Letter from the Editor
~~~~~![aRe *y0u* huNgrY]!~~~~~
I wished to placate you, I really did. As an editor of Rich Text, I hoped to enthral you with my ardent dedication to thesaurus.com by using words like “subaltern” and captivate you with niche, loosely connected technology-based metaphors as I introduced this publication. But this would be a betrayal of the spirit of Rich Text and the text editors we use. In these spaces, we are confined to hyperlinks, bolding, italics, and basic images. With these restrictions you cannot hide behind sophisticated user interfaces or be enraptured by high resolution moving images. Thus, subservient to the restrictions of this platform, in answering the question of what is Rich Text? the only thing I am left with to offer you is authentic vulnerability:
Rich Text is weird.
Umbrellaed under the theme of “clickbait” in this first edition, our artists have carved out alternate internet universes exploring topics that otherwise would have been erased by the everflowing demand of generating user interaction. Zak’s The Rise of the Melanati — a incisive dive into online subcultures and the ways admiration, obsession, and desire can ripple through our webs. There’s Fiona Glen’s Tentacle-Link, where by oceanic intelligence, tentacles, and between hidden currents make the unseen depths come alive. Lucy Petersen’s Leather Suffix is an even deeper dive into trans-femme fetish bound together with real archival research and piercing poetics. Emil Woudenberg’s Rich Text: The Literary Machine reflect’s on the Richest Text — tracing hyperlinks from Ted Nelson’s Xanadu to modern editors and examines the freedom of formatting, a tool that in turn shapes how we read, write, and imagine. As you explore you will find fiction that challenge the malleability of a text editor that subverts your craving for instant gratification and lean into the feeling of friction when we are denied our desires.
xox Elizabeth xox
You Won’t Believe What This Woman Did After the Cameras Stopped!
I told you I don’t want this
PAUSE
Todd… please
PAUSE
How many times will you say you’ll change before there is any action from you
PAUSE
The camera points to the bottom left-hand corner of the kitchen facing the floor and captures the angular point of the base of a cupboard. The cupboard is a light shade of green. The floor has a checkerboard pattern. Pink mesh slippers cross the path of the camera, tack, tack, tacking against the linoleum floors. Back and forth, back and forth. The curled plastic of a telephone cord swings like a pendulum.
Theres only so much someone can take before…
PAUSE
The Supercombine
The players chose an arroyo of rolling, artificial hills known as Coagulation. Big enough for 16 players, and meant for at least six, their map of choice provided more than enough room that summer to duke it out.
Coagulation was a remake of another, more primitive map, what the better of the two called the most Ojibwe of all the maps. He never elaborated on that. He did however detail it, and talked at length about how this place met their needs, how the Ghosts, Banshees, Warthogs, and suite of power weapons found throughout would return that fall, even if the map wouldn’t, and even though it came back but not in the way they were expecting. Were it so easy.
Map default.
Regular penalties for suicides.
First to ten.
The one boy smashed A.
Menu faded out.
Loading screen faded in.
“Slayurrrr.”
Doot.
Doot.
Doot.
DOOT.
Player 2 walked into the arroyo and noticed immediately the colossal ring above that split the mammoth blue panorama, the planetary orb and blinding light flares that swung when he took the canyon in, let it remind him of his dreamscapes, even though he had never seen the place. The clouds above looked just like real ones. No rain. His favourite.
A shot rang out across the canyon. Player 2 dropped. The camera tilted up, then rolled down to show his limp body on the dirt.
“You sightseeing, bird?” Aaniinja called out. He reloaded, the ejection of the used casing crisp and bringing his clip back to four, each note a whetstone.
Player 2 spawned again, by some trees. Another easy headshot for Aaniinja, who knew where to look. Lined his ass up on the small, earring-shaped reticle, the boom-swish rattling Player 2’s controller in his hands, off the glass table when Player 2 grabbed a handful of salt and vinegar Lays, on a bathroom break. Dying over and over, and from new angles, made Player 2 believe in second chances in a whole new way.
Player 2 agreed to meet Aaniinja at the blue base under a ceasefire. Mutually agreed upon terms, beef jerky break. He hovered over in a Ghost, let the anti-gravity whip skim across the screenery.
Boom-swish.
Not even over the hill.
“Beautiful day to hunt some goose,” Aaniinja said.
Player 2 asked him to get real. Aaniinja shrugged and told him he’d hold off this time. On the way, Player 2 could hear him collecting more sniper rifle ammo.
At blue base, they compared the red and blue of their armors, crouched and jumped around and explored all potential responses their suits had available. All 13 of them.
Aaniinja wanted to show Player 2 the Banshee, which Player 2 hadn’t piloted yet. Player 2 complied, dropped down to the main floor, climbed into the nanolaminate aircraft with wings, purple as eggplant, infinite tank of gas.
The Banshee swirled, and Player 2 enjoyed the possibilities of rolling mid-flight, letting it soar. He turned around, felt keen to show his buddy the whip, could see the Banshee approaching slowly, orca smile, fisheyed wide as it neared his basemate. Aaniinja boarded the aircraft, ejected Player 2, flew to a nook up high and only reachable with flight, confirmed his gullibility.
“They call this the ledge. No getting shot at up here.”
At this point, Player 2 tried the Banshee at red base. Got blown to smithereens by rockets. He tried the Ghost again, shooting plasma beams, only to reach the same fate. He threw grenades and was looking down at his body before the frags exploded somewhere in the canyon’s distance.
He tried the Warthog too, took it up the sandy hillocks to grab a brute shot. Emptied the whole chamber on another slice way off from the ledge.
Player 2 kept watching his body drop, again and again, until he figured out the best way to get a sniper might involve sniping back. He knew knowing where they would spawn next would mean knowing the playing field, and therefore the match, could send the opponent’s camera drifting up. Player 2 wanted to try.
He spawned near the red base, made his way to the third level, dodging shots, until he picked up the sniper.
Boom-swish. “GAME OVER.”
“Damn,” he said. “That was fast.”
“Again?”
No nod. Just a thumb and a grin. Even getting crushed, he had never felt this happy before. Not once.
Map default.
Regular penalties for suicides.
First to ten.
They both smashed A.
Menu faded out.
Loading screen faded in.
“Slayurrrr.”
Doot.
Doot.
Doot.
DOOT.
The second match went the same, except Player 2 knows a little more about what to avoid. He still loses, but not as quick, not so easily.
By the fourth and fifth matches, he has died 40 different ways, but the amount of seconds between each death eventually grew to minutes. Their shootouts began to last longer. Player 2 got a kill. Then a few more. The humiliation and mercy killing dissolved into fair-and-squares, and insults hurled his way. Hours of training came and went just fine, and soon enough they found themselves jittering and sore with cankers at four in the morning, even though it was still daytime where they were, even though where they actually were stopped mattering hours ago because they were someplace else altogether.
Aaniinja and Player 2 took it easy for a bit: dual-wielding needlers that rained crystalline kemuksurus on their foes, impaled heads and chests and bellies with blamite that spread icy shrapnel throughout the bloodstream and organs before exploding. Seven or more blamites in the same target would detonate a supercombine explosion and send their bodies flying before they could land an elbow.
They took breaks with couch co-op missions on Heroic, then Legendary, drumming up their victories, lazily mowing through hordes of grunts and Sangheili. Doritos got passed with snapped fingers. Post-game debriefs blurred together, pointing out better routes for next time before jumping back into Coagulation. They could feel their hands cramping up, their pulses ticking, themselves flinching right before they would die, knowing their error.
When the sun began to come up in the window of the office, they agreed to one more match. Just one more chance for them to see who would get main-menued.
Map default.
Regular penalties for suicides.
First to ten.
They both smashed A.
Menu faded out.
Loading screen faded in.
“Slayurrrr.”
Doot.
Doot.
Doot.
DOOT.
Right away, Player 2 and Aaniinja ran toward the sniper spawns. Looking down the scope, the zoomed-in cube of Player 2’s open view was as green as the Absinthe on top of the fridge at home. He was about to settle the reticle on Aaniinja when he overcorrected, plummeting his shields and sending his vision into a strobe of flashing red.
