Slipbox
Created: 2025-05-27 (19:20:00) — Modified: 2025-06-25 (19:38:34)Status: ongoing
I’m a relentless note-taker. It’s not enough to add pages per day to my journal and composition books, or add entries to my personal wiki, I’ve been keeping for years at this point a physical zettelkasten too.
A zettelkasten, a slipbox, is a system for organising your notes in the order they were created. I think. There are extensive resources out there and if you are so inclined you can disappear deep down the index card productivity rabbithole.
My method probably preserves all the overhead and none of the benefit, but it seems to work well enough. It’s how this website is organised!
I want this entry to be like an ongoing sampler of my handwritten notes. Sort of like a random-access blog, an accumulating collection of out-of-context half-thoughts. Um… enjoy!
2025
2025-06-25 (19:20:35)
Rereading Raving has led me down some strange alleys this month. McKenzie Wark frames raving as a temporary, dissociative escape from the scarification and no-future of our moment.
“what was once outside the spectacle, the two forces that might disrupt it: pollution and the proletariat. but we lost. now only pollution surrounds it as its externality, the remnant of historical time.”
I wonder if it’s an oversimplification to interpret this as simply about raving in the ruins, partying while the apocalyptic tidal wave roll bears down. Counterintuitively, discussing raving in these terms may open space for imagining redemptive futures at the same time it asserts there is no future.
Some things this has loosely led me to:
- Il Gruppo Nun, Revolutionary Demonology, mainly for dark winter moods;
- Johanna Isaacson, The Ballerina and the Bull, and the idea of expressive negation; and
- José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, for its discussion of queerness as a horizon.
Assumably this will all lead somewhere.
2025-06-08 (09:11:08)
Idea for a zine about memory cards. The Animal Crossing essay could go in, of course, but also:
- finding other people’s save files on pre-owned cartridges;
- returning to old save files on memory cards after literal decades; and
- finding save files for games you no longer own, maybe never owned, only borrowed from friends or rented from Video 2000, or Video-EZY, or their grungier sibling Civic Video.
What did we lose when we stopped embedding these records of our play in proprietary, chunky memory bricks?
This is not just an exercise in nostalgia. It could also be a way of mining natural history, in the vein of Walter Benjamin, unearthing what these obsolete artefacts tell us about the cultural, economic and material forces of the time.
2025-06-02 (19:02:00)
Talking with R— who is working on a bootleg Gameboy cartridge, which immediately reminded me of the Sachen 8-in-1 Color cartridge I once owned and now appear to have lost.
8-in-1 contained such games as Ant Soldier, Sky Ace, Dan Laser, Zoo Block, Cap Knick=Knack, Flea Circus, Explosive and Magic Maze…
So imagine my surprise when we went to look it up, on finding alternative versions with entirely different sets of games.
Artic Zone [sic], Magical Tower, Railway, Worm Visitor, Bomb Disposer, 2nd Space, Black Forest Tale, Armor Force…
Virus Attack, Electron World, Trouble Zone, Dice Square, Pile Wonder [!!!], Snake Roy, Puppet Knight, Suleiman’s Treasure…
Alternative timelines branching out. What if, instead of struggling with Dan Laser and Cap Knick=Knack, I had all those years ago at Revolution CD purchased instead the version with:
Worm Visitor
or Pile Wonder [!!!]
Imagining videogames, but what about imaginary bootlegs? Or when the game exists but is so unfinished or illegible that the imagination cannot help but get pulled into the vacuum, to attempt reconstruction and salvage?
Something for the zine.
Endmatter
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