Entries appearing in essay
While I Rock
My favorite example of a literary translation error begins in the year 2000.
Scavengers Reign
The primary theme of Scavengers Reign is right there in plain sight. I think it’s trying to reckon with how we face the overwhelming power of the natural world and its implacable indifference to the individual organisms that make it up.
The Infinite Library
With the launch of GPTs, OpenAI is letting anyone with a ChatGPT Pro account create and share customized chatbots. The one I made is called The Infinite Library, and it lets you browse the cultural products of an alternate civilization.
Eroticism, Interiority, and AI Art
The conversation about recent advances in machine learning-driven image generation tools (I don’t like the term “AI art,” but it’s become ubiquitous, and I am caving to the weight of convention) has—like so many other topics in the churn of cultural discourse—quickly become weird. One of
The Neck Fantasy
For two years now my waking hours have been marked by persistent neck and shoulder pain. At its worst it was incapacitating and it made basic daily functioning nearly impossible; most days it is merely annoying, representing a measurable but surmountable increase in the volume of the mental static I
Deinocheirus Revisited
It’s funny what sticks in your mind. As a kid I had the standard kid-type obsession with dinosaurs. Having an obsession with dinosaurs is great, or at least it was great in my case, because it mostly manifested itself as a desire to read every dinosaur book on which
The Perfect Thing
I have a few vices. I sleep in. I buy drug store candy and eat it, in volume, at my desk. I put too much cream and sugar in my coffee. I enjoy dirty comic books. But by far my most long-standing and financially deleterious vice is my love of gadgets.
Redesigning the Sockdolager
I have the privilege of maintaining the archives for The Sockdolager, an online zine of speculative fiction. Although the zine is currently on publishing hiatus, I feel very strongly about keeping the lights on for the authors who'd done me the honor of letting me publish their work. As convenient
Jack in Texas
I was 11 or 12 for sure; definitely no older than 13.
On Target
Upon the metaphorical road's failure to rise up to meet me, I was forced to take a job in Shitty Retail, working the 0400-1200 logistics shift at a Target store in Cheyenne, WY, USA. It was there under the threateningly, vertiginously expansive skies that I learned the way of the world.