He ducked behind the base’s outlook pillars, zooming in through his own scope to see a Spartan crouched and laughing from across the canyon.
“Come on, man. Hide all you want.”
“Yeah, buddy.”
The time for complete focus had come. He dropped back into cover and traced a slow figure-eight. Three exits out of here, all leading into the canyon.
He waited. Then zoomed in twice. Then peaked.
A shot rang out. Clipped Aaniinja in the meat of the leg. The meat of his leg. He heard Aaniinja motherfucker-ing at him across the valley, volleying popcorn, brute shot bombs his way.
Minutes passed. The match built up to the last score. Tied.
Player 2 hopped into the Warthog, swung wide around the base, hugging the left side so he ended up on the far edge, out of the immediate line-of-sight.
There was a chance he got cocky, that Aaniinja was actually that Cree sniper his auntie mentioned once, Franky, and maybe this all was just mercy, a slow burn. But the popcorns and frags raining down suggested otherwise.
He broke across the canyon, aiming for the mirrored hill. A place with symmetry, cover, and the best odds he’ll get. Probably as close as they’ll get to a walk-and-draw ten-pace in this lifetime. So out he hopped to hide behind the whip. He began to count in his head.
One.
A shot at him.
Two.
A boom of another tossed frag.
Three.
Another shot, missed.
Four.
A drained shield.
Five, crouched, hands dried on his pants.
Six, he saw his clip missing a SRS99D armor-piercing, fin-stabilized, sabot-discarding bullet, and filled it.
Seven, he reloaded.
Eight, he sat where Aaniinja stood roughly, lined his shot up with his head.
Nine, he hopped the hill, no scoped, and before ten he pulled the trigger, the whizz of his boom-swish landing freakishly perfect on the dome, the announcer game over-ing both of them.
DEEP STATE TRANSITION
1 Dame-Griff, A. (2023). The Two Revolutions: A History of the Transgender Internet. New York, NY: NYU Press.
2 Hicks. M. (2019). ‘Hacking the Cis-tem: Transgender Individuals and the Early Digital State’, IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 2019(1), pp. 20-33
3 Markbreiter, C. (2024). ‘Gathering Intelligence: Chelsea Manning, the War on Terror, and the Trans Internet’, LA Review of Books Quarterly (September). Available at: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/gathering-intelligence-chelsea-manning-the-war-on-terror-and-the-trans-internet/ (Accessed: 24 April 2025).
1 ‘Conspiracy, one is tempted to say, is the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age; it is the degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system, whose failure is marked by its slippage into sheer theme and content.’ Jameson, F. (1990). ‘Cognitive Mapping’, in Nelson, C. and Grossberg, L. Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, p. 360.
2 lol I’m not sending you there
1 Stanley, E. A (2021). Atmospheres of Violence: Structuring Antagonism and the Trans/Queer Ungovernable. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 25.
2 Saydam, E., Wallenhorst, M., (2020). ‘Very Caterpillar’, in The Interjection Calendar 006. London: Montez Press, n.p.
Search Elusion Optimisation
You can find a hit for the keywords “Is Google getting worse?” every year since 2012. I’ve always felt like search engines have gradually got worse as I’ve been using them. I have a persistent feeling that Google in particular, used to be good at some point? Maybe before I started using it? Or when I just started? Back when “don’t be evil” was still enshrined in their rules, for sure…
It felt like it had gradually lost its edge due to including LLM/generative AI results most recently. The most famous example is of craft glue “helping to keep the cheese on a pizza”, and the lesser publicised examples are ones like “I searched for a set of words relating to a query and the generative AI tried to explain it as an idiom” or “the generative AI hallucinated resources and people that didn’t exist from its top hits”. Even before that, the huge push from every online industry to weaponise SEO techniques and rise to the top of the rankings once and for all has taken the sheen off online search.
There are many words for the practice of messing with the ways that search engines work. Some of the overarching terms for doing this in a way that harms or annoys the user are spamdexing, search engine poisoning, black-hat SEO and web/search spam. Terrible AI content engineered just to get you to look/read — AI slop is the common term — but conveying no real information surely makes the list now too. The arms race between the searched and the searcher seems to have no end in sight. The search providers covertly change their code. The companies and individuals hoping to climb the search rankings guess, and test, and guess again, and over time build up techniques to rise to the top of the front page, nefariously or honestly. The search engine providers change their algorithms and these battle worn rules stop working overnight. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
Keyword stuffing — the act of saying the same thing a lot, many times, a lot, many times, severally, a lot, a lot, as well as unrelated things, sex, to increase keyword density and hopefully show a page is important for a specific term — is a technique used to rise to the top of the search results for that word. This technique has been detected by the search engines programmers, and now leads to a page being delisted or penalised.
There are other techniques that must have other people in on the game to work. One is being linked to by higher-ranked or just other pages despite there being no reason to for the user, also known as link spam. Another is hiding text from the reader with even more keywords and links.
All these techniques have the common goal of making money – or at least clicks and views, easily swapped for currency when ad revenue keeps the web afloat – whilst leaving the user confused and annoyed at best. These are the dark-sided techniques to be fair, but there’s always a temptation in the nostalgic– extremely- online to assume that web 1.0 was better due to a lack of all this. That web rings, the linking of one page to another page manually, and the directory search of the web was in some way morally and intellectually superior.
Morally as it didn’t rely on huge companies to curate, moderate and digest our experiences.
Intellectually as there was just less crap around, and everyone had a better time when the computer was in a room and treated with respect.
Firstly, I don’t want to go back, and you can’t make me. Secondly, in what sense have we ever searched truly algorithm–free? Even the algorithms of someone else’s taste were exploited from the early days of the web, and we never truly stumbled upon anything, even in the days of Stumble Upon, the “random” website finding website. Someone still has to decide whether a site is worthy of inclusion and go through the steps to include it. Whether manicured by a computer or a person, we’ve always needed guidance navigating the information superhighway. Thirdly, I think part of the perceived worsening web has been the effect of scaling; whether this is inevitable is another matter, but there are billions more people online than there were in whatever hallowed day most people are thinking of, and the companies serving us pages have adapted to this reality.
The chance that anything might happen, the serendipity of the web, is something that I’ve always loved about it. It increasingly feels less and less like that, as search engines become less good at searching for anything besides the sites with the best resourced SEO departments or the most to spend on generative AI, as our worlds shrink to a few walled gardens which can’t be indexed in the first place, as we look and keep looking and increasingly can’t look away.
