Ah, the two-thousand-tens. A decade that began when I was 11 and ended, according to math, just after I turned 21. In this list I will try to quantify that long series of experiences by picking a hundred items and events that represent those years best. I will fail; the list skips right from the mid-30s to #1. I started writing it in December of 2019 and forgot it was in here until recently, but I’m sharing it anyway.

This isn’t a list based on objective quality, popularity, or cultural relevance, but rather importance to me, which may seem like a pretty self-serving way to write an article. But I don’t have anyone else’s experiences to go on, just my own. Feel free to not read this, or bail before you read all 100. I get it.

100. Sabritones

Sabritones are a chile & lime-flavored puffed snack that I discovered this summer while subletting an otherwise empty three-bedroom house at the top of a large hill. The flavor is like less-intense Takis and the texture is like a softer Utz cheez ball. That summer, which I spent in Boone because I was taking a photo class, involved a lot of late nights and self-reflection, and a lot of sweaty walks down and back up that awful hill to grab some of these at the Speedway.

99. The Infinite Jukebox

This is a strange little webapp from Paul Lemere and the MIT Media Lab that analyzes a song you choose by beats and then assigns links between points where a computer thinks you won’t notice it skipping backward to extend the length of the song to essentially indefinite. The result is clunky, sometimes jarring, but always sort of… interesting, in the same way that bad facial recognition or a Roomba getting stuck in a corner is interesting. Computers trying to interpret human characteristics is just sort of weird. I got a lot of playtime out of this thing in the phase where I would just fixate on one song at a time, and almost certainly every track I mention in this list has been run through it. It’s also fun if you want to make the intro to Dean Town last for seven minutes, as a prank on yourself.

98. The Original Green Edition Red Bull

Before it was available full-time, the green Red Bull was the 2016 “summer edition”, and had a different flavor that was less sweet and more apple-forward. I drank a lot of them during the last summer I spent in my hometown before moving to college, mostly purchased at the Royal Farms across from the arcade. The new year-round green one is alright, but it’s not as sour and the kiwi takes more of a front seat. Why’d you change it, Red Bull?

97. @pomological

“old fruit pictures” is an automated Twitter account regularly posting images from the USDA’s archive of antique watercolors of fruit, apparently created as part of the WPA to employ artists by documenting all the different kinds of fruit there are. Twitter sucks insanely bad in 2020, and the best way to alleviate that (if, like me, you can’t make yourself just log off) is to find weird fun stuff like this.

96. The Baltimore Aquarium

Making a day out of looking at some fish always whips ass. Going with some buds, goofing around the whole time, and getting Shake Shack after because it’s like three blocks up from the harbor? Extremely good. Bonus points to this one because I got the aux for the whole drive down and we listened through Vega Intl. Night School by Neon Indian twice in a row. I would recommend giving it a couple hours if you happen to be in town, and maybe check out the Hooters down the hill that the field-trip permission slips always explicitly banned us from patronizing.

95. Unturned Stones

This entry is sort of a backdoor to talk about the worldbuilding subreddit, which is very good and home to a lot of extremely interesting projects and ideas. My favorite one is Valentin Sigalov’s Unturned Stones, a loose narrative network about deep-space mining of “exotic matter”, computerized minds, the politics of a galaxy-spanning technocracy, and fringe spacetime oddities documented and tracked by a mysterious volunteer corps. It’s one of the main influences on my own worldbuilding project, and also, I like looking at cool spaceships.

94. Pocket Notebooks

Since I’m trying to limit myself to specific events or products, pocket notebooks are a standin for the concept of getting organized in general. I took plenty of notes in grade school, and kept something of a diary for a few years, but my self-discipline was a mess and I hid behind habitual disorganization to try and cover up the fact that I actually wasn’t doing homework or studying a whole lot because I just didn’t care.

In college, getting on the bullet journal wave and then eventually moving to pocket notebooks for to-dos and stuff revolutionized my whole deal, as I think it might do to anyone’s deal. This sounds like some big-time nerd shit, but training yourself to get excited about crossing items off a list can turn your whole life around, and notebooks are ideal for that. I wish I could send some of my surplus of blank ones back to myself in 2010.

93. The DESKPOP Show At MAGFest 2019

This show fuckin’ ruled. I may also just put MAGFest on this list, but this specific show sticks out as a high point. I got to see FLOOR BABA live, hang out with some online friends, a shirt I designed sold out in one night, it was sick. Maxo dropped a Kirby 64 remix that he said was unreleased and I’m still waiting for it to come out. Maxo, my dude, release the track.

92. Kirby: Planet Robobot

This one’s making the list because Super Star Ultra and Air Ride, the two video games I’ve probably spent the most time playing, both technically came out before 2010. It’s still extremely fun and probably the best 3DS game. Great premise, delightful pacing, buckwild difficulty ramp. I kinda wish the soundtrack had more original songs on it, but there’s lots of reused Air Ride music in there that made me happy to hear.

91. @pepperoni_boiz

My friend Emily’s extremely sporadic Twitter side account, dedicated to reviewing different brands of pepperonis, is sadly now defunct. But while it ran it was a true joy to experience and to participate in. It also led to the time I’ve laughed the most at absolutely nothing:

Jack Grimes 🌹 on Twitter

This week's Cast Food includes the worst plugs section we've ever done, and I cracked up a second and third time while editing it: https://t.co/zxkQcO9hip

90. Your Kickstarter Sucks

A few entries on this list are enjoyable only from the position of abundant irony that years of existing online builds around you — meaning they’re personal favorites in 2019 that would’ve been wholly inscrutable to me in 2010. YKS is absolutely one of those. On the surface it’s an extremely dumbass podcast about bad crowdfunding campaigns where two hosts (Twitter veterans Jesse Farrar & Mike Hale) race to dunk on each other. But there’s something inviting about YKS’s relaxed energy. It’s sort of the anti-comedy podcast, not in that it’s not funny but in that it subverts the ongoing trend of High Energy Yelling Shows.

OutofcontextYKS on Twitter

https://t.co/fE17c0Xmi1

89. Shovel Knight

Shovel Knight rules. The ultimate Kickstarter success story, it became an overnight (overknight? is that anything?) indie hit in 2014, joining the race for the title of “mascot for all indie games” alongside Super Meat Boy and, uh, the Fez guy. The gameplay is incredibly tight, the artwork is delightful, and the soundtrack, by all-time game composer Jake Kaufman, is an absolute slammer.

Since the original game, multiple sequels starring other knights have been met with less hype but similar respect, each one turning the gameplay and mechanics on their head in neat ways (Plague Knight navigates the first game’s stages but with much more aerial maneuvering, Spectre Knight’s scythe-based jumping movement turns the levels into a Celeste-like precision platformer). They’re all good.

Maybe one of the most polished games of the decade, Shovel Knight delivers the creators’ vision with incredible poise and fluidity. The writing is great. It’s got a 10/10 on Steam. What else do you want?

88. Spacetrawler

I spent a good portion of the 2010s reading webcomics, but Chris Baldwin’s sprawling drama Spacetrawler calls the top spot in quality, meaning I think it holds up a lot better than the increasingly horny self-referencing of, uh, other webcomics I for some reason decided to read the entire run of. It feels like it was fully planned out before the drawing process started, something I couldn’t conceive of during my short comics-making phase. I should see if I can get the physical books anywhere.

87. Steel Band

I went to apparently the only high school in the country with a full steel drum band, and joined it by accident due to a scheduling error. Turns out, the steel drum is both very easy and very fun to play, especially at weird local events that book you as a novelty act (the VFW Christmas party, Dillsburg PickleFest, the Apple Harvest Fair, etc). Family bought my drum from the school as a graduation gift and I still play it on and off.

86. Best of the Worst

I’m trying to remember how I found this show, and I know it was probably in 2017ish but I honestly don’t remember sitting down and deciding to watch it. It just sort of entered my media diet, and I’m thankful for it; a recurring show about a bunch of Minnesotan doofuses watching and riffing on awful VHS tapes. The sort of thing I have a hard time recommending to people but wholly enjoy, even if I avoid their opinions on current movies.

85. nelward

The first nelward track I heard was almost definitely on DESKTAPE. Since then his sound has evolved and grown in new and exciting ways. Alive In Screen is an album I’ve previously reviewed as one of 2017’s best, noting that it’s the kind of experience you need to have uninterrupted — don’t drive a car or play a video game or anything else, just listen to it. Or, if you’ve only got thirty seconds, check out one of his best right here:

84. Leaving Richard’s Valley

I spent the first half of this decade as a big webcomics guy, and if I was purely judging by time-spent-consuming, Questionable Content and xkcd would probably be in the top ten. But the comics that have really had an impact are more subtle and more recent. One of them is Michael DeForge’s Leaving Richard’s Valley, a strange and beautiful tale of cultism, gentrification, counterculture solidarity, self-actualization and talking squirrels. The writing and art are both phenomenal, and if there are any books left I’ll recommend picking one up.

83. John Mulaney’s ‘New In Town’

I don’t think this is an uncommon pick for best-of lists, but that’s for good reason. New In Town is maybe the first time I was really blown away by a comedy special. It’s just really good! Mulaney’s later stuff has also been A-game material, but I don’t know if anything will beat my first exposure. Top to bottom it’s just an incredible comedy set. That’s really all I have to say.

82. Project Blue Book

One of the most pleasant surprises of the 2010s, I decided to watch this show because I’m a bigtime sucker for dumb alien stuff and it turned out to be Actually Pretty Good. The writing process apparently involved stitching together every Wikipedia article I read when I was 12. An unpolished, critical view of Cold War America, some wild UFO stuff, intrigue, and Werner Von Braun getting dunked on for being a war criminal any time he’s in a scene. Also, a character’s first line of dialogue is “Damn spaceship killed all my hogs.” Watch this show. It rules.

81. The Ted Cruz Porn Tweet Incident

The 2010s were largely a decade of being online becoming less fun. In 2010 the Internet still felt like an untamed wilderness of hoaxes about cats grown in bottles and outsider sketch comedy by suburban teenagers. In 2020 it’s a wasteland clear-cut by corporate greed and channeled into fewer separate venues than ever.

As online gets less fun, we jump between eroding islands of joy. Every few months, a singular strange event will grip the world’s attention and online will feel novel again, just for a moment. Perhaps the most memorable of these days was September 11th, 2017, when someone trawling Texas senator and human-lump-of-uncooked-biscuit-dough Ted Cruz’s Twitter likes found that he’d commemorated the anniversary of the deadliest terror attack in American history by favoriting a Tweet from an account called “@SexuallPosts” that contained a two-minute clip of some porno. It’s hard to describe the free-for-all that followed. Dunking on a fascist weirdo for the ultimate sin of being Horny On Main is material ample enough for even the unfunniest among us.

One of my favorite artifacts of the Ted Cruz Porno Tweet Incident (T.C.P.T.I) was posted nearly six months later:

mr cant spell good on Twitter

lol so virgin flights now have a "seat to seat" chat function that lets you dm anyone on the plane

80. TWRP

Not a ton of bands on this list. You might expect to see Ninja Sex Party, but while I did find them very funny for a long time they lacked the impact on my present-day tastes I’m trying to judge by. Instead, I’m including TWRP, who absolutely whip ass in every way. The concept — over-the-top character-gimmick synthrock — seems goofy, and it is, but everything about the production, music, and stage presence come off as totally sincere and absolutely delightful. I saw them live in 2016 and they prefaced every single song with “This one goes out to all the ladies!”. Reader, we may have different tastes, but I challenge you to tell me this doesn’t rule:

79. Salvage Solitude 8140

I got this weird little video game on the cheap as part of a Humble Bundle, and I gotta say, I find myself thinking about it more often than a lot of games with huge budgets and elaborate narratives. Salvage Solitude 8140 is about walking around different floors of an empty space station, fixing computers and machines with your goofy little nail gun, and when they’re all fixed you win. There’s no music, no dialogue, no NPCs, and honestly very little of anything. But this weird lonely emptiness and the dated, surreal graphics give it an extremely distinctive and memorable tone.

78. The Tetris MicroCard

There are maybe half a dozen video games I’m “good” at, and all of them are probably on this list. Tetris is one of them (obviously the skill ceiling is infinite but I like to think I could take on a lot of folks and do pretty well). The Tetris Microcard, manufactured for a limited time by Arduino, is honestly a perfectly-designed object. Tiny but ergonomic. Streamlined to all hell. Extremely easy to bust out on a long road trip and chip away at that 300k barrier. If you can still get one, I recommend it.

