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Headphones render life itself into silence. You experience a deep sensorial and emotional inner life, but you withhold that, determining that this is a gift for yourself, allowing it to ring through your head as your ears follow suit. And when you’re forced to go out into the world without your trusty earsidekick—you struggle to rekindle what life used to sound like. An alien in your own commute.

Growing up I’ve been told countless times that a mark of a great artist was the ability to capture an essence. In philosophy, an essence is the attribute that makes a thing what it fundamentally is. When applied to art, capturing an essence means conveying the intrinsic nature of a subject, whether it's a person, object, emotion, or idea. Essence gives art a sense of authenticity and depth that resonates with viewers on a profound level. Art that captures an essence is a reflection, art without essence is mimicry.

Multitasking Man is the embodiment of someone who has lost control to their infinite appetite for distractions. Multitasking work with entertainment. The behavior the symptom of a deeply addicted individual, one who lacks agency unless certain stimuli are fried to satisfatory numbess. Only the extent of your ever-dwindling agency is the determiner of whether you rise into productivity or continue swallowing water, sinking into stasis.

The balancing act between genuine and ironic bleeds into every interaction. But all these interactions fluctuate between wanting to express a deeply emotional part, doing it in a half-attempted manner, and then falling into the trap of self-ironic verse. The temptation to self-sabotage passion in the fear of not being heard, enacting the de-connective social act myself, not allowing the other to do it for me.

“No one does it like Sully!” “Mike Wazowski has done it again!” “Classic Mike!” shatters through my head like a sentient dental drill rebelling against its blue-gloved doctorate master. My 9-year-old Wazowski-beaten eyes slip down under their lids, and recede into my head hoping to escape—at least visually—the hell of this media connection.

Consuming short-form content is a process of self-harm. Drawn-out long-form suicide, via short-form bursts of unfeelable pain. The most shameful form of suicide. It is the slow death of your attention span, a slow descent into mental/emotional subordination, the process of losing a temporal grasp of your life. Waving a dilapidated goodbye to your newly disfigured consciousness as you surrender fully to The Entertainment.

Every month I am greeted by a new, increasingly worse UI. Everything degrades, everything rots. But iTunes’s clunkiness and customizability felt more physical if that makes sense. It was pleasantly cumbersome in its depth of options, a right click would lead to 20 different selection bars, each with their own drop-down menus of possible query. Spotify on the other hand, feels like an attack on the intelligence of anyone who uses it.

We’re just pigs at a trough, slopping and having our snouts doused in industrial brown liquid that we not just consume, but find the meaning of alienated life through. And now in the age of fandomization, we pigs can use the internet to tell TV writers and content creators what WE want our slop to taste like! Happily mixing our pigshit in with the slop already fed to us.

Online entertainment media has created a want for novelty only if it is within the relations of trust, the insane level of intimacy they have built with their pre-existing objects of consumption. It’s a form of engagement with already consumed media that thumbnails function to. A thumbnail’s role is in complete relation to trust.

Black History Month is much more than a month. It is a time to celebrate black people, accomplishments and innovations. However, as discussed in Linda Kanyamuna’s article, “What about Blackness?”, the Canadian education system has left holes in our Black History, leaving so many of us without grounds to stand on. In this post, Sydney reflects on Linda’s piece and presents readers with the opportunity to not confine their historical reflection to one month, and explore Black excellency all the time.