Hello again, friends new and old. Here’s what I’ve been up to lately:

• ICYMI, I put out a new video essay in June. It’s about American visual culture—where it’s been (derogatory) and where it’s going (vaguely ominous). Check it out on YouTube if you haven’t yet.

  • I really enjoyed making this one. In fact, focusing solely on longform videos has been so fruitful that I’m considering hanging up my TikTok spurs for good. Which begs the question, what is this newsletter for, if not to keep y’all abreast of my short videos? Should I just yap about the mundane facts of my life? Should I post my pinball high scores? Should I share photos of weeds growing up through the sidewalk cracks? What is this, a blog?

• I’m reading A.S. Byatt’s Possession. It’s about two scholars who discover that the poets they respectively study had a secret, extramarital affair with each other. Every page of this book equals roughly one (1) bite of chocolate torte. Delicious and dense.

  • This is a novel about the information we shed as we live our lives: often innocuous and occasionally incriminating. Who does it belong to? If I were writing a contemporary retelling of Possession, I’d call it The Right to Cheat on Your Spouse in a Surveillance State.

• Last month I logged over 60 hours in a virtual co-working game called On-Together. My friend Kevin got me hooked on it. If you’re getting WeWork flashbacks from that description, I don’t blame you, but I promise it’s Not Like That.

  • On-Together is a digital body doubling game. People describe it as “cozy,” if that means anything to you. You join a server, enter “focus mode,” and proceed with your regular daily tasks, feeling motivated to stay on track because you’re Being Perceived by other people. These other people are, like you, represented by highly customizable avatars, who in turn have their own highly customizable pets. It’s all very, even aggressively, cute.

  • It’s shocking how much I’ve begun to look forward to playing this game (almost) every day. But then again, why shouldn’t I? If the ping of Slack can induce real world dread, why can’t chilling with my homies on a digital oceanfront instill a bit of real world serenity?

• I’ve been going to the CINEMA. I’ve watched both Backrooms and The Odyssey since my last update, and I’m pleased to report that practical effects are so back. And look, I didn’t love either of them, but I did love the experience of watching them in honest-to-God, speaker-rattling, hydrogenated soybean oil-drenched movie theaters.

  • Remember in 2020 when they said that movie theaters were dead? Ha!

• Speaking of the Odyssey, I’m slowly making my way through Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy, first published in 1982. In it, Ong frequently cites both the Iliad and the Odyssey as a bridge between contemporary literary cultures and ancient oral ones.

  • In the wake of Nolan’s adaptation, the Odyssey has been subject to a lot of concern trolling from the sorts of people who’d like to look back on Ancient Greece as both origin and pinnacle of Western literacy. The trouble is, of course, the Odyssey isn't a poem that was read by Ancient Greeks at all. It was a collection of stories and myths that had been told, orally, for hundreds of years before they were adapted using then-nascent written words. The Odyssey is bursting with the myriad earmarks of oral storytelling. If the Odyssey began as literature, it wouldn’t be the Odyssey at all.

• My personal Sopranos summer continues! God, what a show. I talk about it in this month’s Patreon bonus video.

• I added some new media recommendations to my Neocities site. Books, essays, fanfic—pick your poison.

• I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick.

  • Maybe the most significant difference between the book and its (arguably?) more famous adaptation, Blade Runner (1982, dir. Ridley Scott), is the androids themselves. In the movie they’re called replicants, and they’re sympathetic figures with whom we’re invited to identify. In the book, though, there’s clearly something off about them. In one disturbing scene, the android Pris dispassionately cuts the legs off a spider as her human companion looks on in horror.

  • In the book, the androids are comparable to humans who’ve been cognitively impaired by breathing nuclear dust. The book calls these people Specials, and they form a permanent underclass. The angst at the core of the novel isn’t so much about the bounty hunter Rick Deckard struggling to differentiate androids from humans, but the question of what a human even is, and who gets to decide.

• I also read Louise Glück’s The Wild Iris. I’ll leave you with my favorite poem from it.

• This post is a simulacrum! A facsimile! A sham! The canonical version lives on my website. You can subscribe via RSS and bypass Substack entirely at https://pagemelt.zone/rss.xml.

I hope you like it. :)

Greetings, all, from the auspicious beginnings of my own personal Tony Soprano summer. Look, Tony Soprano isn’t a guy you want to emulate, exactly. But in a media landscape full of mealy-mouthed, conflict avoidant losers, it’s a rare treat to watch a character make actual (bad) choices and deal with their actual (worse) consequences.

What I’ve been up to lately

• I’ve been watching The Sopranos. Obviously.

• Apparently in the mood to appreciate Italian American cinema, I also watched Moonstruck (1987) for the first time, and: wow! We used to be a proper country, huh?

  • If you didn’t already know, I’m delighted to inform you that Nicolas Cage is hot in this movie. In one memorable scene, Cher visits his bakery and demands he make amends with his estranged brother (her fiancé). Sweat-sheened and lightly manic, he rebukes her before turning to his coworker and demanding, “Chrissy, bring me the big knife. I’m going to cut my throat.” Iconic.