77. Utz Italian Hoagie Chips

I think these may have just been tested out in the home market and then discontinued, but damn, they ruled. Sort of a vinegar base with some tomato and oregano and pepper? I can’t tell if they were meant to taste like a hoagie or pair with one, but either way, an all-time chip. Bring ’em back.

76. The Big Golf Ball Machine at The Franklin Institute

Buddy, if you know, you know. This guy, hanging out on the top floor of the science museum in Philadelphia, chuggin’ away and sending a series of golf balls around a wire track, absolutely rules. The Franklin Institute overall is pretty sick, but this guy was absolutely where I spent the bulk of my time on every day trip and field trip. I hope it’s still there.

75. Frostop Cream Soda

Some of you may know I’m trying to make a career as a Fancy Soda Guy, so I’ll almost always pick one up I’ve never seen before. I scored a bottle of Vanilla Caramel Frostop from on top of — not inside — the checkout soda fridge at the hardware store in the summer of 2015 when I was getting some gas and a belt for the lawn mower. It hung out in the home fridge while I mowed the lawn and was perfectly cold when I was finished. This stuff tastes like a liquefied Cow Tail. Get some if you can find it.

74. The Adventure Zone

Probably appearing on many best-of-the-10s lists is the McElroy family’s delightful Dungeons & Dragons podcast The Adventure Zone. I’m choosing specifically their first iteration, Balance, because of its immense length and extremely good slide from goof-em-up out-of-a-book campaign to gripping magical drama to incredibly weird and perfectly paced hard scifi. Possibly one of the great pieces of storytelling of our time.

73. wint (@dril)

I got on Twitter too late to myself be considered a “weird Twitter guy”, but I’m not gonna come at the king and miss. Dril deserves to be the Poet Laureate, an anonymous account whose every post becomes the new joke format du jour. If his book is still available, get one — I consider it maybe the thing I own that will be the most valuable after the collapse of society, so that I can still chuckle at shit like “lets see if that Awful Groundhog can predict six weeks of Electro House blaring directly into its shity cage” by candlelight in my roaming war gang’s makeshift base camp.

wint on Twitter

Sword's. The only blade known to man

72. Planet Funny by Ken Jennings

If I were accused of “stanning” anybody, it would probably be author, podcaster and former Jeopardy! champ Ken Jennings. His last book, Planet Funny, examines how jokes have seeped (sept?) into every aspect of American culture and why that might be bad. Quick, smart, and shockingly good at transcribing spoken humor (I laughed at the Hannibal Burress prosthetic arms joke even in print), Planet Funny is the kind of book I’m very glad to have picked up when I did. This book would have heightened my pretentious opinions on culture to likely unbearable levels if I had read it when I was 12, but instead I got to read it on a pleasant bus trip to Charlotte and think about how bad it sucks that every commercial is directed by Tim & Eric now.

71. Vena Cava & Shawn Wasabi: ABC Mix Pt. 4

This mix dropped in 2014 and was basically responsible for my discovery of music that whole year. I looked up every track on the tracklist, got into most of the artists, and listened to it dozens of times through. Lemaitre, Pas L’am System, Anamanaguchi, Ollygon, all the mid-teens heavy hitters are in this one. It’s 81 minutes of pretty much exactly 15-year-old Jack’s whole deal. Deeply ingrained memories of listening to an awful-quality rip of it from the shitty single-AA-battery MP3 player I used to own while raking leaves for my grandma. I still listen to it pretty often. Oh, believe it or not, the cover art has actually been made less horny since its original release.

70. The Shitty Single-AA-Battery MP3 Player

I cannot believe I found a photo of this thing. In 2013 I found a barely-functional MP3 player on the school bus, looked for its owner like a good samaritan, and was informed that it was busted and they no longer wanted it. I took it home, learned that it was not busted but just needed the headphone jack cleaned out & a fresh battery, and loaded it up with low-bitrate rips from “soundcloud2mp3.biz” or whatever. I would love to know if it still exists, stuck in a box in the attic or something. I’d also love to browse the great tracks I had on there (the ABC Mix Pt. 4, for sure, and also the bulk of the entries from Zomboy’s Vancouver Beatdown remix competition).

69. Flipnote Hatena

Y’all remember the DSi? In addition to being my first internet-enabled device, and all the notable firsts that entails for an adolescent boy, the DSi connected me to Flipnote Hatena, a website tragically closed down in 2013 where kids could share dumb (or on rare occasion, extremely impressive) animations made with the Flipnote Studio application. To date, it’s one of the most positive and polite online spaces I’ve ever been a part of, and undoubtedly extremely influential to my creative outlook. By the time I left my DSi at a hotel near Philadelphia, I was (not to brag) routinely topping the charts and even got a couple blue stars. I made friends on Flipnote who I wonder about pretty regularly, since we must all be in college now. If anyone has information on the whereabouts of Hatena users “andwoo” and “derpbagel12”, please contact me.

68. The Expanse

The Expanse kicks ass. Based on the novels by James S.A. Corey, this Syfy series takes immense care setting the scene of a colonized solar system stratified by class and planet-of-origin in the 23rd century, and then just lets it rip. So many little character bits are insanely good — from Alex, born and raised on Mars, using cowboy-speak all the time for some reason to mysterious tough-guy mechanic Amos meeting a guy he immediately hates and then calling him different wrong names for all of Season 4. Moments of it pop into my head all the time. Thomas Jane plays a private investigator in way over his head on Ceres and leans into the “jaded detective” role so hard I think it counts as “camp”. It’s an absolute delight. Go check it out, but steal it I guess, because Amazon bought the show after Syfy inexplicably dropped it.

67. Mike Birbiglia’s ‘My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend’ Tour

Objectively speaking, My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend is a pretty good comedy special. For a kid in eighth grade who bought two tickets with the $100 I won designing a T-shirt for the Adams County Envirothon, it was incredible. The poster, autographed by both Mike and his very nice brother Joe, is still proudly hanging in my home. I think I probably have the ticket somewhere, too.

66. The Electric State by Simon Stålenhag

Expert world-crafter and extremely talented concept artist Simon Stålenhag’s work could probably make this list as a unit, but The Electric State stands out. A straightforward narrative collects bits of a much larger and incredibly unique universe as the reader travels through spread after spread of beautiful paintings of giant, mysterious artifacts of some unspoken technocratic forever-war. It’s both engrossingly alien and disconcertingly similar to our current path forward without once losing its grip on the tonal subtlety that keeps the fiction airtight. Delightful book.

65. School Lunch Reviews

Listen, I can include things I made on this list if they brought me joy. School Lunch Reviews was a blog I operated for the last couple years of high school where I described and rated the federal-minimum school lunch I received every weekday. Despite pretty much never talking about it, namedropping the school district led to its discovery by faculty and staff within a few weeks, and we all sort of knew it was me. Eventually SLR became a local sensation and was read regularly by the cafeteria staff and our cool-ass superintendent. Post-graduation I handed it off to a buddy of mine in the class below, who ran it for maybe six weeks before abandoning ship. Nothing gold can stay.

64. 17776

When I think about the most unique and original media experiences of the decade, pretty much nothing surpasses 17776, Jon Bois’ multimedia speculative project on the distant future of American football. I don’t even want to explain it much further than that, beyond that it’s absolutely not necessary that you know anything about football to enjoy it immensely. Just… just go check it out.

63. Ehiorobo - Limeade

Another very important album, this one from 2016, I think. Once in a while, something wild and new with production methods and themes I’ve never thought about before will show up and open up my music intake in sort of a reverse bottleneck. Limeade is one of those.

62. Liartown USA

Liartown USA, creation of LA-based designer Sean Tejaratchi, is one of my favorite things of the decade and probably of all time. I own the book. I frequently reference and imitate it. It’s delivered more earnest laughter to me than maybe any other individual source. Liartown is a blog where Sean constructs elaborate and always incredibly stupid fake book covers, posters, products, magazines, and other ephemera with a comedic voice that’s somehow both totally over-the-top-insane and completely deadpan. It’s masterful. This passage from the beginning of the book will ride in my brain forever:

Once in a while, an idea is so crushingly dumb that I feel obligated to put an absurd amount of work into it. It feels like an apology, a way of saying, “Believe me, I knew it was stupid, it was clear from the start! Look how much of my life I’ve spent dressing it up for you. I know I’ve wasted your time, but look, I’ve wasted mine, too!

61. The Consumer Aesthetics Research Institute

C.A.R.I. is a loose collective of designers and design critics attempting to classify and identify design trends of the 21st century (and plenty of weird 80s and 90s ones, too). I was introduced to them via the wonderful Froyo Tam and have been a regular contributor for most of a year. It’s both a great source of inspiration and a great network of like-minded creatives, and it’s made me hate noodly-armed pastel bougie illustration a whole lot. I won’t be surprised if CARI is a major voice in the world of design in another few years.

60. Kero Kero Bonito

I’m a bad consumer, so I came to a lot of these things Very Late, and KKB is definitely one of my worst offenses. I heard Flamingo in like, 2016 and liked it but of course never did any research. Then I finally checked out Intro Bonito and Time n’ Place last year, two insanely different albums (a breakneck transition from MIDIcore post-pop gooftunes to neo-folk noiserock). I’m a fan! They’re good! That’s all I really have to say. Please come play a show near me!

59. Alien Planet: Darwin IV

Alien Planet: Darwin IV is a barely-feature-length TV “documentary” about a robotic expedition to an exoplanet full of weird creatures, illustrated in pretty good but still charmingly weird CGI. I saw it on the Discovery Channel when I was home sick from school, was immediately enraptured, and spent the next several years intermittently trying to find it to assure myself it was real and not just a hallucination I had in between Benadryl naps. I eventually found it on Youtube in 360p and had a cathartic second watch. I learned it’s based on a book, Expedition by Wayne Barlowe, and now my quest is for a copy of that. I’ll put the film on occasionally when I’ve had a rough one and want to not think about my day for a while. It’s one of those things that’s impossible to share with anybody and make it as meaningful to them as it is to me.

58. Pineapple Fanta

It’s better than the orange one. Fight me.

57. Plants vs. Zombies

I’m not a huge video game guy. Not great at them. Not a ton of games I really sink multiple hours into and make a decision to finish, or even rarer, complete 100%. But Plants vs. Zombies, from pre-EA-buyout PopCap, is a true slam dunk. The gameplay takes pretty much no time to learn, the soundtrack is unbeatable, the aesthetic is great. Every time I talk about it I’m tempted to reinstall it. If you missed it, don’t buy into the lie that it’s just another boring Facebook game. It shreds.

56. Spider-Man: Into The Spiderverse

This will probably also appear on a lot of best-ofs. It may seem out-of-place here, considering my long and vocal history of not really being a superhero-movie guy. I can’t really figure out the Marvel appeal, or get invested in Batman or whatever. But Spiderverse doesn’t ask you to care. It just asks you to look. This movie is a treat for anybody with working eyes, a visual feast and technological tour de force that I’d probably put down as 2018’s top movie. Throwing in a solid plot and likable characters is just a bonus.

I went to see Spiderverse at the theater opening week and left extremely impressed, which happens pretty rarely. In the months that followed, learning about the incredible energy and attention that went into crafting this movie was nearly as enjoyable as the film itself. So many weird ideas went into the production of Spiderverse and all of them paid off. Watch it on the largest available screen.

55. Vulfpeck

“What? A whole band is on this best-of list, and not a specific album or song?” Yeah, and I’m gonna do it a couple more times. Also one of the entries a few up was a specific MP3 player. This is my list.

Vulfpeck is an independent funk band from Ann Arbor, MI that I used to believe was massively underrated but now I realize everyone already likes in secret. It’s just sort of the platonic peak of a great performance. Every track consists of everybody putting in exactly as much work as they need to, and I’d go to bat with the argument that zero of them are bad, including the track where Theo Katzman raps in a comical baby voice the whole time. Just a real nice little gem. Bonus: Their logo and official font are by James Edmonson, one of my favorite typecutters on the scene.

54. Prospect (2018)

I learned about this movie by finding and reading a pretty weird promotional piece, an in-world catalog of space-survival equipment, complete with diagrams, illustrations, and strange ads. It was a gripping little artifact of a beautifully-built world, and I started following the production team, waiting impatiently for the movie to come out. It’s fantastic — a little capsule of narrative that’s clearly a part of a huge, breathing, fully-realized universe but enticingly doesn’t bother to explain all of it, focusing instead on a handful of characters and their crossed motives in a strange setting. Every detail is so finely crafted and every beat so finely paced that I can only imagine how long this spent in the development phase. If you can find it, watch it.

