Ya Mum

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Envy

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Time Loop Nihilism

How Bisexuality Changed Video Games

The Golden Age of Horror Comics - Part 1 (Part 2)

Weighing the Value of Director’s Cuts | Scanline

The True Horror Of Midsommar

— Emil Cioran, from “On the Heights of Despair” I do understand—and it is terrible.

— Franz Kafka, from a letter

I am aware of myself. And, of course, the only things that are aware of themselves and conscious of their individuality are irritated eyes, cut fingers, sore teeth. A healthy eye, finger, tooth might as well not even be there. Isn’t it clear that individual consciousness is just sickness?

— Yevgeny Zamyatin, from “We” To be overly conscious is a sickness, a real, thorough sickness. For man’s everyday use, ordinary human consciousness would be more than enough. 

The explosion of trans identities in the early-2000s challenged my own assumptions, including the assumptions that once felt like challenges, and it wasn’t just the transfeminine spectrum that gave me hope in fluidity. I’d always believed that masculinity could only be the enemy, but then there were the trans fags who showed me something beyond the predetermined, a masculinity negotiated and transformed, a flamboyance through choosing a bodily language of one’s own making. A freedom, but not a freedom from accountability. The meanings of queer and trans are constantly shifting—this is part of the allure. At once identities that declare an end to borders, and identities that constantly build walls, challenging enough to derail conversations and at the same time empty enough to use in the name of a TV show or nonprofit.

One problem with the politics of representation is that often it’s about who is represented, but not what. I’m not saying we don’t ever need an us and them. I know this is how many of us find one another, dance with the scars into arms that might hold not only to harm. I don’t think there always needs to be an invitation to join us, I don’t think this has to be the case, but I do think this should always be an option. I do think a world without borders is a dream we must hold onto—personally, politically, intimately, explosively, expressively.”

There is incredible beauty to the naming and claiming so often found in these worlds, but also there’s a frightening territorialism. I don’t want to become the cops, I want to end policing in all its forms. This is the dream that queer and trans worlds have helped me to imagine.”

The horror inspired by cannibalism attests to the reluctance of the mind to abandon distinction as the basis of being and identity. From the point of view of the victim, cannibalism threatens a greater and more complete annihilation than death, because it involves a kind of metamorphosis into the other. It reaches further than death, deep into the dread of obliteration and nonbeing, because it attacks the very notion of a natural relation between form, identity and life. (…) But the absorption of the body by another suggests a grotesque and perverse postmortem continuation of the self within and as part of another, a monstrosity, not of mixed natures, but of confused existences. Without autonomy, without identity or even consciousness, the formless self continues as an imprisoned particle of the other.”

21st century horror + “unhinged” female leads

“Perhaps what we’re witnessing in horror right now is not a commentary on a single anxiety, but a culmination of all the anxieties that exist in culture—the shit that’s built up, affecting generation after generation, especially women … who’ve internalized the brunt of trauma for so long and are only now able to channel it. The rage that stems from internalising trauma (while coddling men) … is perfectly visualised by Toni Collette literally crawling up the walls in Hereditary.” — Ryan Bradford

ada limon, dead stars:

But mostly we’re forgetting we’re dead stars too, my mouth is full       of dust and I wish to reclaim the rising—

to lean in the spotlight of streetlight with you, toward       what’s larger within us, toward how we were born.

Look, we are not unspectacular things.       We’ve come this far, survived this much. What

would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?

bradley trumpfheller, time’s not an arrow, more the place an arrow touches us

Small wonder: we have an entire word for the direction

opposite this grandfather clock’s hoax motion.

paige lewis, when i tell my husband i miss the sun, he knows

We bring the shadow game home and (this is my favorite part) when we

stretch our shadows across the bed, we get so tangled my husband grips his own wrist,

certain it’s my wrist, and kisses it.

ilya kaminsky, we lived happily during the war

And when they bombed other people’s houses, we

protested but not enough, we opposed them but not

enough. I was  in my bed, around my bed America

was falling, invisible house by invisible house by invisible house.

angie sijun lou, jessica gives me a chill pill