Around age twelve, my childhood friend who lived down the street and I were going through similar stages of puberty in tandem. By sheer happenstance one night when he slept over — as he so often did — we discovered that there was something pleasurable about physical closeness. One of us laid on top of the other and something just happened. It was incredibly awkward, the sensation. We kept it a secret for as long as we could, until the urge hit us again a few months later during the daytime in my bedroom.

The pleasure this time was harder to ignore, and consequently lead to us not paying attention to a busy house on a weekday. As you might suspect, this encounter ended like a bad dream, when my parents came barging in unexpectedly.

There was shock and fear — I’d honestly use the word ‘terror’ without exaggeration. Terror for the two of us, who didn’t really understand what was going on, but knew we had just been caught doing something wrong or immoral. But terror for my parents as well, who clearly didn’t know how to interpret the moment or how to react, both in the immediate moment and the days thereafter.

My friend snuck out of the house without saying goodbye like he used to, and we never spoke again. My parents had me sit in the living room that night to “explain” myself, but I was so filled with shame, fear, and confusion that I mostly just sat in silence while my parents agreed to never speak of the incident again.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is a surrealist horrormance about a filmmaker who is commissioned to remake the classic slasher Camp Miasma — a fictional franchise that clearly spoofs both the Friday the 13th and Sleepaway Camp series. In the original Camp Miasma, a young non-binary or trans person at summer camp is bullied for being “both a boy and a girl” until they’re drowned in the nearby lake and then return with a vengeance as a spear-wielding maniac known as “Little Death”.

Kris Williams [Hack’s Hannah Einbinder], the aforementioned director, is a die-hard fan of the Camp Miasma franchise, specifically the original film, which has since achieved cult-status among horror fans. Not unlike so many other horror aficionados on the internet (ahem), Kris tends to over-intellectualize horror movies, and her creative process almost exclusively revolves around trying to harp on queer themes, political messaging, and self-aware nodding (AHEM!)

At the start of the film, Kris is already on her way to meet with actress Billy Presley [Gillian Anderson] — the original ‘final girl’ of the first Camp Miasma film, now a recluse after “aging out” of her roles in Hollywood. Billy lives in the cabin used as the original set piece for Camp Miasma, and has the first film reeling on a 8mm projector when Kris arrives.

What starts as a delicious meeting-of-the-minds between generations arguing over how to best handle a horror remake in 2026 quickly descends into a seedy, sexy, and psychotic relationship between two broken souls, each using their lust for phantasmagoric violence as a means to communicate that which can’t be said out loud.

Jane Schoenbrun, the [real life] director of Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, has had my undivided attention since their first major film, We’re All Going to the World’s Fair back in 2021. One of the few trans filmmakers to cross into the mainstream, Schoenbrun’s style is best described as “unabashedly queer takes on coming-of-age-stories told through nightmarish abstractions.”

We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is about a teenager lost on the darkest corners of the internet and being taken in by a stranger who may not have their best interests in mind, set against the backdrop of a society who can’t be bothered to find out what’s going on. I Saw the TV Glow is a Lynchian gaze into the mind of the gender-dysphoric, and what symbols laced throughout pop culture can help wandering, queer minds find meaning when the world provides so little.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is, by all means, absolutely in conversation with Schoenbrun’s first two films. It’s much more ‘adult’, in that it very openly discusses how things like sex, sexuality, and nudity are portrayed in films, but at the same time, there’s a very specific sense of distancing in the way the film approaches anything too blue.

There’s very little nudity in Teenage Sex and Death — but there’s a LOT of it in the fictional 80s movie Camp Miasma, which we’re treated to a watch party of through most of the middle act of this film.

But where most cis filmmakers would stop the self-aware critique at “we’re all so obsessed with blood and tits!” a la Roger Stone’s Natural Born Killers or Joel Schumacher’s 8mm, Schoenbrun doesn’t see the obsession as the real problem. Kris, the presumed vector for the filmmaker in this piece, reveres the gore in the Camp Miasma franchise with almost religious fervor; something to be beheld and worshipped in the pantheon of queer storytelling.

But as Billy Presley tells Kris just as the two sit down to dinner and speak in not-so-subtle euphemisms, Camp Miasma was only ever about 2 things;

Flesh and Fluids.

Just as with I Saw the TV Glow, this movie absolutely spoke to me on such a primal level that I couldn’t help but immediately applaud at the end and rush to give it 5 stars on Letterboxd (neeeeeeeeeeerd!)

While I’ve used the term ‘non-binary’ to define myself plenty of times before, I myself don’t identify as trans, and yet that’s never stopped me from moving in complete lockstep through Schoenbrun’s films. There’s something about the way they capture the essence of a character in their most vulnerable, unsexy moments that makes them feel so relatable to me: Justice Smith’s character in I Saw the TV Glow is primarily aloof for the first 95% of the film, only to then have one traumatic breakdown in the final scene, then apologize and go back to work in such a nauseating relatable way that I start crying time every time I rewatch the film.

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, on the other hand, had me beaming from ear to ear from the moment a cover version of R.E.M.’s “Nightswimming” scores the opening title sequence, to the batshit crazy murder-rampage during the film-within-a-film segment set to Counting Crow’s “A Long December”*, and then to the final moments of the film when Kris and Billy are coated in “blood” (winkwink) and purchasing a plethora of their favorite late-night snacks from a gas station while gazing longingly into the picaresque mountainsides amid Donna Lewis’ “I Love You Always Forever.”

*Easily in contention with The Bone Temple for best needle-drop of the year!

It’s a movie that got me just as emotional as Schoenbrun’s first two films, but this time I didn’t have to go sit in a corner and muse through tears for the better part of a night. Instead, I came out of Teenage Sex and Death with a newly forged sense of pride, for lack of a better term.

Because the movie is about discovery at its core. Kris arrives at the original film’s set, intent on writing a remake script that will “honor” the original Camp Miasma while “elevating” the franchise to something bigger and better than it was before. She talks at length about her work is more important to her than love, sex, or happiness, which Billy understands implicitly but intends to change, be it by rationale or by attrition.

As the story progresses and their attraction for one another grows, Kris becomes less interested in making a movie — or at least the one the studios are asking for.

She becomes obsessed with “Little Death” and the murders of the first film. She becomes completely entrenched in the idea that the whole plot to the first film must be real, but not because she’s lost her mind, but because she’s so taken by Billy and her sensual performance in that first film that she can’t believe someone with so much passion could ever be faking it. Someone MUST have been lurking about the campsite, terrorizing the actors right at the point of climax to illicit such a visceral, emotional reaction on camera.

No one could actually enjoy sex that much, she assures herself.

Without spoiling too much, the entire second half of the film is about Kris and Billy exploring one another’s strengths, insecurities, and learning how to express their wants and needs in a way that is both dangerous yet completely safe.

“If it ever gets too real, you can always turn it off,”

Billy tells Kris when they’re laying besides a lit fireplace atop a bedding of torn candy wrappers and leftover fried chicken.

It really fucked me up, the day my parents walked in on me and my friend being intimate. Not just in an embarrassing way, but in a way that completely altered my brain chemistry for decades. That story I told at the beginning of this post is something I’ve never shared with anyone, save for my therapist, until roughly a year or so ago when I started telling an abridged version to a select few in private conversations. And with each iteration, it got a little easier to tell.

It took me THAT long to stop feeling the “burning scalp” sensation that comes with immense shame, guilt, and self-hatred.

I truly loathed myself for so long after being ‘discovered’ by my parents. For being ‘outed’, as it were, when I was only twelve years old. I remember being asked if I was gay at such an early age, and not knowing what that word really meant. I only knew that it was socially unacceptable and stigmatized to such an extent that it would put my safety in jeopardy, and so I always said, “what? Of course not,” which then eventually evolved into, “it was just a phase,” and then “well, no, I’m not gay, but I’m certainly happy for anyone who is,” so I could still be called an Ally but not willingly put the target on myself.

(Let me clarify that there’s never been an ounce of hatred, bigotry, or prejudice portrayed by my parents in my life. This was truly just a befuddling time of confusion and worry on all parts. No one handled it particularly well, especially in 2002 when my friend and I were 12 and my parents were in their early 30s.)

And as anyone who knows a thing or two about psychology might suspect, my “trauma response” was in FULL effect for every day of my life thereafter. From ages twelve to twenty-four, I repressed all feelings of attraction, arousal, experimenting, identity, and acceptance. And even once I moved somewhere far away from home, the fear of the awful event repeating itself never left my mind. Even when I found the freedom to call myself queer/bi/pan/gay/NB in a big city with tons of other similar folks, I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was about to come barging in and discover my ‘secret’ all over again.

Even now, when thoughts of sexuality and attraction enter my mind, I have to reset and breathe slowly, as if I’m about to fall victim to a panic attack.

Therapy has helped, as it always does, but there’s only so much you can tell a therapist about this sort of thing before the session’s over and you’re left to deal with your own thoughts again for another week.

Something has to supplant those feelings. There has to be some medium that you can confide in and identify with as puberty carries on and the feelings only get stronger over time. Your mind needs something external to latch onto to make sense of things internally.

Kris’ obsession with Camp Miasma and slasher movies in general becomes a unsubtle metaphor for her libido: how she repressed her sexual urges and queer thoughts for a time, but ultimately found herself lusting after Billy, both as she was in the original film, and as she is now. Both women’s yearning to identify with a monster like Little Death isn’t born from revenge or hatred, but rather understanding.

As all the scholarly articles from the 80s and 90s will tell you, killers in movies who stab their victims aren’t just killing them, they’re penetrating them. They’re gazing at them through their mask deep in the woods. They’re lusting after their victims just as someone might lust after someone they find attractive. Sex and violence become intrinsically entwined in these films subliminally for those who find themselves taken by the premise, while who detest horror will simply cast it all aside as trash.

It makes the genre a safe space for queer people to hide. To both to feel seen by audiences and to connect with the killers on a psychological level.

Not to say we queer people are the monsters, but rather that we also deserve the right to penetrate; to gaze; to lust.

If We’re All Going to the World’s Fair is about dread in the mind’s of queer teenagers on the internet, and I Saw the TV Glow is about ennui in the spirit of queer 20-somethings trapped in a nostaglia-ridden hellscape, then Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma is about joy in the bodies of queer adults when they find the perfect reality for them to finally be themselves.

It’s uproarious and unflinching.

An absolutely delightful dance of the macabre that doesn’t lean on the usual “women who watch too many horror movies tend to go crazy” tropes like in the recent Censor or Faces of Death, but rather inverts the dynamic and suggests that women (and trans and non-binary folks alike) should be invited to get off through the eyes of a stab-happy lunatic as well. That sexuality isn’t one simple dichotomy or even something that can be easily understood through therapy and childhood.

It’s something rich and complex and filthy and joyous and upsetting and obtuse and weird and kinky and voyeuristic and idealistic and frightening and awkward and euphoric.

Sex is something that people shouldn’t inherently feel ashamed about, nor should they fear it nor condemn its very presence. It should be celebrated and seen as an embrace of self — of understanding and unity and of love.

Even just a year ago, I couldn’t imagine me ever sharing this story in a public setting like this. I wrote my awkward incident into the backstory of one of my POV characters for a novel years ago, and told myself that this act alone would “exorcise” the nightmares, finally. But I think I knew that wasn’t true.

There’s nothing that can easily erase 12 years of avoidance, and over 20 years of anxiety, fear, and dread surrounding something that is meant to be seen as perfectly normal, human, and cherished. Therapy alone doesn’t fix it, nor does telling the story over and over. These things help, but they don’t magically make the shame go away overnight.

There’s so much left unresolved from that pivotal day in my life — I never found out what happened to my friend afterwards. My parents and I have never talked about it…even after I “came out” officially (lol) and introduced them to my partner. I can’t help but wonder if telling the story here in this format will still feel regrettable in some way, because it’s being told exclusively through my eyes and not theirs. Because it’s putting a spotlight on something I know we all agreed to forget, ages ago.

But watching Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma really brought that memory to the forefront of my mind this week. I saw so much of myself in Kris — hiding behind my work and vocations for so long, pretending like I didn’t need to think about sex and attraction because I was just too busy, knowing all the while there was a drowning voice at the bottom of the lake that was begging to finally be heard.

And I saw so much of myself in Billy — the experienced sage who speaks at length of freedom of love and the right to self expression, but who has also spent so long in such isolation and sadness that she hasn’t actually experienced the sensations she speaks at length about in a whole lifetime.

And it makes me wish I had told the story sooner. Not because it would’ve magically fixed things, but it might’ve made me not so afraid. It might’ve helped me find my loving partner sooner or maybe just understand myself a little better.

It would’ve let me learn to embrace Little Death.

Without shame. Without self-hatred.

But it always felt too real, so I always kept myself turned off.

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is the best way to describe depression sometimes.

It’s hard to always know when you’re depressed until you’re already in the middle of an episode. It tends to creep up, often times just as malaise or boredom. It’s only after a few days or weeks that you realize you’re struggling to get out of bed, think straight, or get anything done.

I wouldn’t say I’m fully down the depression rabbit hole yet. I’ve had great days and I’ve had really miserable days, both punctuating long dirges of “ehhhh” days. Which is probably normal on the bell curve of life for most folks, but those miserable days feel particularly miserable when experienced through a depressed mind.

I’m doing okay — honest. Last weekend was my partner’s birthday and it was three or four days of nonstop merriment. Staying away from my phone and the news and most work-related things off-hours really did fix my brain chemistry, for a time.

But like clockwork, when I came back to the job and reverted to doomscrolling in my downtime again, I found myself completely consumed by the cannibalistic nature of loathing that endlessly dwells with infinite patience and growing hunger.

And I’m not someone who likes to just say “well I’m depressed” and live with it. I want to know why I’m depressed and what’s dragging me down so heavily. Not to suggest that depression has an easy explanation, because it never does, but I at least want to believe that something triggers it or awakens it from its infernal slumber.

I have spent the vast majority of this year closely following all the news surrounding the “A.I. Bubble.”

Case solved.

Photo by Brendon Burton

Truly though, whether it’s the emphatic ramblings from coworkers about how much time Copilot has allegedly saved them, the incessant generative ads from garbage companies across all streaming and social platforms, or the parade of hideous posters foisted upon my eyes by every small business in town, I am constantly reading about how close we are to the A.I. apocalypse.

There are a lot of takes about how this ends — fewer and fewer people are becoming convinced this is the dawn of a new technological era, and that A.I. is mostly likely not going to replace us or take our jobs. Most folks agree that the data centers are decimating the local environments and resources. There is little merit behind what LLMs can create and the image/video generators and chatbots are quickly, recursively eating their own slop to such a point that developers are now stealing old textbooks and scanning the pages in the hopes of “fixing” the source data. And what’s not even getting discussed is how much money the entire planet has sunk into these A.I. labs in just the last few years, and if/when they go belly-up, just how much of the global stock market — including pensions, 401Ks, and bonds — they’re going to take with them.

It really does feel like they’re driving us all off the edge of a cliff whether we wanted to even get in the car in the first place or not.

For a while, this invigorated me. I wrote new novels and short stories constantly about emerging technologies and the nightmares they might unleash. I obsessed over things like sentient technologies that could kill us or save us, and found so much truth and emotionality in characters who were forced to face themselves once they were stripped of the technology they lean on so heavily.

And then, sometime this year, that switch got flipped. It was no longer invigorating or creatively rewarding to write about the A.I. apocalypse. It no longer felt like I, as a writer, was doing anything particularly useful in writing these stories about potential nightmares if society wasn’t careful with how we handled this technology.

Probably because the nightmares were already happening. Faster and with more severity than anyone could’ve imagined.

Suicides. Murders. Death market gambling. Stalking. Codependent relationships. Surrendering of all identities and personal information. Isolation. Desperation.

It all felt like whatever a writer could’ve used their platform to warn readers about was suddenly folly — obsolete, even. As if even William Gibson’s cautionary tales were rendered passé.

To such an extent now that the bigger concern with A.I. is how humans will learn to behave again if/when the systems fail. If the chatbots get shut down or the LLMs can’t pull from Github anymore or the data centers burn down and the servers overload and everything about what we know of the internet disintegrates.

People wouldn’t go back to being people. They’d be addicts in withdrawal.

With every article I read and with every podcast I listen to and with every Youtube interview I watch, all of which are — at this point — unanimously agreeing that the promised AGI milestone is nothing more than a ponzi scheme between five or six megacorporations masturbatorily funneling the same trillion dollars between one another, the further down the spiral I tumble.

Not the kind of spiral where one finds an inextricable truth at the end, nor the kind that lets one feel enlightened and unburdened by the cumbersome weight of some terrible obstacle in one’s life, but rather the kind that just feels never-ending. The ouroboros type of spiral that just eats itself and continues to mutate into something nastier and more befuddling the longer you fall.

That is to say, I wish the damn Bubble would pop already. I wish the billionaire chucklefucks would just make their move, dump everything, decimate the markets, let the world burn, and disappear into their caves where they’ll continue building escape rockets for when the world is uninhabitable. Because the waiting — having to sit in a chair every day and be inundated with slop and pretend like it’s the best thing since sliced bread — all the while not having any interactions with real humans or getting anything actually substantial and important done in the real world with what little time I have on this planet — feels a bit like someone forcing my head underwater long after I’ve run out of air.

Reading a physical book helps keep me sane. Playing a game OFFLINE. Picking up a guitar or sitting at the piano. Going to the beach with my partner. Celebrating his birthday with friends. Cooking. Working out. These things help keep the darkness at bay, but these are things that I can only return to at certain times of certain days, while the gaps between them are feeling longer and more painful with each passing week of worse and worse news.

Photo by Brendon Burton

I can barely write.

A tool I’ve relied on since my teenage years feels so useless as of late. Any time in my life when I’ve felt anything — happy, upset, angry, even depressed — I’ve been able to sit down and write a blog post or a poem or a short story or outline a new novel, and feel so much better via the simple act of creation.

But for the last month or so now, writing feels like torture. It feels like pissing in the wind. It feels like it’s only making things worse, somehow.

I assume staring at the abyss of the A.I. dialog is to blame. I assume the endless swath of reports of A.I.-generated novels becoming best sellers and literary agents and publishers constantly being duped by bots is something that is really dragging down my spirits. At a time where I wanted to believe human-generated prose and essays might prevail, it seems like we’re quickly being overwritten by the dumbest common denominator.

Not to suggest I’d ever write just to get recognized or published or paid. Far from it. Hell, I’m 20+ years into it and have yet to see a single word I’ve typed out manifest into anything other than a “like” or “subscribe.”

But I have to imagine this feeling is the same feeling we hear VFX artists in Hollywood relay after studios like Netflix boast about using A.I. generated visuals in their shows. Or how musicians are feeling when they see A.I. generated music taking the top spots on streaming platforms. Or how those who have struggled to find love in real life illustrate their desperation in turning to LLMs for sexual relationships.

It’s not just the thievery of it all. It’s not about the money or the attention. It’s about the vacuity. The empty space that consumes everything around it now like a black hole. The notion that something lifeless and meaningless is occupying spaces meant for humans, and that so many humans (not a lot, but still too many) are openly treating those black holes as if they were just as valid as real people.

It’s the ushering of the algorithm that gets me. Welcoming oblivion with open arms. It’s how people smile at the end of everything just because it feels like they’re supposed to. How everyone I know in the real world is visibly miserable and harder to talk to and more agitated when they leave home, but online they/we act like things have never been better and the lifeless entity that’s been funneled into everyone’s GPUs is slithering into every facet of our lives without question.

But even being Anti-A.I. and pushing back against it in all its forms (again, I will always regret my use of generative A.I. images in my earlier posts) doesn’t inherently include a sense of uplifting humanism. If anything it makes the depression worse because it feels like you’re swimming against a waterfall and waiting to drown. But instead, all that ever happens is the water moves faster and you repeatedly find yourself sinking deeper as you get bashed against the rocks, the passing fish wailing, “just accept it!”, “it helped me book my vacation!”, “it’s gonna cure cancer!”

Hating A.I. is so much more exhausting than embracing it. Hoping for either the collapse of everything or for the watershed moment when humanity gets it shit together simply drains one’s soul of all willpower after so long. Because it’s a situation that’s entirely out of our hands, yet is designed to keep us staring at the screens for the rest of our goddamned lives.

I can’t help but wonder if my depression will vanish the day I just throw my phone in the river. Or get laid off. Either/or.

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A THING THAT IN NO WAY FEELS INCREDIBLY PERTINENT TO THE CURRENT MOMENT.

Unintentional parallels in art; a thing often dissected, yet usually in a way that is meant to deride at least one of the artists in question. But given the weight of the topic and how both of these recently released films tackle it, I don’t think there’s much merit in tearing apart either.

I came away enjoying The Odyssey — enamored by the spectacle of it but being more affected by the brief lamentations from The Iliad than anything else — while I came away from The Samurai & the Prisoner quietly musing on the futility of faith and structure in the face of atrocities.

A few articles have already been written on how these two films are flipsides of the opposite coin, but I actually think it goes deeper. I think they’re both, intentionally or incidentally, reflecting on the subliminal agony that nestles inside the chests of anyone who has endured the harshest of times.

Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s The Samurai & the Prisoner is a 2026 film that is masquerading as a 1960s Japanese arthouse film about a feudal lord from the 1500s. The titular samurai and leader of a clan that controls an impregnable fortress, Araki Murashige, is on his heels as warlord Oda continues to destroy all opposing forces outside the fortress. Politics at play, Murashige is visited by an envoy on behalf of Oda, but rather than honoring the samurai code and either using the envoy to return the message or kill the envoy as a declaration of war, Murashige imprisons the envoy in the fortress dungeon indefinitely.

From this setup, the story plays out of over 4 seasons, each involving a mystery within the fortress that could be attributed to political sabotage, karma for Murashige’s betrayal of the samurai code, or divine retribution from the gods — be they Buddhist or Christian.

As each mystery plays out, Murashige is driven to visit the envoy-turned-prisoner underground, who seems to offer brilliant insights that none of the war council have considered. The more Murashige relies on the prisoner, the more he finds himself mournful of the decisions he’s made — finally tackling the horrors of his time before the rebellion when he served warlord Oda and committed hideous executions in the name of the samurai code. This feeds into his reluctance to kill the envoy when he first arrives, and why Murashige continues to defy the samurai code throughout the film in ways that I care not to spoil because it plays out quite deliciously by the end.

While Murashige continues to struggle with his oath to the way of the samurai, those around him are compelled by the mysteries consuming the fortress, expounding their Buddhist and Christian philosophies without invitation. It becomes apparent that Murashige is a man without faith — in god or man — and that these mysteries are, if anything, punishment for how he previously behaved under Oda’s rule.

