A living hall of story and craft
People sometimes mistake confidence for arrogance, or authority for delusion. I understand why. When someone writes with conviction, especially about their own work, it can sound as though they believe they’ve got it all figured out — as though they woke up one morning knowing exactly what to do. The truth is the opposite. Everything … Read more
Or, Why “Content” Makes My Skin Crawl There’s a kind of quiet shock that happens when you stumble, mid-scroll, onto something real. You’ve been swimming through sludge for so long that your eyes have adjusted to the brown water — and then suddenly, there it is: a hand-carved boat, gliding on purpose. Maybe it’s a … Read more
Back to the Ground: Leaving the Creator Economy The Vegas Strip of Socials When I finally stepped back toward art as a career, I did what everyone said you’re supposed to do: I walked straight onto the neon promenade of the platforms. It was all there — the carnival barkers with growth hacks, the slot … Read more
Escaping the Creator Economy and Breathing Again My feed felt like a mall food court during a fire drill — everyone juggling trays, alarms, ring lights, and a brand voice, while even the cows have adopted Gen Z cadence and a serotonin-deprived wink (and it must be said: this is not an indictment on Gen … Read more
Why I Left Social Media and Still Beat the Algorithm I left social media for the same reason people stop feeding slot machines: I got tired of watching it eat my quarters and call it “networking.” For years I played the game like everyone else. Post a sketch at peak hours. Reply fast. Learn the … Read more
Against Christianity-as-Nation and the Anti-Christic Costume I have stood in rooms that smelled like frankincense and brand-new carpet and heard the same sentence stitched in different fonts: Christ is King. Sometimes it was a chant, sometimes a caption, sometimes a way to end a conversation before it began. In each case it landed like a … Read more
The Joke That Isn’t a Joke Here’s a hilarity I didn’t order: my long, carefully structured essays about precarity, value, and the quiet violences of “content” get ten times the traffic of my actual handmade work. Google, apparently, is a connoisseur of fury—so long as the fury is arranged in clean paragraphs with descriptive subheads. … Read more
The Paradox of Praise Watch how the compliments fall. A canvas of splattered gesture earns reverence. A field of simplified symbols—a circle that means sun, a line that means horizon—gets laughed off as childish. A 3D-printed trinket is hailed as sleek and modern; a clay figure with fingerprints still visible is called dated, school-project, “dirty.” … Read more
The Look That Says “Oh, You’re Doing That?” There’s a particular look that crosses a face when someone sees a tip jar on an artist’s page. It isn’t disgust, not exactly. It’s etiquette’s little wince: oh, you’re doing that? As if a line has been crossed—some invisible threshold between “serious creative” and “person who needs … Read more
How influencer culture turned honest labor into performance — and why I refuse to play along. I make things and I sell them. That’s it. This isn’t content; it’s work. Bookmark it if you want to find it again. Subscribe if your bookmarks look as chaotic as mine. The Uneasy Divide I make things. I … Read more