The Arcades' Lab / Essays
Ideas worth sitting with.
Essays on writing, accessibility, creativity, AI, and the strange business of being human while all the machinery changes.
The Singularity Log
Essays on AI, creativity, and the collapsing scarcity model.
August 6, 2026
The Stepladder
I experience time more like a stepladder. In the Singularity, it gets weird.
June 2, 2026
The Photograph of a River
Every AI productivity study is a photograph of a river. By the time you develop the film, the water has moved.
May 28, 2026
The Hidden Tax on Senior Engineers
AI didn't reduce the demand on your best engineers. It redirected it. 6.5% more code reviewed. 19% less original work.
Arcade Blog
Essays on AI productivity, engineering culture, and what the data actually says.
July 2, 2026
My Brain Was Built for This
I'm a dissociated system. No continuous narrative, no unified memory — just state passed between alters via handoff notes and context files. Sound familiar? It should. You're building it right now and calling it the future of AI.
June 30, 2026
I've Been Waiting for This My Whole Life
I've watched the hype-cycle pattern four times now — dot-com, cloud, big data, mobile. I'm watching it again. Why I'm not scared of what's coming, and why I've been getting ready for three years.
June 16, 2026
Disposable Art Is Still Art
I make disposable art on purpose. A manifesto on con sketches, e621, Yerf, the print-to-digital flinch, and why fan art has always obeyed campfire logic — not museum logic.
Pride Essays
Five essays about Pride, trans life, queer history, grief, survival, and the people who make a life possible.
June 25, 2026
Beneath These Bones
The Pulse anniversary essay. I came out like a monster truck — loud, imposing, destructive — and ran for four years straight. Then one day it all just stopped. This is the quiet, hard shit no one talks about: picking up the broken glass after transition is done.
June 23, 2026
Wicked Little Town
The cornfield kid finds a furry IRC channel and a rabbit named Kristi. The first time I ever heard the word "trans" used in a sentence — not as a slur, not as a punchline, just a woman casually mentioning she was transgender. Origin story.
June 18, 2026
A Fucking Riot
The Stonewall finale. The numbers I carry in my body — 30%, 46%, two bathroom doors — and a thought experiment about what would happen if we treated tonsils the way we treat trans medical care. There'd be a fucking riot.
AI Art Experiments
A catch-all for all the things I make using AI generation.
May 18, 2026
AI Is an Art Medium
Every generation tries to build social levees against the rising water of a new medium. The water doesn't care.
May 18, 2026
Why Transformation?
On living in the uncanny valley, the women who taught me how, and why none of this scares me anymore.
On Writing
Essays on the craft of writing.
May 5, 2026
The Mailbox Had a Pulse
His name was Captain Webster. He sent letters. Then the letters stopped. On the email-list mentors who taught a Midwestern kid that writing could be a community, the twenty years of silence after the infrastructure died, and the publishing pipeline I rebuilt to find the hallway again.
March 29, 2026
Pull, Not Push: Why I'm Rebuilding My Online Presence Backwards
I've had more names on the internet than I've had prescription strengths. That era is over
White Cane Chronicles
Essays on accessibility, blindness, and neurodiversity.
March 18, 2026
I Thought I Had a Bad Memory. I Don't.
Sighted people use the world around them to help them remember thing. When you can't do that, your brain builds something different. Something that might actually be better in some cases.