The Fandom Strain: On the IP Illness That's Killing Magic: The Gathering

• 2000s

Sky Odyssey and What Makes a Video Game (Not) a Cult Classic

How does a well-made game become forgotten?

By Typebar_Admin

/ 30 Apr 2026

• internet culture

The Tweet as a Literary Form

Or: theres actually zero difference between tweets & literature.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 30 Apr 2026

• By Vinky Mittal

The Animal's Voice: Literature, Animal Rights, and the Age of the Anthropocene

"Treating animals as beings with lives equal to our own is a remarkable endeavour, demanding the expanse of our full humanity"

By Typebar_Admin

/ 30 Apr 2026

• Issue 9

Freewrite vs. Alphasmart: What Is Freedom From Distraction Worth?

"These days, I write with pen and paper, mostly..."

By Typebar_Admin

/ 30 Apr 2026

• By Dorian Dawes

The Existential Horror (and Wonder) of No Man's Sky

{{Existence is beautiful, if you let it be. Life is not a question. There does not need to be an answer…}}

By Typebar_Admin

/ 30 Apr 2026

• Issue 9

It Sucks To Use A Typewriter In 2026, But It's Also Worth It

It's a long journey and an extensive effort. Why do it at all?

By Typebar_Admin

/ 30 Apr 2026

• By Gwen C. Katz

East of Wall: What Real Found Family Looks Like

"Marinating as we are in media full of shallow simulacra of found family, seeing the real thing is stunning and refreshing."

By Typebar_Admin

/ 30 Apr 2026

• True Crime

The Unchanging Nature of True Crime: From the 1700s to Contemporary Podcasts

True crime has always been about judgement.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 30 Apr 2026

• Issue 9

Experiences in Nigerian Literature: Embracing the Inherent Messiness of Queer Identities

Fictional and nonfiction works clearly illustrate why understanding messiness is important

By Typebar_Admin

/ 30 Apr 2026

• By Seann Barbour

>Fight >Run >Liberate: How JRPGs Made Me an Anarchist

"To attack and dethrone God is an inherently political act..."

By Typebar_Admin

/ 20 Apr 2026

• Cyberpunk

The Weakness of the Flesh and the Horror of Losing It

In cyberpunk, what does it mean to have a body?

By Typebar_Admin

/ 26 Jan 2026

• By Christopher Sloce

What Happened to the Game that I Love? Basketball After the Vibe Shift

“Nothing happened, you just never loved basketball.”

By Typebar_Admin

/ 26 Jan 2026

• By Matthew Claxton

Science Fiction is Dying. Long Live Post Sci-Fi?

The old mode of science fiction is disappearing. What's replacing it?

By Typebar_Admin

/ 26 Jan 2026

• By Timothy Lee

Anime Abridged Series on YouTube: A Retrospective and Love Letter

The rise and fall of one of YouTube's most iconic genres

By Typebar_Admin

/ 26 Jan 2026

• By Simon McNeil

Technology, Power, and Violence: How the Tangled Lands Tackles Climate Fiction

Saving the world is more complex than solar panels and good vibes.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 26 Jan 2026

• By Ernie Smith

Not So Classic: How Super Mario 64 Changed the Mario Franchise for the Worse

Super Mario Bros. lost something when it gained a dimension.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 26 Jan 2026

• By Alexander Taurozzi

Ultimatum: A Journey Into an America-Fearing Canadian Mind

A book from 53 years ago posited a now too-relevant question: what if the US went rogue?

By Typebar_Admin

/ 26 Jan 2026

• By Jake Pitre

Pulse, Demonlover, and Meanings of the Internet

Two films clairvoyant in their skepticism of the internet.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 26 Jan 2026

• By Nina Luther

Secretary and the Erotic Nature of the Typewriter

"Two lonely people  have come together through a love and desire that’s unique thanks, in part, to the typewriter."