53. Podcast 2

I love Podcast 2 for most of the same reasons I loved CastQuestCast, which is to say it has a loose premise mostly as an excuse to get some buds together and try to one-up each other’s extremely stupid jokes for an hour. Listening to it and guesting on it are both a delight, and hearing a good-faith attempt to revamp school tumble down a conceptual cliff into minutes of discussion about an all-eggs buffet table is just the perfect sort of goofy. I hope this show comes back before the decade is up.

52. Cucumber Gatorade

Coming out of left field is that wonderful sour sports milk known as Gatorade. I have been very into Gatorade for the latter half of the decade and I gotta say, the cucumber one secretly slaps. “Cucumber” is just in the name to scare off people who aren’t open to new experiences. It’s a very good pairing with any of the snacks I mention on this list.

51. Regular Show

I assume the pitching process for Regular Show started with a rejection letter from Adult Swim and then the thought, “if we don’t cuss in this we can just put it on regular Cartoon Network an hour earlier”. I’m glad that happened. Regular Show ruled so much my dad got into it with us, which was funny just in concept. There are bits from it I still think about pretty often (including: a woman letting some astronauts cut in line because they “fought for our country” and Muscleman having an item in his home that “started out as a bowl of chili, but now it’s more of a houseplant”). Final plus: It taught a generation of kids that bosses are bad.

50. POPCORE

POPCORE is an artist and DJ who has influenced my taste immensely during two transitional periods — both in art, at the very tail-end of the time when I thought I could do illustration, and in music, holding up the higher-energy end as I got mostly into more experimental jazzy stuff. Their mixes are very, very good for putting on loud and slamming out a paper or cleaning the house. Or, I assume, having a cool party.

49. Nilla Wafer Top Hat Time

Rhett & Link should probably be on this list just as content creators, if we’re judging based on hours of entertainment provided to me. But when I think about their long list of creations and pull the one that made the most difference to me, it’s N.W.T.H.T. hands down. I performed it at summer camp with two friends who had only heard the song acapella from me and never the original video. I played it during one of those “hey, I know a good video” gatherings at a Halloween party, where it occupied areas of my brain that should have been realizing the girl seated next to me had a big crush on me. I played it on one of my weekly opportunities to pick the music that played before the school news. To me, and to many, it will always be Nilla Wafer Top Hat Time.

48. AdhesiveWombat

As much early-10s Soundcloud music as I’ve mentioned here, a special shoutout needs to go to George Shaw, who goes by the moniker AdhesiveWombat. Basically this guy just puts out a song he’s been working on a few times a year, ranging from straight chiptune to synthpop to more elaborate complextro-style electronica. Every single one is great, and at a time when I was finally discovering music I really enjoyed, these songs and the suggested related tracks Soundcloud served up helped me make up for lost time by showing me a world of music I would otherwise never have known about. The one-two punch of 8-Bit Adventure and Symphony of a Forgotten Sprite absolutely blew my mind in 2012. These days, AdhesiveWombat is typically more of a nostalgia listen than anything else, but I still get excited deep down when I see he’s got a new track out.

Come on, this track shreds.

47. Arrival (2016)

Denis Villenueve’s emotional, psychological scifi thriller Arrival slides into the 47th slot for being a rare thing I really enjoy that’s not too far off from the mainstream. I watched it to discuss it on a podcast a few months after it came out, and then watched it again in typography class to prepare to make a poster for it. This movie dares you to not like it by casting Jeremy Renner and then still absolutely whips anyway. It’s worth watching one night, thinking about for a few days, and then watching a second time.

46. Chipmunks On 16 Speed - Sludgefest

This is maybe the most insane thing I’ve ever heard. It’s a weird fusion of vaporwave, doom metal, post-rock, synthpop and a dozen other influences of post-irony music. Also, it’s just the Alvin and the Chipmunks record “Chipmunk Punk” slowed down by 50% to reveal the original session recordings. It’s like an album out of a cough-syrup nightmare you had while missing junior prom. There’s soul down in there, deep enough, under the gritty crackle of low-speed vinyl. These musicians, hired to perform some top-40 hits to be pitched up an octave as a cash grab, absolutely did not phone it in. The solo on ‘Walk Like An Egyptian’ is fucking nasty. There’s nothing I can write that’ll sell this album better than the top three Youtube comments:

45. What A Time To Be Alive

The self-described “only podcast that counts down the things each week that make you say the thing that’s the title of the podcast” hosted by New York comedians Patty Monahan, Kath Barbadoro and Eli Yudin gets to be one of a few podcasts on this list just for delivering so hard and so consistently. It’s almost every day that a WATTBA bit will pop into my head and crack me up weeks after the fact (Eli confidently telling guest Paul F. Tompkins that the biscuits at Red Lobster are “moister than water” still gets me). The chemistry is all there and the premise is genius, seeing as our current state of endless hell-world means plenty of absurd news stories to cover (favorite categories: animals ending up somewhere weird, funny things falling off trucks, archaeologists discovering an ancient liquid).

Earlier this year I got to see them put on a live show with special guest Luke Mones, and spent a weekend in NYC that probably deserves its own spot on this list. It was fun as hell.

44. Shawn Wasabi

This list entry is both about Shawn’s music, which is very good, and Shawn the guy, who’s also very good. Soundcloud served me Mac N’ Cheese sometime in like 2014 and like a lot of things that year it blew my kid mind. As I was always doing back then, I looked him up on Twitter to thank him for making this cool song, and developed what I like to think of as a solid online friendship. Since then I’ve both continued to be a big fan and have had the fortune to produce some graphics for his last few releases.

43. Important Things with Demetri Martin

I have a tough time pinning down my comedy influences because I largely stopped consuming the real stuff after high school. But Demetri Martin’s old Comedy Central show is definitely near the top. Maybe it’s the kind of twee weirdo-comedy that felt way cooler in the middle of the decade than it did at the end, but there are still sketches from Important Things that crack me up every single time. Take, for example, this one where H. Jon Benjamin and Nathan Fielder help take a stupid concept to its logical terminus:

Gayfoot - Important Things with Demetri Martin (Video Clip) | Comedy Central

Important Things was an incredible source of both jokes I realized the meaning of years later and stuff that was funny at the time. The title character in “Asshole Roommate From The Future” condescendingly saying, “You don’t have LeviSnacks? So, your food does not hover?” was a goof on heavy rotation in my household for months.

42. Jerry Paper - Like A Baby

The 2010s were full of albums that reshaped my tastes and marked new chapters for me, and as recent as it is I would put Like A Baby near the top of that list. After coming back to Jerry’s previous album Fuzzy Logic for a long time I decided to look if they had any new music and my research paid off in full. One of very few “new” vinyls I own.

41. This Week In Chiptune

DJ Cutman’s long-running podcast was another source of new music for years. I miss it. I should also mention here that Cutman has gotta be one of the coolest people of the 2010s. I hear criticism of his music that I sometimes agree with, but nobody can say that dude doesn’t put in the work.

I’m realizing that this list is sort of a roundup of watershed media relevant to my interests, since that’s pretty big when I consider what things have made the most impact on me ten years down. TWiC is very much that, having introduced me to FLOOR BABA, Nelward, and by that route many of my current online friends. Thank you, Cutman.

40. Songs For Moms

In the late summer of sophomore year, when Teen Jack was in kind of a rough headspace, my sleep schedule was typically from 5 or 6am until lunchtime; I’d spend those long nights conversing on AIM with my then-on-and-off-girlfriend (I have never understood her insistence on using AIM) and consuming whatever content drifted by, like a sea sponge.

One night, blearily half-watching a livestream by Jacob Andrews of For Lack Of A Better Comic, I heard a song that hit me in a new way I’d never experienced before. I asked Jacob what it was. The song was I Used To Believe In The West by Songs For Moms, an all-female punk band from Oakland. I immediately went searching, and found all their music on a dusty MySpace page (I know this story sounds like it’s from the Bush administration. I swear to Christ it was like 2013). It was all I listened to for maybe a week.

I love Songs For Moms very much but I don’t talk about them often because it feels like it’s not meant for me, and I enjoy it sort of by accident. It’s a weird outlier in my music intake and I’m probably a weird outlier in their audience, an east-coast high school boy getting very emotionally invested in loud songs about urban angst, womanhood, and romantic betrayal. But the mood and the energy are universal, and I think my enjoyment is a testament to that.

When I got an email from Bandcamp in 2017 that they’d put out a new album, I was extremely excited, and it’s just as good if not better than the last two. All three albums are go-to, tried-and-true “walking around alone at night” music.

39. Gravity Falls

Man, this show ruled. Loaded with serious suspense, extremely tight joke delivery, and premises that came apart to reveal a deeper and more interesting one every single time. Also, it was the first and really only time I’ve showed up early to something that was developing a serious fanbase, and it was nice to be part of one of those for a while. I watched it along with its initial airing and have watched it at least two more times later, which I almost never do with TV. Every episode is incredibly tight and nothing gets forgotten without being tied up later. The eventual metajokes (“Ducktective has a lot of adult themes, and real mystery!”) were always very good.

Note: This DVD box just has the logo of the NES game “Totally Rad” on it. Is that allowed? Who decided on that?

38. Index Cards Against Humanity

The lunch-table classic. I was so goddamn proud of this thing — which went through several iterations and multiple boxes and probably upwards of 2,000 index cards over its several-year lifespan, although photographic evidence is sparse. Either disillusioned with the name-brand CAH’s unfunny punching-down tactics or too broke to afford the $29.99 real deal (although I choose to believe the former), myself and some friends constructed our own version of the famous card game by hand and played it at lunch more or less every day for most of high school. Eventually, as we added jokes we came up with and pruned ones we forgot, the set became completely inscrutable to anyone not part of our friend group. I handed it off to an underclassman friend when I left town, who I’m certain never played it once. This box would be an insane time capsule of my interests and comedy tastes circa 2013 if it was ever found again.

Late edit: I forgot I made another one of these with my freshman-year floormates, which suffered from a similar insularity. I think it might still be sitting on top of a ceiling tile in the sixth-floor student lounge in Frank Hall, waiting for some extremely confused electrician to discover it.

37. Minecraft

Minecraft is another entry I’m sure will be all over best-of lists. It may be one of the best video games ever conceived, and it absolutely tops the pile as far as hours I’ve spent in a game. The arc Minecraft has traveled over this decade is pretty wild, going from “fun weirdo project” in its earliest days to “hot new craze” at its initial official release to a guilty pleasure for kids who were supposed to be too cool for a little kids’ game, and then back to generally well-regarded as battle-royale and scary pizza games entered the scene and siphoned off most of the young, loud demographic that was making Minecraft “uncool” in the mid-teens. I’ve stuck with it on and off through all these phases.

Minecraft is an endless adventure. It’s a little piece of zen. It’s a realm where you’re offered total control. It’s digital art supplies. It’s a cultural touchstone for the Y2K generation that I doubt will be surpassed anytime soon. And no, there’s no need to bump it off the list for its creator acquiring massive wealth and becoming a mens-rights weirdo:

zaratustra found footage creepypasta on Twitter

son: this minecraft game is great dad dad: it is indeed son son: who made it? dad: no one. it came from space

36. Eddsworld

This is another one of these that’s gonna feel dumb if you weren’t around for it. Eddsworld is a series of offbeat flash animations originated by Edd Gould, who sadly passed away in 2012. It’s not much different from the bulk of the late-aughts Flash boom in a lot of ways — characters based on an actual group of friends, strange generic environments, absurdist humor. What sets Eddsworld apart is mostly being actually funny. The joke delivery avoids common period pitfalls and besides some slightly-too-fast pacing (I watched several of them as research for this) is honestly still fuckin’ great in 2019. It’s Homestar Runner for Spongebob kids the way Homestar Runner is Eddsworld for Simpsons kids.

35. FLOOR BABA - GAMEWAVE

GAMEWAVE probably tops the list of “music responsible for my current taste.” I heard the first track off this album on DJ Cutman’s old podcast from a few items ago in December of 2015, and through it I learned about DESKPOP and a whole community of people making wild music I’d never heard anything like. Almost five years down the road it’s still very good, and now every track reminds me of a specific experience, too. “Nice In! / Nice Approach!” got played at the MAG show and absolutely whipped ass.

34. Graduating High School

This is sort of a weird change of pace for this list, but I didn’t want to mention multiple green beverages and zero life achievements. School is typically the first major thing you finish, which is a wild concept at the time, and the knowledge that the long, long cycle of the same deal every week has finally been broken is highly potent. The first point in someone’s life where they’re handed real agency over what they want to do with it, which happened to presumably many people this decade, has to go in the top 100.

