Feral Machines

A woman burns, a man cans peaches, another man works with pearls. This story's undergone heavy revisions since the last time it was posted (under the title 'Do You Garden?').

Either a very short story or a fragment of a slightly longer one -- I'm undecided -- accompanied by notes on the composition exercise it came from. Obstacles in play: 'trepidation', 'Jerusalem', Six of Swords (Waite/Smith).

I've added support for $\LaTeX$-style math expressions to the blogging engine that this website runs on.

P'log now supports light mode and dark mode, and will select the stylesheet on the basis of system preferences.

Ringing in the new year with a resolution to post on a regular basis, and, in particular, to start posting short fiction.

Out with the toc.data file, in with YAML metadata headers!

A revision, or something closer to a rewrite, of a poem I'd published in 2014 in The Electric Encyclopedia of Experimental Literature (EEEL), now sadly defunct, under the title "If You're a Woman and You Feel Like This When You're Alone at Night, It's not Just You". The title came from a clickbait poetry exercise suggested somewhere on surrealist poetry tumblr. A fun scene. Seemed funny at the time.

A biased but honest review of Jackie Ess's debut novel.

Peli and Jackie stayed up all night, talking about transcendental philosophy. This is the transcript.

Some notes following up on a seminar in McKenzie's "Trans Theory as Gender Theory" class, and reflections on the Xenofeminist Manifesto, about 5 years later.

There's three of them, and they're new.

A compilation of half-finished, half-started posts, which have been collecting dust and choking my sense of accomplishment in my /src/feral_machines/content/posts/scratch directory. This quickly turned into a sprawling, incoherent omnibus post.

You know what? Fuck all the journals, all the lit mags, all the respectable outlets. They keep telling me (re: this piece about the industry) things like 'We're tightening up our social media platforms, so we're focusing on pieces that we feel will be highly consumable via the platforms. This might be too dark for us at the moment.' Or 'Would you consider re-working so the tone is jauntier?' Say I make it jaunty and friendly and social-media-ready and a couple respectable people at a couple respectable venues acknowledge my existence for two seconds and I maybe sell a few extra books? That can't be worth it. I just can't see how it's worth it. The more I think about it, the more it should be on a blog, open to everyone and without all the extra bullshit. (A guest post by Lindsay Lerman.)

A poem.

Transcript of a talk we gave in Bratislava, in the Spring of 2017.

A poem I write a few years back -- I think it was in 2014.

A reply to Dom at The Last Instance and Adam at Conflated Automatons, on the subject of "ontological slime" in computation, with much yeggogological meandering.

Brief remark on a common sophism.

On coevolution and parasitism in genetic programming and discourse.

A brief history of those few times where computer virus design and evolutionary computation have crossed paths.

On the subject of Elves.

An introduction to the blog.

Esme Hogeveen interviewed me for Issue 132 of C magazine, back in 2016, on the Xenofeminist Manifesto and related topics.