By Typebar_Admin

/ 26 Jan 2026

• By Adam Ansley

Game Pass in 1994: The Too-Soon Brilliance of the Sega Channel

A brief history of digital games distribution, and why Sega's revolutionary attempt caused no revolution

By Typebar_Admin

/ 26 Jan 2026

• By Beckett Flynn

Jackass and the Tragedy of Cinema's Slop Era

A franchise that died and rotted into merchandise of itself.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 26 Jan 2026

• By Alex Conroy

There is No Proto-Dragon: The Illusion of Fictional Taxonomy

Ask not what a dragon does, but what a dragon is

By Typebar_Admin

/ 26 Jan 2026

• By Karlo Yeager Rodríguez

Blanquitos

Fiction by Karlo Yeager Rodríguez.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 5 Dec 2025

• By Justin Avery Smith

Between the Lions, "Elsagate," and the Fall of Quality Children's Programming

Young imaginations should be expanded, not exploited.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 Aug 2025

• By Timothy Lee

Love & Pop: The Evangelion Creator’s Live-Action Time Capsule Masterpiece That’s Even More Relevant Today

There are no shortcuts to developing real human connections.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 Aug 2025

• By Tiernan Blanchard

Git Gud? More Like Get Literate: Dread Delusion and the Art of Gameplay-as-Story

This game is about choice, belief, and the weight of being a person.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 Aug 2025

• By Danny Cohen

White Noise, Talk Radio, and Our Unexceptional Present

To view our era as unprecedented is both chauvinist and defeatist.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 Aug 2025

• By Laura Berlinsky-Schine

Homer's Odyssey: The First Literary Thriller

Literary thrillers are about the journey, not the destination.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 Aug 2025

• By Matt Wolfbridge

On Civilizational Loss, Mourning, and Life’s Remaining Beauty: An Interview with Luke O’Neil

Everything is as bad as O’Neil says it is. But do we deserve it? His latest fiction collection grasps for an answer.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 Aug 2025

• By Sam Reader

Cyberpunk 2077 and the Anesthesia of #Dissent

There are few easy answers to the questions the cyberpunk genre asks.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 Aug 2025

• By J.D. Harlock

The Super Mario Bros. Films and Our Bizarre Obsession with Faithfulness to the Source Material

Does faithfulness to the source material always lead to a superior adaptation?

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 Aug 2025

• By Jonathan Thornton

A Celebration of the Abject, the Queer, and the Arcane: The Work of Writer-Musician Jenny Hval

Hval’s work, both in written and musical form, shows an artist willing to explore the limits of genres.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 Aug 2025

• By William Schwartz

Flash Gordon and the Importance of Imagination

Flash Gordon is not concerned with lore or brand identification.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 Aug 2025

• By Eden Kupermintz

Weirding the Periphery: How Imperialism Infiltrated Our Imagination Through Fantasy

So much of foundational fantasy is about the (often imperial) core versus outside territories.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 25 May 2025

• By Christopher Luis-Jorge

Pumping Gold: How a Decade of Bodybuilding and Terrorism Started a Wave of Cheap Fantasy Movies

Politics, pulp fiction, and pumping iron.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 25 May 2025

• 2000s

Craving Pulverized Flesh: The Anti-Fascist Philosophy of Zombie Strippers

We are surrounded on all sides by pole-dancing ghouls.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 25 May 2025

• Books

Italo Calvino and the Secret of "Cozy" Fiction

No lattes needed.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 25 May 2025

• By RS Benedict

Lost Highway, David Lynch, and the End of History

We're all on a ride going nowhere down a lost highway.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 25 May 2025

• By Anna C. Webster

Call to Power: How a Forgotten Civilization Spinoff Game Accurately Predicted the Future

One forgotten title from 1999 that would accurately depict the arc of human civilization throughout the 21st century.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 25 May 2025

• Animation

The Legend of Mother Sarah: Light in the Post-Apocalyptic Darkness

The Legend of Mother Sarah is just as bold in its prognosis of our modern woes as Akira.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 25 May 2025

• By Costa Koutsoutis

Martin Scorsese's Casino and America's Rotten Promises

Money, murder, and Manifest Destiny.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 25 May 2025

• By Asa Williams

Professional Wrestling, a Multi-Era Musical Analysis

A musical tour through wrestling history.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 25 May 2025

• Books

Legends, Lattes, and Lament: The Necessity of Pain in "Cozy" Fiction

Cozy fiction works best when contrasted against harsh emotional, material, or political realities.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 24 Feb 2025

• Issue 5

The Digital Dilemma: Why Writers Are Abandoning Modern Word Processing Software

A new era of writing as a mechanical act.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 24 Feb 2025

• internet culture

I Love Myself for No Longer Caring About BuzzFeed

Revisiting a time capsule of 2010s online media–and Millennial creative–culture

By Typebar_Admin

/ 24 Feb 2025

• Books

On Disillusionment, the End of Empire, and 9/11 Memes (Oh Yeah, and His New Novel): An Interview with Ron Currie Jr.