Plus, you get handed a valid reason to have a bigass party in like, the last week of May, which is tight.

33. CastQuestCast

CQC means a lot to me. Not only is it, in my opinion, one of the funniest things ever made, it was the first time I got to work on a real branding project and I’m still proud of the work I did. I’ll still put an old episode on if I need a familiar laugh. Highlights: Quinn reading the table of contents of the Mountain Dew Wikipedia page with increasing contempt in her voice, Horse Planet, Lizzie opening the discussion on “a podcast for ants” with an extremely matter-of-fact “Well, you gotta get it down real small,” the entire cast confidently speculating about the plot of Happy Feet 2 despite nobody having seen it. The list goes on. It’s an incredible show. Maybe it’s stupid as hell if the people who made it aren’t your friends, and that’s okay. It’s special to me.

#1: The Aluminum Slurpee Straw

This probably seems like a minor thing to top off the entire decade. And it is. 7/11 offered these metal straws (ahead of their time!) until at least 2014, and the earliest mention of them I can find is from June 2009 on the V6 Mustang forum:

I obtained the purple one, seen above, at a 7/11 in Nittany, PA on a long-haul delivery trip with my dad for which I was permitted to skip school. Not only is it a good straw — wide diameter for high-speed slurpee flow, becomes very cold, strong for stabbing core samples in a de-juiced slush after a few minutes — this straw is notable because it became sort of a physical reminder of those long road trips I came to love. The Slurpee straw is a totem of my adolescent days spent in the passenger seat, listening to standup comedy snippets on the XM radio and slamming Combos, buffalo chicken rollers, and various frozen beverages. If this list is based on impact on the person I am in 2020, then the slurpee straw, as it represents those hours on the road, had the #1 spot locked down from the start.

(Chapter 1)

The explosion instantly vaporized Keystone’s B ring and much of the central shaft. The A ring and the docked Pascagoula, being further away, were instead simply blown to pieces. A cloud of shredded metal and shattered polyceramic spread out across the vacuum, each bit of shrapnel following its own minuscule inertia to an unknown destination. In untold years some of them may have joined the rings of Saturn, or been pulled in and added to the mass of Jupiter. In the meantime, their presence would hinder high-speed shipping through this corridor of space with the threat of an algae-cell rupture or hull breach. The outer colonies would suffer.

Authorities would find it suspicious that there was an explosion at all, as this would indicate a failure of the automatic cooldown system built to kick in when plasma containment failed. The official incident report from Algonquin Metals & Ores, LLC would suggest that the meltdown was almost certainly the result of intentional sabotage, although it would clear Felix Rook, believed dead, of any suspicion.

Roger Thomas stared absently at the round, flat parcel in his lap. A patch bearing the Algonquin logo, an arrowhead over a star, gazed back. In the back of the cabin, Felix Rook was floating asleep, a sedative patch from Keystone’s emergency medical kit clinging to his neck. His mouth moved slightly, mumbling something. Thomas didn’t envy the man. Months of sole operation gave one strange dreams.

But as he watched, Rook’s face scrunched and then his eyes slowly opened, recognizing the interior of the Keystone escape shuttle. A shock turned his mumbling into words as his expression sharpened in concern.

“What the fuck is going on?”

Rook didn’t flinch. “We’re goin’ to Ganymede, after I make a stop t’drop this off.” He held up the data platter, letting the jacket wrapped around it fall away but carefully not touching it with bare hands. The smooth disc reflected Rook’s bewilderment back at him with a golden tint.

Rook reached out for a railing and turned himself around to face the rear window. The blue-grey splash of Keystone was fading away behind them. He spun back around, hard, barely catching himself on the rail.

“You — what the fuck! What is that?” He pointed at Thomas with his free arm.

Thomas rewrapped the disc and strapped it into the second seat. “Oh, I didn’t tell you why I came through, since I was in a hurry. Alright. A couplea’days ago, some information was beamed through your little station from Ganymede — from Subarashii — to Earth. Now that’s not really strange, I know.”

Rook’s grip on the wall railing was getting tighter.

“But just a couple’a hours after that signal got through, the Zheng He took off from Earth with Ming on it. An’ he is just haulin’ ass to Ganymede right now. An’ this platter” — he patted the disk — “should have a copy of whatever that message was.”

Rook’s knuckles lost some of their whiteness. Chairman Ming hadn’t left Earth in years. Rumor was he’d been in bad health and was considering retirement. For him to make such a long trip on such short notice must have taken something important.

“But if you pulled that disk from the — ”

“Then it’s encrypted. Which is why we’re going to Ganymede, to get us a key.”

Rook flinched at “us”. “And you think nobody is gonna guess what you’re doing? Keystone gets this secret message and then explodes?”

“I’m not too worried right now, t’be honest. As far as anybody can tell we’re just a chunk a’station headed toward Jupiter. Drive’s off.”

Rook shut his eyes again, considering his situation. “And you decided to take me along instead of just letting me get blown up.”

“Well, sorry for not askin’ but I thought you’d prefer this.”

Without the engine running the shuttle was almost totally silent.

“And you don’t know how to get the message off the disk.”

“Also correct. More of a computer breaker than a computer hacker, m’self.”

Reyes studied their reflection in the dark screen as they rehearsed a message in their head. What did they need to say? That they were alive, for starters. That the Pascagoula was hijacked. That Jimenez and Tucker were presumably dead. Reyes took a long breath of recycled air and pushed down the “RECORD FOR OUTGOING” button on the console. Their dim reflection dissolved as a digital one replaced it. Reyes straightened and looked ahead.

“This is Caspar Reyes. Several days ago I left Luna on the UAA Pascagoula along with two others: James Tucker and Elsie Jimenez. We were attacked by a pirate who took control of the ship. I have to imagine that both of them are now dead. I was picked up by a-” Had Redmond ever given a full name? Wayne? Wade. “by a scrapper, Redmond Wade, and I am recording this message from his ship, the Corvus.”

Reyes trailed off. What else should they include?

“We’re heading to Jupiter to help out with the search for the Pascagoula. I am alive and okay. Thank you.”

They released the button and sent the message before it could play back for review. The Corvus turned its radio dish sunward and beamed Reyes’ message toward Luna. The screen helpfully noted that it would take 21 minutes to cross the gap.

“You didn’t ask me about the helping-out part.” Redmond’s voice seemed to appear out of nowhere, and Reyes jumped. He gave an “Ah, sorry”, but didn’t take his hands off the back of the seat.

“We are, right? That’s why we’re headed this way?” Reyes tilted their head back to look up at the scrapper, whose face didn’t seem to change. He sighed, inadvertently blowing air down at Reyes.

“We’re stopping at Callisto to pick up some supplies, is what I said. Then I’m going to Titan to get the ship checked.” He looked up at the screen and all Reyes could see was beard. “I’m not… I want to help out. You’re welcome to stay on board for as long as you have to. But I’m on contract.”

Reyes slouched. “It’s on the way!”

“So you think Keystone was related.”

“The timing is right. An outbound ship gets hijacked, and a station blows up right after it was meant to arrive?”

Redmond sighed again and sat on a box of suit batteries. Reyes swiveled to face him.

“I think you could be right. Maybe whoever nabbed the Pascagoula flew it right into Keystone, for whatever reason. I don’t know. But this ship,” he pointed down at the deck, “is scheduled for a service inspection at Titan in six days. And if I want to stay on contract, which I do, I have to be there.”

“Titan is the same way out! There’s time to at least check with whoever’s headed to Keystone and see what’s going on!”

“They count hours, not miles.”

The little triangle on the navigation screen blipped one notch ahead on the flight vector. Callisto was two days out.

“I’d love to find out what happened.” Redmond’s silence-filling impulse kicked in. “I’m sorry about your friends, truly. But picking you up doesn’t sweep my job. And if things are about to get bad out here I’m not trying to get caught up in it. We don’t know — ”

Reyes stood up. “We don’t know.” They left the cabin in measured paces.

Redmond stared at the navigation display in silence.

SATURNINE, part one

The early 24th century found humanity in strange waters. Moore’s Law had plateaued near the end of the 20th, placing human brains at the reins of the second wave of space exploration in lieu of once-imagined robots. The immense material wealth plucked from the skies radically transformed Earthbound society. Power concentrated, borders blurred, and the great famines and near-Armageddon of the Second Cold War distilled a deep restlessness out of the human spirit.

Space became a destination for two types: those bored with the new-age comforts of terrestrial life and those who have not yet been granted them. The former became the tourist; the latter, the laborer. Trillions of dollars in ice, metals, and chemicals are freighted across the solar system by those who will never taste the wealth they transport. Decades of government research built the steps to the stars now ascended by private aerospace firms and transport lines and mining companies, employers filling the vacant niche of tribes or nations.

Permanent human habitation began on Luna, now an independent state of several million. Asteroid alloys and Jovian hydrogen built and fuel fleets of ships raking across the system to keep the teeming network of stations afloat and alive — and more urgently, profitable.

Within forty years of the first permanent station on Titan, a new generation of spaceborn humans was maturing. Native respect for greedy Earth left a void filled by anger and radical ideology. Whispers spread on secret channels in the outer reaches, far from the seat of power. When violence ignites, the response is always swift; ideas, however, cannot be extinguished as easily.

For the moment, there is a cruel stability. But scale has not altered the rhythm of human history, and stability cannot last forever.

Black slowly became gray and then finally white as Caspar Reyes opened their eyes for the first time in nearly two Earth days. They ached, and something was pressing on the back of their head — no, not pressing. It was gravity, hugging their whole back, pulling. Their hands were cold. There was something on their face. Reyes tried to investigate with uncooperative nerves. Shaky arms lifted up, held position for a second, dropped back down. Their left elbow hurt. Caspar shut their eyes again, remembering a documentary they’d seen as a kid about wildlife on Earth. A baby deer, in its first minutes as an independent organism, could walk apace with its mother.

Reyes became aware of a door the moment it opened, revealing a square bearded head balanced on a bulky flight suit. Patches studded the front and sleeves, but a name didn’t jump out.

“Hey, buddy, are you alright?”, inquired a man now leaning over Reyes as if they were machinery on a workbench. Reyes managed a groan.

“It’s okay. Just rest up and I’ll get you some water.” He turned back to the door. “I don’t know how long you were out here. There wasn’t another flight plan through this keyhole for weeks. I’d love to find out, when you’re feeling alright. Well, nobody would be ‘alright’, but when…”

The voice blurred as the man ascended some stairs. A voice clearly used to talking to itself.

Reyes made another attempt to identify the object on their face and this time their hands met warm, soft plastic; obviously an oxygen mask. They were in a medical bay. Not dead, it would seem. Awake? Probably, based on the fatigue.

Reyes once again bargained with their arms for some support, this time managing to wedge themself up and get a look around. A medical tower to the right; access panels and a terminal on the left. Okay, they were on a ship. Going somewhere, if there was gravity. Where?

The man returned, offering a bottle of water like a beachcombing trophy. “Here, this should help. You’ve been stewing in carbon for a while. Feeling any better?”

Reyes gave a slow nod, accepting the bottle and knocking it back with surprising vigor. They were thirsty. Why were they so thirsty?

“So,” the mystery man perched on a metal stool. “Do you remember anything about how you got here?”

Reyes strained to think. Did they?

“Sorry, I mean if you can talk. I — sorry.”

Reyes didn’t say anything, but looked the man in the eyes for the first time. He froze.

“Listen. I can probably guess some of the things you want to ask. I’m Redmond Wade, I work in metal salvage. This ship is mine. I call it the Corvus. I caught wind of a UAA ship disappearing out here, the Pascagoula. Were you on it?

Reyes nodded. A word started to form but didn’t make it out.

“Well, I came out here looking for wreckage, to see if I could pick anything, but I didn’t find a wreck. I just found a corpse in a suit, or that’s what I thought. But — and congratulations on this — you’re alive. After who knows how long.”

Reyes stared. The Pascagoula. Gaps were filling. A supply trip to Europa… a pressure alarm… another mystery man…

This time a word survived all the way up. “The… the ship… gone?” Reyes felt like their throat had been buffed smooth.

“The Pascagoula? Yeah. STSA says it was supposed to be at Europa yesterday, but it didn’t, and nobody can seem to find it. Lot of folks just guessed a wreck, which is why I’m here, but it seems like that’s not the case.” He paused. “Or maybe someone else just got here first and netted all the bits, but then why wouldn’t they have picked you up?” He pointed a finger at Reyes, now sitting upright. “Hmm… Oh, yeah, I am a sole operator. Hence the, um, the talking all the time.”