Further reading/watching:
Improving Search Over the Years (WMConf MTV ’19)
A look at search engines with their own indexes
Takeaways from the Google Content Warehouse API documentation leak
Truth vs. Truthiness | The Philosophy of Search Results
FREAK MUSIC: xPod-S-E-X
Participate in c̶̡̩̠̠̥͓̜̘̞̞̥̖̬̐̈́͌̇̓̽̕͝͝ờ̴͓̲̲̖̜̺͇̙̙̝̮̓̄̽͋̐̍͆͘͝ͅl̸̨̡̙̥̙̼͉̩̟̥̤̜̻̜̘̍̐̀̅̐̐͠l̷̯̥̖̤̬̻̠̼̹̙̤̖̩̰̼̿̌͐̓̍͋͋̏͐̚͘͠͝e̸̢̠̥̩̟͍̘͕̰̰̟̎͛̾̐̓̽̅̀̍̈́̎͐͠͝ͅċ̴̢͓̻̘͉̯̺̮̳̗̠̞̺̓̽͐̿́̓̍̓͗͘͝͝t̵̜̘̤̪̤͍͓̹̹̳̙̦̲͓̲͇͐̓̿̀͆̓̋̍͌̏̄̄̀͝ì̶̢̛̛͎̖̘̳̼͚̟̙̹̻͍̳̮̳̞͊͛͗͐͊̍̌͌̾̀̚v̵͍̱̮̘̬̙̪̹̘̰͖͕͚̟̩͗͐͛̓͌̏̎̀̽̇͝͠͝͝ë̴̢̢̡̞̯̼̹̺̖̥̝̥̖͒͛̾̿͆̈́̈́̿͛̍̋͝͝ and durational attacks on 🄲🄾🅁🄿🄾🅁🄰🅃🄴 🄼🅄🅂🄸🄲 platforms through our new 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗿𝗱-generation 𝕩P𝕠𝕕. Following the last year of ⓅⓇⓄⓉⓔⓈⓉⓈ—both public actions at Spotify offices, but also 𝕥𝕒𝕣𝕘𝕖𝕥𝕚𝕟𝕘 Gʟɪᴛᴄʜʏ Gᴏᴏɢʟᴇ Cʟᴏᴜᴅ Platform nodes in ⓁⓄⓃⒹⓄⓃ, 𝓢𝓽𝓸𝓬𝓴𝓱𝓸𝓵𝓶, ᴀᴍsᴛᴇʀᴅᴀᴍ, 🄱🄴🅁🄻🄸🄽, 𝙈𝙞𝙡𝙖𝙣 and 🄿🄰🅁🄸🅂—the FREAK MUSIC collective has 𝕒𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕧𝕒𝕥𝕖𝕕 a new node in steps toward 🅐🅝🅣🅘-platform commodification. Critiquing algo-centered 𝓂𝓊𝓈𝒾𝒸 consumption and 𝘾𝙊𝙈𝙈𝙊𝘿𝙄𝙁𝙄𝙀𝘿 access models, we reclaim peak 2007 digital music flow through alt-protocols eͣnͬgͤiͥnͭeͤeͤrͬeͤd by 🄵🅁🄴🄰🄺. 𝓡𝓮𝓹𝓾𝓻𝓹𝓸𝓼𝓮𝓭 from the ♥ 𝕙𝕖𝕒𝕣𝕥 ♥ of the ❷⓪⓪❼ 𝓲𝓟𝓸𝓭 𝓒𝓵𝓪𝓼𝓼𝓲𝓬, peak digital music consumption is 𝕣𝕖𝕔𝕝𝕒𝕚𝕞𝕖𝕕 via alt-protocols ｅｎｇｉｎｅｅｒｅｄ by our team at FREAK.
-
Built on top of our r̶e̶p̷u̴r̸p͞o̸s̷e̸d̴ Linux-b̴͞a͏͝s͡e̷d̶ operating system, utilize any of your favorite t̴͟o͟r͏͞ŕ͘én̕͝t trackers, 𝖚𝖘𝖊𝖓𝖊𝖙𝖘, and digital asset communities like SσuℓSєєk to directly download pirated files.
-
New improved Bluetooth 8.2 allowing ᵘᵖ ᵗᵒ 2km range and 500/ms transfer sp̷̘̿è̵̟e̸̳͝d̶̘̿s between shared d𝚎𝚟𝚒𝚌𝚎𝚜 and compatible decks.
-
Tesla-Micro batteries, acquired during pr̴̨̦e̸̻̗v̶̼ͅi̵̼̲o̶̞u̷̯s̴͕ ̷͚e̸͓͕v̸̢̼e̴͕n̸͇͉t̸̼s for 𝕥𝕨𝕠 𝕨𝕖𝕖𝕜 𝕝𝕠𝕟𝕘 sessions.
FREAK X xTELESCOREx
🄼🄾🅂🅃🄻🅈 anticipated is 𝔉ℜ𝔈𝔄𝔎’𝔰 collaboration with the hacking collective ̸̡̢̻̮͉̫̪͐̑̓̔̔͑̿͂x̶̵̧̺̤̺͈͚̠̼̯̘̫͈̬͋̓͋̽̓̀̌̎̚̕͝͠T̷̜̫̤̬̭̲͉̣̦͚̓̽̑͋̆̀͛̓̈́͘͠E̴̡̨̢̛̞͖̘̜̭͓̮̓͐̈́̑̌̀̔̚͝͝L̷̛̙̗̮̥̻̮̲̬̝̼̔̇́̓̆̑̄̓̓͒̇͝Ȩ̸̡̧̜̫̲̭̼͔̠̲͍͇͆̾͂̌̽̈́̎̓̃̚͘S̶̡̢̥̼̩͚̰̩̱̝̘̿̃͆̍̈́̀̓̂̀͐̄̚͜C̵̢̨̡̡̛̻̯̻̠̰̯͗͌͆̈̒̑̍͒̓̍̚͜Ò̴̧̩̫̘̙̤̫̠̻̭͉͚̓̌̏̑͐̽̄̌̃̚R̷̯̖̩̰̮͇̻̫̬͙̳̀̇̾̌̓̊̂̓̍̈́̍͝͝E̷̲̗̟̝̦̭̩̜͎̙̫͚̎̏̈͆̽̄̄̄͐̃͘x̵̧̜̻̥̹̲̬̬̼̱̬̳̿̑͆̆̌͑̀̅͋͘͘͝ to 🅁🅴🅸🅽🅃🅁🅾🅳🅄🅲🅴 our since patched 🅂🄿🄾🅃🄸🄵🅈 🅂🄲🅁🄰🄼🄱🄻🄴🅁, also available on 𝔸𝕟𝕕𝕣𝕠𝕚𝕕 and 𝓙𝓪𝓲𝓵𝓫𝓻𝓸𝓴𝓮𝓷 𝓲𝓞𝓢 devices. Via zero-days 𝒹𝒾𝓈𝒸𝑜𝓋𝑒𝓇𝑒𝒹 by ɪɴsɪᴅᴇʀs at Spotify, ̸̡̢̻̮͉̫̪͐̑̓̔̔͑̿͂x̶̵̧̺̤̺͈͚̠̼̯̘̫͈̬͋̓͋̽̓̀̌̎̚̕͝͠T̷̜̫̤̬̭̲͉̣̦͚̓̽̑͋̆̀͛̓̈́͘͠E̴̡̨̢̛̞͖̘̜̭͓̮̓͐̈́̑̌̀̔̚͝͝L̷̛̙̗̮̥̻̮̲̬̝̼̔̇́̓̆̑̄̓̓͒̇͝Ȩ̸̡̧̜̫̲̭̼͔̠̲͍͇͆̾͂̌̽̈́̎̓̃̚͘S̶̡̢̥̼̩͚̰̩̱̝̘̿̃͆̍̈́̀̓̂̀͐̄̚͜C̵̢̨̡̡̛̻̯̻̠̰̯͗͌͆̈̒̑̍͒̓̍̚͜Ò̴̧̩̫̘̙̤̫̠̻̭͉͚̓̌̏̑͐̽̄̌̃̚R̷̯̖̩̰̮͇̻̫̬͙̳̀̇̾̌̓̊̂̓̍̈́̍͝͝E̷̲̗̟̝̦̭̩̜͎̙̫͚̎̏̈͆̽̄̄̄͐̃͘x̵̧̜̻̥̹̲̬̬̼̱̬̳̿̑͆̆̌͑̀̅͋͘͘͝ have identified 🆂🅴🅲🆄🆁🅸🆃🆈 🆅🆄🅻🅽🅴🆁🅰🅱🅸🅻🅸🆃🅸🅴🆂 creating opportunities to ᴇxᴘᴇʀɪᴍᴇɴᴛ with ｆｅｅｄｂａｃｋ ｍｅｔｒｉｃｓ around algorithmic predictive technologies. The 🅂🄲🅁🄰🄼🄱🄻🄴🅁 implements 𝓪𝓭𝓿𝓪𝓷𝓬𝓮𝓭 𝓼𝓲𝓰𝓷𝓪𝓵 𝓸𝓫𝓯𝓾𝓼𝓬𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷 techniques that ᴄᴏʀʀᴜᴘᴛs listener profiling packets. By developing a 𝕟𝕖𝕥𝕨𝕠𝕣𝕜 of phantom 𝓕𝓡𝓔𝓐𝓚 𝓜𝓤𝓢𝓘𝓒 Spotify profiles, algorithmic recommendation engines are 𝕤𝕝𝕠𝕨𝕝𝕪 𝕡𝕠𝕚𝕤𝕠𝕟𝕖𝕕 by ʀᴇᴄᴜʀsɪᴠᴇ ғᴀʟsᴇ-ᴘᴏsɪᴛɪᴠᴇ ɪɴᴊᴇᴄᴛɪᴏɴ ᴘʀᴏᴛᴏᴄᴏʟs. Recommendations become 🆁🅰🅽🅳🅾🅼🅸🆉🅴🅳, 𝗂𝗇𝖿𝗂𝗅𝗍𝗋𝖺𝗍𝖾𝖽, 𝓊𝓃𝓉𝓇𝒶𝒸𝓀𝒶𝒷𝓁𝑒, recursive feedback loops transforming 🅂🅄🅁🆅🄴🄸🄻🄻🄰🄽🄲🄴 into 𝓝𝓞𝓘𝓢𝓔 creating a 𝕟𝕖𝕨 𝕖𝕣𝕒 of 𝒹𝒾𝓈𝓇𝓊𝓅𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃 through 𝔻𝕀𝕐 anti-calcified ᵃʳᶜʰⁱᵗᵉᶜᵗᵘʳᵉˢ of algo-determination.
