The Arcades' Lab / Essays
Ideas worth sitting with.
Essays on queer and trans life, 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.
October 2, 2026
The Collapse of Effort and the Birth of Abundance
A week of free inference, a furry municipal sports club, a Minecraft casino, and a folding Tak board: what happens when the first version of every idea becomes cheap enough to make.
September 27, 2026
When Art Gets Cheap Enough to Waste
A Telegram sticker factory, the economics of disposable art, and what changes when images become cheap enough to function as language.
August 6, 2026
The Stepladder
I experience time more like a stepladder. In the Singularity, it gets weird.
Queer Columns
A monthly column by Austen Tucker on trans life, queer history, and the policies that shape what happens next. Let people be people.
September 23, 2026
The Safe Door
What happens when a community's needs become too difficult to meet? The needs don't disappear. They go underground.
On Writing
Essays on the craft of writing.
September 23, 2026
The Dream Space
On rakugo's makura, James Baldwin, and the craft of earning a reader's trust before asking them to follow a story into uncomfortable places.
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
Bunch
Build logs from a private companion tool built to accommodate a system with DID — memory, handoffs, and continuity as engineering problems.
September 9, 2026
Bunch
I have DID. Bunch is a private companion I built to hold the context my memory drops between alters — a build log about using AI to accommodate yourself, and what it looks like to start with the verbs instead of the screens.
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.
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.