• I finished reading Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. It’s about a girl from another planet who communicates with her alien superiors via dumpster-salvaged fax machine. (Oh, and she’s also Italian American! Culturally, at least.) I liked it. I made a short video about why I don’t think it’s a sci-fi novel.

• I added new section to website for reading recommendations—specifically stuff you can read for (mostly) free online. Thoughtful human curation is more important than ever, and I want to #DoMyPart. My hope is that when you’re bored in line at the DMV, you’ll think to yourself, “Doesn’t Mel have some reading recs on their site? I should check those out!”

  • My most recent rec is “The Banal Horror of Jimmy Fallon” by Jon Greenaway for Current Affairs. It’s been making the rounds and deservedly so.

• Speaking of banal horrors, I accidentally read my first AI-generated fanfic. Well, maybe “accidentally” isn’t the right word. I was suspicious by the 30% mark, but I kept reading, unable to look away. Kind of like how I always watch the entire “Billie Jean”-dancing Chinese robot video when it crosses my feed. I’m inexplicably compelled by this robot—the awkward, frantic movements it makes before collapsing into a pitiful heap. Anyway, the experience of reading my first AI-generated fanfic was unpleasant yet edifying. I made a short video about it.

  • I also made a short follow-up video about why the hell people are using AI to “write” fanfic in the first place.

• I’ve been trudging through The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison, a widely beloved 2014 fantasy novel that I was sure would be a new favorite. (Hubris!) At the beginning of the book, 18-year-old Maia, the banished son of the late emperor, is unexpectedly thrust onto the throne and into the deep end. He spends the book navigating his new role in a state of perpetual mortification. It’s tedious to read! He’s the literal emperor! Grow up! But I acknowledge that is what the book’s about: growing up, shifting from a reactive frame of mind to a proactive one, learning that you can never please everybody, etc., etc. If I’d read it at 18, I probably would’ve gotten more out of it.

• It hasn’t been a great reading month, I guess, because I’m also struggling to get through Ken Liu’s All That We See or Seem. That pains me to admit, because Ken Liu is MY GUY. His short story collection The Paper Menagerie is one of the few books I’d recommend to absolutely everyone on the planet without caveat. I know what his beautiful, shimmering mind is capable of, and it’s more than All That We See or Seem. Don’t get me wrong, the book does have some of the philosophical sci-fi elements you’d expect of Liu, but they’re flattened by his attempt to force them into the genre mystery format.

• I hurt my foot, so the podiatrist put me in a boot. I have to wear it everywhere. It looks ridiculous, but it’s easy to walk in, so I’m counting my blessings. Every few weeks, I return to the podiatrist’s office, and he tells me how much longer I have to wear the boot, which is always more time than whatever he said last. While I wait for my name to be called, I stare into the swirling abyss of the waiting room accent wall and contemplate my fate.

• Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke is the buzziest novel of the year. If you haven’t heard, it’s about a Hannah Neeleman-esque tradwife who’s transported back in time to 1855 Idaho. I haven’t read it, but I have strong feelings about Christian extremism, so I did participate in a bit of discourse about it.

  • I think where I’m from (small town Kentucky) and my religious upbringing (liberal Presbyterian surrounded by evangelicals and Southern Baptists) has impacted my perspective on the long tradition of evangelicals attempting to penetrate secular culture. Tradwives didn’t fall out of a coconut tree, after all. I talk more about that in this month’s Patreon bonus video.

• All the Yesteryear talk got me thinking about what’s perhaps THEE most successful satire of American evangelicalism to date, the 2004 teen comedy Saved! I made a short video about it.

• I got a new personal high score on the Jurassic Park pinball machine (Stern, 2019)! Behold the triumphant self-portrait of the reigning T-Rex Rampage Champion.

• This post is a simulacrum! A facsimile! A sham! The canonical version lives on my website. You can subscribe via RSS and bypass Substack entirely at https://pagemelt.zone/rss.xml.

(Re)introduction

Last September, I set up this newsletter thinking I’d be writing a personal essay every few months. That was dumb. Not because writing personal essays is an unworthy or unachievable goal, but because it’s not a goal that I’ve ever actually had.

Suffice it to say, I’ve scaled back my ambitions. No personal essays. Instead, every month or two, I’ll post a rundown of everything I’ve been up to lately. Starting now.

What I’ve been up to lately

• I rebuilt my website. My old site was weird and offbeat—more of an art project than a business portal. Don’t get me wrong, my new website is also weird and offbeat, but it’s also more navigable to people primarily interested in my videos.

• I read George Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, and I can’t seem to shut up about it.

• I’m reading Beautyland by Marie-Helene Bertino. It’s lovely. I made a short video about its excellent use of embodied observation as an alternative to microexpressions.

• I read the nichely viral There Is No Antimemetics Division by qntm. I made a short video about it, and I delved a bit deeper in this month’s Patreon video. I can’t say I recommend the novel, exactly, but I wholeheartedly recommend qntm’s short story “Lena.” You can read it for free on his website.