“Mm.” Reyes tried to sound like they meant “I gathered that, and it’s fine” instead of “Oh, great, one of these weirdos”, but it was a nuance their aching lungs couldn’t handle. Everyone knew that sole operators had a reputation for being kind of strange, even if this guy had just done them a huge favor.

“Hey, weren’t you? I mean — were there other — if there were other people on…”

There had been. And now they were missing. Reyes thought about this for a minute, their brain warming up by the second. Tucker, the pilot, and Jimenez, the navigator. Gone, along with the Pascagoula and its cargo.

“Can you tell me who you are? Who the other people were?” The man seemed to understand that this was a big ask.

Reyes’ arm managed to tug the mask off, more by weight than by muscle. “Caspar Reyes, that’s me. I’m… I was the engineer. There’s… there were two other people on the Pascagoula.” Reyes’ voice was finding new strength now. “Dallas Tucker, he was the pilot, and Eva Jimenez, she was the navigator. We were delivering some stuff to Europa, most of it was medicine, some water filters… huhh…”

Reyes went back to focusing on breathing. They’d exhausted all their words for a while. Redmond understood.

“Okay, I’m gonna make a call, but I’m glad you’re remembering. Just stay down here for now. You were out a while… Your suit was backfilling CO2, Christ. Okay, just holler updeck if you need anything, but stay put.” Redmond hurdled up the steps to the command deck. Reyes strained to hear the call but only got a low rumble, the churn of ear blood. Pieces kept filing in.

They’d left Luna on an ahead-of-schedule supply run to Europa. The water filters were important; the ice shelf they were melting for drinking water had been getting dirtier lately. The Pascagoula was an older ship, from the ’40s. Still human-navigated. Things were running fine until flip…

They’d been attacked — ambushed. Someone was waiting in a cube skiff with the lights out, latched onto the hull during the turn. He’d pried open the airlock, came in with a bolt spitter. A face wasn’t resolving. White hair, and… a beard? Suit collar?

He’d left them for dead, out here in this long stretch of nothing. Jiminez and Tucker presumably were dead, wherever they’d ended up — apparently too far away for this salvage guy to spot them. There was no debris because there was no wreck. And the Pascagoula was still running, somewhere.

Redmond came bounding down the steps again. “So — okay, I just talked to the STSA guys on Deimos. They’re alerting everyone down the chain to look out for the Pascagoula, since it’s not here. It’ll probably be a while before we hear back. Are — do you need anything?”

“Deimos?” some grit was returning to Reyes’ voice. “Where are we right now?”

“We’re in the Mars ring. If you were headed to Europa from Earth, about — about, uh, half of the way — ”

“We were hijacked.” Saying it shook more pieces down. “During the flip, a cube skiff caught us. It was too small to spot until it was close. One guy came in through the airlock. We had, uh, Tucker almost got him… Jesus Christ, Tucker…” The momentum was headed downward now. “And Jimenez, fuck, she’s — are they out here too? Did you see anything else?”

Redmond pondered the question for a second. “I didn’t catch any other suit signals, no. They could be out here, but if they got tossed during the flip there’s no saying where. Or if — well — you know. I just found you.”

Reyes felt numb, this time inside. They slid back down to laying.

Heavy hands replaced the oxygen mask. “I’m… I’m sorry. I can look. I’ll look.”

As Redmond scaled the stairs a third time, sleep returned.

Keystone Station was a real piece of shit.

For one, the place was obsolete. A halfway stop for fuel and supplies between Jupiter and Saturn made sense when ships were slower and that distance took a couple weeks to cover. But drives had improved, fuel lasted longer, and now almost nobody needed to stop at grimy old Keystone — especially not on company flights where sparing a few hours to top off your tanks would mean kissing an on-time bonus goodbye.

Keystone Station was still in commission because the rules said Algonquin Metals & Ores LLC needed to have a nonzero number of full-time employees in this sector to maintain exclusive mining rights, and there were some nickel-iron trojans out this way that still hadn’t been towed.

An alert light flickered to life on the relay console, its accompanying buzzer jolting Rook out of his job-loathing reverie. There was a fault somewhere in the radio system, probably caused by another voltage spike downstairs.

Defunct as it was logistically, nothing completely went to waste out here; not even the tiniest, leakiest little bucket of oxygen. In addition to maintaining the legal requirement, Keystone had been refitted into a travel stop for information. One of its two habitat rings was now living space for a mess of radio equipment, chirping away at all hours bouncing transponder calls back and forth.

Rook walked up the infinite hallway of Ring A, clutching a cup of water. He was a pin on a map, a placeholder to fulfill the letter of the law. He was a human loophole. He could almost see the water’s surface bending, drawn away from the station’s axis instead of toward a planet. Suddenly no longer thirsty, he dumped the water into a trough of filter plants. They could use it.

Rook climbed a narrow ladder through the ceiling into the main shaft, where Keystone’s false gravity no longer applied, and started maneuvering feet-first through the narrow passage to the B ring. Algonquin kept solo contracts to six months, most likely so whoever got stuck out here didn’t totally lose it and blow the reactor, or just hop an airlock. Rook was on month four, day seventeen. More than halfway done. The previous tenant had opted to scratch some tally marks into the ceiling over the bunk, which Rook thought was too grim a tradition to uphold. He’d taped a poster his mother had sent of the Grand Canyon up there instead; a little piece of a real horizon to keep him sane.

There were certainly worse jobs out here, and nobody got put on a six-month solo post without a psych exam showing they could handle it. Rook had a cousin working on an ice barge who would probably envy him, if she remembered he existed.

The inert-gas mix the computers breathed had to be replaced by regular air before anyone could enter the computer ring. The whir of the circulator pumps kicking in finally cut off the music Rook had been listening to upstairs and trying to hang onto on his way down. He peered through the door into the dim room, and when the door hissed open he climbed inside, feeling the pull of the outer wall as he descended. More false gravity.

Racks of little boxes with little lights lined both walls. This machinery apparently was designed to clean up incoming transmissions, an elaborate computational system for scrubbing background noise and amplifying the useful parts of the message before passing it along. Rook didn’t get to see the messages, and would probably be fired for trying. Which might not be a bad exit plan, come to think of it.

The first thing to do was find the fiber to trace. Rook popped the latches on a panel labelled “DATA TO OUTSIDE ANTENNA” and started rifling through the polymer-optic cables for one that lacked their usual glow.

Halfway through re-tying the first bundle, the station’s intercom bleeped, indicating a message intended for Keystone and not just passing through. Rook scrambled to a wall terminal to read it.

KEYSTONE: UAA PASCAGOULA 2681B DIVERTING COURSE TO DOCK. PLEASE CLEAR AND PREPARE DOCKING BAY. ETA 35 MINUTES. FLIGHT REGISTER 681380U. OVER.

Reaching deep to remember the right syntax, Rook sent back:

PASCAGOULA: DOCKING BAY WILL BE READY. PLEASED TO HAVE THE COMPANY. OVER.

The docking bay had not been used since Rook got here, but it was already cleared and presumably all the locks worked fine. He had half an hour to at least pull up the busted radio module.

After a few more minutes of squinting at individual optic lines, he finally found the dead one. An even closer squint revealed its routing code, which pointed to somewhere in the computer’s protected core; an area Rook didn’t have the key to, which was bullshit.

“What if a fire starts in there?”, he remembered asking the higher-ups. They’d told him not to worry about it. Back to ring A to put in a work order, then. And maybe check the tanks for whatever the Pascagoula needed. Was there any fuel left up there?

To see if the ETA had changed, Rook punched the flight register into the computer, which asked the nearest ships to ask the nearest Space Transport Standards Authority relay to confirm and return the flight plan someone logged before leaving. A decentralized network for maintaining accountability, or so it was designed. In practice? A little clunky.

The nearest ships besides the Pascagoula were a couple of asteroid tugs a few degrees west, and the nearest STSA center was on Callisto. All this signal delay put together took a couple of minutes, after which the Pascagoula’s original flight vector appeared on the main monitor.

It didn’t come near Keystone at all.

Rook stared, a little confused, at the vector STSA had sent — the familiar nine-shape of a least-energy orbit from Luna to Europa. But Keystone was well beyond the end of this path. Coming here would be a major delay, and altering course that far without alerting STSA was risking a significant fine. Something must have gone wrong.

Anxiety mounting, Rook decided to send another message:

PASCAGOULA: IS UPCOMING DOCKING FOR EMERGENCY REASONS? CAN HAVE MEDICAL SUPPLIES UNPACKED ON ARRIVAL. OVER.

By now they were close enough that it should’ve taken less than a second to transmit. Rook waited ten. Nothing came back.

PASCAGOULA: PLEASE COPY IF ABLE. SUSPECTING COMMS ISSUES. OVER.

Again no reply.

Two scenarios unfolded in Rook’s mind. If the Pascagoula’s communications were offline, it would be hard to dock, but not impossible if the pilot knew what they were doing. If they were having power issues, they could still coast to a stop and ferry everyone over in suits, cycling the airlock manually.

But if everyone on board was dead, then the Pascagoula was fifteen minutes away from impact.

Keystone Station wasn’t designed to move. It didn’t have propellants. It had a single escape shuttle that may or may not have been up to code, and even if it survived the launch would put Rook directly in the debris spray. He could try that and probably die of a puncture or he could stay here and eat it in the collision.

The Pascagoula was now close enough to talk to. Rook, shaking, pulled down the switch for continuous transmission.

“This is Keystone Station. UAA Pascagoula, please respond. You are on a collision course. I repeat, please alter your vector or engage retros immediately to avoid a collision. Over.”

The hiss of radio silence was bitter. Rook peered through the dusty window, where the approaching ship was now a visible light to the right of Jupiter’s distant disc. He could make out the green cross of its algae cells, his panic suddenly doubled by how fast they were becoming clearer.

“UAA Pascagoula, please respond.” Fear distorted his voice as much as the static would. “You need to either alter course or flip immediately. Over.”

Nothing. Shit. Rook leaned his forehead against the window, dabbing it with sweat. He stared at his incoming doom. Probably only five minutes now.

Then the speck of doom lit up with the flare of an engine kicking on, and kicking on hard. To fully stop in the distance left the Pascagoula would be pulling six or seven g’s — not unheard of, but typically avoided if possible.

Rook gripped the voice reciever. “Pascagoula, this is Keystone. Please copy.”

Well, docking without comms was a lot better than getting vaporized by a ghost ship. The speck continued to blast its drive; still growing brighter but slowing down now. Two minutes to contact.

Despite his relief Rook continued to expect the worst. He grabbed a medical kit and, grunting at the exertion, carried it up into the spine and started the climb to the docking ring. Struggling to reorient himself in the narrow shaft, he gave the kit a both-legs kick toward the top end. It sailed cleanly up the tube and stopped against the airlock door with a thump. Rook followed, initializing the airlock’s autocycle when he arrived. The light in the antechamber flickered on yellow, indicating a vacuum, but no leaks. Relief.

If the Pascagoula’s comms were totally shot, there was nothing to do but wait for them to dock and hope they knew what they were doing. Rook tried contact again, this time from the terminal by the airlock.

“Pascagoula, you are cleared for approach and docking. If you can hear me, please proceed.”

No response came, but a nervous peek through the airlock window confirmed that the ship was maneuvering into place. The barely-audible rumble of thruster vapor sliding off the hull revealed that the Pascagoula’s pilot did seem to know how to dock.

Then, finally, the low clunk of the clamps engaging. The Pascagoula’s docking bridge extended and found the groove surrounding Keystone’s outer airlock door. There was a chorus of mechanical hissing as both vessels contributed some atmosphere to pressurize the bridge. The light turned green.

And then, nothing. The Pascagoula’s door stayed shut, and Rook couldn’t see any movement through the four layers of glass. But surely there was somebody on board making their way down from the control deck. A lone survivor of a life-support malfunction, possibly. Rook unzipped the medkit and checked its contents: standard stuff.

What could’ve happened over there? They would’ve had lots of fuel and backup air. A ship that size would probably have eight or nine crew on board, and at least as many suits if there was a breach. But they’d made an unreported course change, refused to answer hails, and —

The realization hit Rook at the same instant it came true. He sprang up off the floor and pressed his back against the wall a second before the airlock door burst open and a figure stepped out.

In an instant Rook was back on the floor, still against the wall, staring at a demuzzled rivet gun. Holding it was a tall, bony man with stiff white hair and a rough beard bracketing a blistered, scowling face.

“Hello”, he said. “Where’s the computer?” His accent was halfway Scottish and halfway… Lunar?