A lazier writer would market this as “The Golden Girls meets Breaking Bad.”

By Typebar_Admin

/ 24 Feb 2025

• Fiction Discussion

Searching for the Feminine Grotesque

The feminine grotesque gives a rare voice to women expressing ideas that go against social norms.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 24 Feb 2025

• Gaming

Dungeons, Dragons, and Game Design: Why 4E Rules the D&D Roost

I doubt Dungeons and Dragons will ever be so honest again.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 24 Feb 2025

• internet culture

Rumble in the Belly of the Brain-Rotted Beast: Tyson vs. Paul Live at the Terror Dome

America is back, baby, Jake Paul says. You know what America he’s talking about.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 24 Feb 2025

• internet culture

No, You Don't Need a Social Media Presence as a Writer

The ubiquitous advice is wrong.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 24 Feb 2025

• Fiction Discussion

Interrogating Power and Narrative in the Cities of the Weft Trilogy

An admonishment to read closely and not to fix upon plot becomes an encouragement to read as you will.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 24 Feb 2025

• Fiction Discussion

Leg Drops are Literature: Professional Wrestling Angles as Literary Narratives

Wrestling is as deep as literature, steroids and steel cages notwithstanding

By Typebar_Admin

/ 24 Feb 2025

• 90s

Girl, Interrupted 25 Years Later: An Unheralded Film with a Lasting Cultural Impact

A prescient, if largely undiscussed, film about American attitudes towards mental health.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 20 Dec 2024

• internet culture

Echo chamber, Town Square, or Den of Iniquity: What Is Bluesky, Really?

Bluesky has arrived. But the party online is long since over.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 Nov 2024

• Books

Shirley Jackson, Hangsaman, and the Horror of False Freedom

The real tragedy is believing yourself free when freedom is impossible.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 Nov 2024

• Fiction Discussion

Sworn Brothers: The Connection Between Theater and Gaming

Games have been adapted to film, but are they meant for theater?

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 Nov 2024

• Books

Lev Grossman's Neoliberal Hell on Earth: The True Terror Behind The Magicians

Imagine if Pod Save America ran a magic school.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 Nov 2024

• Gaming

Architect Mario: Video Game Cities and Lost American Urbanism

Video games are the only place most Americans encounter good urban design.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 Nov 2024

• Books

An Unintended Critique of Manifest Destiny in H. P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness

On dismal failure and death drives.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 Nov 2024

• Books

Claire Keegan and the Value of Waiting a Long Time for Something Short

What we lose when we value production over precision.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 Nov 2024

• Books

Forget Edgar Allen Poe, What About Wilkie Collins? A Tribute to the Forgotten Father of the Detective Novel

With 27 novels, more than 50 short stories and 15 plays, it’s time that Collins started to get the credit he deserved.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 Nov 2024

• Books

Ritual & Responsibility: Subversion in The Wasp Factory and We Have Always Lived in the Castle

There is nothing so commanding, right, or natural in the powers that be that a child cannot toss them aside.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 Nov 2024

• Books

All That is Solid Melts Into Air: A Review of Stories are Weapons

Several significant flaws prevent this book from being a useful treatise on the American culture wars.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 30 Aug 2024

• Fiction Discussion

Sadomasochism in Space: Lost Worlds of Gender Representation in 1980s Science-fiction Romance

The obscure 1980s novel that unlocks the key to emotionally and psychologically sophisticated science fiction.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 30 Aug 2024

• Fiction Discussion

Tangled Fantasies: Speculative Anti-Imperialism and the Myth of Internal Resistance in S.A. Corey’s The Mercy of Gods

Is modern science fiction's indulging in escapism rationalizing our own complicities?

