Velcro City Tourist Board

Category: Art

  • cultural currency exchange

    Cat & Girl is another of the webcomics that I’ve been following for what seems like forever. It’s always good, albeit increasingly bleak and acid in recent years, but today’s strip in particular achieved a bridging of the structural and individual so deft that I simply couldn’t stand myself outside of it; a belly-laugh and…

  • don’t tell me what to do, show me

    Adam Roberts responds here to a tweet by Tade Thompson which (to be very reductive) argues for a full reversal of the old “show, don’t tell” edict, beating up on which seems to have become something of a shibboleth of the online writing community in recent times. In his sometimes Bartleby-ish way, Roberts rejects this…

  • the dulling sameness of a world of infinite but meaningless variety

    Via Andrew Curry’s ever-reliable Just Two Things newsletter—where does he find the time?!—here’s Annie Dorsen on AI “art” at [checks notes]… ah, The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists? When people’s imaginative energy is replaced by the drop-down menu “creativity” of big tech platforms, on a mass scale, we are facing a particularly dire form of…

  • stories and possibilities are always multiple, infinite

    Wonderful essay here at LitHub by Ellie Robins. I was sold from this moment: The truth is, there can be no such thing as a monomyth. Stories are alive, and like all living beings, they exist in ecosystems. In the living world, a monoculture always spells death. Ellie Robins https://lithub.com/how-to-go-home-on-resisting-a-very-english-heros-journey/ TFW someone totally nails, with…

  • images which know that they are science fictional / Neom

    I would never attempt—nor even wish to attempt—to gainsay Gary Wolfe on the matter of science fiction as it appears in ink on pulp or text on screens; he is a model of critical generosity, and a very nice chap to boot. But there’s an aside in his review of the new Lavie Tidhar that…