Rook sputtered. “Wh- what happened to the c-”

“I killed ’em. I would’a killed you already, too, but I need to know where the computer core is, and seeing as I already did so much killin’ on that ship I figure if you show me and let me take what I need, you can live.”

Definitely Lunar. His words tumbled out with the strange cockney rhythm of the shipyards’ chatter.

Rook stayed seated. “The computer i-i-is in the second ring down, but I can’t get into the core. I-It’s sealed off.”

The man cocked his head slightly. “Ah, I’ll take care of that. You — well, actually, you come with me. Is it just you out here?”

“Wh — I- yeah. Yes.”

“Good. Let’s go. Up the tube, then. You first.”

Rook reoriented himself to face down the spine toward Ring B and started climbing along. He could hear the man follow suit, almost certainly still holding the gun. His mind churned. Okay. He was being pirated. Experiencing a piracy? This guy had killed an entire crew, commandeered a UAA ship…to come to an obsolete relay station in the backwaters of the system? Why?

They reached the end of the shaft. Catching a handrail, Rook swung into the still-open hatch and planted his feet on the floor, stepping out of the way just in time to avoid catching his visitor on the shoulders. The man immediately strode to the fiber panel and started picking through bundles, barely looking at Rook as he dug a flashlight out of his leg pocket.

“Y’got a name, still? Solos forget ’em, sometimes.”

Rook rescued a grain of confidence in the absence of a weapon pointed at his head. “Uh, yeah. My name’s Felix Rook. Who are you?”

The man suppressed a laugh but then changed his mind, letting out a rusty chuckle. “How long’ve you been out here, son? I’m Roger Thomas.”

Flashes from news packets spilled from the back of Rook’s brain. Roger Thomas was presumed responsible for the attack on Enceladus. The sinking of the Colfax, on Saturn. He was wanted by just about all the major Earth nations for untold billions in theft and destruction. He was touted by freighters and miners as the most dangerous man in the system. And now he was sitting on the floor of Rook’s station shuffling through cables. Rook was frozen in shock, able only to stare dead ahead.

“Ah, shit”, grunted Thomas, turning to face Rook. “D’you have a cutter charge?”

The command deck of the Corvus was, like many ships, intended for a sole operator. While the dangers of space travel were plentiful, the two major potentialities (collisions with debris and reactor malfunction) were better solved by smaller vessels than larger crews. A ship with only enough supplies on board to sustain one person for a few months is less worth a pirate’s trouble, and while the algae cell had eliminated the need to pack one’s own air, the weight of food and water was still significant. As a result, single-person ships were fairly common, and sole operators were a breed of spacefarer both revered and ridiculed; often found coalescing in startlingly-quiet bars on the outer moons.

Long weeks alone had unpredictable psychological effects, even on pilots examined thoroughly when hired. The last murmur of an SO cracking was never more than a few months ago — to Reyes’ memory, the most recent story was of an ice hauler found drifting in the rings, its pilot overdosed on painkillers and allegedly a series of inscrutable symbols scratched on the walls. Whether or not the more colorful details were true, there was a mass understanding that solo spacefaring resulted in some real weirdos.

Redmond stood anxiously by the terminal, eyes grazing the screen for any useful information. “We’re gonna need to make a supply grab now that there’s two people aboard”, he announced, eyes still affixed. “We’ll be swinging by Callisto in a couple of days, so if there’s anything you think of, let me know.”

Reyes, gazing out the window at the yellow speck of Jupiter in the distance, simply nodded.

“I haven’t seen anything about the Pascagoula. But I’d bet they’re looking the same way we’re headed, right? Probably. Have you been to Callisto?”

Reyes took a long blink to shake their tunnel vision. “No. I’ve been to Ganymede once.”

Redmond turned his body, but his head didn’t follow, eyes still on the terminal. “Ganymede? Are you PCA?” Nationality mattered less out here than it did on Earth, but the question was valid — Subarashii was basically the only reason anyone lived on or visited Ganymede.

“No, I’m, um — I was born on Luna. I used to work for Loadstar. We ran cargo there a couple times.”

“Oh, a real Loony, huh?”

Reyes winced at the phrase. They hadn’t been home in years, but the stereotypes followed. Luna was known to attract some of Earth’s more vocally intolerant emigrants.

“Ah, I’m sorry. I take plenty of shit for being an SO. I guess people think both of us are nuts.”

Reyes shrugged. “It’s fine. When I was working for Loadstar I told them I was from Ceres, just so I didn’t have to hear it, but then we actually made a drop at Ceres, and everyone was looking at me for directions around the docks, like I was — like I knew. So I had to come clean.”

Redmond laughed cautiously, as if he hadn’t in a while. “What did they say?”

“Oh, man, most of those guys already guessed I was lying, but they, uh —they thought I was a criminal or something so they didn’t ask me about it. But I remember, what was… Charlotte, our navigator, she was so mad. Like it was a big deal!”

This time Redmond laughed with confidence. “It’s a lot harder to lie about having a crew!”

Behind him, the terminal flashed to life. He spun around to read the screen.

STSA PRIORITY ALERT: RELAY NETWORK EXPERIENCING PARTIAL OUTAGE. KEY JUPITER-SATURN RELAY LOST; CAUSE UNDER INVESTIGATION.

Reyes was too far from the screen to read it. “What’s it say?”

“There’s a comms outage, apparently…they’re saying the key Jupiter-Saturn relay is gone? Wouldn’t that be, uh… Stonewall? St- uh, Keystone?”

“Are we close enough to scope it?”

“Yeah, we might be.” Redmond moved to the navigation console and started punching keys. “Let me look it up, see if we can get a, um…”

He stopped, distracted by the feed from the forward camera.

“What?” Reyes joined him behind the console. “I don’t see it.”

“No, we’re too far out for good optics. But look at this.” Redmond pulled up the last chunk of recording.

A scattering of stars beyond the now-thumbnail-sized disc of Jupiter. For a second, one of the specks flared brighter. When the flare subsided, the speck was gone.

“If that was Keystone Station…” Redmond trailed off.

“…then it’s gone.”

Chapter 2

I have made two major changes in my life over the last five years. One was deciding definitively that I wanted to design for a living. The other was realizing that capitalism, the only venue in 2019 where one could spend a lifetime designing, is the preeminent threat to human life.

I hope it’s understandable that this conflict has caused me some amount of moral panic. And I’ve decided to cope with it by examining the circumstances of design, how it got here, and how we might attempt to right the ship.

Before design was an institution, it was a trade. Pre-computers, labor and design were tightly bound; workers assembled pasteups, operated machinery, cut film, and worked in a very direct way on a product; a finished magazine cover or spread or poster. Things were slow and often tedious, but this was the pace of the world. There were folks arguing that design was an art — after all, it requires some degree of aesthetic sensibility to excel at, but the consensus was that pretty much anyone with some training could more or less make it. Designers were not celebrities and did not aspire to celebrity. It was a job.

But the landscape of American society would change dramatically as boomer capitalism teamed up with technology in an assault on the working class. In a spot-on microcosm of Marx, designers became alienated from the product of their labor. Not only were they no longer working with their hands, perhaps shortcutting a deep human psychological need, they were increasingly working in abstractions, chasing manufactured trends. Design became a wedge capitalism could use to make itself feel like our friend.

Another extremely key pivot happened here. Design started facing up instead of down. Designers had to sell ideas to corporations and executives to stay ahead of the pack, and increasingly they had to sell themselves and their “brand” to other designers. Design started to insulate itself from society because society began to see it as mystical, intangible.

I’m not a historian, but I speculate that this trend began with the very fast jump from physical tools to computers; something that, at the time, average people didn’t understand especially well. Anybody could look at a pasteboard and because it works by manipulating physical items with one’s hands get a rough idea of what was going on. But digital design — and especially early digital design, with its clunky tools and awful user interfaces — looked indistinguishable from magic to an untrained viewer. American culture started to treat creatives like magicians, and in a spot-on microcosm of Marx, designers became alienated from their labor by the market. The scale tipped from craft to art, and modern design became a soverign industry.

Following the jump to computers, which on its own dug a considerable moat around design as a trade, another trend took hold that would eventually bring us here. Design started to revolve internally around celebrity and personality, in many cases rather than quality or consistency of work. Conferences sprung up, offering insights from big names on the new secrets of great design that had apparently materialized since the pasteboard era, and ticket prices kept climbing. Design bought into its own mythos. When culture at large decided that it was some sort of unknowable voodoo, it didn’t push back. Designers were now famous, even if just within the design world.

Are design celebrities like Paula Scher or Michael Beirut talented? Certainly, and I’m not contesting that idea. But does any Pentagram partner or international book designer or conference speaker posses some kind of secret natural gift that nobody else can hope to achieve? I’d posit the answer is no. The best-known designers in the world today aren’t really known for their work; they’re known for their charisma and personality — and increasingly they’re known for being known at all in a field so saturated that it’s difficult to imagine reaching those heights. This culture of idolization does nothing to encourage serious questions or move design forward faster than it’s being dragged by money; if anything, it’s stagnated new thinking.

I’ve hardened this attitude with some help from maybe the most “famous” designer I still really admire: Aaron Draplin, who writes that “So much of design can be this odd, elite thing, almost purposely angled to go above people’s heads. That shit freaks me out.” He’s right — modern design is stratified by elitism that seems to have sprung from this myth of the secret gift. If you’re not familiar with Aaron Draplin, his work is largely rooted in a philosophy of craft rather than art. He’s managed to keep the labor of design rewarding, like so many workers are unable to, by poking a hole in the veil of mysticism and deciding that “good design” is simply work that’s fun to make and fun to look at. That’s it! Like the end of a children’s fable, there is no magical secret. Good design is nice to look at, end of criteria. The idea that there’s a system of intangible factors that somehow transcend subjectivity is absurd.

What Draplin does not mention nearly as often is the role of class. Considering that we currently live in hell, it’s difficult to keep believing in meritocracy. No celebrity designer is bad at design, certainly, but thousands of great designers never achieve celebrity. The question is anchored here: Does everyone with sufficient talent deserve the big-name treatment and seven-figure branding accounts, or does nobody?

As corporations amass unjustifiable, incomprehensible wealth that they must defend from the lurking threat of class consciousness, design is co-opted to prop up unjust systems faster and more recklessly than ever before. Modern capitalism is suppressing dissent more insidiously than anytime in the 20th century because technology has made it possible for capitalism to pose as a friend.

Why would any respectable laborer quietly and passively allow this system to persist? Design is the veneer separating the public from capitalism’s true, awful reality. Tech corporations with zero qualms platforming fascist misinformation and genocide-advocism hide behind goofy Memphis illustrations and pastel color palettes. Healthcare companies that gouge grieving families for immense executive profit dodge public criticism by hiring Wieden & Kennedy to produce zany ads featuring winks to internet culture, and all the while, the cruel machinery keeps humming, churning human suffering into shareholder returns.

Artists should feel a responsibility, as humans interested in truth and emotion, to reduce the global net suffering. Being a good artist, as most would define it, involves some level of empathy.

Craftspeople should feel a responsibility, as laborers, to fight for a system that fairly values themselves and their peers.

Celebrity designers do neither. Is the reason as simple as class solidarity? Working for wealthy clients is lucrative, and study after study (the anecdotal evidence was already overwhelming, but it’s good to cite real science) has proven that wealth reduces empathy almost overnight. Perhaps the owning class keeps design under control by opening the door to designers whose work defends their wealth — a door tightly locked to 99.999% of people at all other times.

Of course, when there is no ethical consumption there is no ethical production. Designers often need to serve capital simply to survive, the same way all workers do. Capitalism is a racket that goes unpunished by making us all complicit. It’s tough to make a living doing graphic design on a commune, and many designers are also activists and advocates for justice.

But even outside the scope of corporate, paid design, the Internet’s insistence that we are all brands is taking its toll on meaningful discussion. Edgy, flashy visual work and tight typography are infinitely more clickable than drawn-out discourse on what designers should be saying. For small-time workers trying to get ahead in a brutally competitive field, the potential ends must justify the means.

But why does the conference circuit, people with the time to consider these ideas and the comfort to risk taking a stand, never speak up? Zeroing in on the empathy aspect: When a designer becomes part of a class that is effectively shielded from politics, it’s easy to believe that design is also like this; that it somehow exists in an apolitical vacuum without real repercussions. Big-name designers either don’t understand the importance of not enabling violent structures of power or — perhaps more worryingly — simply don’t care

This is a lie, a lie that has both justified continued silence from design-at-large about its defense of evil and as a side effect led design trends toward their current bleak plateau. I hate the tech-startup-neo-Memphis-pastel style very, very much.

