Green Screens: Nine Perfect Strangers and Manipulation

Nine Perfect Strangers brilliantly explores how savvy operators manipulate people--and audiences. Unless... it doesn't. What do its bewildering and contradictory story choices say about self help, cults, hippies, and the harm art does?

In Search Of More Applause: 'Inside' And The World Neoliberalism Promised

Bo Burnham's movie "Inside" stretches the term "comedy special" till it shatters. Why does its clutter of fragments cut so deep? Maybe because of how it reflects the world neoliberalism promised us...

content include: spoilers for Inside, neoliberalism, suicide, jokes about suicide, jokes about jokes about suicide, self-referentiality, audience hostility, alienation.

Chorby Prefers Not To: Blaseball, Bartleby, and a Fandom's Malicious Compliance

Chorby Short is an adorable frog girl who is also sometimes a witch. Or perhaps, she's just some data in a game taking the internet by storm called Blaseball. Or perhaps, she's a new example of an idea from an 1853 Herman Melville story. Or perhaps, she's all this and more? 

Culture Kept In Its Coffin: How The Netflix Model Buries Our Media History

Classic anime like Revolutionary Girl Utena could get a new lease on life if released serially in the present day... but Netflix and its many competitors aren't in the business of preserving or selling art. What do we lose when our media history becomes #Content?

Galaxy Brained: Annihilation and Queer Cosmic Horror

Annihilation: The Ending Explained!!!

content warning: body horror, spoilers for Annihilation, cosmic horror, mad ravings, closetedness and detransitioning, homophobia, slurs

In The End We All Do What We Must: Universal Paperclips, Clicker Games, AI, and Agency

Remember Universal Paperclips, that clicker game? Remember turning the human race into paperclips? Ok, so, what if you just... didn't? What would that choice tell us about game design, agency, artificial intelligence, and people?

Nasty, Brutish, and Short: The Promised Neverland and Human Nature

The nightmarish final boss of hit manga The Promised Neverland is... philosopher Thomas Hobbes??

Content warning for major late manga spoilers for The Promised Neverland, cannibalism, gore, monarchy, body horror.

Room For You Inside: Pink Floyd In Quarantine

You barricade yourself in your hotel room; it becomes a fascist rally. You write a concept album about your alienation; it becomes the Thatcherite Revolution. You live in modern luxury; it becomes a mad haunted house. This is a story about Pink Floyd's The Wall and the culmination of half a century of No Alternative.

Content warnings for discussion of quarantine, isolation, apartment horror, drug abuse, mental breakdowns, neoliberalism and its brother, fascism.

Evil Be Thou My Good, or Why Dirk Strider Is Literally Satan

Homestuck was a Gnostic story. The Homestuck Epilogues are a satanic one. Dirk Strider is the devil. To understand, we'll have to consult a poet who's of the devil's part: John Milton.

Let's Pop Together Part 2

Is what Pop Team Epic does to everything it touches that different from what Ready Player One does to The Iron Giant? After you flatten pop down, break it apart, and repeat it to the point of meaninglessness, can you find a way back to sincerity?

Let's Pop Together: Part 1

What is it that makes today's Pop Team Epic's so different, so appealing? And can it explain why people hate the marketing for Ready Player One so damn much?

Freakangels In Arcadia: Haunt The Future

It's about time.

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.

Future City: BLAME! as Postmodern Architecture Hell

Let's talk about the buildings in BLAME!, demons, and postmodernism.

BLAME!: The End of Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk is dead. Tsutomu Nihei's BLAME! is its bloating corpse. We're just living in it. 

This is very much a Part 1.

A Lot Of Preps Stared At Me: My Immortal and Parafiction

What do we want the author of My Immortal to be?

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.