant-Garde Museology which I am sure will fill me with tons of ideas, as well as some comics and a very indulgent minifigure of one of my favorite FGO girls. He was very appreciative of the ergonomic mouse, new coffee pot and collection of Junji Ito stories I got him, so I was glad I picked out some good stuff too.

We also had our standard big holiday meal of ham, roast veggies, stuffing (though if it's stuffing that's not stuffed in anything, isn't it just a savory bread pudding?) hot mulled wine and a box of fancy chocolates. And then we drank MORE wine and watched Terminator 2. Stephen says this is an Irish thing bc one of the channels there always shows it on Christmas Day... this sounds made up to me but I am always happy to watch this one. I ALWAYS cry when Terminator learns self-sacrifice and destroys himself to protect John even though John orders him not to ;~;

I also participated in two Secret Santas this year!

For the Bitsy Secret Santa I made a game called "Space Loner Chronicle" for FreckledFemme, and got an amazing game called we should appreciate this little combination from Sean!

For the Grasshopper Manufacture Secret Santa I wrote some fluffy Mills/Garcian for Marty... which is, let's face it, an EXQUISITE rarepair, and got some lovely fanart of my favorite highly underrated The Silver Case character from Venom.

That's all from me for now! Hope everyone is having a great holiday.

Dream Photography

2020-12-20T00:00:00Z

This year, while I was separated from my partner for several months due to the pandemic holding up visa processing and travel, I had to come up with things to do. It was a period of time where I basically could hardly leave the house, and didn't really have any social contact beyond my family, discord calling my partner, and, of course, The Zone. I don't like to linger on it much, because it was a really stressful time, but one of my achievements this year is definitely getting through that period.

Anyways, what did I do? It was a weird mix:

rewatched Hannibal
got deeply into processing my feelings through The Silver Case fanfiction
researched and panicked about developments in the UK visa system daily
started a one-sided rivalry with Sally Rooney's work after I discovered we were born in the same year
contemplated never being able to see my partner again (should have spent a lot less time doing this)
became a more committed anarchist (if border abolition seemed like a good idea before, it was now a great idea...)
cultivated intense nostalgia for the moss, lichens, and hogweed along the clyde in Glasgow

And plenty of other things, I'm sure. The point being, because I couldn't really go anywhere, because I couldn't apply for jobs and scheduled academic events and opportunities all basically vanished instantly, and because it was hard to focus on "productive" stuff from the stress and confusion, it's all kind of a slurry in my brain. But one thing I did push myself to start and maintain was the twitter account @dream_stills.

It's a pretty simple page. I set up an emulator to play LSD: Dream Emulator on my computer because it's a game that's very generative and interesting, without requiring a lot of action or processing a lot of information on the player's part, besides just walking and looking around. It was basically the level of interesting distraction to effort that I could manage. I discovered that the emulator had the ability to mimic CRT monitor effects and also take snapshots, and I loved how these screenshots came out kind of vague, textured, nostalgic... They made me think of what is absolutely the best elements of one of my favorite ever art projects, Suzanne Treister's Fictional Videogame Stills. So I ended up taking a lot of photos in LSD and wanting to share them.

Making sure I uploaded 2 or 3 to the account daily was a small thing to hold myself accountable to when writing or reading academic material was too hard. It gave a little structure to my day; if nothing else, at least every few hours I did that. They trailed off and became more irregular once I actually got back, and started running out of photos, though sometimes I would think to just put one up.

Maybe it was reading Melos' recent blog on "Shuffled World Games," which put a name to something I really, really like, or just the fact that I've basically finished with my obligations for the year and am giving myself two weeks off to prepare for the further big life changes probably forthcoming in the new year, but I just had the urge to pick LSD back up today. I was impressed with how fresh and exciting it felt even though, by now, I've played almost 100 in-game days and have a pretty thorough sense of the game's "areas" and how it tends to shuffle you through them.

I felt like I was capturing really neat images again almost immediately! It's not creativity in the traditional sense, but by throwing so many interesting combinations of space, theme, object at you, LSD manages to feel like a process of discovery, and making interesting images of it a process of creation, despite being a static object. This is kind of what I found intriguing about videogames as a kid and seem to so rarely find now, the idea that the mysterious liveliness of the computer could keep presenting you genuinely surprising and unpredictable things.