• The (fictional) SCP Foundation-inspired organization to which the (fictional) Antimemetics Division belongs got me thinking about the last season of Angel. Do y’all remember Angel? I don’t blame you if you don’t, it aired over 20 years ago, but it’s great. I talked about it in this month’s Patreon video.

  

• I’ve been slowly making my way through Susan Sontag’s Against Interpretation and Other Essays. I made a short video about what the titular 1964 essay has to say about LLMs-as-literary-digests.

• According to Last.FM, I’ve streamed “Call It Easy” by Racing Mount Pleasant 123 times in the last 30 days. Pitchfork called the record “ambitious but underwhelming, filled with grand gestures that arrive at foregone conclusions.” I basically agree, but I love it anyway. What’s life about if not euphorically discovering for yourself the things that everybody else already seems to know?

• I finally finished Charlie Adhara’s Big Bad Wolf series, in which, over the course of five books, we follow Cooper and Park as they solve werewolf-related crimes and fall in love—not necessarily in that order. I had a lot of fun with these books, and I talked about them in… you guessed it (this month’s Patreon video).

  

• Stewing in a soup of ideas about power (the mysterious Organization to which the Antimemetics Division belongs; the evil law firm that serves as Angel’s chief antagonist; Charlie Adhara’s insular werewolf crime-solving agency, The Trust), I finally watched Conclave (2024). I’m not sure what I was expecting, but it definitely wasn’t such a powerful rejection of cynicism wrapped up in a locked room mystery.

• My local pinball bar bought Stern’s new Pokemon machine. It’s fun. I’m not very good at it yet—my highest score is in the 50 million range (amateur hour, trust me)—but I’m not worried. Pinball is like all institutions. It’s not tradition; it’s not the past. It’s what you do next.

• This post is a simulacrum! A facsimile! A sham! The canonical version lives on my website. You can subscribe via RSS and bypass Substack entirely at https://pagemelt.zone/rss.xml.

My parents gave me a Sony Walkman for my 9th birthday. As I liberated it from its hard plastic packaging, my mom solemnly explained its rules of use. I wasn’t allowed to listen to it at school, at church, or at the dinner table. I don’t remember chafing against these constraints. Instead, I found that they created opportunities.

As the ‘90s gave way the ‘00s, I swapped out my Walkman for its less ergonomic younger brother, the Discman.

By that time, I was old enough to hang out at the mall unsupervised. My mom would drop me off in front of FYE on Friday evenings, equipped with the handwritten list that would serve as my guide.

The list was an ongoing labor of love. Throughout the week I’d jot down the names of bands that VH1’s talking heads lauded as important or influential (The Clash, Nirvana, Radiohead) as well as bands that my friends featured on their Xanga sites (Bright Eyes, The Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Neutral Milk Hotel). Armed with my list and working in alphabetical order, I’d flick through each row of CDs, plastic anti-theft devices clacking together as I assembled a stack of candidates.

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At the listening kiosk I’d work through each 30-second track sample, twirling the coiled headphone cord as I listened. I’d stand there until closing time, whittling my selection pool down to a singular winner, which I’d purchase with my $20 allowance.

At home later that night, I’d sit cross-legged on my bedroom floor, new CD whirring in my Discman as I pored over the liner notes. The CD was no longer just the music it contained, but a sigil of my own creation. It was a totem. It was the artifact of the curatorial decisions of a 14-year-old suburban oddball, at once mass-produced and utterly unique to me. It was magic.

Even at the time, I sensed I was standing on shifting sands. When I was 14 in 2004, MP3 players had already found a foothold, and by 2007 my friends had started selling off their CDs for extra cash. In 2009 I followed suit, offloading my entire collection for a cool $150 at Coconut Records in Evansville, Indiana. CDs continued to drop precipitously in value throughout the 2010s, and for a long time, it felt like I’d gotten a good deal.

But something is changing. The denizens of the tech-critical internet are calling for, among other things, a return to physical media. I like that idea. I’m charmed by the thought of a scruffy 19-year-old discovering a Matchbox 20 CD at the bottom of a Goodwill bin. But it’s not enough to cancel your Spotify subscription and buy used Y2K-era CDs by the binful. I came of age in the ‘00s, after all. I vividly remember that specific flavor of virulence, which is why I’m skeptical of nostalgia for it cloaked as progress. As we build the future, we can look back, but we have a responsibility to look forward too.

I think we’re on the right track, though—indulging the desire to sift through the bins, to shepherd our own collections, to hold magic in our hands.

Updates

• Speaking of nostalgia, I recently made a short video about Walmart-in-2002 AI slop.

• Pagemelt.zone remains my pride and joy. I’m always tinkering with it, trying to strike the right balance between quirky and accessible. I’ve recently added a Treasure Box page, which I’m already in the process of redesigning. So it goes.

• I just released a new Patreon-exclusive video — “the purpose of a system is what it does”. In it, I talk about bribing kids to read and whether or not AI can be art, among other things. If you like my work, consider supporting me for $3/month so I can make even more of it.

• This post is a simulacrum! A facsimile! A sham! The canonical version lives on my website at pagemelt.zone/meltdown. You can subscribe via RSS and bypass Substack entirely at https://pagemelt.zone/rss.xml.