Posts in Analysis
Present Unheimlich: William Gibson's Blue Ant Trilogy

Pattern Recognition by William Gibson is the first of a loose trilogy – called, alternatively, the Blue Ant or Bigend trilogy – that also includes Spook Country and Zero History. Pattern Recognition was released in 2003, and was set in the summer of 2002 – the events of September 11 form the backdrop for the plot, but are not center stage

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Crossing Wires and Killing Punk

In fiction, and broadly in aesthetics, punk is largely anti-authoritarian but non-revolutionary. In the political compass sense, it tends towards the bottom or “libertarian” end (caveat: people who claim to be libertarian in the US political sense are not and never will be punk. Don’t @ me.) In narrative media, this tends towards a somewhat mythic structure (similar to the thing I called “the millennial monomyth” a while back), a paradigm that all -punk stories usually follow, similar to 19th century realism or naturalism in many ways. Consider a capable but fairly normal person who wishes to be largely left alone; consider some powerful agency or circumstance that will not do that. The story is the Rube Goldberg interaction that arises here.

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Doing Art: Some Ways to Unshackle Creativity

These are not the steps to creativity, nor are they merely tools that you use as you proceed in your own acts of creation. They are options that I hope you can make use of as you work on your art. Anyone who purports to offer you a foolproof guide to creativity is just as suspect as someone who is offering you a foolproof guide to critical thinking. Anyone you believe on this topic is going to (unintentionally?) sabotage you.

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Crafting a Healthy Masculinity (Part 3): On Jeffrey Epstein, Incels, and the Quest for Status

A man like Jeffrey Epstein satisfies his desires flagrantly and nauseatingly because he believes his status protects him from repercussion. A man like Elliott Rodger commits a mass murder because he feels he has been shamed. The cause common to the two incidents is status, and a lack of concern for women and their autonomy and safety is just the vector, not the cause.

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