Anyways, I plan to keep putting up photos regularly now... until I get busy or distracted with something else of course! For the rest of the year though, my only tasks are to do the big shop for Christmas dinner (for 2) and make a secret santa gift for the Bitsy discord. All the rest of my time I'm going to spend reading the backlog of books and comics I built up over the year, and photographing dreams.

Yes, Free as in Beer

2020-12-11T00:00:00Z

One of my fav writers in (but certainly not limited to) the games space, Lana Polansky, has written a great article which elegantly lays out the ways that IP law, instead of guaranteeing the right of artists of all types to be paid for their work, as it is often conceptualized, primarily serves to centralize and privatize the production of culture, and funnel its profits towards powerful corporations.

Read the whole article, of course, but this part struck me as especially incisive:

As time wears on, and IP law is used to criminalize all forms of file-sharing and sampling, it becomes increasingly clear that the focus on “piracy” and illegal file-sharing is only a pretext at wearing down what still exists of the public domain to squeeze it for profit. This is because the companies using IP law in this way need to enclose and privatize what remains of the cultural commons to keep up their rate of profit.

I think this points to something about how we can formulate demands to organize around for a true mass culture. Piracy is a touchy subject, even if rationally someone can admit that IP law and the DRM and streaming platforms that follow its logic clearly favor a minority of bigger players, they still often kind of believe that it somehow still secures the right to be paid for one's creative work. It absolutely doesn't, though! In essence, it ring-fences a subset of professionalized creative work that can be monetized, enforced with strong prejudice towards how corporations produce and distribute this work, while leaving an enormous portion of human creativity and response to culture in a no man's land of ambiguity, to be picked off by DMCA notices at will.

Smaller scale creators and their fans who still "believe in" this promise of IP law, which is, in essence, a sort of upward mobility thing, can often be instrumentalized as "useful idiots" to expand the stranglehold of corporate IP enforcement on the commons. Of course, the eminently loatheable Chuck Wendig is framed as primarily responsible for the ridiculous (and potentially ridiculously destructive) Internet Archive lawsuit, but several other more beloved YA, SF and Fantasy writers seemed to also agree... So naturally the publishers, an increasingly monopolized group of corporations who are the primary mechanism for the exclusive nature of publishing and the extraction of profit from authors' work can position themselves as acting in the same authors' interests.

Additionally, just shoring up IP law by complaining about piracy is a sort of middle manager response that fails to address the huge amount of productive cultural work that is completely outside of the remit of IP law and the ability to be monetized or protected to begin with. This podcast about fashion knockoffs was illuminating to me in how clearly it demonstrated this; Dapper Dan is targeted for decades for incorporating couture logos into designs nothing like the actual products they produce, and yet, years later, it's completely legal for them to turn around and copy the cut and construction of his work, so long as they're not using someone else's logo. It makes me think about how platitudes about professionalization almost always betray a complete ignorance of the ways many creators doing important work are already excluded from selling or protecting their rights to their own work, not just... idk, ignorant or stubborn.

It makes me think about how a common saying within software and open source communities is "free as in speech, not free as in beer." "Free as in beer," implies a sort of short-sighted hedonism to simply getting things for no cost, whereas it's more noble somehow to want things to be unrestricted in other senses, like non-proprietary and non-censored. But I dunno! As piracy, looting, "getting it for free" and even giving it for free become increasingly framed as a bad thing, I think we have to renew the demand for free beer too! Like, is the alternative to assert that any form of currency has ever, at any point, shown potential for being an adequate medium for distributing value fairly and meeting people's needs? Truly?

In essence, what's so wrong with short sighted hedonism as an alternative to playing by the rules of a dysfunctional and perverse system anyways? The laws and values that have become normalized, in most of anglophone society anyways, have already stolen the opportunity for a comfortable life and worthwhile reward for contributing to society from most artists and creative people in general, in favor of shoring up a minority of superstars and their handlers. In the long term, culture should be free in both senses, in that anyone can experience it, but also that anyone has the resources and free time to make it... but of course this is the point all of my blog posts reach, haha...

Anyways, I hope you're all having a lovely December... I am still scrambling around trying to get my cards and gifts together in a timely fashion! If you'd like to get your hands on some culture that can only exist in the gray spaces of IP law and the public domain, I have been listening almost non-stop to David Kanaga's spectacular, videogamey arrangement of The Nutcracker.

