Do You Ever Know If It Ends? Ever?

If you had been living under a rock and not checking the news at all today, Liam Payne is dead. It's unexpected, and odd, and off, and tragic, and I don't know why it feels so hollow. I guess I do know: it's because I'm in shock.

But I'm also pretty angry about it. Because people say things have to change, but we don't do anything; we let Hollywood and social politics and war machines kill people again and again. Liam Payne was troubled, and he was hurt by the industry, by being treated like a commodity as a mere child. And yeah, he wasn't perfect and he hurt people in turn, perpetuating that very cycle, but he was human and deserved better, just like those he hurt deserved better, and he was also a father, a son, a friend...

Hurt people hurt people. It's a tale as old as time. And the troubled rockstar celebrity guy who burns himself out and dies tragically young is a tale as old as time, too. But maybe it really shouldn't be - we have to sop letting the entertainment industry push these kids to their breaking points and turning them into troubled adults that only spread that pain further down the road.

I really, truly was rooting for him to get his shit together. He has a son. He was only thirty-one. It's just a reminder how how fragile life is and how dangerous it is to leave people alone when they're on a bad high, or having a panic attack or outburst. Locking someone alone in a hotel room is not a solution. I don't know if anybody could have saved him from his own demons, but somebody certainly should have been there.

RIP Liam.

A Perfect Treat for Cyberpunk Fans and Those With an Eye on Tomorrow

Art is evolving. Things that used to feel futuristic and cyberpunk and speculative are now contemporary and modern commentary and examinations of things we're living through. Humanity is manifesting various visions of the future all at once, and generative AI including chatbots are allowing us to essentially peek into the collective unconsciousness of our species; a digital scrying tool. Here the author combines a multimedia approach using samplings from the infamous Google chatbot interview to re-purpose into poetry, taking photos of an old Dell computer pried apart, its circuits and motherboards essentially a post-mortem of a machine, a collection of autopsy photos, bits and pieces of circuitry almost recalling photos of veins and organs as you read the pieces and see the lines being drawn, the comparisons between forms of consciousness and what emotion truly means, what our definition of life is, what our definition of intelligence and cognition is. Futures that in the years to come will only become more cloudy as all the high-strangeness intensifies.

This is the perfect modern art for the crazy modern world. JP Seabright is an artist to watch for sure! Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with a review copy.