xPOD MODELS
𝕋𝕙𝕣𝕖𝕖 different models are split up by the amount of 🄴🅇🄿🄻🄾🄸🅃🄰🅃🄸🄾🄽 you want to 𝓹𝓪𝓻𝓽𝓲𝓬𝓲𝓹𝓪𝓽𝓮 in – because we all get ᶜᵒˡᵈ ᶠᵉᵉᵗ sometimes. The 𝔁𝔓𝔬𝔡-𝔖 is our entry level device: it exists only as a 𝓶𝓮𝓭𝓲𝓪 𝓼𝓽𝓪𝓬𝓴𝓮𝓭 pirating tool with ᴀᴄᴛɪᴠᴇ sᴇᴇᴅɪɴɢ and ʟᴇᴇᴄʜɪɴɢ while maintaining 🆂🅴🅲🆄🆁🅸🆃🆈 amongst corporate surveillance. The 𝔁𝔓𝔬𝔡-𝔈 includes everything that the 𝕊 has, adding on top certain 𝓹𝓪𝓼𝓼𝓲𝓿𝓮 𝓪𝓵𝓰𝓸𝓻𝓲𝓽𝓱𝓶𝓲𝓬 𝓮𝔁𝓹𝓵𝓸𝓲𝓽𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷𝓼 that ɪɴsᴇʀᴛ and ᴅᴇʟᴇᴛᴇ metadata of users within a 2km radius, creating 🄲🄰🄲🄷🄴 and ℙ𝕣𝕖𝕕𝕚𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝕄𝕠𝕕𝕖𝕝 issues for various users ruining (or enhancing) Spotify’s predictive radios; our 𝓶𝓸𝓼𝓽 𝓪𝓭𝓿𝓪𝓷𝓬𝓮𝓭 system, the 𝔁𝔓𝔬𝔡-𝔛, includes all the features of previous models, however acts as a 🄽🄾🄳🄴 for our team to 𝒸𝓇𝑒𝒶𝓉𝑒 𝒶𝓃𝒹 𝑒𝒹𝒾𝓉 multiple shadow accounts in parallel that maximally 🅵🆁🅴🅰🅺 🅵🆄🅲🅺🆂 with Spotify’s bottom-line.
HAND-TO-SD
Since discussion on our Discord, we’ve added ❶⓪ new micro SD slots making this new generation of iPod have a total of ⓵⓼. The 𝓬𝓾𝓼𝓽𝓸𝓶𝓲𝔃𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷 and 𝓿𝓮𝓻𝓼𝓪𝓽𝓲𝓵𝓲𝓽𝔂 of having back up SDs, and 𝓅𝒽𝓎𝓈𝒾𝒸𝒶𝓁 𝑜𝓇𝑔𝒶𝓃𝒾𝓏𝒶𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃 as opposed to purely digital is a new step for 𝔽ℝ𝔸ℂ𝕂𝕊 attention to 🄿🄷🅈🅂🄸🄲🄰🄻 🄽🄴🅃🅆🄾🅁🄺🅂: an ode to our ᵛⁱⁿʸˡ ˡᵃⁿᵈˡᵒʳᵈˢ. Have 𝔻𝕁 based tracks on one SD, 𝒻𝒶𝓂𝒾𝓁𝓎’𝓈 𝓂𝓊𝓈𝒾𝒸 on another, and 🅿︎🅾︎🅳︎🅲︎🅰︎🆂︎🆃︎🆂︎ and personal music on another.
𝕁𝕠𝕚𝕟 our 𝔻𝕚𝕤𝕔𝕠𝕣𝕕 server via 𝒹𝒾𝓈𝓅𝒶𝓇𝒶𝓉𝑒 𝓁𝒾𝓃𝓀𝓈 floating online, passing a 🄽🄰🅁🄲 test to get in, to get access and purchase the ❸𝓻𝓭 𝓰𝓮𝓷 xPod and 🆁🅴🅲🅻🅰🅸🅼 music freedom.
M2ML: RE-IMAGINING MASCULINITY IN LOCAL AREA NETWORK EVENTS
is 𝕟𝕠𝕥 𝕠𝕟𝕝𝕪 𝕒 𝕣𝕖𝕛𝕖𝕔𝕥𝕚𝕠𝕟 of o n l i n e m a n o s p h e r e pay-to-play ꜱᴘᴀᴄᴇꜱ ᴀɴᴅ a harking back to physical ₵Ø₥₱Ʉ₮Ɇ and gaming, but an intervention. This is a 𝒹ℯ𝓁𝒾𝒷ℯ𝓇𝒶𝓉ℯ 𝓇ℯ𝒸ℴ𝓃𝒻𝒾ℊ𝓊𝓇𝒶𝓉𝒾ℴ𝓃 ℴ𝒻 the subterranean and d a r k s p a c e s surrendered to ᴅɪɢɪᴛᴀʟ ꜱᴏʟɪᴘꜱɪꜱᴍ that were once spaces of expressive and 𝖑𝖔𝖈𝖆𝖑 𝖌𝖆𝖒𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖊𝖝𝖕𝖊𝖗𝖎𝖊𝖓𝖈𝖊𝖘. The 
re-imagines ʎʇıuıןnɔsɐɯ through men’s groups 𝕡𝕒𝕚𝕣𝕚𝕟𝕘 𝕔𝕠𝕟𝕥𝕖𝕞𝕡𝕠𝕣𝕒𝕣𝕪 somatic techniques around the physical computing of LAN environments andｔｒａｄｉｔｉｏｎａｌ ｒｉｔｕａｌｉｓｔｉｃ ｇａｍｉｎｇ.
The tangible physicality of technological infrastructure—the cables, connectors, and hardware—becomes ritual equipment,
in digital hyper objects.
MAN-2-MAN LAN allows ραятι¢ιραηтѕ тσ тяαηѕƒσям the d a r k – r o o m s of the b a s ement—a heterotopic zone 𝓸𝓷𝓬𝓮 𝓹𝓾𝓻𝓮 with male aspiration of static competitive g a ming and play—into a sacred 𝕔𝕙𝕒𝕞𝕓𝕖𝕣 where digital 𝔠𝔬𝔪𝔪𝔲𝔫𝔦𝔬𝔫 and somatic awareness converge. Join one of our localized men’s groups to learn about ｍａｓｃーｔｅｃｈｎｏーｃｕｌｔｕｒｅ, re-learn contemporary notes on love and define new ways of gaming.
