The Simulation That Has Consequences
Every day, something in the range of two hundred emails arrive that I didn’t ask for. Press releases, collaboration pitches, what I can only describe as beg mail. Over enough years you develop a reflex for these—a sub-second triage so automatic it barely registers as reading. Some requests stay with you anyway. A company selling wooden dildos. Another specializing in underwear for retirees. My personal favorite: someone who opened his pitch by calling me an asshole, then, in the very next paragraph, asked me to write about his hip-hop album. I genuinely admire the structure of that email.
This is context for why an older piece of blog culture—the Stöckchen, a chain of questions passed between bloggers, each recipient answering and then forwarding to ten more—feels almost civilized by comparison. Anna Frost, whom some of you might recognize from children’s television or the front rows of fashion shows, recently threw a set of ten my way. Here’s what came out when I tried to answer honestly.
The best thing this journal has ever given me is a life I couldn’t have designed in advance. It took me to Berlin, to Tokyo, to New York. It turned sitting in front of a computer watching cartoons—genuinely my favorite activity, no irony—into something that pays rent. I don’t know how to explain what that means without sounding unbearably pleased with myself, but it’s the truest answer I have. The best thing is also the simplest: doing what you love, and having it be enough.
What I can’t live without is my MacBook. If the legal framework existed, I’d have married it already—though I strongly suspect I’d leave it for a newer, slimmer model the moment one dropped. Anyone who’s known me for more than a year will recognize the pattern immediately.
Running this blog has always felt like playing a city-builder—SimCity, Civilization, something in that genre. You pick the topics, manage the distribution, negotiate with agencies and labels and PR people, watch the numbers, adjust. The difference is that a city-builder ends when you close the window. This one has actual consequences. The choices are real, the audience is real, the feedback loop is real. That combination is more addictive than anything else I’ve found.
Privacy is a more complicated answer. When this site was still called ANIBOY—the very first version, before MARCELTV, before TOKYOPUNK, before all the names it’s accumulated since—there was no concept of withholding anything. I wrote about who I’d slept with. I wrote about hating my teachers. I wrote about why Ana didn’t love me, by name, in public, on the internet, where anyone could read it. I was a teenager with a publishing platform and I used it the way teenagers do. I’m older now. I’ve gotten quieter in certain ways. But I still try to put something true into every post here, even when it’s buried, even when it’s subtle—especially when it’s subtle.
If I could start over, I’d be more consistent. That’s the real answer. My worst habit is experimenting for its own sake: switching languages mid-run, lurching from high-brow to gutter-level and back, redesigning everything when I got bored. Readers want to know what they’re returning to. They want the version they liked to still be there. The experiments were necessary—I couldn’t have found what I was actually doing without trying things—but the instability cost more than I understood at the time.
What I want from the internet in a policy sense: people who actually understand it should be making decisions about it. Fair Use legislation. Protected net neutrality. Cheap, fast internet treated as infrastructure rather than a premium product. And, on a smaller scale, I’d like bloggers to stop destroying the space from the inside—the competitive backstabbing, the envy dressed up as criticism, all of it. We’re collectively stronger than we’ve ever actually behaved. This should be obvious by now.
The dream app question is always revealing. On a bad day, I want an X-ray app that sees through clothing. On a normal day, I want something that answers every question the universe poses—from the meaning of existence down to the specific chain of events required to get Kate Upton, topless, riding a Pokémon through my office. I’m not entirely certain those two requests are as different as they sound.
The single wish I’d spend on someone else: I’d want René, who runs Nerdcore, to get his drinking under control. That’s not a dramatic wish. It’s just the one that matters most right now.