Step 2

2020-12-07T00:00:00Z

Or: So Your Organization Has Started a Small Grant/Low-Bar Funding Framework

My most read piece from this year is almost certainly what I wrote on the response to a round of EU cultural funding going to a few game studios, Alexis Kennedy's independent venture among them. In the piece I suggest lowering the professionalization bar and application process of these grants and distributing them more equitably, i.e., instead of giving hundreds of thousands of euros to one (highly problematic) studio, give a few hundreds or thousands to a much broader set of creators, both in number and in terms of who they are and what they're making. And I'm not going to say Actually, No to this, it's great that it's been cited as inspiration for some orgs like Biome starting a small creators grant with as minimum fuss for the applicants as possible.

But I do kind of have mixed feelings about this kind of polemical and reactive piece being the one that got the most attention over the past year. Like, on the one hand, I am an aesthete at heart who likes to write about the finicky details of car controls and character relationships and visual novel choice structures! When my more aggro pieces are the ones that get traction I feel like my public perception is as, well, someone who doesn't like anything, when what drives me is my love and fascination with the generative swamp of human creativity.

And on top of that, while small grants are great, and can be career making or even life saving for people whose practices or training or background don't match up with who gets larger, more traditional grants and commissions, they are only a solution for that specific instance of the problem, rather than broadly solving what arts funding ops play one part in maintaining, the whole pyramid scheme style hierarchy of a capitalist art world.

I had mixed feelings about this critique of mutual aid amidst its popularity as a slogan during COVID lockdowns. I understand how its acceptability is based heavily on its similarity to charity, but I also feel like just making sure it feeds into some form of organizing is missing an important step that a lot of these calls to "organize!" do. When this critique comes up there often seems to be the expectation that this organizing will take the form of party politics, which in the UK has, when I've encountered it, meant following around whatever protest movement is on to hand out your newspapers and try to get people to sign up for your mailing list.

Without going into the specific groups that tend to do this (a can of worms for sure), let's just ask why they do this. Because these protests are where people get excited. To give an example me and a lot of people I know have experienced personally, for all the issues with XR, when they come in and pedestrianize a chunk of your city and you can just walk through an area that used to be defined by wariness of cars and having to navigate around them, you get a sense of how superficial the apparent "rational" organization of society is, how all these alternatives are up for grabs in a real way. Protest, rioting, and yes, even mutual aid activities like community meals, free classes and other resources provide imaginative spaces where these demands are generated.

That's where I think a lot of these alternative funding structures stop short... you can do good for as many people as your organization can serve, but is there a bigger demand to orient your practice towards and make your future plans around? This is tricky because it's categorically a hard thing for an organization to do. The dream of just asking and receiving, where art supplies are available for everyone in addition to equitably distributed leisure time, food, medical care and shelter, is a dream without organizations in a sense, besides freely associating collaborations.

I'm interested in these dreams! I'm crazy about them, because I think it's the only way the art that interests me makes sense. Even with more small grants, there's still hierarchy and scarcity, there's still the small number of winners and the huge pool of losers that the prestige of a financialized art world depends upon. In a way, it's just adjusting the degree to which the needed "bad art" that successful art is demonstrated as elevating itself out of is formally subsidized. But the fact is that all art is some form of labor, and like all forms of labor (even the forms that are not given a particular value under capitalism), it is socially necessary. It's not a frivolity, it's what makes life itself interesting.

As opposed to changing your funding model, this is all kind of speculative and conceptual, right? But also, like blocking off a part of the city center to cars for a few days, a no strings attached grant to an emerging creator who hasn't had to do anything to prove themselves can be a spark that sets off this imaginative capacity, and starts to spread it to others. I think the value in mutual aid is that it must be connected to these demands and these capabilities to imagine a world that works in a different way. Otherwise, yes, it is too close to just replicating charity. We should all be thinking towards a world where arts funding abolishes itself, simply because everyone already has plenty of time and resources to make what they wish. And then attack the hierarchy and orthodoxy of the art world from every angle to make it happen, not just one.

WP-2 Connection

2020-12-03T00:00:00Z

Hello!

How is everyone doing today! I'm happy to say that I typed the raw text for this blog post on my new Tandy WP-2! I've covered in some previous posts how I found out about the Tandy and my rationale for trying it out. I want to use it as a portable focus device for writing and learn more about the history and experiences of early portable computers and one-use devices. Plus it just has an amazingly solid, clicky keyboard, which is always more fun to write on.

So, here is what I did today:

My first goal was to install a RAM chip I ordered separately to increase the number of files it can hold. This gave me the opportunity to unscrew the case and see what was inside. It's a lovely board and in great shape. Inserting the chip was very easy, and suddenly I had onboard memory in addition to working memory! Success!!