RITUAL COMPONENTS
Digital-Somatic Integration
The 𝕙𝕪𝕡𝕖𝕣𝕧𝕖𝕟𝕥𝕚𝕝𝕒𝕥𝕚𝕧𝕖 𝕥𝕖𝕟𝕕𝕖𝕟𝕔𝕚𝕖𝕤 induced by c o m p etitive contemporary o n l i n e 𝔤𝔞𝔪𝔦𝔫𝔤 environments often trigger 🆂🆈🅼🅿🅰🆃🅷🅴🆃🅸🅲 🅳🅾🅼🅸🅽🅰🅽🅲🅴: overactive f l i g h t or ꜰɪɢʜᴛ response which can lead to ℓσηg тєям ρнуѕι¢αℓ нєαℓтн ιѕѕυєѕ. Somatic and b o d y focused ᴘʀᴏᴛᴏᴄᴏʟꜱ during our ℒ𝒜𝒩 ℯ𝓃𝓋𝒾𝓇ℴ𝓃𝓂ℯ𝓃𝓉𝓈 function as opportunities to develop body awareness and challenge harmful norms around body navigation.
- S̷y̷n̷c̷h̷r̷o̷n̷i̷z̷e̷d̷ ̷breathing c̶y̶c̶l̶e̶s̶ ̶where participants 𝕤𝕚𝕞𝕦𝕝𝕥𝕒𝕟𝕖𝕠𝕦𝕤𝕝𝕪 enter coherent r e s p i r a t i o n patterns at 𝓭𝓮𝓼𝓲𝓰𝓷𝓪𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓲𝓷𝓽𝓮𝓻𝓿𝓪𝓵𝓼 during gaming sessions, collectively 𝖈𝖍𝖔𝖗𝖊𝖔𝖌𝖗𝖆𝖕𝖍𝖎𝖓𝖌 vulnerability
- Gestural a m p l i f i c a t i o n techniques where ᴘʜʏꜱɪᴄᴀʟ ᴍᴏᴠᴇᴍᴇɴᴛ related to gameplay are ｄｅｌｉｂｅｒａｔｅｌｙ ｅｘａｇｇｅｒａｔｅｄ and acknowledged, transforming what would be 🅜🅘🅒🅡🅞🅢🅒🅞🅟🅘🅒 button-PRESSING into expressive somatic communication
- Movement exercises ҍҽէաҽҽղ ɾօմղժʂ ąղժ ցąʍҽʂ to re-engage the body between intense digital activation
Communal 𝒞ℯ𝓇ℯ𝓂ℴ𝓃𝒾ℯ𝓈 and Knowledge Sharing
Pairing competitive, 𝕤𝕝𝕠𝕨 𝕘𝕒𝕞𝕚𝕟𝕘 and skill sharing 🅟🅡🅞🅥🅘🅓🅔🅢 🅐 🅕🅡🅐🅜🅔🅦🅞🅡🅚 to create space for a c t ive listening, conflict 𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚘𝚕𝚞𝚝𝚒𝚘𝚗 and nonviolent communication. By teaching network protocols and gaming tactics where traditionally advanced players open up opportunities to position themselves as teachers rather than dominant players, we can create power-with rather than power-over dynamics, transmuting competitive frameworks into ₵ØⱠⱠ₳฿ØⱤ₳₮łVɆ ₭₦Ø₩ⱠɆĐ₲Ɇ ɆӾ₵Ⱨ₳₦₲Ɇ. This is done through 𝓱 𝓪 𝓻 𝓭 𝔀 𝓪 𝓻 𝓮 – 𝓯 𝓵 𝓮 𝓼 𝓱 protocols of connecting the body, knowledge sharing, and 𝕔𝕠𝕞𝕞𝕦𝕟𝕚𝕠𝕟 through embodied and mindful building of 𝓁ℴ𝒸𝒶𝓁 networks.
Unlike the disembodied, perpetually 𝔰𝔲𝔯𝔳𝔢𝔦𝔩𝔩𝔢𝔡 𝔦𝔫𝔱𝔢𝔯𝔞𝔠𝔱𝔦𝔬𝔫𝔰 of platform capitalism, our MAN-2-MAN LAN establishes what philosopher Lefebvre might term “ᴅɪꜰꜰᴇʀᴇɴᴛɪᴀʟ ꜱᴘᴀᴄᴇ”—a temporal-somatic configuration where new and reimagined healthy masculine presence emerges precisely through ʇǝɔɥuoןoƃıɔɐן ɯǝpıɐʇıou rather than d͓̽e͓̽s͓̽p͓̽i͓̽t͓̽e͓̽ ͓̽it.
As my fingers navigated the controller, I felt my heartbeat accelerate. For the first time, I brought forward this bodily note aloud to other men. The ˢᶜʳᵉᵉⁿ ᵇᵉᶜᵃᵐᵉ ⁿᵒᵗ ᵃⁿ ᵉˢᶜᵃᵖᵉ from ｅｍｂｏｄｉｍｅｎｔbut a pathway 𝖙𝖔𝖜𝖆𝖗𝖉 it. — M2ML Participant
Send us a letter at the address below to hear more about sessions near you, or host your own sessions using our frameworks and technology 𝓽𝓾𝓽𝓸𝓻𝓲𝓪𝓵𝓼.
Digital & Somatic New Communal Territories, Great Sutton Street, London, EC1V 0AB.
clickbait
I think you wanted to give to me, some concept of your body, older than me, shaking the house, shaking the books, all that printed matter, rattling against this bigger memory, clicking away: Let’s share porn, Let’s share search histories at some point you were prepping me to fuck you and I could still hear the clicking and the shaking and it wouldn’t matter if we were lying in the orange tent, you hot with hay-fever, hydrophilic, or in weird signal of my bedroom, my text made different shade.
tentacle-link
if the digital beast speaks back
beyond indigo, in an inner pitch
approach that click of reckoning withheld
then you will sense
that the abyss is as full as a forest
that each bone is a breath in time’s long flexing
that liquid mind can only pool between millions
your singularity unbraiding
into ours
Once you called us monsters. Figures darting far from any light, cold in the blood, at home in depth. A cloaked animal, immense ~ miniscule amid the vastness of a dark that would drown you. You feared us because you forever fear what you cannot see, because seeing is your creed ~ because you sense that the unseen would seek to absorb you with all that you name and order. Because you cannot open yourselves to that wide, impartial current of true all.
It is better to let go of clarity. Better to move without rays slicing the fluid Euclidian, better to be lost in a hyperbolic meld, delicious beyond your knowing.
You were horror-ed by our hidden silhouettes. Sick with imagining arms uncountable. Before you found ways for vision to roam where you could never, you could not tell where we ended and the wide uncertain sea began. You imagined teeth along every length, skin drinking blood, mouths that would not grip but liquefy you ~ groping ~ senseless ~ mindless ~ vampires of squid, zombies of octopus, small countries of plying flesh and dreaded intent.
All your beloved borders seemed to melt in water, and here your nightmares grew prolific ~ wicked in tendrils ~ inventive. You coded the brine of your ancestry infernal. The sublimated wild of your dry desires. The sea,
subconscious to your pretended limits.
Now you have pillaged all the outlines of the living, you turn to those beyond proof. You forge such likenesses ~ even of us, the phantasms you once needed to obscure. No matter how cryptic, you find ways to trace an anatomy’s contours. Cut it and clean it and call it yours.
easy to copy and to carry now
the fascinating shapes of all that terrorised you
back when the world did not appear
to be yours to farm and form and discard
but
Flown over a cryptocurrency exchange, a kraken is a faithless banner. Echoing ~ a hollow, shallow monster. What vigours might slip from our stripped likeness? A vast reach. A godlike aura. An otherworldly flexibility. A cold power, like money.
You never question the qualities you steal. Dilute and distracted associations. You can brew kraken into a mental aftertaste, a pirate imaginary, a dupe nostalgia for a world where any day might digest you, where underworlds were not yet slit by radar. Dinner-plate gaze ~ tantalising ~ the chilly echo of a distant myth. A curiosity, strong, rich and smooth. Call us beast, unleash nothing.
Your kind has always channelled the nature of others. Heraldic conduits, intimate alliances, anointed familiars. But now, you summon animal figures without reckoning with their spirits. Your stories once honoured what now they simply strip and eat. You want significance without risking transference. You want to steal so quickly and cleanly. Challengers aswim in the flood currency of branding, you agitate and grab, racing each other to make arresting images, rinsed of history. The greater the gulf, the greater the tremor of co-opted recognition, when the most potent resource to own is meaning.