The creeping blandness of Right-Now Design Trends is representative of — in fact, it’s really caused by — the relationship between capitalism and design reaching a new level of synergy. Capital is averse to risk, and when that brain is controlling design, design ceases to take risks. The owning class is perfectly happy to prey on design’s self-centeredness and self-importance to frame dissent as “ugly” and conformity as valuable, molding design in its own awful image.

We need to sit up and face it: Design is politics. The crystal goblet was shattered long ago, and the content-versus-form argument put away. They are two components of one message, and the choices people who shape form make about how to present content have an indelible effect on our lives and our society — and, with it, a responsibility to examine the implications outside the bubble of design those choices might have on real people and real institutions.

There are designers making meaningful criticisms of capital, and it’s heartening to see. But the fight to get those voices heard is going to be a steep climb out of our current pit of imitation and aggregation.

I believe a huge item on the to-do list is to demystify design, to admit to ourselves that it’s really not that complicated, no matter what every buzzword-laden design doc (please, please click this one) and rebranding brief explaining why 2019’s ten thousandth geometric sans-serif logo is a “bold, groundbreaking new direction” would have society believe. Elitism must come tumbling down for design to reestablish itself as a trade. If design is art, there should be no bar to entry, and if design is craft, we should reward innovation with credit and dissent with attention.

For significantly more coherent writing on this topic, I recommend Erik Carter’s ‘Do You Want Typography or Do You Want The Truth?’ for Gradient Magazine.

“THE MAIN WATER CONTAMINANT SENSOR IS LOCATED AT THE JUNCTION OF FLOW LINE 2 AND THE PRIMARY FILTER ASSEMBLY, BEHIND MAINTENANCE PANEL 22-J. BEFORE SERVICING THE CONTAMINANT SENSOR, BE SURE TO SHUT OFF WATER FLOW IN LINE 2 AND FLUSH THE LINE WITH AIR TO AVOID STANDWATER LEAKAGE”.

Reyes crouched on the floor and set his wrench down between his feet, watching the resulting ripples bounce off the walls. Standwater, which at the very least he now knew by name, was still dripping from Flow Line 2 into the dim chamber adjacent to Maintenance Panel 22-J. He shook some droplets from the pages of the yellow three-ring manual, glaring at a diagram of the water-flow regulation system. The smell was thick and clingy and earthy, like a pond in late spring. Same stuff, he guessed. Just more expensive.

Algae was the lifeblood of space travel — the humble stigeoclonium Subarashii, developed by geneticists on Callisto in the late ‘50s. They’d named it after their parent company; patented the special genetic blend that made these little green cells hyperefficient at scrubbing carbon dixoide, quit multiplying when they filled a container, and perfectly happy to photosynthesize at distances from the sun plants honestly had no business being. Now every long-hauler in the system had long green wings full of pond scum, keeping the humans on board alive and breathing. A lot of folks said you could even eat it; although Reyes could think of several things on the ship he’d eat first in such a pinch, including wire insulation.

Reyes’ attention turned back to the situation at hand — a water monitor busted from mineral buildup, a line he’d forgotten to flush, and two inches of skim sloshing around in the crawlspace. Outside of that, some pipes, some hot lithium, two inches of polyceramic plating, and no help for probably a million klicks. Great. Cool.

Tired of crouching, Reyes sat, dipping his ass in the water. Who cared? This was his ship, and he had dry clothes up top. He could walk around naked if he wanted. The manual didn’t offer a clear solution to this specific issue — which made a kind of sense that was almost funny. You didn’t read me before, so fuck you, don’t read me now. There was a logical sequence of steps here: Lug the vacuum down from the equipment locker, suck the water up, pour one little bucketful at a time into the topoff valve. It would probably take three or four hours, which meant it could be 22:00 before this was fixed, and Reyes needed to sleep at least a little before he got to Ceres at six.

Without water coming through the cells, the algae would stagnate, and eventually the oxygen production would stall. But there was at least a day of O2 in the tanks, and the scrubbers were fresh. Honestly, Reyes could probably run this Ceres delivery and make it back out to Saturn before he had to get this problem fixed. He entertained pushing the limit for a minute, seeing how long just the air in the cabin and the reserve could keep him running, like a mouse under a bell jar. No, better to get this handled before docking, especially since you had to stop moving to dock, and the maneuvers involved could throw this water up through the vents and into something important.

He bent forward, peering at the cloudy water between his legs. The smell kept coming, loamy and thick. Reyes had never been to Earth, and probably never would; its powerful gravity was too much for the weak heart and bones of a body that had developed since birth in weak artificial g. But every human, as generations of spacers had learned, had a nostalgia for it lodged in their brainstem.

It went beyond survival. Most folks living on ships and stations breathed a low-pressure, oxygen-argon atmosphere that resembled Earth air only in that it was capable of keeping a human alive. A few pilots (mostly rich folks with the means to tailor the air systems on their yachts) resented this, and ran on a one-atmosphere nitrogen blend, but you had to keep buying nitrogen to keep the tanks full, and you leaked faster if you took a puncture, and the sensors went nuts if you ever had to dry-dock for something. And your lungs didn’t know the difference.

Reyes guess it was a principle thing, but didn’t really understand it. If you loved Earth air so much, why not live there? And if you couldn’t because you were born out here, just accept it. Be proud of it! He fought with his brainstem a lot.

Now, Earth food did make a real difference, as tough as it was to get. It just took a long time to get stuff you couldn’t freeze over such absurd distances, and a lot of vegetables (tomatoes were practically an urban legend out here) didn’t survive the forces of lifting something into space. This problem was also kind of funny, a callback to the ancient days of conquistadors and explorers. People had tried a lot of the same solutions, too; packing things in salt, intentionally venting the cargo hold to shock-freeze a load of meat, even bringing live animals out here to butcher them at the destination. A pen of pigs, hopped up on gravity meds, milling around in the belly of a starship, understandably distressed the whole way (there is, as it turns out, practically zero mud in space). They grew vegetables on the loop stations, but if you lived further out than Luna, eating anything not made mostly out of enriched soy protein was a rare luxury. At least spices held up to g-force well. There were some fajitas in the mess hall on Aerostat Verona that a few guys had signed up to work on the methane rig just to try. Or maybe it was the triple hazard pay.

A ping over the intercom jarred Reyes back to reality. The computer, incapable of getting lost on tangents, was informing him that it was making the final course change of the trip. Sure enough, the reactor’s chugging changed in pitch for a minute, and the long puff of an attitude thruster kicked on behind the open panel. The water level crept up the right wall, and Reyes was forced to lean against it, as the ship turned. Remembering the flight plan, this meant they were now closing in on Ceres. Six o’clock arrival. And here he was, with wet pants, no water flow to the cells, and an impending headache.

The computer pinged a second time. There was an incoming message updeck, probably somebody at Ceres harbor control checking in. Great. Cool.

Time to get up and get the vacuum.

9–1–1, WHAT IS your emergency?

Hey, hi. My name’s Chris, Chris Thompson. I’m, uh… This is going to be a weird question. Where is this?

This is the Latimore Township dispatch. Do you need help?

Is that where I am? Latimore… Sorry, what state is this?

Pennsylvania, sir. Are you okay?

Penns — shit. Um, I’m, uh… physically I’m okay, yes. I’m… lost?

You’re lost?

Yeah, I’m not sure where I am.

Can you describe your location?

Yeah, I’m… I’m walking, alongside a road… there’s a sign coming up. I’ll get to the intersection and read you the signs.

Okay. Take it easy.

…

Okay, I’m at, uh, Quaker Church Road and, um, Wolf… Road, at the T. I’m — I’m on a bridge.

Okay. Stay there. I’m sending someone to get you now.

Okay, thanks, thank you. I’m… I’m still kind of confused.

Have you taken anything recently?

No, I… Christ, I do sound like I’m on drugs. I’m sorry. I’m…

That’s alright. Try and calm down a little, okay?

I’m okay, thank you. I’m alright. I was asleep, or… falling asleep? I was at Angie’s place, and there…

Are you far from home?

Yes. You said we’re in Pennsylvania?

Yes, that’s correct.

Okay. Yeah, shit. The last thing… the last thing I remember, I was in Oregon.

In Oregon?

Yes. I was at a friend’s house, in Tumelo, Oregon. Do you… do you know where that is? It’s like, 2 or 3 hours south of Portland, out in the mountains.

I’m afraid I don’t. You say you were just there?

Yeah, I was, um… I was hanging out with some friends at somebody’s apartment. We were watching Futurama, and I started to fall asleep, and I…
I woke up and I was here. Or I was up the road a ways, I guess.

You don’t remember anything in between?

No, I was, um… You know what, I was laying on my right side, on the couch, and then I was laying on my right side on the road.

How long were you in the road?

I, uh… I don’t know. I don’t have a good way to tell. I woke up, and I realized I was on… I was on pavement, and I got up and I just… I just started walking. I figured a road would take me somewhere. And I called you guys.

Are you hurt? Do you feel sick?

No, I don’t think so. I actually feel alright, just I’m kinda sleepy. I feel… I probably should feel worse. Considering. Hey, is the cop gonna have his lights on?

I’m sorry?

You sent a cop out here, to pick me up?

We sent an ambulance. I can radio them, if you want.

No, that’s… I feel like I should explain this to you. Before I forget.

You were talking about falling asleep at a friend’s house.

Yeah, that’s the last thing I remember. I mean, I remember calling you, and walking down the road a little bit.

Do you have a history of sleepwalking?

Aha. Hahahahahaha. I, I don’t, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It feels wrong, to laugh at a 911 operator.

You’re alright. Just stay put. The ambulance is only a few minutes away.

Okay. Thanks. I’m sorry.

Do you remember anything else unusual?

I… Yes, I do.

Can you describe it?

It felt like… like I was beginning to have a dream. Like a dream was getting ready, and I caught it early? Like I fell asleep too fast and I saw the dream before it was ready. Does that make any sense?

Can you give me more details?

Um… I don’t know. It’s hard, for me to describe. I hear a siren, I think.

That should be for you.

Yeah. Thank you. I’m sorry this sounds crazy, I’m not… This isn’t a prank call, or anything. I can see the lights now, coming over this way.

Tell the paramedics what you told me, alright?

I’ll try, yeah. Thank you.

Be safe. I hope you get home soon.

Thank you. Have a good night.

“NOW, WE GET helicopters sometimes, and this — this wasn’t no helicopter.”

“Can you speak into the recorder, please?”

“I see helicopters out here, ah, couple ‘a times a month. Usually headin’ for the hospital down towards Weston. And you can always tell, ’cause it’s always — it’s always the same noise, gets loud comin’ over the mountain and then quiet again further away it goes. Loud, too, I can hear ’em from inside most nights.”

“So you say this was… different? A different sound?”

“Yessir.”

“Different how? Louder? When did you hear it?”

“Well, I was done watchin’ the news and I was about to go to bed, must’ve been ‘round 11:30 or 12. And this sound, this… hummin’ sound, comes up over the hill on the west side. So I turn on the porch light and I step out, to see what’s goin’ on, thinkin’ maybe it’s a low plane or some kinda… some kinda equipment, maybe, and…”

“Did you see anything?”

“Not right then, no. But this sound, man, it was loud. I’m puttin’ my hands over m’ears to block it out, and it’s not workin’, and I start gettin’ scared, you know? Like the noise is inside my head.”

“And you left your home? For the lake?”

“Yep, I figured out it was comin’ from over the hill, from the lake side. So I run back inside a minute and grab a flashlight, and I head over to have a look.”

“This was soon after the noise started?”

“I… I think so, yes.”

“You don’t remember?”

“Well I must’ve been outside the first time for… ‘bout five minutes? Ten? And then I grab my flashlight, and — ”

“Did you also take a weapon?”

“No, I — I woulda but I was cleanin’ my rifle, thing was taken apart on the table. So I just took my light, and I head up over the hill to see what’s goin’ on over at the lake.”

“Can you describe what you saw, please?”

“I come up ov — ”

“Speak into the recorder, please.”

“Sorry, I come up over the hill, and y’know how that side of it is, mostly rocks, so I’m not about to run down to the water in the dark’n twist my damn ankle. But I get up there and look down at the lake, I kinda shine my light around on the water, and it’s… it’s like… like it’s rainin’ out, the water — the water’s all chopped up, like, and… wavin’ and splashin’, but I can see the moon out, full moon last night — ”

“ — It was a waning gibbous.”

“…”

“Sorry, continue.”

“Well, the water’s jumpin’ around, just goin’ crazy, and it sounds like the water is makin’ the sound. And I stand there just lookin’ at it for probably ten, fifteen minutes. I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Did you make any deliberate movement toward the water?”