The Samurai and the Prisoner is a gothic, philosophical character study of a man plagued with responsibility, riddled with guilt, and haunted by an inescapable inability to decide what’s right, what’s wrong, and who’s to blame for anything anymore.

In many ways, Murashige is a modern man. The worst things become, the more he retreats, as if accepting that the cycle of horrors that started when he first joined warlord Oda and have continued since he rebelled will follow him to the grave and beyond. His obsession with the prisoner isn’t just a desperate attempt to solve the mysteries of each season, it’s a plea to be understood and given some direction — any direction — from the only person he can be sure has no political or religious ulterior motives. The prisoner is as honest and pure of a soul as Murashige can find in the trap he’s set for himself.

While the movie very deliberately avoids showing almost all of the bloody conflicts between Oda’s conquest, Murashige’s rebellion, and the surprise attacks from either side, the atrocities are written starkly across Murashige’s reactions. He’s a man who has not only seen the horrors of war, and not only actively participated in them, but is now desperately trying to distance himself from them at all costs. To such effect that when confronted with ideologies, be they Buddhist or Christian, he retracts and even rejects their prospects, and when he’s confronted with his own [disavowed] creed of the samurai, he chooses to do the exact opposite of what the creed dictates.

A man bound by contradictions, motivated to protect what clan he has left, but unable to choose what’s right by his own moral compass after acts of war have shown him that moral compasses mean little to those who don’t survive.

SIMILARLY,

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey is about anything but the odyssey.

Sing in me, dead horse, and beat it to Hades and back.

Homer’s The Odyssey was a favorite read of mine in high school, if only because I was one of those helpless nerds who wasted months of his life on Age of Mythology. While I absolutely crave stories about intervention from the gods and the coming horrors of monsters dwelling in inscrutable caves, there was something so compelling about The Odyssey in the way it unfolds around its titular character, rather than to him. Odysseus isn’t a hero who overcomes the odds with physicality and kills everyone who stands in his way, but either cleverly outsmarts the opponent, or barely survives by the skin of his teeth and at great expense to his crew.

Nolan doesn’t avoid this narrative, to be clear. He still very much wants you to witness the suffering Odysseus endures on his torturous trip home from Troy, but the 2026 film does erase most of the character’s wisdom, cleverness, and wit for the sake of highlighting his hubris. At first glance, I found this a frustrating choice, but the longer I think on the film, the more the change helps reaffirm a clear theme that resonates within Odysseus from the start of the film to the very end.

Impenetrable regret.

In a much, much, muchmuchmuch more obvious thread to follow than in The Samurai and the Prisoner, The Odyssey makes it abundantly clear that Odysseus resents the war, the army he fought for, the general Agamemnon that he took orders from, and even himself for every thing that befell the Trojans.

The infamous Trojan horse rug-pull that ultimately leads to the decimation of Troy’s army and her citizens within her walls is a betrayal of Zeus’ Law i.e. treat all as guests in your home and/or do unto others as you’d have done unto you. But then we see that, even after the war, Odysseus’ men repeatedly tread on the homes of others — be it the cyclops' cave, Circe’s hut, the Laestrygonian tribe, the Sun God’s island, etc. — without humility or apology, and face the inevitable, horrific consequences.

By the time Odysseus returns home (spoilers? It’s been three thousand years), he’s not just traumatized, he’s completely hollowed out by the shame and guilt of what he knows he and his people are responsible for. This is where the movie shines its brightest for me — despite my teenage lizard brain being tickled by the presence of Charybdis, Scylla, and Calypso — what works best for me are the moments where Odysseus is forced to confront of the truths about what Agamemnon’s war really meant.

At a key point in the second act, Odysseus and his crew traverse the River Styx into Hades and are met with the wraiths (ghosts) of the men he has lost over the years. One in particular, Sinon, speaks directly about how he was treated as bait for the Trojans: knowing full well Sinon would be killed on sight, Odysseus leaves the boy out in the open to make sure the Trojans accept the sabotaged horse as a prize of surrender. Sinon ruthlessly reminds Odysseus how the spoils of war are little compared to the weight the survivors will carry with them now, knowing that they betrayed every law of the gods to invade an unsuspecting home and desecrate it from the inside out.

The best part of the film, for me, is the returning presence of Athena — dressed as an ordinary woman in garbs — who follows Odysseus throughout the story and repeatedly asks him to consider what real honor he brings with him across the sea? Is victory worth anything when it brings with it a damnation of the heart? When Odysseus remembers the sacking of Troy for the last time, he recalls the execution of an innocent woman who suddenly becomes Athena herself, suggesting that Ithaca has completely abandoned the last tenets of its values for the sake of an expeditious "victory” that, arguably, did nothing to help Odysseus’ people and family.

Odysseus’ rejection of Agamemnon’s route home after the war at the start of the film is seen as a flippant moment of reprieve. In retrospect, it’s a deeply revealing moment of introspection, as we realize this is the point where Odysseus can’t follow the orders of a warlord any further. And yet, no matter what choice Odysseus made, terror waited. Had he followed Agamemnon, he would’ve arrived back in Ithaca/Sparta in a timely manner, and been met with an uprising when Helen of Troy betrays Agamemnon for his murder of their child. Instead, he chooses to forge his own path home, and is met with years of unspeakable nightmares brought on by the actions of his own hubris and that of his crew.

Ultimately, The Odyssey isn’t about returning home or family ties, but about the sins of war following the survivors long after the ashes fall. It’s about how both the ones who ‘followed orders’ and the ones who think of themselves as independent and morally just are equally condemned, no matter the paths they take during times of peace.

As if both Kiyoshi Kurasawa and Christopher Nolan saw the conflict coming years in advance, it feels like both films are in direct conversation with the now.

They both unabashedly reflect not just the anguish and suffering that comes from those who survive war, but the condemnation and regret that dwells within the minds of those responsible for the rest of their days and beyond.

A thing that we all wonder — is regret still a tangible thing in this day and age? In the era of genocide, drone bombings, and tactical-AI-driven-assassinations — do those who commit war crimes still feel it? Are they plagued by the ghosts of their past every day until their last?

Or are the cries of Athena lost at sea?
Are the musings of the prisoner lost somewhere deep in the dungeon?

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Truth be told, I never understood Charli much at all, prior to Brat. I had seen her perform at smaller festivals, and while I enjoy a pulsating electro-pop set as much as the next gay, nothing about her aesthetic or lyrics really drew me in. She was always the club girl who bragged about doing too many drugs — which is cool, but not my vibe.

I dissected Brat extensively when it came out in 2024, but in short, that album was the turnkey that finally unlocked Charli’s artistic merit for me. I suddenly understood how self-aware she was and how everything she was singing about was an illustration of insecurities, mimicries of criticisms, or imaginary dialogues with her inner demons. Moreover, her work with producer A.G. Cook helped me finally click with her auto-tuned voice and Drum & Bass approach to melodies in a way that her previous records sort of lacked with a throughline necessary for an old curmudgeon like me.

When she took Brat on tour in 2024, I was really hoping to catch Charli live again so I could finally connect the dots live that I hadn’t been able to for so long. Unfortunately, her surprise set at the Radius was impossible to get into, and both of her Allstate Arena shows were the same nights as Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds. Coachella 2025 (the final leg of the tour) wasn’t an option for us that year, and so I watched from home with visceral vicariousness, especially for older songs I had heard played live previously but hadn’t “figured out” how to interpret until now.

And then, by providence or sheer willpower (apologies to my liver), I managed to snag a ticket for her performance at Lollapalooza last Friday.

Firstly, a word about Charli XCX’s music in 2026.

Oddly, Charli never really rested after Brat’s monumental success throughout 2024 and 2025. She absolutely could’ve taken a deserved year or two off and let the dust settle before returning to the limelight, but instead, she released a faux documentary (a la This Is Spinal Tap) this past spring — The Moment — and started teasing grandiose collaborations with legends like John Cale, Martin Scorsese, Marc Jacobs, David Cronenberg, etc. etc. etc. while recording the soundtrack to the 2026 film version of Wuthering Heights.

Just a week prior to performance at Lollapalooza, Charli XCX released Music, Fashion, Film — a brand new 30 minute album comprised of 11 stripped down rock songs.

On its surface, Music, Fashion, Film is a minimalist, bordering on simple, record from an artist known for maximalism and audacity. Moreover, much like Charli’s earlier works, the lyrics are easy to misconstrue if one isn’t really aware of all of Charli’s backstory going into the piece. Her strange back-and-forth with Taylor Swift, her struggles with Brat’s measurable impact on the pop scene, her finally being accepted into the awards scene and building bridges with pop giants like Lorde and Billie Eilish, and most importantly — how much dudes on the internet fucking hate her.

“If you take away the music, then what has she got?”

I only got to listen to the new record once before the Lollapalooza performance, and while I did enjoy it, I didn’t have time to really ingest its meaning or hidden complexities. But even on face value, the album is an OBVIOUS counter-point to Brat. It’s an explicit middle finger to anyone who attacked Charli for being all-DJ-produced EDM wannabe, for not being able to ‘sing properly’ without autotune, for writing about nothing but drugs and clubs, and for not being a ‘real’ artist.

This set the stage (ha) for a fascinating sort of palpitation going into Lollapalooza Friday evening. An already cool and rainy day, folks were on-edge just hoping that Charli’s show would go on unabated by the dreary weather, especially after sub-headliner Lil Uzi Vert cancelled at the last minute, sending most of the stage’s scheduling off the rails.

But Charli XCX’s set did start promptly on time, and was quick to answer the question, “just how much of the new album is she going to play?”

The answer was: pretty much all of it.

Which is BALLSY for an artist who just dropped a whole new album a week prior — an album that, frankly, was a complete 180 from the one just two years prior that had made her a global superstar.

I surely couldn’t have been the only person in the crowd to have not seen Charli post-Brat, so her starting off the set (the very first of this tour) with 4 of the first 6 songs being from Music, Fashion, Film was a daring choice. One that I was personally vibing with, because I did quite enjoy the album the one time I had listened to it, but one that I wondered how the rest of the audience (almost definitely bigger Charli fans than I) would react.

They were ecstatic.

Part of that was probably a reaction to a headliner proceeding in spite of the weather, part of that is the drugs and alcohol coursing through one’s veins at a big dance party like this, and part of that was likely a reaction to the sheer awesome presence on stage.

Y’all have likely seen the footage already — a pyramid of cages stacked with strobe lights and topped by a single massive subwoofer that emits smoke. A powerful image on its own, and one that continued to prove more relevant to the subtextual narrative being woven by Charli as the set progressed.

Even if audiences didn’t know all the words to “Rock Music,” “Yeah,” “Card Declined,” or “Wink Wink” just yet, there was no arguing against how much power these new songs had in a live setting, with a full live band and Charli in an oversized leather jacket that was clearly a cheeky reference to dudes in rock bands who always seem too cool to move around much.

Charli — to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge — has never been one for choreography. Her previous shows had always been a very lively and free-spirited act of endless kinetic energy that felt chaotic, bordering on directionless.

In stark contrast, this show was may be the most well-produced and choreographed show I’ve watched since Lady Gaga at Coachella (both 2018 and 2025.) While not as vibrant and staged as Gaga’s shows, Charli’s specific movements, endless array of backup dancers, and VERY DELIBERATE camerawork was clearly made for television and film above being just a festival set. There was a full blown fashion runway down the catwalk that bisected the audience, and a twenty-piece dance party on the pyramid that hearkened back to Charli performance at the Grammy’s in 2024.

Moreover, the choreography was not literal dance moves meant to be easily interpreted. The choreography felt experimental; confrontational. Twenty or so women atop the pyramid, flailing about desperately in precise but dangerous swings that felt like every beat was teetering on the verge of catastrophe — especially in the rain. Almost as if they were designed to mimic Charli’s old way of spinning and screaming on stage when she was but a solo artist with a DJ performing at 3 P.M. on a side stage at a small, indie festival in Union Park…

Older songs like “Track 10” and “Pink Diamond” didn’t just send the audience into an uproar — especially when the latter was punctuated by a torrential downpour supernaturally timed for precisely the song’s runtime — but were also met with a controlled yet potent performance from Charli that felt like a version of her I hadn’t seen at previous festival sets. Still the unhinged party girl, but now something declarative; controlled and intentional. Like she was feigning the party aesthetics with sober eyes and a heavy heart, as if to say something harsher, darker, and more poignant about herself and they way we’ve been looking at her this whole time.

I really need to circle back to the camerawork here, because as jaw dropping as the stage production and choreography was, there’s just no denying that Charli’s personal camera crew performed some kind of black magic ritual to make an electronic-laden-popstar-turned-rock-musician performance at a music festival in the rain into a full blown cinematic experience. I’ve dared since compared it to Beyonce’s Homecoming performance, if not in scope and breadth, then at the very least in artistic intention, cinematography, lighting, and intense dynamics between Charli and her voyeurs.

Quick shoutout to the Lollapalooza livestream for being absolute garbage — I rewatched the show the following morning and was so disappointed to see that the festival had chosen to use their own stage crew’s footage, which was poorly angled, never aware of where Charli was on stage, not properly adjusted to the lighting, and hadn’t prepared for the weather. The feed was a choppy mess filled with random drone footage of the BACK of the stage where we could see nothing. The few times they did cut to Charli’s camera, they removed the visual effects we had seen on the LED screens in person that were being used for specific narrative structures (black and white filters for her old songs, chaotic zoom effects for moments of intense introspection…) Just an all-around clownshow from Lollapalooza that further proved why it will never be the Midwestern Coachella that it so often tries to be.

Rest assured, there was a whole thirty minute section of the fest devoted to all the hits from Brat, as well as several tracks from her Wuthering Heights soundtrack that, again, felt like something completely different from what I had seen on the streams during Coachella and other Brat-era performances the year or two prior. A Charli that wasn’t flaunting (sincerely or ironically) in the audience’s face, but now instead almost inviting people to rethinking everything she had done, from “Von Dutch” to “Girl, So Confusing” and beyond — as if we were watching Charli herself reflect back on her own work in real time. And it’s unclear if she likes what she sees.

And I think I’m reading so much into the nuances of a fucking music festival performance — a thing I’ve never really done for any of the Lollapalooza headliners I’ve seen before (and trust me, I’ve seen a LOT) — because it was the first headlining show I’ve seen in a while that felt like a genuinely special moment.

Billie Eilish, Kendrick Lamar, Dua Lipa, Lana Del Rey, SZA, and so many others from recent years have all been excellent, sure, but they were also rehearsed. These were all artists mid-tour with shows that had been planned to death and back, to the point that the artists and all the performers on stage had every footstep memorized. It’s great to witness; pure joy and revelry throughout, but those kinds of performances tend to lack a vulnerability and realness that one only gets from an unscripted live show that feels dangerous or chaotic — i.e. a “rock” show. (I’m using that word liberally. I don’t literally just mean old white dudes with guitars.)

And THAT is what Charli XCX’s performance was harping on so much on Friday.

Raw, dangerous, and something unexpected.

It’s the first show of the tour — she’s about to perform this same show 20+ times for countless other crowds across huge cities this year. I suspect if I ever go see this show again, I’ll feel less inspired because the show will feel more rehearsed and memorized (because it will be) and thus carry a lack of genuine emotion in the performances.

But to see the first show of its kind, the week after Charli released an album that — by design — completely skewered everything that had come before it, AND to watch her perform the WHOLE album to a crowd of screaming fans who probably went in expecting Brat 2.0 after an endless deluge of gray skies and downpours?

There was something about it that just felt more important than all the others. Save for maybe Miley Cyrus, who was the headliner on Thursday of 2021, effectively heralding the return to live music post-pandemic. Another treasured moment, albeit for an entirely different reason.

What probably drove the emotional resonance home was the finale.

Charli ended the set with the remaining tracks from the album (6 of the 7 last songs were from Music, Fashion, Film) and her band of live musicians returning to the pyramid while the dancers slowly incorporated themselves into parts of the stage.

Some folks did leave during this part, although not nearly as many as I would have expected. With the exception of “SS26”, which was a single prior to the album’s release, no one really knew the words to the rest of the show, yet we all remained planted in the dirt and watched with mouths ajar as Charli donned this sort of L7/Hole/Kim Gordon outfit and made clear the lyrics that had been reverberating through her mind ever since Brat become the cultural phenomenon we now know it to be.

We’re walkin’ on a runway that goes straight to hell.
Nothing’s gonna save us, not music, fashion or film.

These words — the lyrics to “SS26”, along with the profound finale where Charli and the dancers stood in a stoic, Renaissance-like pose for five minutes while a monologue from David Cronenberg echoes across the park — is where I think I finally made sense of what we were witnessing.

The world broke Charli XCX. Brat broke Charli XCX. Our love for it broke her previous understanding of the world — whatever that was.

Forever the party girl, she doesn’t dance or do lines anymore to feel. She does them to NOT feel, if she can even be bothered to do them at all anymore. If Brat was a self-referential reflection of her stature in the pop world, then Music, Fashion, Film is an even harsher reflection on how useless Brat felt in the wake of everything terrible that’s happened in the world since its release.

And while Charli was clearly overjoyed to work with the likes of Cronenberg, Scorsese, Cale, Jacobs, etc. — as would anybody — it’s evident that her takeaway from this creative venture is that no amount of #ART can save the world.

Brat Summer came and went, and Charli walked away still unsure of what it said about her, and clearly didn’t necessarily feel like it had made anything better on a grander scale.

Per the words of David Cronenberg that flashed over the LED screens while the camera slowly zoomed out from Charli and the dancers in frozen poses, bathed in black and white:

As I was lying there on the sidewalk, I did not think about art at all.

I thought about people, I thought about life.

That’s why I like being close to my house,

somehow that was comforting, even though it makes no sense, you know?

But, no, I wasn’t thinking about art.

And I wasn’t thinking about art as endurance as immortality, you know?

I mean, we can talk about immortal artists of various kinds,

And it can turn out that, yes, some artists have created art that has really survived thousands of years.

And that’s fantastic, but experientially, for them,

they are dead, they are gone, they are not experiencing that.

These are true things and thank goodness for them.

I really feel, and you hear me assuring you that,

oblivion is freedom.

They are dead, they are gone, no one lasts forever.

These words repeated over and over as the audience left in droves, and I stood there in the spot my friends and I had carved out an hour before Charli hit the stage, just staring at the screens with wide eyes.

For all the heavy metal and punk and rock n roll dudes I had seen on stage over the years babble on about death and destruction and resurrection in nebulous terms that never struck a nerve or made me think twice…Charli XCX had just openly said that this 80 minute spectacle had meant nothing. That it may hold some intrinsic value to the audience, or that it may mean something more in the distance future, but it is now, for her, done and over with. She will die and not feel any one way or the other about it.

To be presented with such earnest, unnerving nihilism giftwrapped in the form of pop music is something that is hard to describe with words (though fuck knows I’m trying!) and something that I’m still chewing on three days after the show.

To finally get to experience Brat live was otherworldly.

To be the first to experience Music, Fashion, Film live was transcendental.

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As previously noted, my big goal for early 2026 was to finish a new draft of my Midwestern gothic horror, The Sky Screams Tuesday, and pitch it to 3 agents at the Let’s Just Write! Conference here in Chicago back in June. While I did succeed at finishing the draft, cleaning it up, and pitching the manuscript to 3 agents, I’m currently sitting at 2 [polite] rejections thus far. I also ended up querying the manuscript to three other agents online who just happened to align with my project for this vision, but I’m not falling down the same rabbit hole with this work like I did The Sea of Rapture last year. If something good happens, you’ll hear about it. If you hear nothing, assume this novel died the same sad death as the last.

For maybe the first time in 20-some-odd years of writing, I don’t explicitly have my next project picked out just yet. I have a few lovely friends who have offered to read The Sky Screams Tuesday (hello out there!) and I’ll be more than happy to give it another go in the wake of their feedback, but until then, I desperately NEED to get my mind out of Weilog Bluffs and into a wholly new space that lets me build something from the ground up, and then destroy it unceremoniously.

Permit me, dear reader (I fucking hate novels written in that tone), to wax poetic about my current top prospects, and help me whittle the list down.

DEATH MARKET

Probably the idea I’m currently most attached to;

the story of a gay man and his husband crossing the border into Canada on a quest for revenge after a family annihilator takes away everything from them.

Told from the POV of the husband, it’s about the couple’s descent into unfettered wrath after one man seemingly loses his family, only to then discover his brother and two in-laws are precariously missing. The husband, who has a troubled past with dark sites on the internet, is able to track down the 3 missing men across Canada, revealing an insidious conspiracy involving infidelity, religious cults, generative AI, and death-market gambling sites.

This one being the most fresh, it still needs a proper outline before I actually start the first draft.

Suicidal Thoughts of Bisexual Bodybuilders

Obviously the most autobiographical thing imaginable…I wrote the first chapter to this one a year ago and then quickly abandoned it because the POV didn’t really make much sense in practice.

A story told over the course of multiple relationships a la Dennis Cooper, it’s about a bodybuilder who works as a personal trainer at a 24 hour gym. At nights, when the rest of the staff are gone, he hooks up with multiple people in the locker room, all the while feeling something primordial changing deep within him and threatening to boil to the surface.

With a Mouthful of Diamonds

An unabashed ripoff of William Gibson stories, it’s about the trashiest scam artist in a cyberpunk dystopian nightmare of a future who rips off the unsuspecting people of both the real world and the digital world, up until the day that he gets caught by a clever hacker who holds his digital avatar hostage until he agrees to become the trojan horse that will infect the world’s largest datacenter.

Self explanatory. Outline is virtually (ha) done. Needs a first draft.

Bloodbinder

More of a comic/graphic novel situation, but if I were to ever create a superhero, it would be a riff off the idea of bloodbending from Avatar: The Last Airbender.

On the day they try to commit suicide in the tub, a non-binary teenager is visited by a fabulous ancient demon who offers them the ability to ‘see’ into the history and sensations written inside someone’s blood. Over time, they learn to control and manipulate the blood of those around them, leading to both disastrous and miraculous consequences.

Needs an outline.

Into the Frying Pan

I fucking hate that title. I’ll think of a better one eventually.

Anywho, after auditioning for Next Level Chef last year, I got the idea to write a story about someone on a cooking show who is HOPELESSLY out of their depth.

The gist of this novel would be that the main character is constantly on the verge of being eliminated every episode, but manages to sabotage the dishes of his competitors — ultimately revealing that they’re using some kind of chaos magic to unleash pandemonium across the set.

Needs…a lot. It’s still in the “VAGUE CONCEPTS” folder.

Thunderclap Sonata

Witnessing a legendary feud between two huge rappers that reignites the hip-hop scene the world over, an aging rock band conspires with a batch of newcomers to fake an online beef in the hopes of mimicking the rappers’ success, only for the conflict to spill over into real life and get all too personal far too quickly.

Needs everything still.

City for the Ghoulish

Definitely just me working out my struggles with grief.