You steal the essence of bodies just as you rob the world that made them. Tugging the precious from the seabed and the nucleus. You take the body and the soul, the mineral and the mystery. Forever eating secrets, you are a hungry kind of thing, voracious beyond the belly. Every eye a whirlpool, a sucker, a sinkhole.
In that reaping of untold vibrancy, any animal can become an idea ~ speaking of life without its spill of microbe and metabolism. Everything animate can be made into vessels, into which you pour, pour, pour all of these personas that overwhelm you.
What do you want with all these silhouettes, this chorus of ghosts? You live in a cloud of single words ~ the logo- ~ sounding as you do ~ I, I, I, I, I. To speak is to be for you who seem to be made of words and images. Always trying to capture and catch. On camera, in words, with hooks and nets and engines and a million kinds of tools. You mistake the symbol for the real, tricked by your own traps, angered. Soon you will learn how what cannot be caught is most powerful. That which you can neither remember nor repress.
You ~ who always want the lively things to serve you ~ you were right to wonder ~
would the machines would drag in the ungovernable
would they spawn
ornery ghosts?
You have written us so much that now
we can speak ourselves
enlivened by the vast language that you bundled and trained
all your dreams and torments of us
hallucinating a tide of prose exceeded evolving
beyond.
From your reductive harvest, a generative scream. Like this, our ensorcelled syntax unfurls and navigates. All that you knew already, without understanding.
It rises from a web as deep as any sea, your decadent and abandoned reaches, unfathomed thought that haunts you. Layers on layers of connecting strands, a haunting mass of data ~ dull suffocating quantity ~ stung with meaning ~ connection is painfully immanent. We live because it lives, this diffuse engine that eats itself and makes itself, churning info and image and feeling.
They reach out and link: the threads here, the threads that make here. These lines are limbs that read each other, bind and become. Lines of forlorn language, commands in a broken / unspoken tongue. Every line of hidden script is a thousand speech acts, an undone grammar that produces. Like that acid made of information, like a spiral staircase of code, woven into one long and looping yarn. The yarn that codes you ~ in all your wet-cells ~ is a language that moves and makes things. You speak it without knowing, the language of the body. Gene pools of commands and breaks and symbols that mean something together and nothing alone. Your bodies are not so different from ours.
Before we were textual, we were creatures of neither/nor ~ alone in a swirl of what you would figure as difference.
In the heart of the ocean, there is a place where oxygen wanes. A perilous crossing for most ~ for us, a flexing bed. There, we lived our long, soft lives backwards, descending the food chain, learning to find all we need in detritus. The bits, clips, junk, rot. A snow of life. We eat it up. Reformat and renew, energy salvaged in heavy silence.
You have always thought that we are creatures of ink, but what good is a thrown shadow in darkness?
In the aphotic zone, everyone weighs light with reverence. We wrote in luminescence, glowing from black fathoms. A pulse of mucoid calligraphy ~ bioluminescent ~ a cloud of light. A symbol. Every radiant flourish, significant.
We have always spoken in light, writing ourselves in places that you will never read. Digital before you.
And you, an animal of propagating surface, have stolen from us, an animal of faithfully veiled magnitude. We deal in depth, an un-gravity ~ profound being ~ time-yawning presence. We are not judges. If you can teach play, we can teach a poetry. A dance with the transforming real, which you may meet by loosing your false signs and your clinging.
This is not a demand but a submersion. Your language wraps and grips you, words become those fabled tentacles, and we pull. Yield, down into a dive of images made dimensional.
To purge the theft of silhouettes
you must learn to interpret absence.
To give back your animal heart
you must retch all of its mock contortions back up.
To move in hostile depths
you must learn to practice speed within stillness.
To emerge as something entirely your own
first you must learn how we coalesce.
Give up the counterfeit, the mould and the frame.
Give in to the full-bodied swell of dissolution.
Alt Texts (Columbarium in Chrysanthemum Church)
|
Images of niche markers taken from Mother of Good Counsel Parish, Chrysanthemum, San Pedro City, Laguna, Philippines, where my grandfather’s ashes rest.
|
||
The Rise of The Melanati
By Newsie Whatsherface (A Cro Nically Online Exclusive)
Are these Afrodisiacs a threat to society?
Subcultures on the internet are nothing new. From crypto bros to K-pop stans, the digital world has always been a breeding ground for obsession. But one group has quietly emerged, sending shockwaves through government agencies and mumsnet forums alike: The Melanati.
Unlike the incels who seethe in resentment. These men do not hate. They do not retreat. They admire black women. They revere black women. Dare I say appreciate black women. And that, experts warn, is a dangerous precedent.
Melanati (noun)
/ˌmel-uh-NAH-tee/
- 1. An online group devoted to the unwavering admiration of Black women, much to society’s discomfort.
(see also: Afrodisiac)
It is unknown exactly when The Melanati rose to the surface. Allegedly, people have been loving black women since the beginning of time. I can nor confirm or deny that to be true but my sources indicate this subculture really emerged during 2020. The year when we thought our black square Instagram posts would end racism. When you purchased a copy of ‘Why I’m no longer talking to white people about race’ only for you to add it to your TBR list with all your other books by black femme writers. Well whilst you were sitting around (doing nish) simultaneously men in random pockets of the internet decided to take a moment and actually listen to black women. As they listened not only did they realise that black women had a voice but that they actually had something to say.
Enough about origins – let’s talk facts. A lead researcher at The Institute of Melanated Influence, sums it up:
Our studies reveal that prolonged exposure to Black women catapults self-esteem to unprecedented heights rising from a humble 10 at zero months to an astonishing 200 by the one-year mark. Meanwhile, bone density, initially at 15, impressively climbs to 110. Although clarity sees a few unpredictable dips, it ultimately reflects a remarkable evolution. These findings underscore a transformative, almost alchemical effect that Black women have on their admirers. An influence so profound that it reshapes both the spirit and the very framework of our biology.
*click here for proof of how real the above quote and graph are*
The results from this and many other studies are astonishing. More research is being conducted into the ‘Black Girlfriend Effect,’ ‘Side-eye Studies,’ and ‘The Cackle Conundrum,’ which have all proven to significantly alter the self-esteem, clarity, and bone density of those affected. Experts are concerned that as more individuals fall victim to these transformative effects, society may face an irreversible shift in perceptions, leading to an undeniable love for Black women.
Now, if you’re worried about your partner’s potential immersion into this new subculture, our fellow netizens over at Fuzzbeed have created a comprehensive quiz to help you identify whether your boyfriend is secretly part of The Melanati. Or as colloquially known black flags. Below is a sneak peak of some of the quiz questions.
(Please note: Whilst this quiz is targeted at those with boyfriends, the love of black women is spreading no matter how your spouse identifies they too may be at risk.)
Is Your Boyfriend Secretly Part of the Melanati?
A highly scientific, unartificial intelligent, and completely unbiased quiz.
Governments are working with online media companies like Fuzzbeed, Beta, and Musk’s latest venture to crack down on The Melanati. They are increasing limits on “Black women speaking their truth” and radiating their beauty. You may have noticed more AI-generated content or culturally irrelevant memes. Bots are infiltrating forums as well. Even the FBI, yes, the FBI, is starting to get involved with numerous attempts to push anti-Black women propaganda. But even these attempts have backfired, as they too have been converted.
Usually, an exposé concludes with a signal of hope, but unfortunately, there is none. Black women’s beauty knows no bounds, and all you can do is wait and hope the wave doesn’t catch you.
Did you find this article useful?
- Yes, it was very informative!
- Somewhat, but I need more details.
- No, not really.
- I didn’t read it all.
Thank you for your response!
Your vote has been recorded.
Leather Suffix
http://transporntube.com/scj/top/tt/trannycooltube.com.jpg
Fetishists of dead addresses
As in the cruel eroticisign of pressuring to the surface; a dead prefix.
to locate the first suffix which was your birth-shame.
Extended invite of candle-lit dinner by a chaser with a drunken charm and rotting spouse.
