Summer 2026
A collection of seasonal excerpts from the commonplace
Essays, blogs, and other prose:
How Videogames Feed the War Machine, Lewis Gordon
10 Years in the Game Space, Jay Castello
If there is anything at all that is authentic about me, it comes when I don’t know what to say. To write is to find a throughline, and yes, it should be honest, but it is always a flattening, a presenting of a part of something much more complex with all the edges sanded off.
- Alligator Alcatraz Isn’t Just An American Fantasy, Sarah Borus
The crocodiles are not about security, for the prison or the government serves. They're about the thrill of reaching back through time to pull the tactics of the past into the present.
Papers, Please and the Reality of Being an American Tranny, Micaela Deitz
Getting my identity documents in order made me feel like Jorji, balancing the fluctuating demands of a ridiculous government with the resources at my disposal.
- Everyone I Know Agrees With Me, Jake Steinberg
The Post is not concerned with context or specificity. The world of The Post is only 300 characters wide. By replacing a mean word with a nice one, we can accomplish something! Politics can be achieved by simply adjusting our tone and adhering to an implied decorum. The only ideal we must uphold is whichever one demands we follow the same script in our particular online bubble. If this is enough to qualify as politics, then imagine how relieved the people in power must be.
The Writing is the Reward, Steven Santana
Inside a Mass Shooter’s Harrowing History With ChatGPT, Mark Follman
Rendering the whole world blank: Precarity, totalising fear and digital scrolling, Alex Paterson
What marks precarity as a distinct state, and what unites the experience of so many, is that it involves a form of relation to the future which is profoundly unstable, giving the subject the sense that a desirable future is deeply tenuous, or otherwise out of one’s grasp – that in one breath is its possibility may collapse entirely, or that one simply cannot see a path towards it – not only in relation to something like work or home ownership but also the broader desires of political equality, meaningful intimacy and, as Berlant says, all the fantasies which come to ‘foster life as a project of adding up to something.’
Video:
The New Americana, pagemelt
The Bad Prose Epidemic, Kate Alexandra
The Revolt Against Technology, Jared Henderson
I Am Turning Myself Into a Video Game Plane, Jacob Geller
The Odyssey: How Nolan's Dream Collapsed, Kate Alexandra
Having spent a career arguing that a good man with a gun is better than a bad man with a gun, Nolan seems finally to have come around to the idea that the gun just might be the problem.
Elsewhere:
- Books: The Wind Has Risen (Tatsuo Hori, trans. Francis B. Tenny), Canon (Paige Lewis), The Score (C. Thi Nguyen)*
- Manga: Horimiya vol. 1-3, Witch Hat Atelier vol. 14, Snow White with the Red Hair vol. 26, City vol. 3, Cocoon (Machiko Kyō), I Have a Crush at Work vol. 11
- Music: Art Sorority, Fiddlehead, Tournament Arc, Phantom Regiment
- Movies and Short Films: Independence Day, Independence Day: Resurgence, The Wind Rises, The Odyssey, The Samurai and the Prisoner, Israelism, Penguin Midnight, The Lovers, Paper Trail, Cocoon: One Summer of Girlhood, 47 Ronin, The Wolf of Wall Street
- TV: The Sopranos Seasons 2-6, The Newsroom Season 1-3, Succession Season 1, The American Revolution, The Ghost in the Shell*
- Videogames: Splatoon Raiders, Big Walk,* Valkyria Chronicles,* Fire Emblem: Three Houses (Crimson Flower)*
*in progress
Bylines:
ICYMI: I wrote about The Many Faces of Naoko Satomi in The Wind Has Risen and The Wind Rises, am still waiting for a reply, and I contributed to Bullet Points Monthly's 10 Year Anniversary.
Upcoming: I contributed an afterword to Jacob Geller's new book, shipping soon, and will have two essays (on Death Stranding and Xenoblade Chronicles 3) in [lock-on] 007, out next year.