Dobes Zone

       Something I've been mulling on for a while is how a certain flavor of online media analysis has shaped how people engage with art- be it visual art, writing, film, etc- and it's seriously lowering the bar of discussion. Largely this type of discussion revolves around negative reactions to media without taking an in-depth look at themes or context and it is very arbitrary. In simple terms, a lot of this discussion comes to us in the format of "snark", a style of catty review that was popularized in the internet of the 00's and generally focuses on elements being inaccurate or just not up to the author's personal standards. While "snark" can be funny to some, it is a shallow way of approaching media and bases itself mostly on kneejerk off-the-cuff reactions. It adds very little to a person's understanding or appreciation of art.      The next evolution of the "snark" style is the YouTube phenomenon of "reaction" videos, w...

 I've been carrying around far too many science fiction and fantasy paperbacks for decades and that's a problem I'm not aiming to change any time soon. As usual, I'm also a sucker for talking animal fiction, especially when it's aimed at adult audiences. Not too long ago I learned about the novel Cat House (1989) from a friend, who mentioned the plot and it sounded weird enough to compel me to dig up a copy for myself. I also grabbed its sequel Catamount. More about that later. My copy of Cat House. Beautiful cover by illustrator Dan Craig     The hook of Cat House is a plot about bored spayed house-cats starting a cat brothel so they can mate with tomcats who aren't interested in having kittens. The females take prey animals as payment but that's more for fun than anything else, since they're all well-fed house-cats. This ends up angering some of the unfixed cats, who consider the whole thing unnatural. The broader story is about the conflict of human d...

       Well, it feels funny to be back at an older sort of place like this. After deleting tumblr (rip) when its algorithms started flagging anything mildly peach-colored as "adult content", there wasn't really a space for me to blog. Instagram is nice in some ways, but it's more about pictures than words and has an algorithm that tends to favor frequent posting and especially videos. Twitter allows me to post some little blurbs and I do share my work and some hobby things there, but frankly the less time spent scrolling a timeline the better. Twitter is no longer really a space where I keep up with friends and see what they're doing, it's more an onslaught of news where everyone discusses the trending topic(s) of the day. There's staying informed and then there's whatever the hell Twitter is- a form of self harm, I think.     So I find myself returning to something more insular and traditional because I really missed having a space to talk about thing...