The next challenge was getting the WP-2 to communicate with my PC somehow. I got a serial port to USB cable, a null modem adapter, and a gender changer to put between them. I had to puzzle with the screws a bit to make it work, just on a physical level. Then it took messing with applications and settings all afternoon to get something that transferred to my PC properly.

I'll save you the puzzle and say exactly what ended up working. First, there is probably a specific driver that has to be installed for the serial cable to work. Look in your settings and copy the device name/error to find the correct driver online. Then, install the version of mComm that works with your device. In mComm, one of the ports available should be "COM3." That means it's detecting the serial cable properly. Plug the serial cable into the port on the top of your WP-2 and start the service. Go to the "Files" menu (F2-+) and then navigate to the file you want to send. Highlight it and convert it to .DA first, (F1-A) and then copy (F1-C) it to "Diskette." You should get some action in the log on your PC, and the file should be in whatever is the target folder of mComm. It will have a few weird characters from the unusual file type if you open it in a notepad app, but you should be able to get the raw text for editing and formatting easily.

I am so happy to be using this thing as a distraction-free writing device already. I did NaNo last month, and while I was successful it was stressful to not be able to get into the writing "zone" because of apps, tabs, and so on. This is a special treat for me, as I try to get back into the world of fiction writing, and I hope it helps any other nerdy writers who want to refurbish and use one of these devices with a modern PC.

Finally, some other things I bought to make it more convenient: rechargeable AAs and a charging socket to make portable writing less wasteful, and a simple 6V DC adapter for writing anywhere I can plug in. That's my whole kit! I'm excited to use this thing more and see what I end up writing on it.

After sending the raw text of this post from my WP-2 to my PC I formatted it and added images in Zonelets Buddy :)

From Arecibo

2020-12-02T00:00:00Z

Decksgiving!

2020-11-26T00:00:00Z

My own Tandy WP-2 came in the mail today! I've unboxed it and put in the batteries just to see if it worked and typed out a few sample sentences. The full-size keyboard is beautiful and so satisfyingly clicky!

I'm in the UK so Thanksgiving isn't really a thing over here... Still, since we're probably not going to be able to do much over the holidays this year, and because we've both been pretty stressed the last few weeks, we decided to make a Thanksgiving meal anyways. This plus getting the Tandy was almost enough to make me feel festive! Though it's really sinking in that I'm going to have to just mail gifts and cards to everyone this year, better get on that... (BTW, my card signup list is here.)

What we did today is our usual strat for holiday meals (it's just the two of us, me and Stephen). Get a nice type of roast for the main (last Christmas we did a honey glazed ham), and then get sprouts, roasting potatoes and yams, plus some stuffing for me. Get a box of nice chocolates and a bottle of wine. Put the roast in one pan and all the veggies on another and cook them for the right time. End up breaking into the chocolates early, they were supposed to be for desert! When everything's done pour the wine and eat the food and then have the rest of the chocolates. Make sure you also watch a corny movie or some episodes of Game Center CX. Oh, and make sandwiches from the leftovers the next day. Well, that's my advice!!

Hello from Zonelets Buddy

2020-11-25T00:00:00Z

Hi!

I'm writing this post using a new tool made by my friend candle. They make a lot of web based tools, and this one is called Zonelets Buddy. It's a simple online interface that automatically generates new posts in the Zonelets workflow for you. Cool! If you can read this it's working.

Try it for yourself here!

One-Use Devices

2020-11-23T00:00:00Z

The first computer I really learned my way around as a kid was my dad's PC, which ran Windows 95. Sure, I was more easily impressed at that age, probably, but it also felt like an extremely powerful and flexible tool. I would do all kinds of hacky things like change file types, edit files in notepad, and run things in different modes or with different settings just to see what would happen. We even had Print Shop, so I could make really dumb booklets and signs and greeting cards.

That sort of fiddling and discovery is something I feel the computer I use now (a 4+ year old Lenovo laptop, running Windows 10) actively discourages me from doing. Being able to edit file types, open them with the "wrong" program, see hidden files, and so on are all no longer defaults or easily accessible options. And whenever I try to run something I found online, ding! Possible threat alert! It seems like the operating system I once loved now increasingly treats you like a 2 year old at risk of putting anything you find on the ground in your mouth... I (at least kind of) know what I'm doing! It also seems to be trying to force me into particular work flows that either require me buying into an always-online or subscription model, or using a specific app for every type of thing I want to do... after each all-too-frequent update I have Microsoft Edge, the Xbox Arcade and Microsoft Office greeting me again despite my attempts to banish them once and for all...