“Well, I — I don’t think so, but that’s where you boys found me, so I must’ve got down there somehow, fell, or somethin’…”

“Lucky fall.”

“Yeah, guess so. Back hurts, but it’s been hurtin’.”

“Do you remember what happened to your light?”

“No, I guess I lost it. Might be in the lake, somewhere. Y’all have one of those trowler boats, for bodies? You could maybe find it like that.”

“I… I don’t think the department would break out the trawler for a flashlight.”

“Well, I thought I’d ask. It was a nice light, got it back in my Army days.”

“Is there anything else you haven’t told us?”

“That’s… that’s all I remember, no. Must’ve fallen into the water at some point. I just… I can’t shake that sound.”

“You’re still hearing it?”

“No, not since last night. But I remember it, like, like better than I can remember anything else. Just this loud hummin’. Not like a musical note, or a pitch, but loud as all hell, shakin’ my bones, and, and…”

“Well, that’s all we needed you for, then. Give us a call if there’s anything else you think we should know.”

“Thank’ya, I will. Y’all be careful.”

“We will, Burt. Thank you.”

Food Network’s Large Adult Son and famously bombastic celebrity chef Guy Fieri has a tendency to exclaim about “Flavortown” when impressed by an ingredient or dish. His mannerisms and presentation have become, in recent years, the subject of some ironic online attention. Last year, ironic online news outlet VICE sat Fieri down for an interview and asked, point-blank, about the nature (and location) of Flavortown. The presumably improvised response he gave is brilliantly entertaining, a testament to just how in on the bit this man is. The quote eventually made its way over to comedy advice podcast My Brother, My Brother and Me, where oldest brother Justin McElroy read it and riffed on it with middlest and youngest brothers Travis and Griffin. What ensued was a series of increasingly complex goofs about the Deep Flavortown Lore than culminated in a movie pitch fit for IMAX, or maybe one of those 4-D theaters where you can smell things like at Hershey Park.

But what makes such a strange, niche concept so funny? The answer is something that goes beyond traditional staples of public speaking — an element called metanarrative.

The question that founds this speech seems to take Fieri by surprise — he’s being asked to add narrative to something that doesn’t deserve nor need it. Flavortown isn’t a place that exists, it’s just a goofy thing he decided to yell once. Clearly there’s no space for any expansion there, and yet the comedic situation demands expanding. Take this excerpt, for example:

“What would be the airline in Flavortown? Sausage Airlines? It just doesn’t stop.”

This is the point where Fieri realizes he’s opened a creative space, and this is the point where it’s clear he understands metanarrative. Metanarrative is the name for the practice of extrapolating an expansive and often absurd narrative information from something intentionally devoid of it. It’s a long-form comedic technique that I, at least, enjoy immensely — see, for example, Polygon’s 2016 series Car Boys, in which two hosts play an extremely straightforward and highly technical driving simulator and end up building, based on visual glitches and errors in the game, an extensive and multi-faceted psychological horror narrative featuring multiple characters and several main conflicts.

We live in a time where capitalism has shoehorned every movie into a “cinematic universe”, where nearly no fiction is allowed to stand on the free market unsupported by at least one half-hearted sequel and maybe a streaming-service-exclusive prestige show. Everything we make must be everything we buy — Star Wars novels, backpacks, cars, podcasts becoming TV shows becoming movies and then books and then podcasts again as we try our best to navigate, like hungry earthworms, the great compost pile that is American culture. Countless, endless remakes and reboots and adaptations of the most absurd and obscure works — Emojis are a movie, movies are card games and card games are TV. In this mind-bending churn of our collective creative bankruptcy, why shouldn’t a chef’s throwaway catchphrase become an epic PG-13 fantasy-drama trilogy starring the man himself?

At the same time, when something artistically solid appears on the scene, its intentional ambiguity is so often trampled by internet culture’s need to factualize and understand as if it were history every tiny piece of a film, TV show, book, et cetera. As a culture we’ve come to consume all fiction as some kind of puzzle to be solved or riddle to be answered, urgently unsatisfied — perhaps due to the real world being a place of such uncertainty and unease — to simply not know whether Kurt Russell was the titular Thing or what the last third of 2001: A Space Odyssey is even about, regardless of the artist’s intent.

Taking this aggravating practice to the absolute extreme by ironically applying it to insignificant, intentionally narrative-less things will frequently build absurd, sprawling networks of improvisation. With complete freedom to extrapolate, as we see here in the aftermath of Fieri’s deposition, things tend to get weird fast.

Let’s return to the content of the quote. Fieri opens by establishing, for anyone somehow unfamiliar, his whole character appeal in the opening sentence:

“I once said on camera, ‘That pizza looks like a manhole cover in Flavortown’.”

That’s a wild thing to qualify about a pizza. But it also pries open the Flavortown metanarrative just wide enough for the rest of the building he does here to work. It’s important to remember that Flavortown isn’t a place or even a solidified concept before this point. It’s a joke, a thing Fieri references when appraising the powerful taste of a hot dog with macaroni and cheese on it or a ghost-pepper-infused buffalo wing. Flavortown is an element of Fieri’s famously zealous camera performance, something Guy Fieri the character invented; not Guy Fieri the man.

And yet, always the showman, Fieri understands what his audience is trying to get here: the metanarrative. This quote resembles Fieri’s food style itself — a powerful and rewarding blend of substance and presentation.

“Willy Wonka had a chocolate stream, you know? So it’s taking these iconic food items, these iconic food moments, and giving them a home. They all live in Flavortown. […] I have people walk up to me and say, ‘Hey, I’m a citizen of Flavortown.’ I have people that want to pledge to be a city council member of Flavortown or the mechanic. It doesn’t stop.”

Is this collective tendency to latch onto and assign meaning to the meaningless an emergent quality of human psychology, some vestige of our primate pattern-recognition? Is it a bit we’re all in on because it’s funny? That’s more difficult to ascribe. I think it’s likely that we’re just sharing in the joy of building a metanarrative from nothing — or, in this case, from the confusing catchphrase of a celebrity chef, who may himself be in on the bit.

“I just said it, and then people heard it. Of course, there’s no Flavortown — unless you believe in it.”

Dismantling industrial capitalism is way past cool.

Our world is in crisis. Every year, millions of tons of greenhouse gases, pollutants, poison and smoke are pumped into our oceans, soil and atmosphere. Scientists predict that unless we radically change our system of global production within the next few years the Earth will become uninhabitable in the next hundred.

Whose fault is this? A deadly cocktail of overconsumption, profit-driven global capitalism and a sprawling, unchecked industrial system is mostly to blame (but, sure, quit using straws if you want). Just 100 companies are responsible for as much as 70% of global greenhouse emissions. Capitalism is, quite literally, ripping the planet apart and selling it to us in pieces.

In these drastic times, an increasing number of radicals are turning to drastic measures — engaging and fighting the expansion of predatory capitalism in the real, physical world, where you have the power to confront it. From pipeline protests at Standing Rock to occupying Exxon offices to sabotaging construction equipment, direct climate action is becoming an increasingly powerful weapon in the hands of an angry and rightfully scared lower class. This kind of direct, physical resistance is the only functional and short-term workable way to save our fragile world from the blind, thrashing greed of industrial capitalism.

Who, then, is going to lead us into this new era of climate radicalism? We need someone with applicable experience and an understanding of anticapitalist organizing. Someone who’s recognizable, outspoken, fast, and blue.

Sonic the Hedgehog is, at its (his?) core, a game about radical climate action. Not content to try voting away the destruction brought on by Robotnik’s capitalist means, Sonic takes to occupation and sabotage. He doesn’t stay home and buy a more efficient car or start recycling. He acts.

The Oil Oceans and Chemical Plants of the world, hubs of environmental exploitation, are just sitting around chugging out smog when we arrive. They’re vulnerable to anyone willing to put forth the effort, protected from destruction only by the idea that we shouldn’t cross that fence or turn this valve.

Sonic’s brand of industrial sabotage isn’t a destructive action, it’s a protective action. He liberates the animals trapped by the construction of capital oppression (represented somewhat hamfistedly but still effectively by a big metal cage). And every time, these animals simply scatter, having learned nothing of their brush with death at the hands of industrialism. These animals represent the center, the people most at risk but least conscious of the danger looming over them. These animals are the right-wing poor, the social liberals, the capital apologists.

Sonic (and, to a similar extent, Knuckles and Tails) are the radicals that will save us. They’re on the ground trashing equipment, freeing the oppressed and slowly choking to a rightful death the Mean Bean Machine that is capitalism.

Earlier tonight (or maybe they’re still on?), the Emmys happened- one of a few regular events we all recognize as the official say on What’s Good. Who did the best TV? Well, I don’t have the time to watch any, so I’ll just catch the awards and find out that way. People across America skipped right to the end of the proverbial Bachelor and decided to have their opinions handed down to them by the Hollywood elite for yet another year, ignoring all the fantastic shows that came out and didn’t get mentioned, like the one on Youtube where that guy with a heavy New England accent builds a boat step by step.

Anyway, plenty of good shows got awards they deserve, probably. Same thing for the Academy Awards, the Grammies, and whatever the theater one is called. But what stuck out to me was that one of the Emmys went to the Oscars. That’s wild! Award shows are now giving each other awards! And the Oscars isn’t even a show, it’s on like once a year. The Super Bowl doesn’t win Emmys, even though lots of people watch and presumably enjoy that.

Anyway, what I’m gonna pitch here is my Hot New Idea for something I think is long overdue. I call it The Award.

The Award would be a single trophy, given once a year — probably sometime in August — to whatever the best thing was that year. No more trying to remember who directed or wrote what, and no more of these categories and nominees and all that cruft. I’m talking a streamlined, hyperefficient system where whoever made the Best Thing of the Year gets a big ol’ trophy. (Also they have to bring it back the next year, like the Stanley Cup.)

Imagine being able to say that you made the Best Media of 2018. Not “Oscar-Nominated” or “3-Time Grammy Winner” or whatever. When I see your movie in the DVD bin next to the Amiibos at Target, and I see “2018 Award Winner” on the front, I’ll know with confidence that it kicks ass — it didn’t just beat every other movie, it beat every album, video game, musical, and scientific discovery of 2018. It was the best thing any human being accomplished all year.

Now, this might appear to have some major flaws. “Isn’t this extremely subjective?”, I hear you asking. “This is the pinnacle of apples-to-oranges!”. Well, reader, let me assure you the judging process will be as fair and as considerate as possible. Because, reader, I will be the one giving out the yearly Award.

I know this may seem like an immense task. Watching everything that comes out, every year? There’s so much! But I think with a little help I can handle it and give out The Award comfortable in the knowledge that I evaluated all comers and truly decided on the best one. Is everything I watch gonna be a slam dunk? No. There are a lot of Netflix ripoffs and daytime procedurals and local high-school productions and amateur rap singles and Amazon originals that are gonna be unpleasant to experience. But I am willing to take on this burden, to pick out the diamonds in the rough, and to once a year, on national television, reveal which one was the best and hand the person responsible for me seeing it a tall, shiny thing. Possibly a small statue of me, giving a thumbs-up? We’ll work on it.

And, speaking of the ceremony, I think all these existing awards have it backwards. A parade of celebs in front of a logo-studded backdrop, followed by a few limp jokes delivered by a white, inoffensive host and then maybe 45 minutes of people crying into napkins? Sorry, bud, not everyone is a Getty Images photographer. That stuff’s just hollow ornamentation. I think we need to scale back and do something a little more low-key, like maybe getting everyone together at Chick-fil-A, and just do a real laid-back thing. Or maybe forgo the whole show and announce it after emerging from my house red-eyed and disheveled like Punxetawney Phil, or the guys who choose the new pope.

The big advantage to The Award is that by shedding all the spectacle we can get people to take it less seriously. Instead of waiting like Victorian orphans for the Hollywood upper class to fling open their shutters and toss down the golden coin of Correct Opinions, so that we may run off down the alleyway to buy whichever Christmas turkey they deemed best, the masses will get their opinions handed up to them by me, a dumbass. And because I won’t be bringing any wealth, fame, or substantial knowledge to the table, people will feel more free to disagree with my judgement.

Tons of people are going to see me give The Award to Gill And Gilbert and say, hey! I thought the new season of BoJack Horseman was good, too! Or the new Spiderman game! Or the guys who dug up that old bread in Africa! And to them, I will say, yeah. You’re right, those things are all pretty good. It was a really close call. And people will learn, pulled over this crucial threshold by the weight of putting all their anger and doubt in one basket, that awards are stupid.