The Legacy of Unus Annus

Unus Annus Youtube channel

My essay “The Legacy of Unus Annus: Ephemeral Art in a Cyberpunk World” was recently published by Interstellar Flight Magazine. The essay takes a deep dive into Unus Annus and how it intersects with our cyberpunk world and traditional art forms, such as shitposting and ephemeral art.

What would you do if you knew you only had one year left to live?

This philosophical question lies at the heart of Unus Annus (latin for “one year”), a creative experiment developed by gamers Mark Fischbach (Markiplier) and Ethan Nestor (Crankgameplays). The pair created a YouTube channel and set themselves the challenge of creating one video every day for a year — only to delete the entire channel and all of its content at the end of that year.

Unus Annus is situated within this crossroads of art and technology, embodying fine art traditions through a digital medium well suited to the cyberpunk world in which we live. I had a fantastic time exploring these elements through a ton of research and sheer fascinating.

This is definitely an essay that benefited from working with a great editor at Interstellar Flight Press, who pushed me harder to dig deeper. After all this hard work putting this essay together, I’m so excited to share it with you.

Culture Consumption: October 2018

Hi, lovelies. Here’s my month in books, movies, television, and games. 🙂

Books

Artificial Condition (The Murderbot Diaries #2) by Martha WellsIt’s been a phenomenal month of reading. In addition to Sawkill Girls by Claire Legrand and The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers (discussed here and here), I read Artificial Condition, the second book in Martha Wells’s Murderbot Diaries. After the events of All Systems Red, Murderbot goes looking into its dark past in an attempt to remember just what happened on the day when a number of humans were killed. Of course, there are problems along the way.  I read this novella all in one sitting. I love Murderbot and all his anxieties and the way he somehow tries to do what’s right by people, even when all he wants to do is hide away somewhere and watch vids. So far, there are two more books in this series and I’m looking forward to reading them.

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Culture Consumption: September 2018

Hi, lovelies. Here’s my month in books, movies, television, and games. 🙂

Books

I read and adored I Am Not Your Final Girl, a collection of horror-themed poetry by Claire C. Holland (review) and Nova Ren Suma’s latest eerie YA novel, A Room Away from the Wolves, for which I’m hosting a giveaway. Although each has a very different tone, both books explore the strength of women when faced with unsettling or violent circumstances. I highly recommend them.

I also enjoyed Jeremy C Shipp’s novella The Atrocities, which is a tightly told horror story. Ms. Valdez is hired as a private teacher for Isabella. She journeys to an labyrinthine estate adorned with grotesque statues and painting, where she learns that the young girl she is supposed to teach is dead and a ghost. As Ms. Valdez begins to uncover the truth about this strange family, she faces the hauntings of her own past. Great story.

Sticking with the horror theme, I finished the graphic short story collection Fragments of Horror by Junji Ito. I adore Ito’s work in general, though this collection didn’t quite meet the same level of unsettling beauty as Uzumaki or the stories in Shiver.  Still, there were a couple stories that stood out for me, with images that linger, including “Dissection-chan,” in which a woman is obsessed with the idea of dissection, and “Blackbird,” in which a man survives a hiking accident through horrific means.

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Culture Consumption: August 2018

Hi, lovelies. Here’s my month in books, movies, television, and games. 🙂

Books

The Changeling by Victor LaValleThe Changeling by Victor LaValle is a powerful novel, presenting a variety of horror, both mundane and supernatural, a mix of folklore and familial love and violence. Apollo Kagwa is a book man, tracking down rare first editions to make his living. When he falls in love with Emma and they have a son together, he is determined to be a better father than the man who abandoned him when he was young. But Emma begins acting in strange and unsettling ways, building to a terrible act before vanishing — and Apollo’s world is spun out of control.

What makes the horrors of this novel work so effectively is how rooted the story is in normal, everyday life before slowly gathering in strange moments one-by-one. It’s beautifully evoked, layering in the anxieties of fatherhood and dealing with racism and the ways we fail to be compassionate to loved ones when things are hard and the male ego and so much more — all combined with its undertones of folklore. The worst horrors are not always of the supernatural kind, and this story parallels them well — making for a frightening and deeply moving tale.

This is the second book by LaValle that I’ve read (the first being The Ballad of Black Tom) and I’m itching to read more of his work.

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Culture Consumption: June 2018

Hi, lovelies. Here’s my month in books, movies, television, and games.

Books

All Systems Red-Martha WellsMartha Wells’ novella All Systems Red presents the diaries of a company-supplied security android designed to provide protection for survey teams exploring planets for possible resources. Murderbot, as it calls itself, just wants to be left alone to watch hours of vids in peace. But when another survey team mysteriously goes silent, it has to work with it’s team of clients to discover the truth before they’re all killed.

I loved this book. Murderbot is cynical about humans and the world in general, an attitude that is totally understandable given its circumstances and understanding of the universe. But the team of scientists he’s assigned to give him a broader perspective on humanity, showing him people who are able to work together with compassion and intelligence — such considerations they show not just to each other but to Murderbot itself, as they continue to work with and rely on it. It’s so wonderful to read a story that centers people who are good to each other. Plus, the action is intense, making this short and rapid read.

I also completed Wonderbook, Jeff Vandermeer’s massive tome containing a beautifully illustrated toolboox for writers of fantastical fiction (which I wrote about here).

And I read through the 2018 Rhysling Anthology, which essentially acts as a voters packet for the Rhysling Awards. It’s a fantastic overview of the best short and long form speculative poetry from the previous year, as nominated by members of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Poetry association, showcasing a wide array of poetic voices, styles, and forms.

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