I know these complaints mean I should probably just suck it up and learn how to use Linux, lol, but the Windows desktop is still my paradiagrammatic computer experience, it's the language I know how to read, even if each subsequent version seems to be shifting further away...

Anyways, I've gotten back into writing fiction this month. I'm working out a script for a whole visual novel for NaNoWriMo. I don't think too many people know that I was in a creative writing programme for college, it was actually what I got a scholarship to go for. So I've written a lot of fiction in the past and basically gave it up (with the exception of occasional fanfic) during my graduate level academic work. Still, one of my earliest computer memories is copying the Word Perfect files I kept my stories in onto a chunky yellow floppy disk, so I could keep them in their own spot while my dad used the computer for other things.

This is all related, I swear! Getting back into the swing of writing fiction, especially in the sense of just getting a first draft OUT which is the main thrust of NaNo, got me thinking about writing and focus. When I saw the DevTerm teaser images released, I thought, god, that would be a really nice thing to be able to draft on. It does a ton more stuff, which again, I would be able to appreciate more if I had learned about linux by now, but I liked the idea of a writing "pad" that was just a long screen and a keyboard. Writing by hand is hard for me, I'm actually freakishly double-jointed in my fingers which means my handwriting is very poor and it's also very tiring to write more than a few sentences by hand. Plus it's always nicer to produce some raw text, right?

The DevTerm is still a conceptual device, only up for preorder now, and a bit expensive for something I might not use the whole capabilities of. I think my dream writing device would be somewhere between the FreeWrite (which uses e-ink and deposits what you write automatically in Dropbox folders, and also has a chunky mechanical keyboard, but is insanely expensive and honestly pretty ugly imo) and the DevTerm (I love the longer screen and how clicky the keys look combined with the much better looking case.), but fortunately for me there's a variety of late 80s and early 90s one-use devices that (kind of) fit the bill: portable word processors!

So with that, introducing my new hobby project! I found a nearly-new Tandy WP-2 online for £45, and getting a few spare batteries as well as a serial adapter that will hopefully allow it to output to my PC still came to around 1/3rd of the price of a DevTerm preorder. All it does is type, and output ASCII files, so I feel like it'll hopefully be a handy tool for very focused drafting in the future. And if I get extra ambitious, apparently you can run IF like Zork on it, too! Here's a very neat video showing it in action (plus a cat cameo). I found it at this site which appears to have a lot of vintage tech stuff in general available, including a lot of plotter pens.

I see trying to refurbish and use a one-use device like this as an interesting way to learn computer history a bit more first-hand, but also as a way of always re-imagining my relationship to computers, highlighting the good, the flexible, the helpful, and trying to see to what degree I can get away from the bad, the irritating, etc. We'll see how it goes!

Abolish Art, But How?

2020-11-20T00:00:00Z

Another Art World, Part 1: Art Communism and Artificial Scarcity

Another Art World, Part 2: Utopia of Freedom as a Market Value

Another Art World, Part 3: Policing and Symbolic Order

By Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber

This blog seems like a good place to dump more casual thoughts on articles I read that aren't ready for a more formal "piece" of writing, I think. Anyways, I was excited to dig into these articles by Nika Dubrovsky and David Graeber (who, unfortunately, passed away earlier this year). Graeber's work especially heavily informed one of my favorite books on art of all time: Art After Money, Money After Art by Max Haiven, and his work on debt, financialization and gift economies from an anarchist perspective help me to understand things that so strongly shape the physical and social mechanisms of this world, but also always point to the fact that these institutions are not necessary or eternal, that I don't have to adjust myself or my goals to "adapt" to them. I was interested to see, particularly, what these authors would identify as issues with the contemporary art world and alternatives to it.

I think these essays are provocative and very worth reading, even if I don't agree with every line and would kind of want to go for deeper, more complex reads in many places. There are some aspects of this that are more outright political, I don't think it discredits protest movements even if they involve looting, for example, so I don't really get the point of that digression. But I do generally agree that the art world as it exists relies on creating a huge amount of artificial scarcity. There has to be hundreds or thousands of "losers" making "worthless art" for every "genius" to have the level of prestige and value surrounding "important art" to be justified. As Hito Steyerl famously said, in an interview quip that truly altered my perspective permanently: "The more unpaid interns, the more expensive the art."