A woman who lost her son in a tragic accident struggles to make ends meet, despite the constant condolences from friends, family, and neighbors that bring no comfort. Written in the form of letters to her deceased child, it details the grotesque offers she receives from lawyers and corporations to try to ease her pain but ultimately only makes it worse.

Then the script flips and the second half of the novel are letters written by the son.

Needs an outline.

Deviants

I finished the first draft a year or two ago and was pretty happy with the final product, but ultimately got some solid feedback pointing out a few major flaws in the tone and pacing. I really wanna take another crack at this because it just felt so strong in my heart.

Part time truck driver, part time drag queen, Buddy Gustavson/Moxie Dawn is on a frivolous tour across the United States. But when a politically charged lunatic nearly ends their life, they’re forced to reconsider their priorities and ultimately choose to bring drag to the least suspecting towns across America in the hopes of changing minds.

Wrath Incarnate

I’ve bashed my head on so many tables trying to figure out the best approach to this. I’ve written more outlines than I can count. It really SHOULD be a found footage horror film, if I had the ability and resources to make such a thing…But as a novel, there’s something about the medium that’s holding this one back.

A high profile media journalist in New York is called back to their small hometown after the disappearance of a local teenager. What starts as a trivial series of interviews across town quickly descends into Lynchian terror as an unworldly truth erupts between the families that held the town together.

A Legacy of Thunder

I could probably knock this one out as a short story next month if I REALLY wanted to…

Long after humanity has wiped itself out, the next sentient species to dominate the planet begins excavation of an ancient crater. While they’ve crafted a perfect society of politeness and peace, one young creature is left feeling disturbed when a relic from beneath the crater starts emitting a strange frequency that only they can hear.

Tickled Pink

Y’all already read about this one. I just had to figure out a way to creatively exorcise my hatred for a particular federal agency that has wreaked havoc on the city I live in and love. I wrote the first half two separate times and then gave up both times because I couldn’t get around how depressed it made me.

Told from the perspective of a federal agent, it’s about the last days of the Occupation in Chicago, where the agency has been installed as a purging task force, designed to track, detain, and imprison all invasive ‘aliens’ deemed dangerous by the administration. But once the agent is captured by the radical Rainbow Coalition and injected with the toxic WMV serum, he starts to realize the agency itself might be the cause of all the turmoil.

Maw

I wrote this one back in 2019 and really need to reread it ASAP. It seems like it got a lot of love from the beta readers back then and probably feels even more palpable nowadays.

A man wakes up on an island and cannot remember his name or his past. He is a guest in a small house to a family of 4 who treat him like a servant. He learns to behave and he learns to helps, but knows something is wrong. Each time he’s severely injured, he’s placed on a mystical slab and is healed overnight, but remembers little about the day before. The cycle repeats over and over, all the while small fragments from his past lives slowly coalesce into a hideous tapestry of abuse, gaslighting, and manipulation that lead him to an inarguable, mortifying conclusion.

Sanctuary in the Silver Sleep

I want this novel to work. I want it to work so badly. It’s on par with The Sea of Rapture for the novel I think has the most “haha! look at what I managed to pull off!” chest-beating moment of pride upon completion.

Unfortunately, it’s way too long (close to 119,000 words) and almost certainly won’t be anyone’s cup of tea. It would need a full re-write and severe cuts.

After the second Civil War, the A.I. takeover, and severe climate catastrophes, America is in shambles. Big cities are under complete control of autonomous corporations and the rest has collapsed into post-apocalyptic bedlam.

One of the last human cab drivers is given orders by a powerful A.I. to deliver a special package from a warehouse in New York City to a mansion in San Diego, no questions asked. When the driver refuses, the A.I. abducts her and commandeers her taxi, forcing her to deliver the package against her will and with the A.I. now installed in her radio. What ensues is a cross-country fever dream of burning mountainsides, warring farmtowns, drowning deserts, and a series of primitive cults that threaten to tear the cab apart — all told through the combative arguments and philosophical musings of a bitter cab driver and a pragmatic A.I.

And then there’s the batch of novels that I considered done two, three, four times over, set in stone and never to be seen again.

All Available Platforms is my version of Network, as told by a Youtuber that becomes a sensation overnight and immediately discovers the true cost of online fandom. It feels even more prescient now but I have no idea how to revamp it into something that might attract eyes.

Dragonflies in Lavender works on such a campy, bloodbath-horror level, but I can admit it needs a totally new structure. We all love a vampire love story, but my version can’t seem to decide which vampires are good, which are bad, and what’s scary versus what’s sexy.

Evisceration could genuinely be such a shining star in my oeuvre if I would just figure out how to write like a literary genius and not a commercial airport-thriller author. (lol) Truly though, the idea of a cross-generational story set in a country of prison systems being overthrown by three key jailbreaks across an entire century has such potential, but I always seem to flub the prose.

And then there’s The Heretics of Hell series…My oldest love. My most fickle love. Every time I go back and read the first 4 novels I completed (I know, I know) I find myself so tickled by the complexity of the characters and the hookiness of the writing — and then annoyed at how convoluted the plot feels and how contrived some of the twists are. Maybe those are just the trappings of any good dark fantasy novel, but it feels like a real hindrance for this 6-parter that I’ll never go back and finish.

I thought writing these out would help me choose where to go next, but it actually just kinda gave me some insight in how to pitch any novel in 2 sentences of less — which is definitely useful!

When it comes to picking the next project, I think the heart wants what the heart wants, and I just need to go with what feels right. Yes, logically, Wrath Incarnate and With a Mouthful of Diamonds have been ready and waiting for YEARS, but I can’t deny the fact that DEATH MARKET is becoming more and more solidified in my mind with each passing day. I can practically write the entire first chapter in my head at this point.

And so it goes, I shall work on DEATH MARKET over the next few weeks and report back with the results.

The middling, meddlesome, mind-numbing results.

Same as it ever was!

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So let’s gab about Drag Race!

I don’t know if there is any season of RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars that hasn’t been met with excessive hatred, disappointment, and all around loathing — save for season 7 which featured eight winners of previous seasons and was generally treated as a fun celebration with no frills.

Fans hated All Stars 1 for its tag-team structure, they hated season 2 for Alaska beating Katya, season 3 for BenDelaCreme’s self-elimination, season 4 for ending in a tie, season 5 for there being so little competition, season 8 for Kandy and Alexis ruining everything, season 9 for being stake-less, and season 10 for the Ginger Minj Of It All.

I haven’t watched All Stars season 6 yet, don’t at me.

The deck was stacked against All Stars 11 before it started.

Despite it coming with a stellar cast of beloved repeat contestants, recent break out stars, long lost favorites, and surprising glow-ups, the internet fanbase (ugh) went into this season with the cynical eyebrow raised, ready to skewer production the minute anything went askew.

And without fail, certain things in each bracket certainly went askew, just as they did in All Stars 10. Morgan McMichaels got screwed out of advancing for no reason other than RuPaul said so, Silky magically backdoored her way into advancing with little more than a 15 second montage before the end of her bracket, and the Sam Star/Kennedy Davenport red carpet treatment bordered on feeling like another Ginger Minj situation.

BUT, each bracket did make a point to deliver on good competition and hot drama throughout — Dawn’s surprise trampling, A’keria’s mind-blowing lip-syncs, Vivacious’ confessionals, Selina’s meltdowns (and terrible politicking), Aura’s glow-up, and literally everything about Jasmine and Joey.

It felt like folks were generally okay with how the season was playing out. Despite some of the chicanery going on behind the scenes to get obvious production-picks like Silky, Kennedy, and Crystal to the merge, it felt like each bracket had managed to maintain some level of suspense, camp, and drama, and people were vibing with the top 6 7 8 that we ended up with.

And then real world beef drained the show of all its joy and tea in an instant…

For the uninitiated (lucky you), one of the two winners of the first bracket — A’keria C. Davenport — and one of the two winners of the second bracket — Silky Nutmeg Ganache — have some real bad blood between them in real life.

After weeks of sleuthing, the internet came to the conclusion that, factually, Silky had previously bought a house in Texas and let A’keria crash in her guest room for a few months while A’keria got her life together. A’keria had little to her name, but allegedly brought with her a TV and a sewing machine. When Silky eventually grew tired of having a roommate and asked A’keria to move out, A’keria agreed but took a long time to make it happen, and in the meantime failed to take all her items with her i.e. the tv and sewing machine. A year later, A’keria claimed that Silky actually ‘stole’ the tv and sewing machine, and filed a lawsuit against Silky for petty theft. Silky showed up for court with receipts, A’keria didn’t show up at all, and the girls haven’t spoken since. The end.

None of this is covered in the canon of All Stars 11.

Fans who go back and watch this season in the future are going to be LOST when it comes to why these two queens will not look each other in the eye or speak to one another for the last 3 episodes of the season. They just repeatedly mention “she knows what she did” on camera and then tell the other girls not to worry about it.

And it makes the entire 3-episode span of the merge FUCKING MISERABLE.

The tension between the two of them is palpable from the minute they walk into the werkroom and never leaves during the challenges, runways, or untucked. It’s made worse by the fact that they always sit on the opposite ends of the room from each other, meaning the other 6 girls are forced to dwell within the mucky, passive-aggressive atmosphere they’ve created.

Dawn and Jasmine both mention it several times, trying to make some good drama for the cameras at the very least, and maybe getting the two of them to talk/fight it out at best. But nothing comes of it. Both A’keria and Silky try to play the smug “high road” card by not explaining themselves to anyone while simultaneously making everyone (including the audience) incredibly uncomfortable.

The tension carries over into every single storyline, so much so that absolutely nothing about the merge lands emotionally.

Kennedy and Sam’s eliminations, Crystal’s double win, Joey’s top tier performances, Jasmine’s tantrums, and Dawn’s commentary are all repeatedly muted and/or distracted from by the awkward situation A’keria and Silky have put everyone in.

Dawn does the correct thing and tries to utilize the Rate-A-Queen mechanism to FORCE A’keria and Silky into the bottom 2 so they have to duke it out on the main stage. It doesn’t even matter which one of them loses, as long as SOMEONE goes home and this stupid drama ends. Jasmine even has fun exposing Dawn’s conspiracy after the fact, because she understands THAT’S HOW GOOD TV DRAMA WORKS.

But no. We don’t get such a payoff between A’keria and Silky. Somehow (dunno if the girls actually wanted to save Silky or if production nudged them) A’keria gets put in the bottom twice, but Silky never does, so we have to watch A’keria pout her way through 2 great lip-syncs to the finale while Silky basically disappears, presumably because she doesn’t want to talk much while the A’keria drama is still festering.

“Surely production is using the lip-sync smackdown finale format to force A’keria and Silky to fight it out on the grandest stage of them all!” we all thought.

Nope.

They’re both lambs to the slaughter that is Joey Jay’s meteoric rise. Which is great, to be clear, but again feels a little bittersweet, because in both cases it meant that Joey became the bitch that ruined a ‘good’ feud.

How production managed to never pull the trigger on Silky vs A’keria is beyond me, unless it was done intentionally because everyone was just THAT afraid of what would happen if those girls went at each other’s throats on television.

Ultimately, everything in the merge just falls flat. Kennedy’s elimination should’ve been on the Plane Jane level of shock, but barely registered. Crystal’s domination should’ve been a point of contention with the girls backstage, but never gets explored. Joey should’ve been treated as the second coming, but gets weighted down. Jasmine being the master manipulator of the season deserved recognition, but wasn’t really discussed.

All because every single moment of those last 3 episodes revolves around the girls trying to figure out what the hell happened between A’keria and Silky, and never getting a real answer.

It really reminds me why ‘reality tv’ is such a fickle thing.

It wants the glory of fictional storytelling — of setups and payoffs and arcs and character development — while also retaining the gritty drama of the real world — bad blood and unresolved conflict and extreme personalities.

But instead, All Stars 11 just reminded me that those two genres are so often completely incompatible. At some point, the contestants have to either agree to go full-kayfabe and ham it up for the cameras, or play everything very serious and put their beefs aside entirely for the sake of competition.

A’keria and Silky made it abundantly clear that they weren’t budging on the drama. They both seem to genuinely hate each other (even now, a year after filming) and have no desire to resolve their issues. That’s fine, but then production should’ve made the choice to either not highlight the beef at all, or force one of them out of the competition sooner (it wouldn’t be the first time they’ve punished a contestant for not giving good tv.)

Instead, probably because both queens are so beloved by the fans, RuPaul and the crew decided to let both A’keria and Silky overstay their welcome and never deliver on the drama, simultaneously diluting Kennedy and Sam’s eliminations AND dominating every interaction between Dawn, Crystal, Joey, and Jasmine.

And thus relegating this season of All Stars to being yet another notch on the belt — just another thing for the fanbase to ravenously despise.

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“Didn’t we collectively agree that this is a garbage person and we were all gonna stop supporting them?”

I’m not only talking about the monsters who were called out during the Me Too and Speaking Out movements of the late 2010s, but even the bastards from before and after, who were repeatedly reported and caught committing horrendous acts of abuse, across the globe and through every social echelon.

And yet, in 2026, now more than ever, it’s like everyone received a memo that we’re all just going to let bygones be bygones and ignore the past transgressions of abhorrent people.

This whole spiral I’ve been tumbling down was spurred on by the return of someone who I had been repeatedly told for the last two years was effectively dead in the public eye — Drake.

Up until a month or two ago, the only input anyone had in regards to Drake from the last two years was how brutally he was massacred by Kendrick Lamar in the infamous feud…The idea being that Drake had effectively been outed as a pedophile by the music industry and was effectively a social pariah.

He was buried, for all intents and purposes. The popular narrative was that the man had been so thoroughly and publicly humiliated (to such an extent that people were shouting it at the fucking Superbowl) that he’d never come back.

Now, there were plenty of us who knew better. I can absolutely go dig up old posts of mine that explicitly said, “Just wait. Whenever he comes back with new music, he’ll announce a tour and sell out Soldier Field in a week and just act like the feud never happened.” I didn’t WANT this to be true, but my most cynical instincts felt pretty certain about how things would eventually pan out.

And lo and behold, here we are.

Drake hath returned, with not just one album, but THREE. Several songs are already at the top of the charts. Every thing he says and does is repeatedly reshared and rehashed on TikTok. Folks are BEGGINING for him to announce a tour.

So, in the immortal words of Greg Davies, “what have we learned today?”

In short, we’ve learned that most people don’t actually give a shit about “protecting children” or “seeking justice against abusers” or properly “calling people out”.

Everything is performative. Same as it ever was.

Drake’s catastrophic collapse into societal hell and his obnoxious rebirth through the piss-laden ashes isn’t even unique. It’s just the highest-profile example as of late. A regrettable yet inevitable outcome of a culture that gave up on criticizing those in power sometime in the last ten years, once it was decided that criticism never actually achieved anything substantial.

As always, shit rolls downhill. So if we are to look up and see where this garbage behavior comes from, it’s no surprise that we find the most powerful person in world, once again, as one of the prime culprits in breaking the spirits of billions of people.

Who else has [allegedly] been known to prey upon, victimize, harass, abuse, and harm women and children? Who else has a myriad of provable connections to the single darkest, seediest organization of systematic traffickers and abusers in the modern era?

And who else has essentially been given a “get out of jail free” card by both his voters and the branches of government designed to check and balance his powers?

If the single worst person imaginable is allowed to reshape the world in his image without so much as the slightest criticism, then it stands to reason that all those of his same ilk can continue to profit and thrive in that same society which chooses to give up on said criticism.

artwork by Mute Neighbor

Less than a year ago, we heard all about how many powerful people were on THE LIST.

Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking and Jay-Z and Noam Chomsky…

There was a supposed keg of dynamite beneath our feet and a tinderbox in our hands. The world promised immense repercussions for those who were found to be in cahoots with Epstein and the like.

And now, just one war with Iran and one hilarious flub with the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool later…

Y’all seemingly moved on.

I see the memes on reddit occasionally, sure. The “woah that’s crazy, but you know what’s crazier?” catty responses, as if that’s all it takes to keep people invigorated.

But nothing sticks. Nothing that gets covered in the media or talked about in any wide, meaningful capacity. Hell, all it took was for the administration to hire the president's personal lawyer as the Attorney General to effectively kill the whole LIST story, by simply saying “no, we’re never releasing it. Bye.”

Anyone who actually cared should’ve taken to the streets and demanded the AG’s resignation (putting it mildly), but instead, it barely even made a blip in the news cycle against the constant manufactured controversies around gas prices and data centers.

And now it feels like everyone who was tied to Epstein will be permitted to trot away into the sunset once again.

It’s a never-ending deluge of putridness.

P. Diddy and Ghislaine Maxwell are expected to receive presidential pardons.

People are genuinely hoping for Kevin Spacey to make a return to mainstream Hollywood films.

Marilyn Manson is still putting out new music and touring, with relatively positive reception. Pentagram was thrusted into stardom because of a stupid fucking meme and Bobby Liebling’s crimes are now essentially erased.

Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, and Larry Ellison still have a vice-like grip on the western economy, despite their clear connections to predators like Epstein AND white nationalists networks.

Kanye West is gearing up for a huge comeback tour with an endless army of fans claiming he’s definitely cool again.

The Michael Jackson biopic made a zillion dollars at the box office and is already quickly re-writing history for those young enough to not know any better.

Armie Hammer is making movies again (audience reception TBD).

Hell, we all agreed that J.K. Rowling should be jettisoned into outer space a decade ago, yet how many people are gonna watch that stupid HBO series remake of Harry Potter because they just CAN’T put their nostalgia-boner away for ten minutes?

artwork by Sick of Realism

At this point, nothing can shock me. Only disappoint.

I fully expect both Harvey Weinstein and Roman Polanski to attend the Oscars in the coming years. Bill Cosby will make a comeback and Lostprophets will reunite.

Sure, on paper those all sound like bad jokes. But again, I implore you to look back at who was “gone for good” just 2, 5, 10, or even 20 years ago, and look where they are now.

And how many of them actually put in any effort towards progressing as human beings? Who actually repented or went to therapy or publicly atoned? Who, if any of them, seem to regret their past actions and are trying their hardest to do better?

By my measure, none of them.

Meaning it falls onto the shoulders of the general public to hold these people accountable. When the criminal justice system fails and the media ecosystem is compromised, it must land with the People to decide what sins do and don’t matter to us as a community.

And the biggest, harshest lesson as of late is that we truly, simply, plainly do NOT care about stopping abusers.

We do not care about protecting others from the hideous, predatory actions of men in positions of power.

We only care about “dunk tweet” culture and ratios.

We only care about saying that these are awful people when it’s opportune and trendy.

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Waxing poetic about All Elite Wrestling feels almost cliche at this point, to such an extent that I now feel like we’re back in the “praising AEW is so obnoxious” territory. Which is a bit dumb in an industry where it was hard to find good stories on TV for so long, but hey, internet fanbases are nothing if not fickle as hell.

I don’t recall being very invested in the storytelling side of professional wrestling on television for a very long time. Going all the way back to my childhood, you’d have to reference Eddie Guerrero or Chris Benoit’s title wins to really get much of an emotional reaction out of me. Most of my WWE and TNA watching experience in the 2010s was "well, I love professional wrestling, so I’ll take what I can get.” Sometimes you had moments like AJ Styles, Kevin Owens, and Shinsuke Nakamura holding titles simultaneously, and that was exciting for a brief period, but always came with it the cynical notion that we all knew those title reigns would be short-lived. (See also last week when WWE finally had the gumption to give Sami Zayn the belt…10 years too late and another run that I imagine won’t last more than a month.)

And then I moved to Chicago, discovered independent wrestling promotions, and everything on television just felt kinda dead on arrival.

As has been discussed ad nauseum, AEW has been a breath of fresh air for folks who love professional wrestling — not sports entertainment.

Not to be a pedantic asshat (although if you’ve been reading my work for long enough, you already know…) but what WWE and even TNA have been offering for nearly 20 years now has been more ‘sports entertainment’ i.e. larger than life characters who speak in melodramatic terms and spend more time mugging for the camera than actually fighting in the ring. There’s a reason people love that, and I have no interest in taking that away from them.

But I just prefer more action in the ring and storytelling told through physicality rather than someone yelling at the camera.

And, despite the naysayers, AEW has continued to deliver that in spades.

I thiiiiiiiiiiiink a lot of the ire that AEW draws in relation to its storytelling is that AEW isn’t beholden to relying solely on their pay-per-views for starting/ending narratives. AEW’s writing is both open-ended — a feud can start, stop, restart, and reach a conclusion anywhere between Wednesday night Dynamites, Saturday night Collisions, and any of the pay-per-views — while also often times keeping their stories self-contained to a single match.

This is a convoluted way of saying that if two opposing forces meet in the ring (Swerve Strickland and Will Ospreay, for instance) the match itself will reach a proper conclusion where one man is the victor, and that will conclude that arc of the story and the two men will likely not go head-to-head with one another for a while, BUT given the two men’s repeated encounters over the years and conflicting interests in the main event, this match will almost certainly be baked into any upcoming confrontations between the two. The writing is both evolving and changing with the match results AND making definitive decisions about characters’ fates, which I think is something that people who are used to the never-ending-blood-feud-same-guys-in-the-same-52-matches-a-year style of WWE might find irksome.

If you’re not watching Dynamite, Collision, and the PPVs consistently, it might feel like the storytelling is disjointed or even random. Ospreay can go from revisiting his feud with Swerve to then reigniting his feud with Kenny Omega to then moving on to MJF, all while still keeping an arms’ length relationship with Jon Moxley after their encounter last year.

You have to be able to juggle a few different thoughts in your head at once to follow what’s going on in most professional wrestling — and I say that with no contempt. I mean it sincerely. If you go to an indie show, you can follow the simple and immediate story being told in the ring, but ask a frequent attendee, and they’ll tell you the two people in the ring have actually fought four times before, and they each have separate beefs with several other people on the roster and what’s happening in the ring has repercussions for those past and future conflicts. I’ve always loved that AEW holds true to that same ethos, and doesn’t just erase last year’s events the minute the big PPV is over.

While the commentators in AEW have only made passing references thus far, the knowledge of the men’s heavyweight title history makes the current narrative infinitely more dramatic compelling.

Not only did we recently have two of the best talents in the men’s division — Swerve Strickland and Will Ospreay — recently go head to head to earn a shot at the title at All In in Wembley Stadium in August, but we also got to see the payoff to a situation that was setup over a year ago. Frequent watchers will remember that Swerve and Will were two integral factors at All In 2025 as part of the ‘Avengers’ style backup Hangman Adam Page received in his fight against Jon Moxley and the Death Riders. Moreover, in the absolute banger of a match Swerve and Will put on last Sunday, they each performed several of Hangman’s signature moves, clearly trying to hint to the audience that this is all still interwoven together and that the writers/producers didn’t just magically forget about Hangman in his absence. This can be said for everyone who was tied into the main event story last year and is now being woven back in this year, i.e. Kenny Omega, the Conglomeration, etc.