By Typebar_Admin

/ 30 Aug 2024

• Books

The Death of The F*ck: Neopuritanism and Commercial Fiction

How readers with presumably progressive politics are increasingly aligning with the far right on the moralization of sex.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 30 Aug 2024

• Books

Michel Houellebecq and the Birth of the Incel

“The idea gradually dawned on me that all these people – men or women – were not in the least deranged; they were simply lacking in love.”

By Typebar_Admin

/ 30 Aug 2024

• Issue 3

Rabbits with Eyeliner: Gender and Prosocial Education in LEGO Sets

Why is LEGO telling us to pick up garbage? And who is LEGO telling to pick up garbage?

By Typebar_Admin

/ 30 Aug 2024

• Issue 3

The Writing Revolution Will Come When We Realize Our Collective Value

Together, we can forge ahead and make something different.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 30 Aug 2024

• Books

Building Our Own Palace of Dreams: The 1981 Novel that Envisioned the Modern Surveillance State

A novel that stands above 1984 and Brave New World in prescience.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 30 Aug 2024

• Issue 3

Outta the Pool: Remembering the Adult Swim Live Streams

All you need to make art is a camera, a mic, and an idea. Maybe a cool fish tank too.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 30 Aug 2024

• 2000s

Nostalgia Ends Here: The 2000s Sucked, Actually

A decade of recession, war, and fearmongering. But at least we had clear plastic electronics...

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 May 2024

• Fiction Discussion

Representation and Refraction: Gender and The Triple Goddess in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman

For trans women of a certain generation, The Sandman left a lingering uneasiness.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 May 2024

• Gaming

Invisible Cities 2: Neopets as a Lived Space

Neopets and French sociology, together at last.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 May 2024

• Gaming

Playing Fate: Choice and Doom in Gothic Gameplay

Why play gothic games where we choose doom, inevitability, and inescapable cycles of despair?

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 May 2024

• Books

Lore Done Right: Micaiah Johnson's The Space Between Worlds

Lore becomes more powerful when there's less of it.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 May 2024

• Fantasy

Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and ChatGPT: How Snobbery Can Save Us From the Literary Robot Apocalypse

Readers, critics, and editors have to demand better.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 May 2024

• Fiction Discussion

Bringing Sherlock Holmes to the 21st Century (or The Adventure of Japan Having All the Fun)

The best Sherlock Holmes stories of the last two decades have come from Japan.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 May 2024

• Books

Someone You Can Worldbuild a Nest In: John Wiswell, Fictional Worlds, and Limitations

Worldbuilding discussions in genre fiction frequently miss the point.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 May 2024

• Books

Interpreting the Abyss: An Ode to Christopher Manson's MAZE

The labyrinth inside an 80s puzzle book will never be solved, never die, and never let go of its victims.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 29 May 2024

• Fantasy

Infernal Transmutation: Remembering K.J. Bishop's The Etched City

In the surreal and slipstream, ambiguity is strength.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 24 Mar 2024

• Issue 1

The Barbie Typewriter: Cracking Codes in Trademarked Pink

A little typewriter with a big secret.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 24 Mar 2024

• film

No Country for Cringe Men: Remembering the Channel Awesome Anniversary Trilogy

Remembering the web's worst movies so you don't have to.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 24 Mar 2024

• Fiction Discussion

Science Fiction and the Death of the Sun

The driving force behind nihilistic visions of the future.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 24 Mar 2024

• Issue 1

Nobody Wants to Buy The Future: Why Science Fiction Literature is Vanishing

We got to one of the futures Science Fiction proposed, and it sucked.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 24 Mar 2024

• Fantasy

Concerning Habits: Purpose In Fiction and How to Defy It

I feel a pang when I reach the end of The Lord of the Rings because it means I must wake.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 24 Mar 2024

• Fantasy

Finding Space for the "Literary" in Fantasy: A Reflection on A Woman of the Sword

A trend-defying novel about the "wrong" character told the "wrong" way.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 24 Mar 2024

• 90s

How Aeon Flux Deconstructed the Mystery Box TV Show (Before It Existed)

The show is notable for more than its dystopian backdrops and ugly-sexy character designs.

By Typebar_Admin

/ 24 Mar 2024

• internet culture

Doug Walker Was Right: How To Boldly Flee Predicted the Modern Internet

Everyone is the worst person in the room and rewarded for it constantly. Sound familiar?

By Typebar_Admin

/ 24 Mar 2024