We are critics, poets, artists, and writers.
We want you to feel what we feel.
We want you to feel it viscerally.
Embodied Writing
My thumb has a broad, pinging pain brought on by an RSI I developed as a programmer. My stomach growls and churns, eager for food I can only purchase by working a job that continues to exacerbate my injury. Pushing the pain to the back of my mind, I let the screams of Coco Joey radiate through my ears and down my spine, creating a fiery pulse in my chest and an electric spark in my legs.
These are the embodied results of experiences and social systems and art. Many western critics and academics overlook these embodied results under the assumption that what is felt in the body is less important than what is thought in the brain. We do not believe the two can be separated. We want to feel our analysis in our bones and our viscera. We want you to feel it too.
Well-Seasoned Takes
All posts must be given time to stew in the juices of our guts, marinate in the fluids of our brains, and be tenderized by the passage of time. If we don’t viscerally feel it, how can we expect you to? This doesn’t mean we will never cover recent events or newly released media, only that we will give our experiences a chance to breath.
Cheap Art Made By People Who Are Paid Well
We take inspiration from both Bread & Puppet and Sonic the Hedgehog. Just as we want cheap art to be available to feed the masses, we also want smaller, scrappier art pieces made by artists who are paid more to work less and we are not kidding!
For now, this is a one person endeavor that will chug along for as long as it can be subsidized. Long term, though? This will be the standard the site will live by.
Taking Full Advantage of the Medium
We love the written word. As a medium, it has painted lush landscapes, let us swim through the thoughts of others, and ripped holes in our hearts only to sew them back together.
But this site is not text. It is hypertext.
We will still host traditionally written pieces, as they hold their own power in (relative) simplicity. But we are hosted in a medium that has a much stretchier understanding of how text can be displayed. It would be a shame to leave an opportunity to use that stretchiness on the table.
Truth is Inaccessible; Due-Diligence is Not
Humanity will never have direct access to the truth. Our perception of the world is limited by the senses we experience it through, shaped by the state of our bodies as it processes those experiences, and filtered once more by the ideological frames we hold in our minds. Try as we might, we will always be biased.
But lacking direct access to truth does not mean we owe nothing to it. Worldviews require evidence, and evidence invites scrutiny. We do not hide that we are biased: we aim to identify our biases and lay them bare for investigation.
What this means specifically depends on the piece. It could be fact-finding and fact-checking, it could be reading the opinions of others who have examined an artistic movement, or it could mean introspecting while wandering through the artistic spaces of others. It could be as simple as stating plainly what one believes at the start of an article. Whatever form it takes, we will perform due-diligence to the best of our ability.
Generative AI?
AI steals art, wastes water, fucks up our basic utilities, and helps commit atrocities. Here’s a list of fights against new AI data centers across the U.S. Join your local fight (they’re sprouting up everywhere) or support another’s fight from afar!
And in case it wasn’t clear, fuck generative AI, fuck the horse it rode in on, and fuck that horse’s parents for raising a terrible horse child.