Moxley’s own involvement with Ospreay’s rehabilitation storyline in 2026 is itself a callback to his villainous reign as champion last year, as he now aims to turn a beloved babyface to the dark side in hopes of living vicariously through his protege. (And let’s be real, if Ospreay wins the belt at All In, the first thing that’s gonna happen is Mox will betray him and claim the belt as his own for putting in all the work as a trainer to ‘remake’ Ospreay.)

Story by story, title by title, AEW is taking great care to ensure that, despite appearances at first glance, the episodes and the PPVs are actually VERY story-driven and emotionally resonant. More so than any of the other major televised wrestling products, to my liking.

Even with the plethora of injuries and issues they’ve had with their absurdly deep roster, there’s nary a moment where one character’s exit and another’s re-emergence isn’t used as a story beat to capitalize on a previous event or bridge us towards something new. Jay White’s return on Sunday, for instance, was brilliantly used as a way to reignite his battle with David Finlay in New Japan Pro Wrestling that ended with Jay bloodied and unconscious.

If this is what ‘indie shit’ is, then it’s all the more reason why I love it and not so much overproduced sports entertainment reality TV style product that has dominated the industry for decades.

The idea of backstage promos and interviews being a small percentage of the show, and everything else taking place live in the ring is, to me, what is so enjoyable about professional wrestling as an artform. From that point on, it’s up to the wrestlers (well, and the producers) to decide what gets referenced and what narratives will be picked up and what will be forgotten. Knowing that AEW is constantly revering the works of the past, be it WWE, WCW, ECW, as well as TNA and endless indie promotions, while also never forgetting their own past stories of the last 5 years makes them feel all the more inclusive and celebratory of the artform, rather than treating it as a means to a financial end.

Thus far, it really feels to me, more and more with each and every passing week, that AEW is not really willing to blindly forget much of any story*. There are people who aren’t on TV much anymore and consequently don’t get references as often as they should, but that doesn’t suggest the same kind of “fuck it all” attitude that critics tend to level against AEW.

*Even with more toxic relationships that ultimately imploded like Cody Rhodes and CM Punk, AEW hasn’t tried to fully erase their stories from the history books. If anything, they just don’t bother to mention them unless it’s integral to the current narrative.

It suggests that a) AEW assumes the audience is both literate and paying attention (a high bar in 2026, I know) and b) AEW matches can operate both as contained stories on their own merits AND as components to a larger piece of constantly changing and evolving storytelling without needing to stop the show and insecurely explain itself.

It’s worth reiterating that there is no BAD way to enjoy professional wrestling — it is, by definition, a circus-like spoof of combat sports, intentionally designed to illicit emotional reactions from fixed narratives, scripted endings, and sleight-of-hand action that maximizes visual violence while minimizing physical injury.

It’s obviously folly to try to argue which circus act writes the best literary novel over the course of their 10, 20, 30+ year run.

All that really matters is what resonates most with you as a viewer and what brings you the most amount of joy on a weekly basis. For my personal liking, I want more in-ring storytelling and the assumption that I can figure out what stories are being interwoven and referenced on my own without a million vignettes backstage trying to spoon-feed me the information.

Others online clearly feel very differently, to such an extent that I felt the need to write a dorky-ass response on here. And even re-reading this post now, I kinda wish I hadn’t entertained the trolls.

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As I mentioned on Friday, I spent all of this past Saturday at the Steppenwolf Theater in Lincoln Park to attend the annual Let’s Just Write! conference, hosted by the Chicago Writers Association.

Being my first time at any writing conference, I went in with no real expectations, save for the fact that I wanted to meet a few literary agents so I could pitch the latest draft of my Queer-Gothic-Horror, The Sky Screams Tuesday, as well as get to know as many fellow writers as possible. The conference also offered a good number of speakers from the writing, editing, publishing, and marketing worlds that I fully intended to engage with and learn something from.

But therein lies the rub; when one is preparing to pitch one’s manuscript to an agent in the middle of a conference, you tend to get so worked up about the pitch and spend so much time on preparation, you kind of miss out on anything else that happens.

So I got to the conference early with the specific goal of meeting folks and earnestly giving the key speakers my undivided attention, but ultimately found myself flooded with anxiety as the morning carried on and I kept re-writing my pitch over and over, trying to figure out exactly what specific combination of words over the course of 5 minutes would give me any shot in hell of catching these agents’ ears.

And when it came time for me to pitch my first agent, the whole thing whizzed by in a blur.

I didn’t follow anything I wrote down — as is tradition. I never follow my notes when I give a presentation at work or interview for a job, either. I have the key points memorized, and then I just…talk.

So I pitched the first 2 agents — both of whom had specifically requested horror novels, and gothic horror at that, on their Manuscript Wishlist Pages. Both times, my nerves caused my brain to short-circuit on a few occasions, but I otherwise got through the pitch smoothly and was able to answer any questions they had.

And just like that, five minutes had passed. In both pitches, we ran out of time before I even knew what had happened, and in both cases…

The agents asked for my first 25 pages!

Genuine elation.

Of course the cynic in me couldn’t help but think, “I bet they ask EVERYONE for sample pages,” but from what I gathered in subsequent conversations with other writers at the conference, that wasn’t necessarily the case. It really seemed like both agents had a genuine interest in myself as a writer and the story that I was offering.

I was so tickled that I, again, failed to pay much attention to the speakers for the rest of the afternoon, even after I returned to the main hall.

Deciding to push my luck (and take advantage of situation I had put myself in), I actually looked up the third agent — who didn’t have horror on her MSWL — and saw that she was a fan of Stephen King, and figured I’d shoot my shot on a last minute impromptu pitch with her.

Not only did she love my premise, but she asked for the FULL manuscript (!) AND we ended up talking for another ten minutes after our session ended. She was THAT enthralled by my pitch!

So now I have the added pressure this week of trying to make sure the manuscript is as tight as it can be, while also fixing up a LOT of minor issues I’ve been putting off for a while (poor choices in character names, the order of chapters to ensure good pacing, removing ‘stage direction’ narration…)

But I’m trying not to let the joyous feelings of Saturday vanish so easily. Finally, after 20 years of reading in solitude, being given a chance to meet with agents face to face and getting even just a small amount of validation is genuinely invigorating.

Moreover, while I did miss out on some of the major points delivered by the key speakers in the main hall, I did get a chance to properly network with a dozen or so writers, editors, and staff members.

It was initially worrisome to see how well-attended the conference was, if only because I wasn’t sure if I was the only one there who was unpublished and begging for a morsel of attention from the agents, but the worry was almost immediately washed away as I started mingling with the folks sitting near me and realized we were ALL in the same boat. I’d wager almost all of the one hundred or so attendees were unpublished authors, attending to both learn and network, but, most importantly, to pitch their novels.

The shared anxiety brought us all together, such that anytime anyone from our group stepped away to go get ready for their pitches, the rest of us wished them well and waited with baited breath for their return, hoping for good news. This, combined with a much-needed cocktail hour after the conference wrapped, helped us all find a beautiful sense of stressed-based comradery that I never knew existed in the literary world, simply because I had spent SO much time on my own, at my computer, only ever sharing my experiences with a screen.

TL;DR I finally gave my first face-to-face pitch ever to 3 literary agents, and all 3 asked for sample pages. One of whom specifically got VERY excited and asked for the full manuscript. I met a ton of great people who were all fascinatingly talented writers, and did pick up a thing or two from the key speakers.

All in all, just a pretty cool day that I need to remember to cherish and appreciate before I let the stress of re-writes take over my brain again.

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I’m attending the Let’s Just Write conference hosted by the Chicago Writers Association tomorrow morning — my first in-person writers conference for authors, agents, editors, and publishers to mingle and possibly establish working relationships.

I’d be lying if I wasn’t OVERLY nervous about this. I can go through a thousand job interviews with ease before I ever think about trying to sell myself to a literary agent face to face. I can sell myself as a engineer or project manager or what have you, but trying to make anyone believe I’m a good writer after 20 years of failure is…petrifying.

I’ve started working on reprogramming my brain to go into tomorrow with the simple adage of ‘just have fun.’

Because if I go into this conference with the mentality that I HAVE to connect with an agent in order to make this whole thing worthwhile, I’ll inevitably find a way to come out disappointed and feeling even more cynical about the literary industry than I already do.

I’m going to pitch my Midwestern Gothic Horror/Mystery based on my hometown, formerly The First Tuesday of the Month, now retitled The Sky Screams Tuesday.

I just completed a full re-write of the manuscript two weeks ago, and I completed my editing session this evening. I do genuinely think the new draft is a billion times scarier, funnier, more engaging, better paced, and less convoluted than the last few. Will it be enough to make a literary agent give a shit? Possibly not, but the 2% chance gives me more hope than the myriad query letters I’ve sent in the last decade or two that had less than 1% chance.

The hardest part when it comes to pitching my novels (verbally or in a written query letter) is how the hell to market it.

I can usually manage a quick summary or synopsis, but I can NEVER EVER figure out what recent success stories in literature are comparable to the story I’m trying to sell.

Thankfully, small-towns-haunted-by-the-sins-of-their-past is a WAY more conventional trope in the modern world of both literature and film than cyberpunk-dystopia-drug-addled-fever-dream-about-the-afterlife.

So I was going into this conference planning to pitch The Sky Screams Tuesday as part David Sodergren’s The Haar (claustrophobic, atmospheric), part Grady Hendrix’s How to Sell a Haunted House (campy, emotional), and part Carson Faust’s If the Dead Belong Here (exploring grief and trauma with social commentary),

And I’ll still plan to mention those novels in my pitch.

But then, serendipitously, just a few weeks ago, the new AppleTV+ series Widow’s Bay fell into my lap…

Widow’s Bay is an absolute delight for horror fanatics, comedy enthusiasts, and anyone who generally likes a compelling story of oddball characters trapped in impossible situations.

It’s a multi-POV story about a small island off the New England coast, whose mayor desperately wants to bring in tourists and join modern civilization, but is clearly met with heavy resistance from his local constituents who insist the island has been, and will always be, incredibly cursed.

Each episode is its own contained little slice of horror, be it gothic or Lovecraftian or slasher or hallucinatory, but it’s also a very rewarding long form narrative about families, hidden secrets, and people struggling with their steadfast beliefs in the wake of terrifying truths.

AND MY GOD DID IT HIT CLOSE TO HOME.

Both the pilot episode and the season finale, at times, are wildly similar to the opening and closing of my own novel. So much so that I had a minor panic attack watching them — convinced every reader would just assume I ripped this show off or that I used AI and the AI was just jamming whatever’s currently popular into the manuscript.

Thankfully, the rest of the Widow’s Bay plots (of which there are many) didn’t really have much of anything to do with The Sky Screams Tuesday, and I was able to just remain in awe and inspired, without worrying about too many similarities.

And now it actually feels like an incredibly powerful asset for me, to go into this conference tomorrow — where I am certain countless attendees will be raving about the tremendous season finale of Widow’s Bay and how much everyone enjoys the writing on the show.

I was trying to figure how to include some catchy taglines into my pitch, i.e. “it’s like Salem’s Lot if they had thought to call Hercule Poirot”, or “it’s Theo of Golden as told by Stephen King”.

And those may still work…but now I can just walk in tomorrow and simply say,

“It’s the Midwestern Widow’s Bay!”

And hopefully that will land.

Maybe.

Probably not. But I have to try it at least, don’t I?

Were it not 10 PM on a Friday, I would dive further into the fascinating topic of parallel stories and WHY this novel that I originally wrote over 5 years ago feels so timely in 2026, and why stories like Widow’s Bay are suddenly catching people’s eyes.

Something about how upset we are with older generations? How we’re constantly learning about those who came before us, and it’s always something terrible? How those of us who grew up in small, rural areas carry this strange, inexplicable sense of guilt and shame with us everywhere we go?

There’s a lot to unpack and I haven’t the time nor the energy.

All this to say, I’m excited for the Let’s Just Write Conference tomorrow, regardless of what happens.

And I’m very excited to go back and rewatch Widow’s Bay as soon as possible.

Cheers.

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It’s the basis for all things that differentiate us — not just our experiences and interpretations of those experiences, but they way we imprint them into our mind, and in what way we recall them as we get older. Inevitably, as we get older, every last memory we ever held precious (or kept at bay) tends to morph; edges get duller or structures crumble or colors fade. Something about the memory just doesn’t resonate the way it once did. Memories become these dull, numbing, empty data points that connect us from moment to moment in our lives, often times failing to retain their original meanings after enough time has passed.

There’s genuine terror in this admission, as we all want to believe that OUR memories are perfect. Everyone else is misremembering or misinterpreting something. There’s no way the past that’s imprinted in OUR minds could be distorted or dissolving at the same (or sometimes worse) rate than others.

And that potential decay of memory is such a potent focal point of paranoia in the modern era…

Backrooms is a psychological horror (light sci-fi) film by debut director Kane Parsons — the mastermind behind the Youtube series of the same name.

I enjoyed the Youtube series well enough. I’m not very engrained in GenZ creepypasta culture, and I’ve still never visited 4chan and never intend to, but I was just versed enough in internet lore to understand the gist of the backrooms saga and why it had become so popular.

The idea of ‘no clipping’ through reality into an empty space (a la the architect’s hallway in The Matrix Reloaded) that is polluted by artifacts from the real world; primarily furniture, roadway memorabilia, and useless signage, is something that inherently feels alluring. Simple and evocative, yet disturbing in a way that can’t be expressed so much as felt — both claustrophobic and agoraphobic simultaneously.

Liminal, as we say.

The Youtube series is entertaining, even scary at times, although I wouldn’t call it a great story. Over however many episodes Parsons created via Blender during the pandemic, there’s only a hint of a narrative bridging the videos together, and no real emotional stakes or guiding characters. It’s primarily clips of science experiments across the pantheon of the backrooms, establishing its rules and geography without delving too far into what’s actually happening.

The 2026 film, on the other hand, is RIFE with characterizations, emotional complexities, thematic resonance, and Lynchian, obtuse commentary.

Backrooms is essentially about a man. Down on his luck after a divorce leaves him homeless, Clarks sleeps in a discounted bed at his own vintage furniture store. Left to his own devices (alcohol) and plagued by a thousand ‘what ifs’ that inherently come with the trope of adult men down on their luck, he sees a therapists who insists that he stop blockading the toxic memories of his ex that now hold him back from finding happiness in his day to day life as a would-be architect. She suggests he needs to “look elsewhere” or “take a turn” down a different path.

On the nose, but apropos nevertheless.

Indeed, shortly thereafter, Clark explores the basement of the furniture store to find a spot in the wall that doesn’t actually exist — he moves through the wall like empty space, revealing an endless barrage of off-putting-yellow corridors and rooms plagued by the very furniture that occupies his own store and which never sells.

Much of the second act of the film is just Clark exploring the backrooms, revealing more and more unsettling rooms of geometric impossibilities and gravity-defying designs that confound the mind and hurt the eyes. When Clark tries to explain the backrooms to his therapist, he doesn’t wait for her response before convincing himself she won’t believe him. He returns to the backrooms, this time with a camera crew, ready to document his findings…And of course, things goes terribly, terribly, wrong.

Equal measures House of Leaves, The Shining, and the Minotaur Labyrinth from Greek mythology, Backrooms can be distilled down as a case study of a man’s weakened state of mind, unreliable memory, and yearning for a system of control.

It’s about Clark’s plea for a happiness that he thinks he remembers vividly, yet can never quite seem to manifest when it’s time to feel or emote. It’s about a man’s completely futile resistance to entropy, decay, and the laws of a universe which he can never fully grasp.

Backrooms is an incredibly smart film, in that it does NOT commit to any single message or theme or explanation.

In fact, [mild spoilers] the final scene of the movie is designed specifically to make sure the audience DOESN’T have a specific answer as to what the backrooms are, why they’re here, and who made them. The existence of this realm at all is meant to confound one’s understanding and upend expectations of how things are, but never offer reason or rationality.

The literal changes in direction that Clark makes in lieu of his discovery of the backrooms aren’t actual pivots towards new understandings. Much is made throughout the film about ‘loops’ and returning back to where he started. The idea that, no matter how much time he spends in the backrooms and no matter how deep he explores, he’ll never really find anything new. It’s just him — for better or worse — in all his grotesque iterations. There is no meaning, no revelation, and no change for the better.

In fact, the longer Clark stays in the backrooms, the clearer it becomes that EVERYTHING within those walls is in a state of decay. The furniture from his store is melding together, sinking deeper into the floor. The signs on the wall are disappearing or becoming illegible. There’s something living within the confines of the walls, but it’s amorphous, indiscernible, and inherently malevolent.

Spoiler territory again; but near the end, Clark himself clearly becomes entangled with the backrooms as part of his identity, letting his own entity slip into the fabric of this place, and becoming something distorted, albeit faintly recognizable. The worst parts of himself, dulled and desaturated, while what few edges he had left seem to be gnawed away.

Imprinted now, Clark himself is nothing more than a memory he can barely recall; a version of himself that doesn’t resonate with the version he told us he was at the beginning of the story.

Visually, the film pulls off an incredibly trick in establishing not only a clear aesthetic for the backrooms (mimicking the Youtube series and the 4chan lore before that), but also for the ‘real world.’ Virtually every shot outside the backrooms is static, lifeless, and off-putting, in a way that suggests nothing is ever actually ‘real’, and that even the ‘real’ world itself can be seen as a sort of backrooms.

Because the backrooms are nothing more than a thing we each remember, vaguely. Everything we say or do or feel is inherently a memory, by the definition of what a memory is and how time elapses. Meaning that the real world Clark leaves behind — the furniture store, the therapist’s office, the parking lot — are all just as foreign to him by the end as the backrooms were in the beginning.

The score to Backrooms is just as unsettling as the images, using dreary droning sounds and ambient synth melodies to create a disarming sensation of calm mixed with foreboding dread — like an empty store lit by hard fluorescents bulbs that hum endlessly.

Composed by the director and his collaborator Edo Van Breemen, it’s both referencing and literally pulling from a very specific album from the Bandcamp world, and one with a series of album covers that might feel familiar to those who have seen Backrooms…

Everywhere at the End of Time is an ambient album by an artist known as The Caretaker. Originally uploaded to Bandcamp in 2016, it’s a concept album that mimics the stages of dementia/Alzheimer’s through sonic soundscapes. It utilizes repetition, degradation of motifs, and unsettling, dissonant noise to insert the listener into the theoretical headspace of someone suffering from significant memory loss and distortion.

It’s a haunting, almost painful piece to engage with for a long period of time. The later tracks run over 20 minutes each, meaning to fully experience the album would take several hours, and in those hours, not unlike William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loops, you’re invited to let your mind crumble. By design, the album is this alluring, static piece of timeless sounds that simply resonates endlessly, and lets you, the listener, dictate how to interpret and feel each turn the album takes.

But the more you’re invested in the album, the more it consumes you and feeds back your emotions tenfold, like an echo chamber.

There’s a very specific scene in Backrooms that explicitly uses one song from The Caretaker (the only non-original music in the score, I believe), suggesting that Kane Parsons and the A24 team were not only incredibly aware of The Caretaker’s influence on memory-related-art, but are leaning INTO the majestic nightmare established by artists previous to Kane’s creation of the Youtube series.

What this means is that there is an entire online ecosystem of ‘liminal art’ — something we’ve all seen on reddit or out and about at this point. Unsettling, static images of empty stores from the 90s, eerie soundtracks of slowed down elevator music, grainy video footage of an empty field…

This all suggests that the horror of lost or decaying memory isn’t just a backrooms phenomenon, and it’s not something contained to the apparati of film — or even literature or music — but rather, it’s an internet-based phenomenon. It’s a unique type of storytelling that relies on all forms of art that came before, and utilizes modern technology now to capitalize on how much we all carry this fear with us through our daily lives.

…Repeating loops, expecting change, and refusing to understand that our memories are imperfect, and are about to become even less defined with each passing day.

Coincidentally and in fantastic tandem with witnessing Backrooms, I just finished reading There is No Antimemetics Division by author Sam Hughes (who goes by his online penname, qntm.)

Similar to Backrooms, There is No Antimemetics Division was originally conceived as an online series, both in written form on blogs and visually on Youtube. After much acclaim and fanfare, qntm was able to publish a full length novel of the story last year, and was immediately seen as the liminal-horror guru of the modern literary world.

There is No Antimemetics Division details accounts from multiple agents within the titular government agency — known for detecting, combating, eliminating, and documenting ‘memetic’ entities aka memes. Not explicitly related to what we understands ‘memes’ to be in the modern vernacular (although I’m sure that chosen term is not a coincidence), memetic entities are invisible beasts of considerable size and power that have infiltrated our reality. Some rest dormant beneath lakes or fly high above mountaintops, while others nest on top of skyscrapers, burrow in basements, or even latch themselves onto the backs of unsuspecting humans.

Memetic entities each possess different skills and demonstrable powers that can be felt in our world, but never explicitly witnessed or recorded. The terrifying effects of memes can only ever be proven after the monsters have already taken hold of a place or person and violated their sovereignty.

What’s most terrifying about the memetic entities isn’t what they can do, but what they require to live — our memories.

Hence the need for an Antimemetics Division.

The novel is both a brutal, sci-fi procedural following multiple high-level agents within the division and their daily encounters with these monsters, often times ending with grizzly battles inside of an Inception-like headspaces constructed by the agent’s own warped consciousnesses…while also becoming a sort of emotional introspection on the division’s [supposed] leader and what it means to lead this group; one whose agents are constantly being zapped of their memories and then forced to re-integrate themselves by slowly rereading their own dossiers over and over and over and over again…Only for their own lives to become distorted, strange recollections that no longer resonate with the person behind the badge, leaving them hollow husks with little to offer both the agency and the memetic entities.

Not unlike some of my other favorite novels like The Raw Shark Texts, There is No Antimemetics Division doesn’t hold back on using the form of the novel itself to obfuscate the reader’s ability to comprehend what the hell is going on. The further you dive into the story, the more the memories of the characters are redacted/forgotten, suggesting that what comes next in their battle with the memes is almost immaterial, because no one will remember it anyway. It feels both anticlimactic yet tonally powerful, to be robbed of these epic moments in lieu of reminding the reader just how truly horrifying the concept is.

The division itself is ultimately rendered useless, not because the entities are too strong to overcome, but because it starts to feel more and more evident that no one will remember the division if and when it finally succeeds in eradicating the last of the memes. Its achievements would be lost, just as easily as its failures, rendering the whole effort a sort stoic, slow, and meandering death in the face of something most humans could never interface with from the start.

