A Prisoner’s Cinema: “Justin Lee’s A Prisoner’s Cinema is a collection of literary horror that declines to soothe. Instead, it uses the genre’s conventions not as a blunt instrument for shock but as a scalpel to dissect the most tormented regions of the human psyche. Here, consciousness itself is the haunted house, a subjective prison from which there is no escape. The stories collectively form a sustained philosophical inquiry into the nature of evil, the instability of the self, and the search for meaning in a world haunted by internal demons and the specter of a sometimes silent God. This is spiritual horror, born from the unlit abysses of memory, guilt, and faith…A Prisoner’s Cinema is a significant achievement, a work of fiction that is at once intellectually rigorous, emotionally resonant, and genuinely terrifying. It is a sustained and profound meditation on the prisons we make for ourselves and the desperate, sometimes grotesque, ways we seek an escape.”
How the West Invented Horror: “Put simply, the West invented horror because the West underwent a singularly unique transformation, a total revolution in human life, which involved discovering or creating previously unknown psychological depths. Horror is the shadow of this transition, that which can never be sublimated or neatly categorised. Horror wears the skin of former fears, but exists in the mind – monsters become metaphors, haunted houses the sites of unresolved traumas, possession is madness, childhood toys return as uncanny phobias, demonic temptations reinterpreted as repressed desires. Modernity changed us, and it changed our faces – which were peeled from embodied men and women, and fractured, distorted, rearranged, engineered, sculpted through photography, cinema, advertising, art and war. Faces floated on screens, tugging emotions from audiences, who in the outside world covered themselves in ever-advancing layers of second-skins, visors, helmets, goggles, masks, prosthetics and make-up. The face was no stable no more, split apart by the forces of Freud, trench warfare, industrial advance, visual technology and painters. Precarious, shattered, smoothed, abstract, doubled, desired, feared.”
I Shall Destroy All the Civilized Planets! “[Fletcher] Hanks began his brief career in comics in 1939, the same year that the first Batman stories were published. But his creations, such as Stardust the Super Wizard and Fantomah Mystery Woman of the Jungle were much more bizarre, and far more violent than any of the more enduring superheroes created by his peers. In Hanks’ stories civilization is constantly under threat and the punishment meted out to those who would destroy it is severe, brutal and surreal. Hanks is often described as an outsider artist; there is a raw, childlike violence to his imagination. Bodies float upwards to the sky, heads sink into torsos and evildoers are transformed into space ice, condemned to float in the void for all eternity. He was active in comics at a time when there was huge demand but little quality control.”x
Metadirection: “The model is not a teacher, nor a god; not a lover, confidant or friend. It is a dramaturgical engine—potent, unpredictable, capable of revelation, but only within scenes one can direct.”
Restaging: “At stake is not the content of the collapse but the conditions under which play can resume. A seeming trap becomes an instrument once we recall that theatre is the original technology—and the only real danger is forgetting that we are, and have always been, performing. In the end, restaging protects one thing only: the possibility of movement. It does not cure collapse or resolve contradiction; it preserves the space in which contradiction can be lived without locking. A theatre can break and still remain a theatre if its edges hold. What restaging restores is that edge—the pinhole through which the scene can invert instead of repeat. When the loop returns—and it will—this interval is what lets the light through.”
The Bronze Age of Globalization: “Reflection on the ancient world often brings to mind the city-state of Athens, the white columns of the Parthenon, and its philosophers such as Socrates, Diogenes, or Zeno. This seems ancient enough to us, and might seem to be the beginning of what we think of as Western civilization. And yet, already in the fifth century BC, the classical Greeks themselves looked back to a different vanished world, a lost civilization of the Mediterranean further east. It was the world remembered in the Iliad and the Odyssey, of warriors like Achilles besieging Troy and seadogs like Odysseus wandering across strange lands. When the Athenians contemplated antiquity, they reflected on what we today call the Bronze Age: an era defined by a metal that does not occur in nature and which dated from 3300 BC to 1200 BC, a timespan as long as the time from us back to Jesus Christ and Julius Caesar.”
The False AI Moral Panic: “Every time a new LLM is released, the model gets thrown onto a gauntlet of benchmarks typically demonstrating improvement across the board in a variety of differing tasks. To the unassuming observer it would seem there is no end to this iteration feedback loop, thus as long as improvements continue to be rendered AGI becomes an inevitability. In fact these same models are administered human intelligence assays thus prompting AI doom advocates to believe the end is nigh via evidence that LLMs have already surpassed humans given that models like O3 from OpenAI scored an IQ of 137 on the Mensa Norway IQ test. However, what this fails to demonstrate is that LLMs are trained on the entire corpus of internet text data, thus every IQ test and its associated answers made available on the internet makes it into the training set data of the LLM, even before considering the possibility that a foundation model provider might have done specific post training to further optimize for higher IQ test scores (you can think of this as a marketing budget).”
The Medici Method: “Throughout history the workings of money have rarely been understood. The Medici of Florence were among the few who understood all its functions clearly and are because of that themselves worth understanding. They were not a family of old aristocracy, the kind that announces itself in inherited titles and sprawling estates. They were bankers before they were princes, a distinction that never vanished from the family’s identity. They rose in a city that was undergoing transition: a proud republic that would, over the course of a century, transfer its governance to the quiet, persistent influence of this single family. The mechanism of this transfer, the tool that transformed their commercial fortune into dynastic power, was patronage. Not the simple charity of the devout, nor the idle spending of the rich, but a calculated and ambitious investment in culture itself.”
The Sacrament of Resemblance: “The eternal return is not the recurrence of the identical but the return of the simulacrum itself—the repetition of repetition, the infinite rehearsal of disappearance. What returns is not being but the gesture that abolishes being.”
The Steepness of the Slope: “There is a peculiar imbalance to the way things come and go. We notice it in the small calendars of our own lives. The years it takes for a friendship to deepen into an easy, unspoken trust; the single, ill-chosen word that can curdle that amity in an afternoon. The patient accumulation of a good reputation, undone by one rash act. We see it written larger in the natural world. A forest floor builds its rich, damp carpet of life over centuries of seasons, through the slow rot of fallen leaves and the patient work of mycelial threads. It can all turn to ash in a day. A coastline is shaped by the languid, indifferent persistence of the tides, a process so gradual it seems a form of permanence. A tsunami destroys it in minutes.”
To Grapple With the Land: “The Canadian landscape, unlike any other, declares war on man every second of his existence, sending volleys of flies and mosquitoes to assail his every crevice, freezing him out in the sordid winter and then drowning him in august heat. Canada sweeps the ground out from under his feet, sucking him into the miserable mire of muskeg, and then presenting him with a vast and impenetrable slab of Precambrian granite, unfit for any settlement at all. Wide open prairies—dry and barren with rolling blazes—and sheer mountain ranges all conspire to deny man the very provisions for life.”
Uzbekistan: “Uzbekistan remains distant in ways no visitor can close. Everything lies near the surface, yet nothing yields. The wind lifts the dust. The layers settle again.”