things i wanna leave back in 2025

02 Jan, 2026

weather: 🌧️ happy new year
critters: waterfowl

the hi-fructose house style

one of those "you know it when you see it" art styles. also found in juxtapoz. i do not hate it--i think i've just seen too much for too long.

ultra high budget flops

it used to be funny when an expensive media racehorse broke its ankle right out of the gate, but now the massive horse pileup just seems deliberate. in the past few years it's been anthem, redfall, concord, babylon's fall, suicide squad, new world, and a bunch of others i can't remember. and that's just games. maybe the real lesson is to race greyhounds instead.

cozy lit

a friend turned me on to michael moorcock's "epic pooh" essay many years ago when i complained about the increasing toothlessness of fantasy books. though many worthy criticisms have been made of this essay, i think mike is still right for treating "cozy" art with suspicion. and why should he? why should i? i dunno. gut feeling.

humoring harry potter fans

i say this, but i know i'm just gonna ignore harry potter fans instead of confronting them ever. any remark would be an invitation for them to rattle off the usual thought-terminating clichés and go crying to a site moderator.

thinking of myself as a cohesive whole

i hate our greatest american poet, but i agree with him that a person contains multitudes. people made more sense to me when i realized we're all products of ongoing negotiations.¹ but i'm always giving myself a hard time for being kind of gelatinous, instead of a brick of ideological granite. maybe i should lay off of that.

letting my bad parts do my thinking

the part of me that hates myself can have input, but he can't have the final say.

thinking fondly of any of the people who groomed me

THEY DIDN'T REALLY LIKE YOU, CHERRY.

the female rage meat art industrial complex

by which i mean fiction about women bloodily losing their minds. i do consume art by and for women, some of which is in this 'genre'--two of my favorite recent books are the empusium and boy parts. but i will never be in a lot of the situations women are in, so i recognize the blatant screaming NOT FOR ME quality of this art.

that being said, these don't work for me on any level: as horror, as wish fulfillment, as black comedy, as good literature. nothing. all these individualized flesh-themed vengeance quests are starting to feel like patriarchy's padded safety bumpers, which women can read in public and talk about on their goodreadses in lieu of killing their manbaby husbands. i miss you, kathy acker.

theory

what have you done for me lately, theory? other than give me anxiety, render me inert, and make me even more of a pedantic asshole?