The two main aspects of it that give me pause are moreso areas for productive disagreement rather than things I outright reject:

1. A lack of critique of social reproduction: A lot of the piece seems invested in the idea that rather than being a hierarchical institution, a museum or arts centre could instead be a caring institution. I don't think these things are necessarily opposites, and this turn also brings to mind Melinda Cooper's point about how simply valorizing an alternate form of social reproduction-- she cites, specifically "a kind of reproductive maternalism that presents itself as anti-patriarchal but positions women as the guardians of nature or the earth or something" --is a sort of trap of reverse or alternate hierarchies (or simply making space for them to survive within capitalism) left activism often falls into. In my day-to-day, I bristle at the idea that I should see the social assumption that I, as a woman, should have more access to "being caring" whether this is something that is seen as trivial or free labor under capitalism, or something that is abstractly glorified under a more communal system, as some sort of positive thing. This was why the position of Wages for Housework was so startling, even to other feminists at the time, because their claims did not simply stop at "women's work is under-valued," but went on to say "and we don't even necessarily like or have a natural affinity for this!"

It's also bothersome that, as women and people of color, who are often the ones forced into poorly valued care and service roles, paid and unpaid, within capitalism, are the ones demanding an art world for them, the art world must now become more caring. It feels similar to the phenomena where a profession becomes poorly paid or poorly valued when women do it, or increases in value when it becomes associated with men. Which is to say, I think the ability to make obscure, fussy, grandiose, etc works of singular vision has been stolen from the vast majority of us for thousands of years & I don't want to settle for some last-minute substitution! lol.

2. The future is... theatre?: Maybe I just have a vendetta against theatre, but I also get a bit tired of it being used as a sort of at-hand analog for an artistic practice that is "communal" or "more immediate" or "more engaging" or whatever you're going for. My experiences of theatre in my life have been working tech for high school productions, and (more begrudgingly) through church youth groups. This is not to argue that any medium has universal special qualities of its production or its effects on the audience, but I also think it's not nothing that these things are so useful to these ends. Actually, I'm arguing the opposite, I guess; there's nothing about monumental sculpture or novel-writing or whatever other form of production that is currently more aligned to "the contemporary" that is inherently impossible to do in a context where everyone would have access to art and culture. I think Claire Bishop's Artificial Hells is a really interesting work that also skillfully takes some of the air out of theatre production fetishism (lol) and she also does a good job covering overlooked experimental practices in the USSR that were eventually repressed, as they note in these articles. Similarly, John Berger's Art and Revolution is thinking about many of these same themes and questions, but revolve around a sculptor working in the USSR.

But basically it seems like an extreme idealization, given how stratified and inaccessible theatre is right now, and also how the way theatre creates roles inherently ends up reproducing a certain hierarchy of production, that theatre can just snap in as the post-Art art. And I don't even want it! I kind of want to bring in Hamja Ahsan's brilliant work in Shy Radicals here as well, where the world of theatre is just as much a manifestation of capitalism's fetishization of personality and extroversion as fine art is of it's fetishization of financial speculation.

Plus I think, as a person I am just very particular and like working independently... Plus I really love the patience and sustenance of a totally asynchronous type of art, like zines, where they're there for you as a personal experience whenever you need them. Many art thiefs who have stolen extremely valuable works of art just keep it under their bed or hang it in their kitchen. And maybe that is what is to be done with the Louvre. ;)

Overall though, I think it's a good & timely strategy to build on the existing abolitionist demands that currently exist about policing and student debt, and spread this way of thinking to all other parts of our lives that systematically reinforce the concerns of capitalism. But, we've also seen how quickly these demands can be diverted into reformism that simply extends the existing hierarchy or swaps in a different one. So I think it's important to not just say "abolish the art world," but to be very careful about how we conceptualize alternative worlds for something as expansive and hard to pin down as human creativity!

Some of my own writing on the topic:

Jesus! I'll try to write something shorter next time, I promise... ha ha.

Why Small

2020-11-19T00:00:00Z

Introducing Stricken

2020-11-15T00:00:00Z

Stricken is a dead simple looking Zonelet style inspired by Low Tech Magazine and using dithering textures from Strike.

"WOW! I love when quotes from other sources can be clearly parceled out of a larger body of text."

--Somebody, idk (2020).

It looks great with the theme (and loads quicker) if you convert your images to 1-bit too!

In short, this theme is trying to be:

Minimalist
Easy to use
Quick-loading
Low file size
Cute!

Well, that's all for now! Bye!