It’s about being forgotten. About the best of our efforts meaning nothing to absolutely everyone — including ourselves — after enough time has passed. How time and space, by design, will erode everything we ever thought we knew, even about ourselves.

To my mind, memory-horror is undoubtedly the new cosmic-horror.

It revolves around the unshakable notion that we, both as individuals and as communities, are hopelessly out of control. That what dwells within us is just as impossible to grasp as the largest Eldritch monster, and just as distant from our consciousness as a parallel universe.

Moreover, I think the notion of LOSING one’s memory is something that strikes deep in the hearts of everyone, regardless of background or experience. If memory is all we really have to dictate how we think, feel, and respond, then to suddenly have that foundation uplifted and flipped over is to completely disrupt even our most basic principles. The horror is no longer just “there’s a secret you never knew” or “you’ve been lied to this whole time”, but rather, “nothing is how you remember it.”

Actually, I think it’s even simpler than that.

Backrooms, The Caretaker, and There is No Antimemetics Division aren’t talking about gaslighting or grooming people into thinking differently their whole lives, a la cults (we’ve had plenty of cult horror for the last decade).

Memory-horror is about erosion. It’s about erasure. It’s natural and unstoppable.

The idea that everything you remembered isn’t entirely wrong, but rather it’s missing something. And it’s not going to get better. You’re going to keep losing parts of those memories every day until your final day — the day you remember nothing at all.

So why 2026?

How is all of this coming to a head NOW?

Part of it is the natural evolution of the medium — the Youtube series Kane Parsons created back in 2020 has only been getting more popular every year, as has qntm’s online writing, as well as the exploration of online music a la Bandcamp, Soundcloud, etc. So there was bound to be a day where each of these magnificent storytellers got their moment in the spotlight.

But moreover, I think analytically, these stories could ONLY be told in 2026.

In an era where all data suggests that we, as a species, are losing our attention spans rapidly to smartphones, social media, and 24/7 news cycles, it must be instinctually part of our lizard-brains to become worried about preserving what memories we have left. At a time where it feels like the past is always distant — even yesterday feels like a lifetime ago — I suspect our minds are reaching out however they can to reassemble the days gone by like a jigsaw puzzle, hoping things will make more sense once we step back and look at the picture as a whole.

But anyone whose been alive long enough knows that won’t happen. Our minds aren’t going to masterfully figure out how things work and put the world back together again (if it was ever ‘together’ in the first place.) The spiral down the memory-vacuum started long ago, and it feels like we’re all too far gone now to crawl back up towards any present-minded, self-aware sense of autonomy.

Which makes Backrooms, There is No Antimemetics Division, and so many other great stories that explore liminal spaces and memory not so much cautionary tales as they are exposés.

They are not just stories, but rather dissertations on how we got here and how we can’t go back. How we’ve succumbed to the endless corridors and shapeless forms that eat away at our memories, leaving only the worst parts of our vessels to become part of the endless, tasteless decor —

like vintage furniture, slowly bleeding into the walls.

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Firstly, I finally finished the next draft of my small town, gothic horror novel this morning! The Last Tuesday of the Month — now retitled The Sky Screams Tuesday — sits about 12,000 words less than it did before, and is much more streamlined and focused.

Almost too focused, I found myself wondering as I came to wrap up the latest version this morning.

Because I’m not delusional enough to think anyone reading this blog remembers anything about my myriad creative projects…The Sky Screams Tuesday is my reconciliation with growing up in central Illinois, and all the troubled revelations that comes with that.

Photo by Brendan Burton

It’s a Midwestern gothic tale at heart, about a small town overrun by ‘hauntings’ — encompassing visions of the dead, poltergeists that tear homes apart, possessions of the innocent at the hands of the most malevolent spirits, and a impenetrable dark shroud that eats away at the perimeter of a small town, and the sanity of those within.

Told from the perspective of 6 innocent bystanders, The Sky Screams Tuesday details the endless horrors that run rampant over the town of Weilog Bluffs throughout an entire month, leading to multiple nightmarish realizations regarding the town’s distant past, buried deep beneath the soil.

It is, brazenly, about towns that try to pretend like their foundations and rises to mediocrity were born of anything other than exploitation and attrition. It’s about all the people I grew up with, who assured me we were all just hard working, blue collar, good folks born from fellow good folks who would never intentionally hurt those not like them. It’s about my own tackling of the past, and coming to accept what atrocities my ancestors must have committed, just by virtue of the time and place in which they existed.

The Sky Screams Tuesday doesn’t beat around this bush. Not this version. It is very open about who these characters are and what they stand for. When the hauntings get worse and the citizens of Weilog Bluffs devolve into hopeless monsters, the novel doesn’t shy away from explicitly talking about which spirits are bringing them to do this, and what they want.

Which feels like it’s breaking some kind of literary rule — to speak the thesis aloud and point to it like a big neon sign off the highway. I feel like most contemporary literature AVOIDS addressing the thesis like the absolute plague. That ‘less is more’ always prevails, and that obscurity works better for suspense than clarity.

I can think of examples where that’s certainly true, but I can also think of endless examples where the opposite works. Stories that are unafraid to wear their message on their sleeve and make it abundantly clear where the story is headed.

I Love Boosters is the latest film from fearless auteur Boots Riley — the mastermind behind Sorry to Bother You.

On it’s face, Boosters is about a ragtag group of girls who steal high-fashion clothes from big name designers, and then turn around and sell them for discounted prices, both as a means of survival, and as a fuck you to the system by redistributing objects of great wealth to the less privileged.

The first half of Boosters plays on this idea repeatedly and effortlessly. It’s hysterical and unabashedly honest in its portrayal of honest thieves and the capitalist ghouls they steal from.

But then the film pivots, rather hard. Not unlike in Sorry to Bother You, there’s a very definable moment in I Love Boosters where the story no longer becomes about the obvious, and suddenly takes a left turn into both the absurd and the existential.

Minor spoilers (for the love of god, if you like weird, satirical, smart films from visionary directors, please go see this movie), but the TL;DR is that the girls discover a magical device that acts as simultaneously as a teleporter to a sweatshop in China, a ‘deconstructor’ that separates objects into their essential parts, and a ‘situation exaggerator’ (self explanatory).

At first, the device feels ridiculous. Like it’s just here as a Deus Ex Machina to minimize the amount of work the characters have to put in to resolve a situation. There’s an entire chase scene throughout the second act that revolves solely around the use and abuse of this device, resulting in Keke Palmer turning a cadre of pyramid scheme scammers into Hellraiser-like fleshless automatons.

But the great trick that I Love Boosters pulls off is that the device is ultimately not just there to resolve the plot (which, yes it is,) but it’s there as a VERY direct message to the audience. It’s about fashion yes, about capitalism and the value it arbitrarily assigns to objects, sure, but it’s also about creativity itself.

A key component of the plot in I Love Boosters is that Keke Palmer is/was a noted fashion designer, however, prior the events of the movie, antagonist and charlatan Demi Moore has made a name for herself as THE famous designer after stealing the works from Palmer and women of color like her.

The device, in turn, is meant to be a creative response to the actuaries and executives that act as both chokepoints and thieves themselves, as they covet and manipulate the creative endeavors of all — writers, actors, fashion designers, filmmakers — to reclaim them as their own and brand them as part of the ‘corporate output.’

And in the face of that, as the creatives, we have a few choices. We can deconstruct, we can teleport (outsource), or we can exaggerate the situation.

I Love Boosters has very little to do with stealing high end clothing by the end of it. I mean, it does, but it’s obvious that Boots isn’t REALLY talking about the simple act of reselling high end dresses by the end of it all. Boots is wearing his heart on his sleeve and speaking DIRECTLY to the audience, with a bald-faced, unabashed, harsh truth about HIS LIFE and his STRUGGLES, clearly in the film industry but also in the music industry and beyond.

And it simply works.

It’s hard to explain how, because a lot of folks might easily tune out during the second half of the film, but those who stick with it just seem to get what I Love Boosters is doing. It just feels so right and so rewarding to see where Boots takes the story after so much absurdism, satire, and ridiculousness.

I look now to June 20th — when I’m set to attend the Chicago Writers Conference, where I’ll be ‘shopping’ my latest manuscript to a handful of literary agents. Essentially doing the same in person as I’ve been doing online for the last 15 years, hawking myself to agents as a ‘personable, likeable' writer with a completed project in their hands that is any way marketable.

I don’t really have any confidence in this fairing any better than any of my online query crusades over the last decade. I’m too far down the rabbit hole and too jaded now to trick myself into thinking ANYTHING I write is worthy of being published, or that ANY agent will ever give me more than five minutes of their time.

But I still feel good about the effort to do this, and that this new version of one of my favorite manuscripts is one that I feel very proud of and happy to show to others.

And above all, I realized that I’m happy I’m not hiding the meaning of this story behind any veneers. The Sky Screams Tuesday is unambiguously me, and exclusively a story I could tell, in all regards. That alone makes me think it’s a worthwhile effort, and something that brings me comfort, peace, happiness, and understanding in a space where so often creative endeavors are robbed of such rewards.

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Even if I didn’t fully grasp the world we were living in — politically — all the way back in 2002 (I was about 12 years old), I was immediately hooked by sassy rhetoric, satirical skits, and the relentless skewering of public figures who I was vaguely aware of, i.e. Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Al Gore, New Gingrich, etc.

My adoration for The Daily Show ran so deep and infected me so quickly that by seventh grade, when were asked to do a home-video project covering something in the news, I immediately convinced my friends to do a kids version of The Daily Show, where I portrayed Jon Stewart and the other students were field correspondents. I don’t remember precisely what topics we covered, but I do remember that I couldn’t find the specific theme song to The Daily Show on Kazaa, so we were forced to use “The Chicken Dance” as our intro music…

Suffice to say, I’ve been a lifelong fan of political commentary, satire, and comedy-based-news writ large. I’ve rarely been able to stomach the actual news, both because of the bleak, grim situation in which we live in (even back then, given the post-9/11-brown-scare-nonsense and whatnot) and because I’ve never been able to take most TV journalists seriously, be they traditional 60 Minutes hosts who speak in unserious terms, MSNBC specialists who overreact to everything, or Fox News rabblerousers who can’t read and just scream until their heads turn purple.

But comedians hit different. Having someone deliver the news to you, followed up immediately with a punchline that deflates the horror does something to the brain. It’s both informative and relieving. And in the case of Jon Stewart, it always felt like you were sitting down with your favorite college professor who could help you understand the assignment, while also making it personally relatable and enjoyable to engage with.

All that being said, The Daily Show was built on the backbones of its correspondents — other comedians who were green-screened into situations across the globe, acting out absurdist sketches, usually committing 110% to dumbfuck characters, for the sake of illustrating a major topic at hand.

And while we can all name our favorites — Rob Corddry, Samantha Bee, Ed Helms, Steve Carrell, Rob Wriggle, Mo Rocca, etc. etc. etc.

The name that always comes up first is Stephen Colbert.

Colbert was an absolute gem on The Daily Show.

His commitment to a bit was second to none, so much so that he inevitably landed his own faux-news show on Comedy Central, The Colbert Report, wherein he got to completely envelope himself in the role of a parody of every asshole Republican commentator that littered the political biosphere throughout the Obama administration — primarily Glenn Beck, with traces of Bill O’Reilly, Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity.

And then Colbert was gift-wrapped the offer of a lifetime: to take over The Late Show on CBS in the wake of David Letterman’s retirement.

There was a lot of hoopla around the choice; primarily because a lot of late night fans didn’t know Colbert as anything other than a satirist, and had doubts about his ability to bring sincerity and heart to the role, but those fears were quickly alleviated when Colbert’s tenure at The Late Show started, and he quickly became the most beloved voice in late night television, as he shared such tender moments about his hardships and family, but also never missed a beat to ask his guests about the same.

This, in tandem with Jon Stewart’s retirement from television and comedy, pulled me away from late night television for a time. Not because I didn’t think Colbert would do well — I knew he would — but it felt like a lot of the ways that I needed to hear the news was being reeled back. Colbert would have to play it safe for the sake of CBS’ sponsors, and The Daily Show did continue with Trevor Noah (who was fine) with a tone that I didn’t think went hard enough at those in powers when that sort of criticism was sorely needed.

Fast forward through the last ten years — because y’all know what all fucking happened at this point, my god don’t make me relive it — and we find ourselves on the eve of The Late Show’s final week on television.

Offered up as a sacrificial lamb by Paramount and its insidious new owners to the current administration, who named Colbert as a #1 enemy of the state simply because the thin-skinned bitch-ass jabronis in the White House can’t stand jokes about their tiny dicks, The Late Show will completely cease to be after Memorial Day weekend. No replacement, no reruns, no revival.

And thusly, Colbert and his staff have been doing what only a man like Colbert can do in this situation; offer a classy sign-off without bending the knee to a tyrant.

Colbert’s presence on late night television throughout both Trump administrations AND a pandemic has been nothing short of a gift to the rest of us. While Seth Meyers approaches his show like a journalist with wit (appreciated!), Jimmy Kimmel treats his like a sermon (heartwarming!), and Jimmy Fallon pretends like the issues in this country don’t exist (jettison him into outer space!), Stephen Colbert never really let the catastrophes of the day completely dilute his message of unity.

Perhaps it’s to honor the format that David Letterman had left behind, or perhaps it’s just because Colbert is too well-intentioned to let himself to fall victim to the news cycle of “everything is on fire every 5 seconds,” but there’s always been a sense of levity to his show that no one else has matched.

Colbert has consistently been the late night TV show host that we need at any given moment, as opposed to a slop-delivery-mechanism we might deserve a la Fallon.

Losing Colbert after this week will genuinely be a heart-wrenching gut-punch to the soul of an America that I resonate with the most strongly; which is one that wants to keep believe that good things are still on the horizon, if only we embrace them.

He’s not the king’s court jester, nor is he the field reporter he once was on The Daily Show or even the emotional reverend on a sermon, but rather he’s the father everyone knows. He wants to have everyone gather around the dinner table and make them feel welcome — even if he’s disappointed in the situation a lot of us have caused.

Tangentially, I was offered a special opportunity to visit the Barack Obama Presidential Library earlier this week, and while I don’t think I can technically speak to any of the specifics on what’s on display in the Museum, Library, or Forum until its officially opened on June 6th, I’d like to at least share my personal journey going through the center, and the indisputable parallel that was conjured in the final week of The Late Show.

Firstly, my relationship with President Obama (as an American voter and U.S. citizen) has been…complicated.

I was raised in a quasi-conservative household, touting that fiscal responsibility was the only real thing that mattered, and everything else was banter. To that end, Obama’s rise to fame in Illinois was generally met with frustration in my family — ostensibly because his budget proposals were seen as abysmal.

In my parents’ defense, Obama’s first big push as senator was to pull a significant amount of funding from public schools in central and southern Illinois (like where my mother taught) to be redirected towards prison reform in Chicago and northern Illinois. So, while I understand that move as a 36 year old in 2026, I can absolutely understand why that was so frustrating at the time.

Enter 2008, as a senior in high school, I felt like I was one of the only students who was actively talking about voting. It was simply beyond the pale for anyone in our age group in our town at that time to even ‘waste’ our energy going to the polls on election day. But still, I was an aspiring Political Science major (haaaaaaaa) and was set on paying close attention to the election.

And whether it was because I was an impressionable 18 year old, influenced by my family’s opinions, or because I wanted to go against the grain of what it seemed like most 18-25 year olds were leaning towards…I voted for John McCain. And in defense of 18 year old me, John McCain was, without question, the last decent Republican, and I had grown up believing he was the pinnacle of honorable men in the military who dedicated their live to serving the country. (Palin didn’t factor into it. I found her as deplorable as everyone else, and just hoped she would never get a chance at the presidency.)

Furthermore, (I know, there’s more YIKES to come) I also didn’t vote for Obama in 2012. I wasn’t a fan of Romney, to be clear, and ultimately went with Libertarian candidate Ron Paul, because he allegedly would be liberal on social issues and conservative on fiscal issues, although I would argue time has not been keen to his views, let alone those of his son, or obviously, the rest of his batshit-crazy party. The 2012 vote actually felt less contrarian at the time, essentially because it was projected that Obama would waltz back into the White House with little to no affair, so the Ron Paul vote felt both like a protest vote and an insistence on pulling conservatives AWAY from the Tea Party shenanigans…Which obviously failed in spectacular fashion.

To be crystal clear, I’ve regretted both votes. Not that either made a difference or have really haunted me in any substantial way, but in the greater context of American politics. How, when I zoom out at what has become of the two major parties and their failure to rise to the occasion in representing their constituents, it feels like my stupid anti-Obama votes in 2008 and 2012 were a part of a horribly misguided resentment that accidentally lumped me in with an ideological cult that I never have wanted anything to do with before or since. How the presidency, especially, has since been denigrated and desecrated to nothing more than a TikTok-esque pulpit for espousing Nazi-sympathizing views, abundant, troll-like corruption, and a deep disdain for all things human.

Knowing what would come after Obama makes me wish that I had voted for him both times, both because it does feel like he was the last coherent, capable, qualified person for the job, and partly because voting for him would’ve felt like clemency from what came after.

Back to the Barack Obama Presidential Library, as I ascended the eight (!) floors that detailed the man’s life, political activism, rise in popularity, nomination, confirmation, and first election, I was overwhelmed with a sense of emptiness.

A movement that I wasn’t a part of, for reasons that I’ve detailed at length in this Substack over the years, and one that now feels like a golden era for a certain group of Americans who crave, as the slogans said, Hope and Change.

There was the obvious whitewashing that comes with any presidential library — they glean over the disgusting bailouts his administration offered to so many different corporations that were either directly responsible for the economic collapse in 2008, or companies that did nothing to help their employees in the wake of the collapse. They try to rewrite his garbage immigration policies as “focusing on deporting the bad guys,” which is disturbingly similar to what MAGA conservatives have been clamoring for since 2016. They tend to skip over most of his flubs with the Middle East, focusing solely on the takedown of Osama Bin Laden as his saving grace.

But none of those minor quibbles could flatten the inarguable emotional resonance that could be felt on every floor, flooded with families crying tears of nostalgic joy. So many people, reminiscing over his two election victories and several of his key speeches that were seen as absolutely milestones in American history — including plenty of kids and teenagers who gazed upon Obama’s works like the cherished performances of rockstars from a bygone era; immortal moments woven into the fabric of their parents’ lives that are no doubt treated as biblical when retold at home for the thirtieth time.

And it made me sad that I’ve never really known that feeling as it relates to politics and leaders in general. To never have anyone that I backed from day 1 march on to victory. (Biden was the closest example, but I would argue that my vote there was more a demand for immediate change — ANY immediate change, rather than a genuine love for Biden himself).

It made me wish I had done things differently, minor as those changes might’ve been, so I hadn’t let myself feel so alone in the political realm during a time in my life where I desperately NEEDED a sense of community, understanding, and indeed, hope.

On the right, it’s just humiliation all the way down, I realize.

With no patience to recap the most recent ‘daily descents into madness’ that consumes our every waking moment, all I can feel anymore is what I’ve been saying for years — conservatism, libertarianism, and indeed, fascism, are all centered on humiliation ‘rituals’, for lack of a better term.

Subordination, submission, domination, power dynamics, supplication.

This doesn’t just refer to the president, but virtually everyone who claims to have conservative (or closely related) views. There is a key factor in the essence of conservativism that not only demands fealty, but also insists that you pass that gross obsession on to those around you. You must treat yourself and everyone in your sphere as subjects to be worshipped or worshipping, boots in mouth at all times. There is an imaginary pecking order across conservativism, that denotes whether you’re a worm or a bird, and you’ll be spoken to thusly.

Everything the ‘right’ does is based on a line of cuckery that passes on from one man to the next, each with a stronger taste of leather on their tongues than the last.

This is why we all now have to endure, awful, pathetic, stupid, asinine shit every single day of our lives.

It’s not just a transactional arrangement the president has with everyone on the right, nor is it simply blackmail, or even personal edifications…It’s a fetish. Conservatives from 2008 to 2015 were dormant incels, spewing hatred online, but terrified to speak out in public against a well spoken, strong willed, provenly capable black man in office. But once they saw an obnoxious white man who [without merit] rambled on about how HE was stronger, smarter, and better at everything than everyone else, not only was their fetish re-activated, but it was given permission to be publicized and shoved into the faces of every single American.

Living in the language of wannabe-bottom-bitches (not offense to bottoms!) for over a decade has warped our understanding of what basics used to dictate standard daily interactions — decorum, civility, and especially responsibility.

With a leader who can never conceive of the idea of ‘the buck stops here,’ but rather lives and rules by ‘the buck must be passed onto the next bloviator down the line’, it can only be a matter of time before that garbage behavior is passed on — not just to those in politics, but all the way through every facet of society, down to self-centered dipshits in movie theaters, at concerts, bars, restaurants, gyms, parks, grocery stories, at family gatherings, funerals, weddings, and within seemingly every home across the nation as everyone becomes obsessed with debasing themselves and those around them for the sake of some form of humiliation.

The death of humanity can obviously be attributed to things like social media and A.I., and we all know I’ve made that argument many a time before, but there’s also no way to consider how we’ve gotten here without just accepting the blatantly obvious fact…

This president is a corrupt, idiotic, demented, self-centered, moronic, abusive, spineless, illiterate, grifting, tiny-dicked, weak-willed, physically malformed, pedophiliac, sex pesting, war criminal.

And all that matters is in this current iteration of life is that the majority of conservatives say — in writing and very publicly — that they think this 79 year old mental patient could beat them in a fist fight. (Yes, this really happened.)

They must continue to have a daddy to kneel for, and they must make sure all 350 million of us are party to the grotesquery at all times of the day.

These are the thoughts that hit me like a brick to the face as I traversed the Barack Obama Presidential Library, BECAUSE it’s so visibly disparate. To yearn for such leadership — charisma, honesty, earnestness, sincerity, accountability (well, to some extent), down to earth-ness, eloquence, civility, responsibility (again, see accountability), adoration, and above all, an ACTUAL sense of Patriotism that has nothing to do with himself, his family, or even just his party, but EVERY LAST AMERICAN, without exception.

And then I realize, that’s why I think I care so much about someone like Stephen Colbert.

He doesn’t insist upon humiliating himself to make Dear Leader happy, and he doesn’t expect you to humiliate yourself to make him happy.

While Jon Stewart will always be a guiding north star for me as it pertains to speaking truth to power through satirical humor, and putting up with no nonsense from either party, it’s Colbert who has proven himself to be the beating heart of comedy in the political sphere for over a decade.

Anyone who has watched The Late Show since Stephen took over knows that the man wears his heart on his sleeve, and rather than pontificating about his own life in front of the camera, he uses stories in the news and interviews with his guests to express his own humanity and his commonality with both participants and viewers on a historic stage that would usually insist upon formality, narcissism, and vapidity above all else.

