Eternal Surprise of the Careless Mind
Memory is a funny, fickle thing. In tech right now, it is especially so. Not only because the cost of the physical hardware to store it has skyrocketed in recent years due to AI driven demand. The more abstract kind has also been put to the test in the trial
Ghost Stories: bibliotherapy, grief, and learning to survive
Death is the last great literary taboo. On a sunny day or a fire-lit night, a book that reminds you that you, or the ones you love, could vanish at any moment is not the natural choice. Only once the loss occurs do people grasp for someone else’s
The old and new of literary plagiarism
T.S. Eliot is misquoted as saying “good writers borrow, great writers steal”. What he actually wrote was: “immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.” The thin line between plagiarism and ‘drawing
I despise a narrator with a smartphone in their hand
What fiction tells us about the human experience modulated by smartphones. The novel – especially when written in first person – allows insight into someone else’s interiority in a way that other media cannot. Sometimes, readers may have more knowledge of what a character thinks and feels about what is happening
We made the wrong person famous
Who is “we” and how much say do audiences really have on who rises to the top? The universal “we” is a feature in online comments sections that has always confused me. A single, ambiguous word renders the entire audience an aligned monolith; often in direct opposition to the creator
The slop we deserve
Recent reports heralded an allegedly viral sensation as the fastest growing TikTok account in history. AI Fruit Love Island is an unholy combination of words that describes precisely what it sounds like. A cartoon series based on the Love Island franchise with fruit characters instead of tanned human ones. The
Pretentiousness, taste, and why people were so mad about Wuthering Heights
In the algorithmic era, it is hard to have individual taste. It is hard to even remember what that is. Taste has always been difficult to define; it is inherently subjective and more of an impression than a fact. You can sense when someone has it, whether it is good
Who’s afraid of algorithmic capture?
People often break out online because they do something unexpected. Over time, they tend to become seemingly interchangeable with similar creators or unrecognisable from what originally made them famous. Is it the influence of newfound wealth and status or something about the act of posting online? Audience capture is the