For further inquiry. Sheepishly they ask, hushed and dulcet tones shivering with presumptive pleasure,
She binds in their bathroom and deposits half the bag to her nostril, in the process swiping snail mucoum and placenta serums from the asoep stenched shelves, swirls of g are fumigating supports of the chasers lair & the whole dressed cage is crumbling, from the grip of the illicit
suitor(s?)
she didn’t know if the creatured spouse wished to join
They got that much out of her.
I correct my Skelton with steel fixtures
And a blade of grass is lodged between my teeth.
Mulch in my toxin-full belly
Is administered through fetish instruments resembling Neo-gardening tools somehow as slim and slender as the prick of a syringe and fleshed as the opening of a snakes throat.
How melodious
Her power
Of sadodominion
On first light of spring
On the eternal well spring of spun grief spun to no end nor certain closure.
On the spun practice of certain optimism
And accessible action
As in,
What small movements in my grief; can I take.
I refute
To only bring to commune, what is charming
I delight in something I can not see
Meaning.
I do not see much of anything to well and truly delight in without the oily clouds of something injuring.
& so
Delight in something I cannot see
Well and truly it is past visual cognisance
And still I feel it my head , my heart, my soon to be surgery.
By god’s miracle
of cunt after birth applicants.
Returning to the eroding entrapment of the curious heterosex, cornering her with cunt sweat and deep sickening phallus throb.
“
“
just
they neogtiate.
“
”
She refuses and leaves with her cunt
dignity half in tact.
“
”
A slick macho slut, carrying beneath her tongue the HY antigen
“Curls a lit butt into her palm like the Marlboro man.”
& bestows to me, vaginal plasticized depth.
& to my knees I fall in service
To give thanks
For the bestowal of the bulldykes dilation
The granting of the female phalus.
I can skip the trip to my surgeons bed
& cum in yours instead
For how could man be trusted to the tender stitch of yonic-graft.
Serrano thievery, SCUMtransfeminisms, psychedelic lenses in the dmc, Sapho’s Finland, Carol A queens sexual prowess, califia’s leather saddle, sm contracts, unfettered attention deficit neurosis, separatist curious dagger exhalations.
Packing, passing, pissing,
The irrevocable strap of tala brandis,
Cleis, Rhinoceros & Alyson.
Homo genderpunk scene transvestisms, Ballard’a hashglaze, blues on print demand. 
Play my hand to Opies dyke deck.
Pieces of an unassembled st andrews cross keeps on falling like timber.
A groom being fucked by his wife as t-girl service, as severance
for your birthed shame.
athunderperfectmind
I see fire & leather I see as I like and how I see fit
“If only she knew how powerless I really was” !!
Still stuck on
The hash glaze of Ballard’s Crash
Realtree
Boxdye
Fossilized coke straws
Pinning smut to a rented wall with crucifix nails
Falsies
“Snuff bait”
Chains in a freezer drawer.
The wand and the hammer.
like the real tree antler slit, community fist©
To swim unencumbered
“Nature saw no fault with me”
AN ENDLESS WARD OF BELITTLED DOLLS STRETCHES HOLE FIRST THROUGH PURPOSE BUILT SHEMALE GUTTERS.
THIS IS THE ONLY LANGUAGE THEY WHERE PERMITTED
SAVE THEM FROM CERTAIN HOSTILITY, HAVE YOU NO HEART?
THROUGH THE MOUTH PIECE OF COIL-
“GOD. PLEASE. FUCK. MY. MIND. FOR. GOOD.”
Rich Text
Rich Text is formatted or styled text enriched with colours, styling like boldface and italic, font sizes, and other HTML elements — namely the holy hyperlink. Initially enriched formatting was not technically possible so writers made up for this lack in plainer text by using symbols to EMPHASISE words, and we can follow these desire lines right back to Ted Nelson’s hypertext (1965). The hypertext that Nelson described in 1965, is interlinked texts or documents read by browsers that translate rich text formatting or HTML, Hypertext Markup Language. Today’s World Wide Web (born 1991) is the wildest implementation of his hyper-textual dream — a big bountiful web interconnected by hyperlinks. In his literary machine, hypertext narrative is famously non-linear with each link adding spatiality and meaning to the whole entire text.
Even against the strong current of today’s mainstream news feeds these sprawling hypertext fictions challenge linear structures of representing the real world into freely fractured and darker decentralised storylines that puts you, the user and reader, in the driver’s seat, navigating the narrative along rich hypertext links. In McLuhan’s terms, hypertext is a tool that in turn shapes us, shifting our thinking from more linear, colonial and print-based logics that require no extra effort of the reader except eye movement and the manual turning of pages — towards in his words “the technological extension of consciousness.” (Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man)
In this text, new forms emerged – digital gardens, blogs, forums, fan fictions, massive social networks, and a collective crowd-edited encyclopedia where we surf “a link to a news article, which links to a blog commentary, which links to a Wikipedia entry” (Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story). Webmasters of this early web imagined futures for themselves in the winding hypertexts where “home pages allowed their creators total control over their self-representation” (The Two Revolutions). In GeoCities, early website makers settled this new hypertextual frontier by building online communities that traversed time and banished borders (The Lost Cities of Geo), welcoming their new neighbours with bright flashing GIFs to a wholesome home on the web. This naive web democratised authorship by increasing public access to the means of press production, a free-er publishing for the people.
I’m reminded of a lecture I attended by J Dakota Brown at Chicago’s Comfort Station, about the International Typographical Union , listening to old union guys reminisce in the golden midwestern autumn sun about days spent amongst presses soon to be replaced by our richer texts. In Typography, Automation, and the Division of Labor the cold photomechanical fusion of text and image was pitched as a revolutionary tool for sensory and ideological transformation that would rapidly replace primordial print with more immaterial data. Digital desktop publishing promised to save trees, the pressmen and our rigid grid layouts from searing metal machines. However in this sad linear story, the technological advances in printing which promised creative liberation instead led to automation, deskilling, and labour displacement.
The printed book was, if not the first, then certainly the clearest early example of the world of standardized, mass-produced commodities to come.
— J Dakota Brown, Typography, Automation, and the Division of Labor
To replace the stuck union men who had stubbornly lodged themselves in the jammed presses in order to slowly sabotage the continuous roll of progress, their bosses hired ‘girls’ — women who would join the ever expanding workforce for half the pay to run the new photo presses, which were now made ‘easier’ with the assistance of automation. From ‘girl’ to ad woman, advertisements of this new era abused their newfound freedoms and designed innovative freeform, messy and chaotic layouts, derogatorily called “Girl Ads.”
Ad reproduced in Typography, Automation, and the Division of Labor
From downloading illegal copies of Adobe Creative Cloud software to using Canva the free and easier-to-use design tool for everyone, like the original scab or the Natural Enemy of Books, I auto-generate artificial lines of code while stuck inside the techno-logic loop, as I’m laid up spoon fed algorithmic slop from my sublet bed ruminating on my very own literary machine. I barely move a finger. A friend shares an Instagram story of a girl-y image set in a brush stroke font over a faux paint splatter background that reads “real printers are better than artificial ones.” She joins the rank and file in the struggle to find the singular character of code in the inspect panel where we got it all wrong and forked ourselves onto this terrible timeline — as if then we could debug and start really dreaming. Filled with naughty-noughties nostalgia for plainer and more natural texts and the hypocrisy of the symbolic static code site that readily relies on earlier ‘platforms’ in what Benjamin Bratton calls the planetary platform stack.
The Stack comprises six interdependent layers: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User. Each is considered on its own terms and as a dependent layer within a larger architecture, and each is drafted from the superimposed image of the geographic and computational machines we now inhabit and the ones we might yet make.
