absurdism

I am haunted by mulch posts.  The most recent mulch video came to me in the middle of the night, when I was hours into scrolling through a particularly nasty bout of insomnia. The video was an edit of a tiny dog surrounded by a frame of glittering hearts, with an AI-generated voice narrating, “Today, I soilmaxxed to the highest potential. I am full of loam, asbestos and red 40.” Mulch posts have periodically appeared in my restless nights for months. In the hours that I know I should be sleeping, I am hounded by…

Too Long; Didn't ReadThis essay retells Olive’s story, a New York City young artist who went looking for something *else* during the pandemic. Olive finds themself in niche and more niche internet spaces, begins to practice alternative ways of using social platforms. Olive offers us their sincere and complicated anxieties about an experience of the internet that evades surveillance capitalism. Too Long; Didn't ReadThis essay retells Olive’s story, a New York City young artist who went looking for something *else*…

Thought you could point out an AI-generated image? Well, this viral image tricked lots of folks online this weekend — and you just might be one of them. The absurd image of the Pope in a puffy white coat that spread across Twitter was, in fact, generated with Midjourney. It quickly became a meme, but very few people were commenting on the true source of the image. Celebrities like Chrissy Teigen jumped in, admitting that that they were also fooled by the Pope’s puffer jacket. I thought the pope’s puffer…

There was no indie band more influential, inimitable and prolific than 1987-91 Pixies. They perfectly mixed the mundane and the profane, the farcical with the galactic, served up depraved powerpop in viscera-dripping, three-minute gobbets. Which is why it was so disappointing when 2010s Pixies abandoned that velvet menace for professional competence on Indie Cindy, Head Carrier and Beneath the Eyrie.Trailed by their best single in years, Doggerel finds happier concord between conventional rock arrangements and Pixies’…