Colorless █​█​█​█​█ Ideas: There Is No Antimemetics Division Review

There Is No Antimemetics Division reminded me why I keep coming back to speculative fiction.

The Twilight Zone Reboot, Five Years Later

Jordan Peele's Twilight Zone reboot is a bizarre time capsule of issues liberals said they cared about in 2019. Just five years on, many of them seem unspeakable at the highest level of politics. What insights into this rapid about-face can we glean from its first season?

A Multiverse Around The Corner (Where Your Dead Friends Live)

Isn't it weird how many stories lately feature villains trying to tap into alternate or simulated realities to reunite with loved ones? Let's take a tour of this multiverse full of dead relatives and what they have to say about our cultural moment.

A Nightmare On The Brains Of The Living: Prometheus and the Undead

Prometheus was supposed to be Ridley Scott's triumphant return to making films about Aliens. Instead, we got a film full of necromancers, ghosts, and zombies. What can we make of this frustrating, tantalizing film?

Freakangels in Arcadia: Jackpot

What happens when the Arcadian Utopia of Solarpunk fails?

Freakangels Of Arcadia

Solarpunk already has some solid foundational texts. This might be a problem for Solarpunk, particularly since both sources--a classic short story and a decade-old webcomic--predate Solarpunk... and they don't exactly get along.

Let's Play 17776 Part 2: Point Of Play

If the point of play is to distract us from play being the point, what happens when our games conflict and contradict each other? Pull meaning from the void with me in Part 2 of my readthrough of 17776.

Read more about fun theory, table legs, existentialism, and what scares me most about 17776 and being immortal

Lessons learned from my miserable time with Shotcut

Hungry for more video content of me crying about fictional spacecraft? Check out the extended cut of part 2

Read more about hypercomics history and 17776's forerunners in A Horizon of Jostling Curiosities

Let's Play 17776 Part 1: Is This 'Football'?

In the future, we hang out. Hang out with me as I read Jon Bois's epic sci fi hypercomic 17776 for the first time and discover the power of duration art, the stress of immortality, and the fact that everything continues to basically be Homestuck.

Bonus Patreon Content:

Read more about 17776 and its hypercomics techniques

Go behind the scenes and learn the workflow I used both to create this video and to end my own existence

Hungry for more video content? Can't wait till next week? Check out the extended cut of part 1

Hack Monuments: The Methods of -punk

For Steampunk, Solarpunk, and Cyberpunk, aesthetic and meaning go hand in hand. In an age of extinction and resurgent fascism, -punk has a choice: hack that meaning, or become a passive monument for others to fight over.

Inside: Game Disintegrating

Inside, spiritual successor to Limbo, is a game about control, but is anyone really at the reins of the game's dystopia? And can an experimental documentary from the 80s give us insight into the game's radical pessimism?

Spoilers for Inside; no familiarity with the game necessary.

You've Got To Throw Your Zombies On The Gears!

Solarpunk is broken. It's going to take some weird lateral moves to fix it, and one strange Steampunk strategy might offer a solution.

Sense8 and Identity

What if Sense8's production and form was as diverse as its casting? As the show's rapid dance between states of cancelled and not-cancelled continues to bewilder me, I try to parse out the show's interest in difference, and some of its current limitations or failings.

It's Basically Fucking Ridiculous That Sense8 Got Cancelled

Sense8 is dead. But all the pieces were there for it to be revolutionary. I don't even have a good summary for this article I'm just fucking pissed that we had all these pieces in place and still for some reason it didn't come together, and I'm left with this multi-part series that I wrote most of before the show was cancelled so like what the fuck. Here's some bewildered rambling about tech history I guess.

Infin8 Stream: Is Sense8 The Future Of TV?

We live in an era defined by the Epic Streaming Show and Netflix. But is the Netflix hit Sense8 the precursor to an even stranger and more brilliant kind of hypermedia storytelling still to come?

Nerd-On-Nerd Violence: Why Is Geek Star Wars Crit So Lousy?

"Star Wars fanboys don't know what they're talking about," grouses Mr Plinkett! But aren't all these bad Star Wars theories, Red Letter Media's popular garbage videos included, totally characteristic of fanboy analysis? And does geek culture encourage us to disengage from the empathetic core of the Star Wars franchise?

Film Theory Theory: MatPat's Star Wars Theories Are Nazi Garbage

"Save the Death Star!" shouts MatPat, "because destroying it would make the money sad!" How does someone argue himself into supporting Space Nazis? Why do fandoms eat it up? And might Star Wars itself have something to say about the way that the culture we live in clouds our vision, preventing us from seeing the stories in front of us?

Modern Myth-Busting: Are Rogue One's Characters Worthy Star Wars Heroes?

"Rogue One is too dark and gritty," cries the Internet! "It sullies the black and white morality of the Modern Myth, Star Wars!" But are these thinkpieces, reviews, and fandom metas really paying close attention to the movies they claim to love? And what does it say that Rogue One's cast is held to a different standard than Han Solo?

Starkitecture: Should We Be Worried About Black Panther's Concept Art?

A few weeks ago we got our first glimpse of the MCU's Black Panther in the form of several concept art pieces. The images look cool at first glance, but does Wakanda's setting design suggest some deeper limitations to the Marvel imagination, and the potential for this film to give us something really original? And what does a movement called The International Style have to do with it?

A Galaxy Very, Very Near: Are Time And Space in Rogue One Core to its Resistance Narrative?

Rogue One is a film about resistance and domination, time and space, environment and technology. Can linking these concepts together tell us more about the film's science fiction storytelling... and reveal something about our own forms of contemporary resistance?

My God, Steven Universe is Full of Stars!: SU and Golden Age Sci Fi

The most recent Stevenbomb introduces five episodes of golden age pulp sci fi adventure... but what does the recontextualization of old narrative techniques in this new interconnected narrative form say about golden age sci fi, about Steven Universe's quest for the truth, and... about the fandom's understanding of the show?