He never shies away from his love for The Lord of the Rings or Bruce Springsteen, nor does he do the ‘old man’ thing on TV where he only books the movie stars and musicians he grew up with. He does the readings, he listens to the albums, he watches the movies. He gives a shit. He’s a man for anyone who needs a place to go at the end of the night to assure themselves that things might be alright — if not today, then certainly tomorrow.

Not having that voice after this week is a net loss for America, and humanity as a whole. Very few people leave a long term gig like this at their absolute peak, and most in Stephen’s situation (i.e. the blatantly corrupt maneuver by Paramount to appease Republican Leather Daddy Tinydick) would use this final week on CBS to burn the place down.

He could spend every second of his show offending the censors, cursing out every billionaire, airing dirty laundry, sharing nasty secrets about his worst guests, and unabashedly burying every last asshole in the media.

And part of me still wishes he would do that.

But the lesson today is that Colbert — not unlike Obama, I came to realize all too late in life — isn’t a vindicative dipshit.

Men like Colbert and Obama aren’t corrupt, idiotic, demented, self-centered, moronic, abusive, spineless, illiterate, grifting, tiny-dicked, weak-willed, physically malformed, pedophiliac, sex pesting, war criminals.

They are men — only mere, mortal men, yes — but men all the same, who act with dignity and grace, in even the hardest of moments. And even if I vehemently disagree with several things Obama did as president, and I probably would butt heads with Colbert on certain things like his emphatic reliance on Catholicism to solve all existential crises, I would never in my life imagine disrespecting either of them as human beings, because there is nothing about the way they’ve handled the last 30 years in the spotlight that would suggest they might treat a lowly person like me disrespectfully.

And that’s so much more than I can say for literally anyone in a position of power in this current moment.

Losing The Late Show is an upsetting, disturbing new [don’t say ‘unprecedented’] height for the kleptomanic, technocratic, corporatocratic, fascistic takeover of every last thing we love, there’s no question.

But losing Stephen Colbert, the human being, as a nightly guiding light is far worse.

A man who, at this stage in the game, might have been the last reasonable, human voice across the pantheon of angry, drunk uncles at the worst family dinner ever.

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At least, up until the end of the PS2 era…So maybe around 2008, when I left for college and could no longer afford new consoles.

This encapsulates what’s essentially referred to as the “original timeline” in its entirety, and what people usually think of when we talk about the gaming franchise — Mortal Kombat, II, Trilogy, 4, Deadly Alliance, Deception, and Armageddon, as well as the side stories like Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Shaolin Monks.

I have yet to engage with the ‘new timeline’ games: Mortal Kombat (2011), Mortal Kombat X, and Mortal Kombat 11, but me thinks I could pick up what’s going on pretty quickly.

All this to say, I am a religious zealot when it comes to Mortal Kombat’s lore, mythology, and storylines. It is the perfect combination of dark fantasy, gory horror, and absurdism that continues to tickle my reptile-brain, 36 years later.

There is also genuinely great storytelling throughout the Mortal Kombat franchise…Albeit not consistently.

The gaming franchise is notorious for retconning everything every time a new iteration comes out. Everyone you thought died in the previous game is suddenly resurrected through some bullshit magical spell or ancient artifact, everyone who survived the last game is killed by some apocalyptic event offscreen between games, and there’s also twenty-some odd new characters to be introduced every game that have apparently always been a part of this world, but just failed to rise to any occasion up until the writers thought it necessary.

And even taking that into consideration, there are still so many fascinating dynamics and emotional arcs throughout the MK universe that I can’t help but gush over.

The entire plot of Deadly Alliance first and foremost is on par with a George R.R. Martin novel, entailing an elaborate scheme by the necromancer Quan Chi and sorcerer Shang Tsung to use Shao Khan’s rise to power as a conduit for unleashing a primordial evil…is simply terrific. I can’t recommend it enough, but if you don’t have access to a PS2, just read a summary or watch the cinematic interstitials on Youtube.

Deception and Armageddon were heavily story-driven (major End Of The World fantasy vibes), focusing more on a narrative structure between fights rather than the standard ‘tournament style’ that existed in the first 4 games as a vague justification for endless bouts, while Mythologies: Sub-Zero and Shaolin Monks went DEEP into the backstories of their main characters, slowly weaving a heavy fabric of interconnected tales between the main roster’s biggest stars.

Mortal Kombat is, by all measures, convoluted as hell.

As is most dark fantasy, to be clear. If it were condensed into a novel, Mortal Kombat would easily slide right alongside The Wheel of Time series as an incredibly dense and confusing amalgamation of cool-ass-magic-fights and quippy characters.

But movie adaptations of Mortal Kombat?

That’s been an uphill battle since the 90s.

Knowing where and when to start a Mortal Kombat movie feels like plucking a needle from a haystack. There are, literally, thousands of subplots and character arcs from the last 30+ years of lore that you could slip out of the pile and take a stab at, but it’s hard to know not only which ones will be satisfying as a contained, 120 minute film, but which ones will also play well on a screen that allows for no user-influenced-interaction like a video game does.

The first iteration, Paul W.S. Anderson’s 1995 Mortal Kombat, is about as close to a practical approach as one can ever conceive of.

Given the wide breadth and scope of the franchise, the biggest hump for any adaptation is knowing how the hell to balance the “real world” events versus the “fantastical” events.

In short, the gist of the Mortal Kombat universe involves a series of parallel dimensions (Earthrealm, Edenia, Outworld, and the Netherrealm being the primary ones anyone cares about) that are in constant struggle for control of one another a la classic portal fantasy tropes. Certain leaders, particularly those of Outworld and the Netherrealm, are keen on expanding their powers and taking over ‘weaker’ realities like Earthrealm and Edenia. Eventually, the ‘gods’ (mostly immortal entities that observe but rarely intervene) issued a decree that one realm may only declare dominance over the other after they win TEN CONSECUTIVE TOURNAMENTS in ‘mortal kombat’, wherein each realm must present their best champion fighters, who will face off against other competitors until one realm’s team has been completely defeated.

Like I said before; convoluted, contrived, and arbitrary as hell.

From a screenwriting perspective, it’s a massive hurdle to know how to lay these rules out quickly and cleanly for an audience.

Anderson’s 1995 film probably does it best, because the vast majority of the film is focused on the literal tournament on a secluded island — treating it more as a karate-style action flick with a few wizards and monsters thrown in, and foregoing most of the ‘big picture’ dark fantasy epic.

It also smartly has a very relatable emotional core to it, i.e. the rise of fan-favorite Liu Kang as a karate-kid-with-fireballs and his revenge against the evil sorcerer Shang Tsung. It’s such a reliable cliche that most of the film writes itself, but in doing so, tends to lose a lot of the unique flair of the games.

Also being from 1995, the visual effects (and especially the gore for which MK is famous for) were lackluster.

In direct contrast, for better or worse, Mortal Kombat: Annihilation from 1997 goes in the precise opposite direction — immediately killing off beloved characters like Johnny Cage and leaning heavily into the HIGH HIGH HIGH fantastical absurdity of the franchise.

In the wake of Liu Kang’s victory over Shang Tsung, the powerful emperor of Outworld, Shao Khan, immediately arrives on Earth and declares…kinda-war-kinda-tournament-kinda-invasion? Again, the rules are pliable as fuck.

What ensues is a comically-goofy, poorly-written, poorly-acted, visually-stunted attempt at sword + sorcery meets high wire kung fu set across a litany of theme-park backdrops. It is inarguably much more ambitious than the first film, but it fails to deliver on almost every level.

(Which I secretly love it for, by the way.)

But alas, Annihilation was the nail in the coffin for this iteration of the film franchise, as it was no longer seen as tenable to make a film version of Mortal Kombat that drifted too far away from Earthrealm and ordinary human characters a la Liu Kang, Johnny Cage, Sonya Blade, Jax, and Kung Lao.

That was until the reboot, Mortal Kombat, in 2021.

In the wake of the ‘new timeline’ stories and subsequent video games that had seen massive success throughout the 2010s, Warner Bros. decided to finally take another stab at a film adaptation, helmed by a new filmmaker (Simon McQuoid) who is, inarguably, a fellow fanboy.

Mortal Kombat (2021) was met immediately with mixed reception, not least of all because of the same aforementioned issues that plagued the first two films:

• How much of the story should be based on Earth vs the fantastical realms?

• Who is the actual main character of this story?

• Is this a tournament or just a series of fights in random locations?

• Is this serious, silly, or scary?

This adaptation threaded the needle slightly better than either of the 90s films, insomuch as it chose to focus mostly on Earth and only have a few glimpses at Outworld and the Netherrealm, and it treated the battles with Shang Tsung and his invading forces as those from a more realistic kung-fu movie than overly digitally-rendered dark fantasy spellcasting.

Moreover, its biggest asset AND its biggest obstacle, was the creation of a brand new character, Cole Young, who was clearly meant to be the audience surrogate. In a world where every other character is already well-acquainted with the rules of mortal kombat, the writers clearly thought inventing a fish-out-water from scratch would make things slightly more palatable for audiences.

On the one hand, it made the storytelling much more straightforward, as Cole’s primary motivations were centered around being a prize fighter, protecting his family, and learning to trust others.

On the other hand, it made everyone else (especially previous lead characters like Liu Kang) look completely inconsequential.

Grounding the story in more realistic and Earthly visuals also meant that the movie would be inherently less fantastical and less horrific, which likely bothered a lot of fans who had hoped the modern era of CGI would open the doors to more interesting interpretations of Edenia, Outworld, and the Netherrealm.

Unanimously, the film’s saving grace was actually its B-plot, detailing the blood feud between warriors Scorpion and Sub-Zero that had lasted eons, and how that feud led to the irrevocable chaos that landed at Cole’s doorstep, giving the danger a sort of emotional consequence and heft to it that was absent in previous attempts.

Ultimately, Mortal Kombat (2021) is a movie that I personally quite enjoyed, and thought at the time was probably the best attempt at an MK film thus far, but still had quibbles with the way they approached the writing.

ALL LEADING UP TO NOW, WITH MORTAL KOMBAT II OFFICIALLY IN THEATERS.

(Sorry, I know this was an insanely long setup to get to a basic ass film review.)

Not unlike when Annihilation was first greenlit, MKII from its inception was presented with a Sophie’s choice: do more of the same, or go in a completely different direction from the 2021 film?

And if anyone saw the trailers, you already know the answer.

Mortal Kombat II is OBSCENELY campy, bordering on parody.

Opening on a set piece for Edenia clearly meant for a high-school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the story opens on a flashback of Shao Khan — ruler of Outworld — at the tail end of his invasion of Edenia and the tenth (and final) consecutive win in the mortal kombat tournament to decide the realm’s fate. Khan obviously wins, defeating Princess Kitana’s father and subjugating all Edenians to the level of loyal servants going forward, all told through incredibly flat melodrama.

Then we speed-run the well-treaded ground: twenty years later, Raiden, Sonya, Jax, and Liu Kang must enlist a 5th member to defend Earthrealm when Shao Khan declares his tenth tournament against our world (after 9 victories), in place of previous hero Kung Lao who was killed in the previous film*.

*This is literally the only homework you need to do to understand the rest of this movie.

Through a literal Deus Ex Machina process that dictates every weird decision made in the greater franchise, “the gods” have chosen Johnny Cage — a washed up, 90s action star who wastes his days drinking through cosplay conventions — to take up the mantle and become the Earth’s fifth champion.

He refuses, thinks this is all nonsense, is shown a glimpse of Edenia and immediately doubles down as a runaway coward, Raiden gives him a good talking to, blah blah blah blah you could write this shit in your sleep, and we’re off to the races.

There’s already a key problem here with the setup.

Once again…Who the fuck is the main character of this story?

For a Lord of the Rings dark fantasy, it’s fine to have several key characters who each have their own arcs that need to be properly juggled in tandem with one another. But for Mortal Kombat, to not have one or two primary focal points is to rob the entire film of any emotional weight.

The short answer is that it’s SUPPOSED to be Princess Kitana and Johnny Cage.

The long answer is that it’s supposed to be Princess Kitana, who seeks revenge against Shao Khan, and Johnny Cage, who needs to rediscover his self confidence and heed the call of duty, but both of these arcs tend to dwindle over time, up until the last five minutes when it’s too late for us to really care anymore.

Along with this issue, we’re presented with the same conundrum that Annihilation faced — how much of this story needs to be grounded on Earth versus the fantastical realms?

And without question, Mortal Kombat II definitely chooses the latter. There might only be collectively about ten minutes of the movie that take place on Earthrealm (Raiden’s Sky Temple doesn’t count because YOU TELL ME where the fuck it’s located on a globe!)

The vast, vast majority of the film plays out in different set pieces spread across Outworld and eventually the Netherrealm, which are both invigorating but also a little disappointing, given how much of the backdrops are CGI-messes draped over green screens behind actors who clearly weren’t told where things would physically be before shooting…Nor were the lighting directors.

*It genuinely was so bothersome that every time there was a closeup shot of a character, you could see green-screened baddies in the background just staring off into the distance or kicking rocks like they never saw anything.

The fights, and there are many, are all relatively good by modern standards, although they do make you yearn for the proper high-wire-kung-fu tapestries that were so integral to 90s action flicks. Here, we’re mostly treated to CGI blood and harsh, rapid cutting between punches that distort the impact, but at the same time, it still reads as much more coherent than the film’s contemporaries. This movie is a lot more playful in the way it handles fights than the others — namely in that it’s not afraid to use the “scene changing” hits from the games to really drive home the absurdity of the physics built into the premise.

MKII is incredibly gory, but it leaves a lot to be desired when compared to the modern games. A few heads splattered by hammers and torsos chopped up by razor hats just feels tame compared to most fatalities you see in the video game equivalents, and I’m unsure if that was due to a lack of creativity on behalf of the filmmakers or just the way the MPAA works as opposed to the ESRB.

But where Mortal Kombat II shines brighter than the other three films is its humor.

Karl Urban as Johnny Cage proves to be a brilliant stroke, as his penchant for cheesy one liners feels incredibly natural and lends itself to the campy tone the film is unabashedly leaning into, while Josh Lawson’s Deadpool-style delivery for the antihero Kano acts as the piss-taking, 4th-wall-breaking absurdist commentary that acts as the “getting ahead of the audience” mechanism, creating a vortex of absolute stupidity that carries most scenes where lame dialog just doesn’t cut it.

This is both the film’s greatest strength and its greatest weakness, as any scene with Cage or Kano (let alone both) tends to devolve into shenanigans that transcend the usual banter of Mortal Kombat and reach something closer to Marvel movies at their most hilarious…For better or worse. It’s hard to say if the Cage/Kano dynamic actually works, or if it’s just the best thing in the movie by default because so many other characters don’t have much going for them*.

*Barakanotwithstanding.

It’s a little odd to have Kano show up in every scene and point at Quan Chi (who sadly is treated as little more than a punching bag) and call him “Voldemort’s Nutsack” over and over, while in the next scene, Johnny Cage refers to Raiden as “Gandalf” over and over…Especially when Karl Urban himself came to fame early in his career through The Lord of the Rings films.

It leaves one feeling like the film just doesn’t want you to take anything seriously. The fights — maybe — but even that feels uneven. Some fights (Sonya vs Sindel, Liu Kang vs zombie Kung Lao [spoilers?], and Cole Young vs Shao Khan especially) all feel INCREDIBLY important and brutal, while others like Johnny Cage vs Baraka feel like complete comedy fodder…Although, to be fair, that Cage/Baraka fight is probably the single best scene in the movie, so I would never dare argue that it ought to have been cut.

Altogether, the tone of Mortal Kombat II is just CONFUSING.

While the first film in the reboot franchise had its comedic moments (mostly courtesy of a more villainous version of Kano), there was still a clear and present sense of danger whenever Shang Tsung and his goons arrived, as well as a solid grounding in the fights — particular the Cole Young and Liu Kang styles of kung fu, and the Scorpion/Sub-Zero bloodbaths. There were stakes and emotions throughout Mortal Kombat (2021), and a general assumption that you, the audience, gave a shit.

But whether because of the backlash or just out of creative curiosity, MKII shows no such reverence. It is a big, dumb, stupid punch-em-up from start to finish that really doesn’t seem to care all that much about whether or not you take these fights seriously or care much about if Princess Kitana or Johnny Cage find their true selves in the end.

And that’s a problem.

Up until now, I’ve only talked about the peripheral story — the worldbuilding, lore, setup, tone, pacing, and general premise going into MKII.

And the story — the literal written words on the page — are where this things goes SO MUCH FURTHER off the rails than ANY other Mortal Kombat project in the franchise’s history, including the universally-loathed Annihilation.

To address the biggest elephant first: neither Johnny Cage nor Princess Kitana have compelling arcs. Kitana does eventually get her revenge and save Edenia, but very little of it has to do with her own actions, while Cage only reluctantly agrees to fight because of attrition, not for any good emotional reason, and his ability to use his ‘powers’ at the end are a matter of plot contrivance.

The next big problem is one core to the function of the game that no movie should ever try to tackle: resurrection.

In the Mortal Kombat games, resurrection is just a part of the mechanics. Fighters die, they go to the Netherrealm (mostly) and either have to be rescued by their friends or revived through dark magic. It’s a very stupid storytelling mechanic to keep favorite characters around that has never made much sense. But this movie TRIES to make sense of it by introducing a personal favorite character of mine, Quan Chi the necromancer, who can apparently just wave his hand now and bring back any old character from the first movie without much effort. This shouldn’t be that big of a problem, but the movies GOES OUT OF ITS OWN WAY to make it a big deal by a) reviving characters like Shang Tsung, Kung Lao, and Sindel as black-eyed zombies under Shao Khan’s control, but then b) revive Kano and then immediately say “his soul is too corrupt! he can’t become a zombie!” solely so the writers can bring back the foul-mouthed asshole without chains to hold back his goofy jokes. Both Kano’s resurrection and the contradictory zombification of at least three villains feels asinine and serves no ultimate purpose in the story other than Action Figure Nostalgia [trademark]. It also just irks me personally, because seeing both Quan Chi and Shang Tsung in the same movie should be rich soil to plant the seeds for the greatest story in the MK universe — Deadly Alliance — but instead, Quan Chi is treated as a court jester and Shang Tsung serves no purpose in the film besides acting as a teleportation device for other, lesser villains.

And then there’s the literal plot.

Beyond the tournament-to-decide-the-fate-of-Earthrealm staple that every MK story ends up juggling, there’s a separate but weirdly equal plot revolving around the McGuffin of the Amulet of Shinnok.

*Incredibly nerdy sidenote: Shinnok is one of the coolest villains in the MK universe, referred to as the Fallen God, serving as arguably the most powerful magical entity and the source of most resurrections. His amulet is a big part of Deception and Armageddon, essentially being treated as the device that brings back the primordial evil known as the Dragon King who instigates the end of the universe and the end of the Original Timeline.

**To my understand, the New Timeline from the last 3 games was forged by Liu Kang who basically sacrificed himself to split the old timeline in half at the moment the Dragon King ended everything, although it kinda sounds like this New Timeline is about to head in that same direction, so what all was the point even? TBD

With the amulet in Shao Khan’s possession, they — meaning Quan Chi, Shang Tsung, and zombified Kung Lao — can attack Raiden in his sky temple and [somehow] absorb his immortal powers through the amulet, then redistribute those powers to Shao Khan, making him immortal for the upcoming tournament.

This just begets so many goddamn questions…

Firstly, why are immortal gods allowed to participate in MORTAL Kombat? Does that not defeat the whole purpose?!

In the 90s films, Raiden — THE GOD OF THUNDER — goes out of his way to explain that he cannot participate, only train the others. The 2021 film avoids the tournament altogether, so it’s a non-issue.

Here, we see that the Earthrealm team is short one person (despite having five people in the temple,) so we can implicitly assume that Raiden can’t participate, but it’s never explicitly said, which is wild for a movie that spends a LOT of its first half explaining EVERYTHING.

But moreover, how does it make sense that Quan Chi, Shang Tsung, and Kung Lao could grant Shao Khan immortality through the amulet, and the ‘gods’ that oversee mortal kombat not call a foul on Shao Khan when he loses — several times, actually — and somehow never dies? Are the gods not watching like we’ve been told they always do?? Does Raiden not phone a god-friend and tell them what just happened? Cause he does that a lot in the games and both 90s films!

The movie digs this hole deeper the longer it goes on, because the amulet becomes THE thing that everyone cares about and talks about constantly. The entire second act of the film is devoted to Johnny Cage, Liu Kang, Sonya Blade, and Jax trying to break into Shao Khan’s castle on Outworld solely to steal and destroy the amulet, which is the only way the writers could think of to jam Kano, Baraka, and fucking Noob Saibot into the story (the last of whom is himself just a device [a resurrected Sub-Zero] to justify bringing back Scorpion for one final unnecessary fight…But luckily that means more Hiroyuki Sanada on our screens, so I can’t really complain about that.)

This all fuses into a baffling final ten minutes, where after trying every weapon and attack in the book, somehow Johnny’s newly discovered high kick is what destroys the amulet, which happens at the exact moment Kitana slashes Shao Khan’s throat, which happens at the exact moment that Shang Tsung sneaks into Raiden’s temple to finish the job and kill the Thunder God*.

*This last part was not set up ANY time during the film, by the way. The Quan Chi/Shang Tsung/Kung Lao surprise attack in the temple during the first act was already out of left field, but for the rest of the movie, Raiden is basically catatonic while Shang Tsung is just popping in and out of green shadows with no real goal. So the shot of him standing over Raiden with a dagger is absolutely jarring and has no merit whatsoever.

Then there’s Jade…My poor, sweet Jade.

Treated as one of Kitana’s underlings for most of the movie, Jade’s story arc SHOULD be that she struggles to fight out of the clutches of Shao Khan’s grasps, and then finds freedom in her friendship with Kitana and fighting back against her lifelong oppressor.

But instead, Jade betrays Kitana and leaves her for dead, only turning face when there’s six minutes left in the movie so she can [somehow] teleport to the Netherrealm and, with a lot of help from Kano and Scorpion, subdue Noob Saibot lacklusterly.

So many decisions in this movie are baffling. While we all know some heroes have to die, it’s kinda offensive that the new character they created just for the 2021 film gets offed in a pretty pathetic way during his first fight of the tournament, and Jax’s death is meant to be heroic but comes across as some “the black dude dies first” 2000s stereotypical bullshit.

Nothing about Sindel’s origin story (she’s Kitana’s mother and ultimately becomes Shao Khan’s concubine) adds up, given how little she seems to care for her daughter during the flashback scenes, and how little her resurrection meant to the plot. …It’s also really unclear if a fighter being resurrected affects the tournament scoreboard or not.