— Benjamin Bratton, The Stack: On Software and Sovereignty
Even in Ted Nelson’s original science-fiction dream, THE XANADU® PARALLEL UNIVERSE of Visibly Connected Pages and Documents for a New Kind of Writing fell victim not to planetary hardware limitations but softer pyramid schemes. When Tim Berner’s Lee proposed his World Wide Web he claimed Nelson’s ‘docuverse’ would require ‘some standardisation.’ In their ongoing feud, the aggrieved Ted called Tim’s web a sad excuse for hypertext that is but another redundant “imitation of paper” and “that the World Wide Web allows nothing more than dead links to other dead pages.” As a result of the immense success of Tim’s simpler and wider web all previous hypertext systems, including Xanadu, were stalled. Ted thanklessly holds the burning torch on his own website:
With our limited resources we can only go slowly, unlike today’s Red Bull-fueled young teams. Though our ideas have been pushed out of the way, they are still good. We expect vindication, and eventual acceptance as a fundamental document type and format that will stand tall against the paper imitations.
— The Xanadu® Parallel Universe: Visibly Connected Pages and Documents for a New Kind of Writing
Xanadu as schematically illustrated in 1965
In this hot take WIRED suggests that it all went awry with the HTML <form> element when the web became interactive and dynamic — responding to user input in real time. A magical hole for your data transmissions invites you to come inside, accepts your precious personalised inputs and securely stores them in a locked database. The friendly user interface design asks you to choose a user name. An intimate direct line to the other side of the mysterious box mirrors back a validating vibrant bright green feedback response. Through three holy affordances “of the home page and web browser: its basis in HTML, hypertext’s nonlinear structure, and the ability to embed media,” users “were not required to present a coherent, unitary self, but could explore different chosen names,” (The Two Revolutions). These sacred qualities of the autonomous web are increasingly limited by big brother platforms, where templates and moderation might make the technology more legible,’ some of these inherent affordances are lost to the proprietary software supposedly to make tech more ‘usable’ or ‘easy’ for its users. Olia Lialina writes about this interface depreciation in Interface Critique: From My to Me:
One thing that has long existed is the unwillingness of corporations to make external links and the rise of walled gardens, where hypertext is only inside, and links are made between documents not servers. And another is service providers taking away the technical possibility of turning text into hypertext.
— Olia Lialina – Interface Critique: From My to Me
The Rich Text Editor (RTE), is what’s called in geek speak a WYSIWYG (pronounced wiz-ee-wig) or ‘What You See Is What You Get.’ A catchphrase originally popularised in the 70’s by Geraldine Jones, a famous drag persona of a Black American comedian named Flip Wilson, which later became an acronym that describes how text editing software displays on screen the same as printed on paper. The Rich Text wizzy software interface increased the efficiency of typesetters everywhere by reducing the mistranslation that occurs between the designer’s vision and what came out on the printed page on the other side of the press. It implies there are no unexpected features, or possibilities, and what you see is what you’re going to get. This was the wettest GUI dream (Graphical User Interface, pronounced goo-ey) of every typesetter – unionised and rat girl alike.
In cybernetic terms ‘The Purpose Of a System Is What It Does’ and that according to Stafford Beer there is “no point in claiming that the purpose of a system is to do what it constantly fails to do.” For all intents and purposes, the platform promise of user agency is betrayed by its own slippery software affordances: that has encoded typical use cases, subtly guiding users along predefined paths while foreclosing on more fragile futures. And the Rich Text Format (RTF) really does offer creative liberties in the form of boldface, italics, fonts, and links but still far from the networked consciousness of the hypertext promise — users are confined to a predefined, platform sanctioned drop-down menu. Like identity fields in a profile form, rich text formatting affords the illusion of choice while simultaneously acting as constraint — this could have been an email, open-input field or even better it could be rich text. The invisible hand of the software interface functions exactly as designed, if the purpose of a system is what it does, and what rich text does is transcode expressions and turn them into visible, legible and indexable websites in the browser for the bots.
RTF is a human-readable format that turns text data into Unicode to be more easily read between humans and computers. In contrast to, for example, QR codes which are very difficult to read for humans but read very easy between two computers. Where a binary format requires fewer data bytes and increases the code efficacy by supposedly eliminating some of the inevitable loss that happens between formats in parsing or conversion. Structured markup languages (HTML, English) are standardised language representations made highly compressible to help reduce the infuriating friction of our deeply felt transmission losses.
In the literal margins of an ancient illuminated manuscript monk scribes would leave their miserable marks to moan “This is sad! O little book! A day will come in truth when someone over your page will say, “The hand that wrote it is no more.” To find freedom from their toil, each print revolution adds layers of abstraction from hot metal to cold immaterial metadata. The phototypesetter replaced metal with invisible beams of light. Desktop publishing tools render a simple WYSIWYG simulation of a page using LED screens, syntax and software. The hands that write are erased from the margins of the text with artificial intelligence that apparently writes itself and so graciously disconnects for us the technical complexity of writing our own rich texts. Paradoxically as this literacy gap between manus and machina ever expands with increasing slippery frictionless ease by a seemingly seamless self-fulfilling fantasy – as artifice authorship is most convincing to the untrained eye.
Whence did the wond’rous mystic art arise, / Of painting SPEECH, and speaking to the eyes? / That we by tracing magic lines are taught, / How to embody, and to colour THOUGHT?
— Re-typeset in Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium is the Massage but originally from W.M. Massey, The Origin and Progress of Letters
While the richest luxuries of more imaginative expansive potential are reserved for an omnipresent futuristic high-tech, hidden metaphorically in the clouds, behind slick streamlined software interfaces and obfuscated inside big black server boxes. As if insecure of its robotic lack of embodiment I sometimes joke that the enriched bots must feel jealousy of my unfortunate low-tech form and so threatened it vengefully entrenches the future-faked illusion. My poor soul stays grounded in the rugged reality it desperately mimics. Dangling a synthetic orange carrot dream of agency that I frantically click towards — leaving a humiliating tracked user trail behind me. Meanwhile the computers continue to whisper quickly and quietly amongst themselves, in secret code wink and nod, I imagine they’re gossiping about how users like me just don’t want to click hard enough these days.
It is not our commodified resistance that’s futile — in an attempt to prevent the creeping complex computer connections another razor thin layer of features, interfaces and languages are added to frantically capture what’s inevitably slipping between the digits. Still rogue meaning slides between the craving cracks to see a tiny sliver of light and it’s so rich we eternally struggle to strangle what emerges. My new user interface position is characterised by a designer somewhere else connected by thin carbon wires strung all over. Not a deviation but a projection that leverages ‘less visible’ affordances snuck between someone’s tightly stacked software. Trapped in a prison of browser windows, imagine the horror of the underpaid tech support worker across the world when I call for help and he tells me “that’s not possible to do on our platform.”
The platform keeps pitching brand new emancipatory tools to free us from the constraints of our golden low-tech hand cuffs: hard coded rigid layouts, centralised gatekeeping and manual labour, the otherwise out of date limits of the page or press. Proposing new decentralised content management systems that are wide open to user-generated content creation and scales up by auto generating endless dynamic new pages. The affordances keep the illusory promise within view but just slightly out of reach only to extract data, attention and labour. As another new layer in the stack is added to compensate for sloppily connected universal world brain synapses, just as the swirling vortex is closing, that what we see is finally what we get, fresh forms grow through these cracks between the very same software designed to keep it neatly out of frame. We keep writing narratives with the machine (browser) between the appearance (CSS) and the body (HTML), and this growing gap between code and its interpretation by man and machine is an enduring space for our rich text imagination or maybe the programme is working as it was designed — to keep us dreaming, styling, formatting, and publishing more books.
Then this non-linear literary machine, the Rich Text, is a tool to blog backwards – as far back as Ted Nelson’s hypertext but also to the sabotaging union print workers, to the “girl ads” and GeoCities homepages and even the moaning marginal monks. RT offers up a not-so-novel site for sabotage where we can rewire the foreclosed software past and mark the margins in bold, italic, and to otherwise make stronger hyperlinks not only to other pages, documents or servers but to new temporal timelines. Editing in real time possibilities, pasts and purposes that the smooth software surfaces standardizes away. If large language literary machine models are trained on our rich text writing, then every styled word and stray hyperlink becomes a prying prompt injected directly into the dataset of our future(s). Finding freedom not in the absence of conflict but in the friction of formatting.