No excerpt really did this piece justice — it is meant as an examination of online gentrification in regard to Tumblr, Itch.io, and the mechanisms by which is works (discourse, it mainly works by discourse), and the side-effects that this is having on the very online and their level of comfort with topics relating to sexuality.
Read MoreThe mirror of terraforming is “xenoforming” — think here of the “red weed” mentioned in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, making the Earth alien-like, or of the strangeness from the Southern Reach Trilogy. Gentrification is like xenoforming. It isn’t some extraterrestrial force though, no little green men are showing up to pry off the old house numbers and put up the addresses rendered in metal Neutraface, the official font of gentrification.
Read MorePerversity is what might be called “ectopic play” or “ectopic sovereignty” – sovereign authority deployed in a limited fashion without permission and in a place where it isn’t considered to belong. In some contexts this might be criminal or stupid. In others, it can be genius. This juxtaposition is what makes perversity so interesting to me. It is the willingness to creatively misuse a given system.
Read MoreNow, I could get all political here, and talk about how people secretly long for what they hate, but I don’t think that’s what’s going on. While hating this media is part of the experience, I don’t think that we enjoy this experience because it’s what we hate — at least, not usually, — I think we do so in spite of the fact that it’s what we hate.
Read MoreThe vaccination was the sort of surreal experience that most of the past year has been characterized by, a jumble of elements that don’t really seem to have much to do with one another all jammed up one atop the other into a confusing melange. While the past year has been full of anxiety, and many unnecessary deaths, the moments where these elements are far from my mind seem to be characterized by this sort of mostly-benign irrealism.
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