Liu Kang has one killer fight with Kung Lao, then two drawn out fights with Shao Khan, the latter of which does ultimately lead to Liu Kang’s “death,” but it’s played off as a sacrifice and a very ominous message that Kung Lao is actually the one who is ‘destined’ to stop Khan…Which obviously doesn’t happen.

Which leads me to ask — is Mortal Kombat II actually just a platform for like, 4 upcoming sequels?

There are more than a handful of references to the brotherhood between Liu Kang and Kung Lao like in the game Shaolin Monks, wherein the two characters must fight through hell to stop Shao Khan and Quan Chi…

But there are several references to Deadly Alliance, wherein Quan Chi and Shang Tsung use the power of Shinnok’s amulet to usurp Shao Khan and take control of Outworld as a massive, magical fortress.

The mere presence of the amulet and its power suggests that Shinnok and The Dragon King are in play, meaning that Deception and Armageddon are world-ending epic sequel choices a la Michael Bay’s later Transformers movies.

And this franchise will never let go of the eternal feud between Sub-Zero and Scorpion, meaning there’s no reason they can’t milk that in the next movie once again with more adaptations of Mythologies.

But as far as just Mortal Kombat II, the film from 2026, is concerned, it’s kinda bewildering to see THIS MANY loose threads just dangling on the screen for folks to try to digest.

Yes, I myself was personally excited to see all these possibilities, but

1) I was incredibly disappointed when none of them panned out and we just got a boiler-plate Kitana vs Shao Khan Outworld Invasion storyline

and

2) I cannot imagine ANYONE who hasn’t played the first seven Mortal Kombat games understanding or giving a flying fuck about any of these potential sequels.

It does such a disservice to the story the current film is trying to tell to have the writers keep winking and nodding to potential projects in the future. Especially coming from a studio like Warner Bros., who famously are hesitant to commit to any sequels in a timely fashion and with appropriate budgets. (The budget on MKII looked shoddy enough as it is, if the poorly positioned green screens and flat CGI were anything to go by.)

All in all, Mortal Kombat II is a mixed bag, perhaps by design.

It’s trying to have the wild-eyed battles of both the 1995 and 2021 films, while also embracing the absurdist humor and fantastical elements of Annihilation, all while jamming every scene with references to every game from the beginning of the franchise, culminating in it all feeling very unfocused and uneven.

Which isn’t to say I disliked it. On the contrary, I came out of the theater beaming like a teenager and shouting that I loved it.

But that’s the nostalgia factory doing its job. You say “Amulet of Shinnok” and for about an hour, I forgot about the embarrassingly stupid decision to have the protectors of Earthrealm ‘split up’ once inside Shao Khan’s castle to look for the amulet, only to re-team 30 seconds later when the emperor and the amulet appear from around an arbitrary corner.

(This was immediately preceded by the team, cloaked, sneaking through a tunnel with Baraka — who, upon reaching the front door to the castle, turns and says “well that’s my time, folks! gotta run” and fucks off, leaving the team to cleverly TAKE OFF THEIR CLOAKS once inside the castle and give away their position.)

It is entertaining, there’s no doubt about that. Actually, Mortal Kombat II is probably THE most entertaining Mortal Kombat film to date, for better or worse.

Just bear in mind that when I say that, I say that as someone who generally thinks of fondly of Annihilation, and sees this movie as much closer to that than anything else.

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To be queer is a wonderful thing — to be anywhere across and between the rainbow spectrum is something that should always be celebrated, heralded, and championed.

The longer queer existence becomes ‘normal’ (I know that’s a loaded expectation in 2026), the more it no longer becomes stigmatized, and therefore presumptions and stereotypes fall by the wayside.

And that’s obviously great!

Even in just the last ten or twenty years, we’ve made great strides to no longer portray gay men in films exclusively as overly flamboyant twinks with lisps and a penchant for dance, nor are lesbians solely seen as flannel-coated construction workers with buzzcuts.

We’ve come to understand so much more about things like the Kinsey Scale and how gender identity and expression is a spectrum, not a M/F questionnaire. There are people in heterosexual and heteroromantic relationships who identify as some form of queer, be they bisexual or non-binary or what have you.

It all makes my heart sing, to tell the truth. Knowing that SO many people out there are openly expressing their queerdom in ways that were seen as taboo just a decade before, often times in ways that don’t demand a cliche “coming out” post or conversation, AND are no longer expected to suddenly rip off their old skin and start singing like a newborn baby in a Broadway play, is a reality that I’ve secretly hoped for since I was a teenager — a world in which everyone understands themselves to be somewhere on the Kinsey Scale and gender spectrum, and aren’t afraid to just openly talk about it without having to put a big pink triangle on their arm.

But there’s a weird drawback that I’ve experienced the older I get and the more I try to mingle within gay communities (this is explicitly about groups of aging gay men, more than anything else.)

There’s the sense that being Out in any capacity is ‘cool’, but it no longer gains you access to the ‘cool gay kids club.’ It feels like there’s a large uptick in gatekeeping going on in CERTAIN LGBTQIA+ spaces as of late that is designed to keep the ‘normies’ out and only let the ‘real gays’ in. This already drove me nuts ten years ago, and nowadays — in a world filled with far more visible bigotry and inarguable leans toward fascism — it absolutely sends me into a rage.

To put it bluntly: as someone who can best be described as ‘pansexual’ and ‘non-binary’ in casual conversation, I’ve always been seen as Not Gay Enough.

It’s a bit of comfort, many days.

To be Not Gay Enough for the Gays and Not Straight Enough for the Straights, or Too Gay for the Straights and Too Straight for the Gays, is a bit of a luxury because it means I don’t have to constrain myself to the expectations of either group. But it also means I’m a bit of a black sheep when I am hanging out in this communities.

It’s a constant refrain,

“Oh, I never would’ve thought you were gay.”

“If I hadn’t seen you two holding hands, I would’ve thought you and your bf were brothers.”

“You don’t give off a queer vibe.”

Generally, by and large, I don’t take these comments as insults. Often times, I find it quite funny that something about my appearance reads as straight. (I’m assuming it correlates to my obsession with fitness, black metal t shirts, and ripped jeans. Although, ironically, my entire Instagram Explore feed is dudes with the exact same fit and style as me who are 100% gay and get clocked as such. Not sure what I’m doing differently…Perhaps I oughta get a septum piercing.)

Separately, there is of course the ‘crowbar’ effect when I hang out with straight dudes — particularly those who don’t know me very well. There’s always a goofy “walking on eggshells” tone that comes across as painfully obvious when I mention that I’m queer to a straight guy when we first meet, as if they’re holding back something that they would normally say around other straight men but now have to censor themselves. It also means that no matter how good of friends I become with some straight dudes, I know I’ll never be allowed to be a part of certain activities or conversations because I’d be seen as a sort of outsider.

I HAVE to assume this a universal experience for women and people of color whenever they meet white men and feel some sort of strange disconnect in the way they talk to you versus who they speak to their bros in private.

There’s a part of me that doesn’t mind this, because I have very distinct memories of high school locker rooms and the weird shit straight dudes would say to each other back then, so I can only assume those conversations haven’t gone away the older and dumber we become.

The combination of the Gaytekeepers within the LGBTQIA+ community AND the Crowbar effect with the straights can make for a really strange, narrow bridge to traverse for those of us who desire to be a part of both the queer and the straight worlds.

It’s a tightrope act, to somehow maintain an imaginary status of “gay enough” (i.e. watching the right movies, keeping up with the right shows, music, etc. and knowing how to gab about the latest gossip) while also being vaguely aware of what’s happening in the realm of sports and Marvel and heavy metal i.e. “straight enough.”

Up until a certain point, I actually love being in this kind of Purgatory. I thrive on having my foot in a hundred different doors at any given moment and knowing dozens of people in a dozen different scenes across a dozen cities. I’m a social butterfly and I love meeting new people and picking up new hobbies and interests every day, so being able to hop from a drag show to a pro wrestling show to a heavy metal concert to a writers group to a Blackhawks game to The Devil Wears Prada 2 is an absolute dream scenario, by and large.

It’s only when I try to SHARE those experiences with certain folks that it suddenly becomes a pitfall.

Those pitfalls (the awkward moments when I feel like I’m not living up to the standards of gay men nor making straight men comfortable enough to be themselves around me) are a litmus test for myself — the question that riddled my mind for much of my teens and twenties, that has slowly faded the more time I spend in my “fuck it all” thirties…

How do I navigate the narrow bridge that lets me enjoy both gay and straight worlds, as someone who sees himself as both and everything in between?

The short answer is I no longer worry about it as much.

The long answer is that I’ve become something of a chameleon — whether by accident or by attrition.

That is to say, I am entirely myself, and I feel MORE myself in the last few years than I did in the thirty years prior. But what I ultimately realized is that the Real Version of Matt Rahn is one that requires a sort of adaptability.

I actually necessarily enjoy being overly sassy and flamboyant around straight dudes, nor do I enjoy being overly masculine (ha) around gay men. My happiest state of being is gauging the vibe of the environment I’m in and then shapeshifting accordingly to match the scenery.

It’s not meant as inauthentic — I hope — but rather the fact that I’m just not someone who can firmly plant their flag in a very specific brand, genre, category or specification and tell everyone to deal with. My anxiety just can’t handle forcing myself on people so brazenly…Though I often admire people with that kind of conviction.

I tend to just be variations of Me in different settings, and so the version of Me you see out in the wild is likely going to be a little different than the Me someone else sees. It’s not meant to be two-faced or fake, but rather trying to meet the other person on their own terms and bring the version of Matt that I think works best for our relationship.

I guess that reads as a little sociopathic, and hell, maybe it is.

But I have far too many toxic memories of trying too hard to swing one way, and coming across as ‘too much’ for some folks and ‘not enough’ for others. There will never be a happy medium that satisfies all parties, and I don’t think that’s what I really want anyway. I don’t want to be Gay Enough for certain groups and Straight Enough for others. I’d rather just be My Own Thing and just have everyone accept me for that, and if that acceptance means that I need to code myself slightly differently in certain environments, I really don’t mind that — I actually thrive on it.

The hardest part for me isn’t being a chameleon, it’s still letting the Matt Rahn Inside shine through the camouflage. The idea of Me always being present, regardless of how gay or straight my outfits read and whatever my cadence and tone sound like on a given day.

But hopefully my sense of humor, sensitivity, long-windedness, and general overly-anxious-bordering-on-paranoia-concern always comes across no matter who I’m with and what we’re doing.

Because I don’t have a desire to give up the straight things in my life nor the gay things nor the in-betweeny, pansexual, nonbinary, trans, lesbionic, queer, dgaf things, even if I don’t meet the expectations of certain members within those groups.

A realization that hits the older I get is that I don’t necessarily need A SINGLE TRIBE. I’m lucky enough to have countless tribes in my life that I can reach out to at any time and be included without question or rigamarole, and that having a sort of chameleon (but hopefully not sociopathic) approach to blending in with each is where I feel the most at home.

If you’re wondering, “well how the hell does he openly express himself to his fullest?” the answer is right in front of you. Writing is where the Realest Version of Matt Rahn exists, and probably always will. Blogs, novels, albums, films, whatever I’m working on in the moment is my most honest form of expression, and something that I’m always going to rely on when I feel like social interactions just aren’t the right place for the chameleon to shed his skin.

While it’s not Pride Month [trademark] yet, it does feel a little bit like the conversations around Queerness In The Modern Era are already firmly in the spotlight again, and this is just something that has been on my mind a lot lately after spending too much time out in the world socializing — now that Chicago is finally back to normal temperatures that allow for public events and gatherings.

And so I don the chameleon cloak once more, with glee, as I do my usual Matt thing of wearing sleeveless metal band t shirts with too much jewelry, cheap sunglasses, and a goofy half-pompadour and very tight stretchy jeans that reads as “idk is he gay tho?” to the frustration of some and the relief of others. And then you’ll speak to me and if I’m feeling saucy I’ll wax poetic about Drag Race or AEW but otherwise I’ll probably wait for you to pick the topic and I’ll run with whatever you give me, not because I don’t care, but because I realize it’s what makes both you and I the most comfortable, and that’s where I feel most like Myself.

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One of the weirdest things in the rise of ‘artificial intelligence’ (lol) over these last 2 or 3 years has been the insistence that people NEED to start using it. That it’s something that will only benefit humanity if we ALL start interacting with it so frequently that it becomes second nature to the way we perform daily tasks. Setting aside the fact that literally NO other invention in the history of mankind has ever forced itself upon us in such a egomaniacal and peer-pressurey manner before (can you imagine if they FORCED everyone to buy a Ford Model T when they were still just prototypes? or if they MADE everyone take a loan to buy the first computers that were effectively little more than calculators?), there’s a real theater of grotesquery parading itself under the banner of ‘economic booms’ across every company and industry right now that is frightening as all hell.

Let us pretend that Generative A.I. (the bullshit we all used in the early days to create stupid images and videos that looked like dogshit and is now being abused by every politician, journalist, and wrestling promoter alike) isn’t a part of the conversation for the moment, and focus solely on the thing that the developers of A.I. want us to become obsessed with -- the chatbots.

The ‘agents’ or workflow managers or whatever terminology is currently polluting Silicon Valley -- merely algorithms; longform codes that are designed to scour the entirety of the internet to produce a sort of personalized summary response to any given query i.e. creating a list of things to do when you ask it for tourist attractions in New York City, or maybe it’ll give you a step by step procedure of how to remove snake venom from a fresh bite in your leg...just like the chatbots we already had 10 years ago, but now souped up with bigger and more water-consuming GPUs and fed by personalized algorithms infamously perfected by TikTok, Instagram, Youtube, and the like.

A.I. agents are effectively a scourge at this point, as every major player in the tech industry has found ways to inject them into every single facet of our daily live. Google is forcing you to use Gemini when you search for anything, Microsoft is forcing you to use Copilot to the point that all new Microslop laptops feature a Copilot button NEXT TO THE FUCKING SPACE BAR, Apple has Siri taking over every phone, Amazon has Alexa But Now It’s Different Somehow, OpenAI has ChatGPT telling kids to jump off bridges, Twitter has MechaHitlerWaitImeanGrok, Anthropic has Claude, and so on and so on and so on.

I’m not necessarily writing today to dig my heels in and say these are all brainwashing cult devices designed to numb your brains and fill it with vacuous (and incorrect) information that will ultimately turn you into a susceptible vegetable incapable of critical thinking...Although this post is probably gonna come off as such regardless, and I’m certainly not gonna STOP anyone from thinking that...

art by Ricardo Bettazzoni

But what freaks me out right now isn’t necessarily the literal functionality (or lack thereof) of these agents. Silicon Valley has been trying to resell the same snake oil every few years for the last decade (see: cryptocurrency, NFTs, the Metaverse and digital real estate, etc.)

What bothers me this time is how many people of significant stature are buying into it, wholesale, without proof of concept, and how many of them are now SUPPORTING its takeover of every sector. How many millionaires are actively CHEERING for A.I. to plunder their companies from its foundations upward, as if they can’t wait for the day they can declare bankruptcy, take the bailout money, and disappear into the sunset.

Namely, this is concerning large companies that require hard, reliable data rendered on a frequent basis to deliver safe, reliable services to a large number of customers. Utilities, banks, insurance carriers, automobile manufacturers, civil services, hospitals, pharmacies, emergency services and response teams, and of course government sectors like the military.

Almost unanimously and overnight, these companies have suddenly taken a hard, disturbing pivot towards embracing A.I. agents in a way that should be concerning to everyone -- given A.I. agents’ lack of transparency in their response processes, and a complete lack of legal confidentiality with whatever private data is openly shared in a user’s query. All the same, billion-dollar companies across the country are all telling their employees to make sure they’re interfacing with A.I. agents of all varieties, spending their monthly token allowances with WHATEVER queries they can think of, and sharing their A.I.-driven results with the shareholders as if whatever was created in a matter of minutes is wholly accurate and more reliable than whatever was human-created, proofread, fact-checked, and peer-reviewed before.

Again, I’m not here to advocate for sensible A.I. use and vetting your data before and after you submit a query. That should be common sense, and I’ve seen plenty of cases where the agent DOES seem to create good and accurate information in a fast manner that could save users some time. (Bear in mind this is for trivial tasks, like basic computation and spreadsheet analysis that any pre-scripted Macro or shared code on GitHub could also do for you, the agent is just saving you the time of tracking down said Macro or searching GitHub. As I’ve said before, the best and most practical use for A.I. thus far is to basically save us time Googling things -- and even then, it sucks at doing that.)

What I’m waving the red flag on here is HOW MANY CEOs, CIOs, CFOs, VPs, Directors, and Managers across the spectrum of the American workforce are all suddenly pretending like A.I. is the last vestige of the economic stronghold that we must all embrace and utilize immediately if we are to survive the coming “changing of the guard.” To such extent that is reads more and more like many large companies are starting to use anti-A.I. beliefs as grounds for layoffs and furloughs, which, in any other reasonable period of time would’ve been seen as explicitly criminal and morally reprehensible, but in 2026 is just seen as “embracing the future.”

So what is the end result for us, as a species?

Again, ignoring the obvious death sentences we’re foisting upon the environment, our attention spans, and interpersonal relationships...

It is the Death of Data. Or rather, the Death of GOOD Data.

We shall soon enter the Era of Vibes. We’ve already heard about ‘vibe coding’, wherein programmers use A.I. platforms to essentially invent code from thin air that kinda sorta does what it needs to, but not really, and also it has ZERO guardrails to stop it from stealing personal or patented information, exploiting minors and susceptible groups, or sharing explicit or dangerous content.

What starts in coding always perforates outward through IT, meaning it won’t be long before EVERYONE is working off of ‘vibes.’ Inputting everything into an A.I. agent, which are famous for validating our feelings and never being able to fact check its responses (see: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver’s episode from this past Sunday), and filling both our hands AND our machines with uncorroborated data that will ultimately be pushed out to the masses as ‘facts’ written in stone.

There used to be this ultimate rule across the universe -- that lies would ultimately come undone over time. That anyone COULD make something up at any time, but eventually, the truth would come to light.

In the corporate world, this is what earnings calls and quarterly reports used to be. A company used to have boil down the hard numbers and look at how much money they spent over a quarter, versus what they made in profits, and report the margins to their investors. If things were bad, they had to be honest about it, otherwise they would face penalties from the government, and subsequent journalists would ring the alarm to investors that things weren’t on the up and up, causing funds to be pulled and the company to be punished accordingly.

As of early 2017 (hint hint) that universal rule started to disappear, as more and more companies were able to get away with fudging their numbers and never having to face consequences from either the government nor the investors for pumping their numbers to improve their evaluations and stock market shares.

That went into overdrive during the pandemic and is now on a horrific trajectory in the wake of A.I. -- where these companies have been given permission to fully invent new realities where they’re all somehow worth half a TRILLION dollars without a single penny to show for it, while they continue to burn through billions and billions of their investors’ dollars (granted most of these investors are private equity firms, so I’m not exactly upset about that.) This behavior, which continues to go unchecked and unpunished, has now visibly become the modus operandi of ANY company with less than altruistic scruples, and who are now all actively inventing narratives to justify their future evaluations as ‘groundbreaking.’

And here we sit, at the precipice of the proverbial bubble everyone’s been talking about, where every damn company is continuing to make shit up about how accurate, reliable, and productive their systems are, and how perfect and untarnished their subsequent products have become, allowing them to invent new metrics to inflate their numbers every quarter and push them (and consequently, the entire U.S. stock market) into the stratosphere, with nothing to show for it.

And as that fugazi-waterfall trickles down to the rest of the economy, everyone will be forced to play by the same rules. Every LLC is now forced to lie about their numbers and claim that things are going swimmingly: that A.I. is taking over and they’re all getting ready to catapult their sectors into the Work of Tomorrow.

But what happens when everything about your work tomorrow is rendered hollow? When everything companies promised investors and stockholders turns out to be completely fabricated? When there is no profit to be shared and the product themselves turn into absolute garbage -- enshittification en masse.

art by Franck Besançon

The first obvious result is the thing I’ve been screaming about for over a year -- that the whole system will collapse. The bubble bursts, and every single company that has becoming wholly obsessed with A.I. will be forced to fold. Untold financial damage will be unleashed across every industry and virtually everyone will be out of a job. Worse than the Great Depression, the Housing Market Crash, and the Pandemic combined.

The second notion, and one that I didn’t want to believe was likely until very recently, is the ‘singularity’ that the tech CEOs blabber on about constantly, pushing all of us into a collective form of A.I. Psychosis.

As everyone tumbles further and further down the rabbit hole, the standards of every company will continue to wither and fade, as every mind becomes numb to the idea of bad information, misleading data, and flat-out-falsehoods. Lying will becoming the new norm, and as long as the Line Goes Up and the investors continue to agree to the lie, then everything will march forward internally...Until it literally can’t.

In the aforementioned industries, lies can only last for so long before the physical world catches up with them.

A utility company can implement A.I. across its engineering, permitting, billing, and management platforms, but how long does that swath of hallucinatory data get passed back and forth before miscalculations and missing information results in a massive outage? In the best case scenario, a whole city loses internet indefinitely. In the worst case scenario, a substation goes dark, a water treatment facility falls apart, or a gas plant ruptures.

Run that simulation again with banks that fabricate how much money should be going where, hospitals with patients’ personal medical history (which is already happening, to be clear), or military contractors who are given misleading information on who to supply with what (also already happening!) and you have an entire civilization that is essentially conditioned to just accept falsehoods and unreliable data, inevitably leading to the very literal collapse of society as infrastructure crumbles and the knowledge of how to stop catastrophes becomes antiquated.

The expectations of truth, quality, and reliability fade into obscurity, and what is left is the sycophantic praises from A.I. agents who tell us all we’re very good boys and girls (gonna assume these conservative-driven A.I.s don’t believe that trans or non-binary is a thing) and that we should keep doing what we’re doing -- even as we flood the system with worse and worse intelligence until an irreversible and catastrophic event renders us all stupefied at our creation. The A.I. will keep patting us on the head even as we all contribute to a nuclear warhead being launched at an ally or a power plant overheats or a skyscraper tips over or planes fall out of the sky.

And what will really get my goat at that point is the Blame Game that will follow.

How no matter what terrible cataclysm this unleashes, every single person will find a way to make sure they had nothing to do with it. No matter what YOU told the A.I. over the years of circle jerking with Copilot over your weekly bank statements, there’s no way whatever YOU asked the A.I. to do with those monthly spending reports could’ve possibly been part of the code that tricked the bank’s A.I. system into accidentally wiring a terrorist organization billions of dollars that then ultimately led to a horrific attack down the street.

It couldn’t be you!

