The very thought of attempting to dissect the term waifu can feel overwhelming. The term is a mimetic manifestation of casual misogyny and ethnic infantilization and also one which has been embraced even by people who are very keen on distinguishing themselves from “weeaboo” incels. This normalization makes it nearly impossible to deliver any sort of critique which will land, especially when women have been a part of that adoption (this doesn’t necessarily make the issue more complex; it just means that it is tougher for people to see it as misogyny if there is equal participation). …

An acquaintance, who goes by syzygyzip elsewhere, and several others, recently spoke on this subject which interests me too, and I wanted to share my own thoughts — which I do not think are much different, and I do not pretend originality here. The subject is the phenomenally prevalent trend of the highest rated comment on a Reddit post, YouTube video, Twitter thread, etc. tending to be a sarcastic joke that, especially in the case of sites such as Reddit, where threads are much longer than Twitter and textual communication is the norm, almost completely redirects all attention. I want…

sometimes "wholesome" means "not horny"; sometimes it means it's positive and uplifting; sometimes it's a kind of safe pleasantness… and it's like, none of these are consistent with each other

If we are seeing what is designated as “wholesome” as comprising the quoted facets above, I think we should recognize that they are just that — facets of a larger concept-object uniting them. They are, in fact, quite consistent with one another. All of these usages are, I believe, coming from a similar place of late-modernistic fatigue which does not know what to do with itself, and so it reverts…

Near the end of 2020, a bunch of musicians populating a chatroom, including myself, each submitted ten minutes’ worth of our work to another musician, Chimeratio, who generously compiled it all into a set totaling nearly ten hours.¹ The work didn’t need to be new; just what we thought might best represent our abilities/style(s), and/or perhaps what we were especially pleased with. The set premiered in late January. I compiled the four videos into a playlist, although you can also access them individually: here (1), here (2), here (3), and here (4). …

There has been a remarkable increase in the attention paid to the UFO issue over the past several months. The New Yorker, for instance, published an enormous piece entitled “How the Pentagon Started Taking UFOs Seriously”; 60 Minutes ran a segment reviewing generally the same reports and persons, and which is now in the top five of their most-viewed YouTube videos; Russell Brand recorded a monologue, asking whether this all was an impending “paradigm shift” or a “distraction”; etc., etc. Algorithms can, and are designed to, give us an incorrect sense of just how prevalent, or important, our (supposed) interests…

Before writing a fuller continuation of my previous essay on architectural criticism, I’m inserting a mini-essay that focuses on a particular piece of criticism. Let me be clear: I don’t see Kate Wagner, the person behind @mcmansionhell, as an enemy; I’m just using one of her articles as an example because I had, in my essay, already linked an image from an article of hers, and I’d rather elaborate on what I mean when I write “…a vapid buildup to a politically convenient takeaway” than bring in an entirely different item. Wagner, in my view, represents a sort of destabilizing…

Last year, I began reacquainting myself with interests which once had intensely excited my imagination and had afterwards been pushed so far aside that it was as if they’d never been. Two of these were cryptids and UFOs. When I last visited Michigan and went through several boxes of belongings I left behind before moving out of state, I found and brought back a book entitled Bigfoot and Other Legendary Creatures. It’s a short book, less than sixty pages. Each chapter is a fictitious account of a cryptid followed by some italicized paragraphs that give a brief historical context for…

One of the special and primary challenges to architectural criticism is that it is addressing something with public and private, artistic and functional, attributes. The degree to which these attributes may be formulated varies, but their dualities are ever-present. What can often arise is a kind of criticism which is expressing a scopophilic relationship between author and subject wherein one fails to appreciate a bigger, public, and more interactive picture. One might pass by a housing complex each day and find it unbearably dreary, yet to speak of it as such and leave it at that does not account for…