You’re such as special boy or girl. You use the A.I. agent responsibly and safely. Nothing you put into the machine is misleading or erroneous, and nothing that it spits back at you could possibly be unreliable. And even if you did or it was, you’re just one little cog in the machine. How much can that one iota of erroneous data really affect the system as a whole? There are nearly a billion people using A.I. right now for millions of other reasons! Surely everyone needs just a little supplication, and surely no one’s data is perfect.

We all just need whatever is at our disposal to get through the day however we can, right?

...Right?

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Roundabout this time last year, I wrote about my feelings of season 17 of RuPaul’s Drag Race and how underwhelming a lot of reality television felt.

As someone who has never been a big fan of reality TV — and often times speak loudly about how I think it’s one of the more detrimental forces in modern media — I am a complete and total sucker for queer reality TV, chief among them being anything that allows for the showcase of queer art, a la Drag Race or Dragula.

And on their surface, I should just be thrilled that shows like this are allowed to exist at all, especially in the face of such ardent political opposition in recent years.

But still, I want these shows to succeed: creatively, critically, financially, and as unending works that hopefully improve with each successive season.

And to that end, Drag Race is one of the more consistent brands in the universe of queer reality television. The general consensus amongst the vast fanbase is that the show started on rocky terrain (seasons 1-4 trying too hard to emulate Tyra Banks’ America’s Next Top Model), before pivoting to sheer queerdrama brilliance (season 5-10 being PEAK TV with vibrant characters and high drama coated with gorgeous artistic flare) and finally settling into reliable albeit predictable ‘storytelling’ (seasons 11-17 all being varying degrees of ‘meh’ and ‘not too bad but kinda bland.’)

Season 18 wrapped this past Friday, and opinions are that, Drag Race is — once again — just fine. It does what it needs to do but it is no longer the elevated program it once was…Some fans actually even went so far as to say they HATED this season, due to several surprise eliminations and an unexpected top three that “ruined” the casting for some folks…And I’m not so sure I agree with any of that.

In the wake of my not-so-great feelings on season 17, I had a lot of demands and expectations as a fan if I wanted to keep watching this show live week after week, and by and large, I thought season 18 did a GREAT job at addressing those concerns in spades.

So let me spend this week not talking about the apocalyptic hellscapes outside our front doors or deep dive into the neurotic psychosis that has consumed my mediocre-author-brain the longer I waste my time trying to make myself more ‘marketable,’ but instead simply gushing over a great season of Drag Race that helped me keep my head held high.

To address the most obvious elephant first, season 18 was filled to the brim with SEASONED QUEENS, HUNNY.

That is to say, after a season where virtually every contestant was under 25 and brand new to drag (probably courtesy of the pandemic?) season 18 felt like a return to form in that the vast majority of the queens were in their 30s and had been doing drag for nearly at least a decade — and the few queens who were on the younger side had made the cast because they had the talent and polish of the 30-something queens, so you never had an uneasiness about the “obvious” girls who just didn’t cut it.

Even early outs like DD Fuego, Mandy Mango, and Ciara Myst (hey, that’s one of my girls!) all had a much more refined sense of taste, a better ability to control the stage and camera, and also never had the foolish courage to walk out on stage as a fucking bedsheet.

There was also just a great diversity of minds this season.

Whereas season 17 (I swear my purpose here is to not just openly talk shit about season 17 nonstop) was almost a hivemind of 20-somethings all obsessing over the same TikTok trends, season 18 had girls from around the country with different backgrounds and upbringings that allowed for a WAY wider range of styles that were evenly showcased throughout the challenges and the runways. You had ‘old school queens’ like Jane Don’t who could pull historic references that tickled the judges, ‘down and dirty’ queens like Darlene Mitchell who would literally wear burgers for bras, and ‘street queens’ like Mia Starr who constantly pulled out the dance moves and had a more contemporary vibe.

Moreover, the format of the show itself just worked more smoothly this year. Unlike so many other seasons that forced a device that would allow for one girl to be saved (or brought back), season 18 was rather cutthroat in that they never brought a queen back, and they never gave a queen a way to protect themselves from elimination. We had the cliche first episode where no one went home, and single lip-sync-for-your-life that was soo good that Ru decided to let both girls stay, and that was it. Otherwise, there was no mercy amongst the 14 girls, and no matter what, we were going to get our classic Top Three one way or another.

The next elephant to address was the sheer audacity of some of the eliminations — and the order in which they happened.

Immediately, anyone reading this who watched the show is probably thinking first and foremost of Jane Don’t. Singlehandedly one of the best runs in the history of the show, Jane Don’t was in the top 3 every single week of this season up until she finally wasn’t. And when she wasn’t, it became abundantly clear that the season’s obvious frontrunner and keeper of one of the best track records in the history of the franchise, was destined for disaster.

Jane Don’t’s elimination (putting her 5th in the competition) has been considered one of the biggest mistakes in the show’s history, and something that made the audience quickly HATE this season. And if you put money on Jane or just like to see girls run the tables, I can understand the frustration. But I, personally, thought removing Jane from the picture was kinda perfect storytelling from a reality TV perspective.

Firstly, Jane was simply not likeable on the show.

I’m sorry, but nothing about her confessionals nor the way she interacted with the other queens made me want her to win. She was snooty, condescending, hard to work with, and clearly resented everyone else anytime they had a slightly different train of thought than Jane. Moreover, she was the single worst winner the show has ever had — spending every week in the top (and usually winning) and then going to the camera and saying that she’s not good enough or even making the other queens feel bad for her. This COULD have been an interesting story arc if, at some point, Jane had learned to open up and share those insecurities, but instead, she doubled down and got worse as the season progressed. For a showrunner, it’s not hard to see that your frontrunner being unlikeable can pose a real problem, and so it only stands to reason that production eventually started looking for ways to see if Jane could either shape up or take herself out (and in doing so, open the field for Myki Meeks who had a similarly great track record and was 10x more likeable with both the fans and the queens.)

Enter MY GIRL, Nini Coco — the antithesis of Jane Don’t. Another incredibly talented queen (who has only been doing drag for 4 years at this point wtfffff?) who started off strong, Nini’s story arc went from being a grouchy engineer who did incredibly well in the first half of the season, to an emotional and struggling perfectionist in the second half who almost got eliminated thrice, but instead put on three of the best lipsyncs-for-your-life ever and proved herself physically, emotionally, and mentally talented enough to get herself to the finale. And, most importantly, Nini knew how to tell a good story. The longer the season went on, the more Nini opened herself up to the other girls and the audience, and as she did worse in some challenges, she learned to adapt and show more of her true self and share more of her story with Ru, making her a trillion times more relatable than some other frontrunners who doubled down and got grumpier.

Whether it was production’s doing or the queens themselves, season 18 had a much better understanding of how to tell 14 separate, concise, and meaningful stories without also giving away the results in an obvious fashion.

On previous seasons, almost anytime a queen got significantly more confessional time on a certain episode or started sharing their deeply personal stories in the werkroom, it became painfully obvious that they were almost certainly going home that week. Season 18 did (unfortunately) get rid of these great emotional beats for the queens, but instead tried to weave the girls’ stories naturally into the conversation throughout the episodes so it made it less clear who was “bottom tier” vs “mid tier” vs “top tier” throughout the runtime.

This actually made the whole season rather exciting for me, while understandably more frustrating for others. A LOT of Drag Race fanatics assumed throughout the first few episodes that Vita VonTesse Star, Mia Starr, and Juicy Love Dion were the obvious frontrunners who had zero chance of going home. And the subsequent implosions after their eliminations, to me, made for excellent TV and the first real feelings of genuine surprise from the show in many, many seasons.

On top of that, both production and the girls did a better job this season of making sure every girl had SOMETHING to show the cameras and establish their fandom/brand going forward. Discord Addams will forever be the queen with THE WALK, Juicy and Mia will both go down as the greatest lipsyncers period, Kenya Pleaser will be seen as the most charismatic performer, Athena Dion is now THE narrator for the world at large, and so on and so on and so on.

And to put a cherry on top of the gush—fountain, I really think the whole finale was tremendous.

Ignoring the fact that the show foolishly put the finale on the standard show studio runway again instead of a proper theater (budget cuts? who can say), I thought Darlene Mitchell, Myki Meeks, and Nini Coco were three of the most likable finalists we’ve had in ages, and all three brought their top tier brands to the show — I say ‘brands’ because a lot of people have attacked all three queens for not having the ‘best’ looks for a finale compared to previous seasons, but I again feel like none of our finalists this year felt the need to compare themselves to other seasons, so much as they wanted to finish THEIR storylines proper and illustrate themselves in a way that matched the tone, style, and vibe of what was presented during the season. They chose continuity over sheer spectacle. Each of their solo performances reinforces this, and the final lip sync between the top 2 cements the exact way each of their storylines should have inevitably wrapped up.

Ultimately, season 18 is a season of stories and of girls that are just unanimously loveable (yes, even Jane). It’s about queens who know who they are and what they want to say and weren’t afraid to do it and say it repeatedly. It’s a season for production to finally surprise us, and in a way that I found narratively satisfying and emotional sensible.

And it’s a season for my alternative girls to thrive.

Ciara Myst had one of the best comebacks (and looks) for the reunion episode.

Discord Addams went down as one of the funniest queens with the best politics.

and Nini Coco became the runner up that absolutely everyone loves and agrees will be THE QUEEN to watch, whenever she appears on our screens (or in our clubs!) next.

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The guitarist of the metal band Harms Way and the co-host of the podcast Hardlore, Bo was a seminal figure in the Chicago music scene, and someone whose presence was, perhaps, considered a given.

To preface this conversation, I want to mention that I never met Bo (save for maybe at a merch booth). I didn’t know him personally, and I don’t want this piece to be misconstrued as a fan who is trying establish a connection I [regrettably] never had with the man.

Instead, I want to talk about Chicago’s reaction to Bo’s death, and the music scene writ large.

Bo’s passing has been, inarguably, something that has permeated every moment I’ve stepped out the door of my Wicker Park apartment for the last two weeks, and that sort of emotional impact that someone can leave on a city as big as Chicago is something worth examining.

At a time where we’ve told ourselves that everyone is disconnected, insular, isolated, and living in a bubble, I feel as though the whole worlds of music, hardcore, straight edge, fitness, podcasting, concerts, festivals, podcasting, and Midwest living in general all truly stopped the day the news of Bo’s passing broke.

Not just on social media — although that was also jarring, given that not just local musicians and fans were sharing the news, but also big names in professional wrestling, fitness, journalism, and non-metal music nationwide were expressing their grief for the situation — but seemingly every bar, restaurant, and record store in town seemed to be reacting to the moment.

At the Metro last week, they held a service for Bo for his friends and family to remember him, wherein the likes of world-famous musicians and athletes all flew in from around the globe to pay their respects and mourn together shoulder to shoulder with all the locals who had grown up with Bo, and even fans who just appreciated him for his art and contribution to the scene.

The following Friday and Saturday, I was at a local metal festival that featured a number of hardcore and grind bands — Pig Destroyer, Young Widows, Weekend Nachos, Plague Bringer, etc. — and there was nary a musician on stage that didn’t dedicate the whole night to Bo Lueders and what he meant to them.

There are shirts with Bo’s face all about town. There’s a GoFundMe for his services that has surpassed every marker imaginable. Turnstile had ‘BO’ taped to their amplifiers for their livestreamed set at Coachella last weekend.

Bo’s name has reverberated throughout the Chicago, the world, and back nonstop in the wake of his death fourteen days ago.

That’s been the largest comfort for me — again, not someone who knew Bo personally, just a fan who always reacts emotionally to…everything — is seeing just how vast and unified the entire scene has been in the wake of Bo’s passing.

To know that at any given moment, around any corner, I’m just a stone’s throw away from someone who was deeply affected by this tragedy and is going through something unimaginable in their heads. To know that a hug right now means more to a lot of people than we can ever know.

To know that loss and grief is something so universal and taxing, yet in this instance, is something that binds thousands of people together in a way that I think brings them together more than it does isolate them.

Anger and frustration have been present, obviously, but so has reconciliation and appreciation and adoration. In spaces where often you see stoic dudes who aren’t willing to share vulnerabilities, now you see an entire city with its heart wide open and pleading for understanding.

It’s bolstered the conversation we all need to remember to have constantly around mental health — around taking care of ourselves and especially each other. To check in with everyone and to understand that you can never really know exactly what else someone is going through in any given moment.

But it’s also brought people together in a way that I suspect only grief can.

To live in a city as large as Chicago, and to know that a single loss of life can elicit THIS large of a reaction from every corner of every neighborhood is to be reminded that life matters — that the folks that we ‘take for granted’ will always be around are such foundational aspects of our daily lives that we don’t even entertain the idea of what happens if and when they’re gone. And once it happens, it becomes all too apparent that their impact on the world is something immeasurably huge.

It’s been humbling and, in a way, heartwarming to see big dudes at heavy metal concerts all pause and weep between mosh pits in remembrance for someone who dedicated their life to music and expression.

While I’ve always been a big fan of Harms Way, I hadn’t sat and listened to much of the Hardlore podcast before.

Last week, the other host of the podcast, Colin Young (drummer for Gods Hate and more) was kind enough to share a very personal interview the two men conducted just a few months prior — with one another.

Rather doing an hourslong deep-dive into their favorite musicians, Bo and Colin faced one another and talked for nearly 2 hours about their own lives. Their upbringings, early memories, hopes and dreams, regrets…They even talk about mental health and dying several times throughout the episode, in a way that feels almost spiritual now in retrospect.

It’s a tough watch, but something I imagine would bring a lot of happiness and solace to those who knew Bo closely, and something that I can personally say made me feel a lot closer to both him and the scene here in Chicago just by simply putting down my phone and listening for two hours.

And now I’m tumbling down the rabbit hole — digging through the Hardlore archives and finally listening to all the great interviews Bo and Colin have done with so many incredible musicians (I just finished the five hour marathon they conducted with Davey
Havok), and while I’m always riveted by their guests, I can’t help but pay attention to Bo.

His attention to detail, his enthrallment with the guests, his prevalence for relating back to his childhood and nostalgia for the days he first bought a band’s CD or saw them live…

He was — and still is — a human we can all relate to. Someone that we all see ourselves in: a fan of music and a fan of people, a musician and a performer and an artist, a man of both Chicago and of the world, and someone anyone would happily sit and chat with.

Someone that ought not be taken for granted, and someone who reminds the world that your impact will always being felt by everyone around you, every single day.

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Neurosis is a name that sticks with you the first time you read it. Their cover art is always something outside the perimeters of standard metal — not necessarily deranged or macabre, but rather…bleak. Artsy, but upsetting.

My first few times seeing Neurosis live were transcendental, in a truer sense than words will do justice. A sonic sensation designed to disarm and disrupt, but never harm. Neurosis’ entire brand is that of brash, harsh, unrelenting perseverance through existential hardship.

And so the addiction grew strong, and I saw them every time they played Chicago, as well as multiple festivals across the country. I fell in love with their side projects and collaborators, their producers and cowriters, and each member’s individual contributions.

Without exaggeration, Through Silver in Blood and A Sun That Never Sets were two of my brightest guiding lights through some of the darkest moments of 20s, while their 2012 release, Honor Found in Decay, was a watershed moment for me in understand just what modern music COULD and, frankly, SHOULD be.

Chief among my biggest musical inspirations at the time was Neurosis’ co-lead-vocalist and guitarist Scott Kelly, who I had met several times over the years both as a fan at any one of his concerts, and in more casual settings when mutual acquaintances would take us to independent professional wrestling shows together. Scott’s art via Neurosis, Corrections House, Shrinebuilder, Mirrors for Psychic Warfare, and even his solo material, had become foundational in my experience with heavy music, noise, and even poetry, etching Neurosis’ impact on my life in dark ink.

That all came to a disturbing, crashing halt in 2022 when Scott Kelly himself left a lengthy post on Facebook, where he admitted to and took responsibility for significant physical, emotional, and financial abuse of his wife and their children for much of their lives together. I won’t reshare the statement, given that Kelly’s own family members had made a point to not go public with the story until absolutely necessary, but it’s easily searchable online. Scott Kelly immediately retired from music entirely, and Neurosis were quick to confirm that he had already been fired. The band was effectively on hiatus, and disappeared into the ether, as do so many other artists when [confirmed] allegations like this are brought to light.

And ever since, I haven’t been able to engage with Scott Kelly’s music — any of it, from Corrections House to Shrinebuilder to Mirrors for Psychic Warfare to Scott’s solo music to even his numerous guest features on Mastodon tracks — on any real emotional level.

Not even Neurosis, who I essentially considered dead and buried in my mind.

The Neurosis-sized gap in my conscious was something that I didn’t think of much at first, simply because ANOTHER beloved public figure being outed (even by himself) as an absolute monster just felt so run-of-the-mill, and it felt like maybe plenty of other heavy bands would soon fill the space…

But it did start to dawn on me after these last few years that something in the world of extreme, independent, experimental, and artistically-driven metal had gone seriously awry.

I wasn’t being punched in the face by aural sensations while also feeling compelled to fall to my knees and plead with the very bindings of nature which surrounds me for generational absolution. I hadn’t heard an album that felt like a true connection to something beyond what’s just beneath my feet, forcing me to stand and gaze into the sky as if waiting to be gifted spiritual clairvoyance from the furthest reaches of the cosmos. No one in the metal scene was matching that perfect blend of noise, adversity, and poetry.

Until just two Fridays ago, when we were treated to one of the most shocking surprise returns of this decade.

Neurosis had been brought back from the dead — with a new, full length album immediately available and live dates soon to follow.

There’s no way around the fact that my heart FLUTTERED by the news. Even just the album cover and its title appearing on my feed made me feel something I didn’t know I still had lurking in my dormant, cold, dead heart. Genuine excitement.

What’s more, there was no need for hesitation and further inquiry, because Neurosis were quick to explain how this revival had come about — in place of Scott Kelly, they had recruited Aaron Turner as co-vocalist and guitarist.

For the unfamiliar, Aaron Turner is THE prodigy of art-noise-prog-sludge-psych-metal for the modern era. An absolute titan of the independent metal scene, Turner’s credits are too long for a comprehensive list, but suffice to say that, being a founder member of Isis (boy that’s gonna get me put on a list…), as well as Sumac and Old Man Gloom had already cemented him as the modern day’s progenitor of the sounds that Neurosis had originally forged.

The serpent had come back to eat its own tail in the best way possible.

An Undying Love for a Burning World is already timeless.

It is both quintessentially 2026 at its core, and yet it is eternal.

It is an album that both speaks to the here and the now, and yet will feel entirely poignant in thirty years’ time.

It is both heavy and gorgeous. It is disturbing and hypnotic. It is a band that has both returned after ten years, screaming for vengeance, and has also seemingly never lost a step — spending the last decade in deep reflection.

While I’m already late to the review-party, as Rolling Stone, Pitchfork, and even Anthony Fantano all agree that is THE best thing to happen to music so far this year (what the fuck reality are we even living in when I find myself agreeing with those three??), I still felt compelled to dedicate at least one week of writing to how masterful this album is, from start to finish.

It is the ONLY album I’ve heard in 2026 so far that necessitated an immediate re-listen as soon as I finished the first spin. It is the ONLY album I’ve been able to rely on almost daily to bring myself back to center and find something enjoyable about the current state we collectively find ourselves trapped in. It is the ONLY escape I can find in a world that does, indeed, feel like it’s burning.

The Burning World part of the title isn’t what really sticks out to me. It’s a cliche at some point in metal and hardcore to refer to the world as some form of doomed or another. Not to say it’s untrue — because it’s not — but it feels overdone and pointless to say it out loud. If anything, it feels like Neurosis is using this second half of the album title as a subversion, and a direct, confrontational rebuttal to the submissiveness and defeat that’s been lingering in metal for the last decade.

An Undying Love for that very same world, however, is something that only Neurosis can articulate. To look at the desecration and horrors around us, and be able to see through the nightmares and anxieties and come to appreciate the serenity that punctuates the worst moments, as brief and as quiet as they may be. Neurosis is a band that never embraced nihilism before, and they are clearly not going to do so now, as they fearlessly use the phrase “undying love” — something I don’t know if any other band in heavy music spaces would dare use in the current ethos.

Despite the unrelenting anguish and punishment laced into virtually every moment of An Undying Love for a Burning World, the imagery it conjures is not one of an ashen city or a imploded society, but rather that of open fields, unscathed mountains, fervent forests, and deep oceans. It is a call to understand the better parts of a world that we often forget, and that will stand tall tomorrow and the tomorrow after that, no matter what we as humans decide to do today.

Not to say it condemns or ignores humanity — quite the contrary, the album is hyper focused on both the How We Got Here and What Can We Do side of the apocalypse. It’s a Call To Action, but the action in question for Neurosis isn’t literal political activism nor self-annihilation, but rather disassociation from the very tools that have driven us apart. To avoid technology and senseless banter; to denounce all forms of hatred and judgement; to embrace connection and understanding at its most essential, basic core.

The opening track, We Are Torn Wide Open puts it succinctly, as a thesis:

The separation that burns our hearts
Is the root of all our disease
We’ve forgotten how to live so we suffer
We’ve forgotten how to struggle so we suffer
We’ve forgotten how to die so we suffer
We’ve forgotten we are wild so we suffer
We exist in isolation so we suffer

The dissonance is deafening.

and in perfect symmetrical fashion, the album’s epic closer answers the opening just as potently:

Sorrow we feel as we harrow the fields
As we know death to be a ravenous beast
Weltering in the blood of our love
The river itself starts to weep

All swept away
Cast from sun into shade
Cold fall ceaseless
In this we are held.

When I’m not listening to An Undying Love for a Burning World — which isn’t often — I’m going back and finally revisiting the old catalog that I loved so much for so long. And while there is still a strange stinging sensation that comes with Scott Kelly’s voice every time he bellows, it’s becoming easier to ignore and even artificially replace in my mind with the voice of Aaron Turner (whose contributions to the latest album shouldn’t be overlooked, as he is one of the only musicians in the modern era who could so seamlessly slip into Kelly’s position while both creating space for his own unique sound and also honoring the artistic merits of what came before.)

“Through Silver in Blood” still genuinely frightens me, while “Stones from the Sky” still makes me weep, and “A Sun That Never Sets” still manages to creeps into the back of my skull and nest in the darkest recesses, where it eats away at both my self-loathing and self-assurance until I’m left with just raw, unfettered id.

It feels like not just a triumph for the band and its members, but for the fans themselves, as we all rejoice in the rebirth of a seminal force that forged a key path for us as broken individuals at times in our lives when no other artists were articulating the feelings of doubt and worry in such a meaningful and spirited way.

An Undying Love for a Burning World is neither a comeback nor a victory lap, but rather an overdue anthem for those who needed something spiritual and poignant in this dire moment, and were only given precisely that at just the right moment, if only they choose now to hear it true and take to heart its unapologetic sincerity — screams and all.

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