HOUDINI Magazine Text Archive July

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                     
   ▄█    █▄     ▄██████▄  ███    █▄  ████████▄   ▄█  ███▄▄▄▄    ▄█  
  ███    ███   ███    ███ ███    ███ ███   ▀███ ███  ███▀▀▀██▄ ███  
  ███    ███   ███    ███ ███    ███ ███    ███ ███▌ ███   ███ ███▌ 
 ▄███▄▄▄▄███▄▄ ███    ███ ███    ███ ███    ███ ███▌ ███   ███ ███▌ 
▀▀███▀▀▀▀███▀  ███    ███ ███    ███ ███    ███ ███▌ ███   ███ ███▌ 
  ███    ███   ███    ███ ███    ███ ███    ███ ███  ███   ███ ███  
  ███    ███   ███    ███ ███    ███ ███   ▄███ ███  ███   ███ ███  
  ███    █▀     ▀██████▀  ████████▀  ████████▀  █▀    ▀█   █▀  █▀   
  
  
                                                                 
   ▄▄▄         ▀▀█                   ▄▄▄▄   ▄▄▄▄   ▄▄▄▄  ▄▄▄▄▄ 
     █  ▄   ▄    █    ▄   ▄         ▀   ▀█ ▄▀  ▀▄ ▀   ▀█ █     
     █  █   █    █    ▀▄ ▄▀             ▄▀ █  ▄ █     ▄▀ ▀▀▀▀▄▄
     █  █   █    █     █▄█            ▄▀   █    █   ▄▀        █
 ▀▄▄▄▀  ▀▄▄▀█    ▀▄▄   ▀█           ▄█▄▄▄▄  █▄▄█  ▄█▄▄▄▄ ▀▄▄▄█▀
                       ▄▀                                      
                      ▀▀

                                                                                                
      * ***          * ***         ***** *     **            **             ***** *     **    
    *  ****  *     *  ****      ******  **    **** *      *****          ******  **    **** * 
   *  *  ****     *  *  ***    **   *  * **    ****      *  ***         **   *  * **    ****  
  *  **   **     *  **   ***  *    *  *  **    * *          ***        *    *  *  **    * *   
 *  ***         *  ***    ***     *  *    **   *           *  **           *  *    **   *     
**   **        **   **     **    ** **    **   *           *  **          ** **    **   *     
**   **        **   **     **    ** **     **  *          *    **         ** **     **  *     
**   **        **   **     **    ** **     **  *          *    **         ** **     **  *     
**   **        **   **     **    ** **      ** *         *      **        ** **      ** *     
**   **        **   **     **    ** **      ** *         *********        ** **      ** *     
 **  **         **  **     **    *  **       ***        *        **       *  **       ***     
  ** *      *    ** *      *        *        ***        *        **          *        ***     
   ***     *      ***     *     ****          **       *****      **     ****          **     
    *******        *******     *  *****               *   ****    ** *  *  *****              
      ***            ***      *     **               *     **      **  *     **               
                              *                      *                 *                      
                               **                     **                **

//DNGN// Conan the Barbarian | The Phoenix on the Sword

Date: 2025-07-01

The internet's a fucking portal, man—a crystal ball that rips you out of your shitty apartment and hurls you into the ether. This month, HOUDINI's dragging you somewhere hot, humid, primal— not Florida—it's Hyborea, the blood-soaked land of grimdark sword and sorcery where Conan, Robert E. Howard's barbarian, carves his legend. 3 parts. 3 dungeon synth albums. 3 segments of //DNGN//.

You think you've got a story that can stand toe-to-toe with Howard's? Write it. Send it to hedorahmusic@gmail.com We'll push it on our site, put it in a paperback or stuff it in a HOUDINI zine, where they'll live forever next to cigarette burns and spilled whiskey. HOUDINI Magazine—WE ARE PULP FICTION.

"KNOW, oh prince, that between the years when the oceans drank Atlantis and the gleaming cities, and the years of the rise of the Sons of Aryas, there was an Age undreamed of, when shining kingdoms lay spread across the world like blue mantles beneath the stars--Nemedia, Ophir, Brythunia, Hyperborea, Zamora with its dark-haired women and towers of spider-haunted mystery, Zingara with its chivalry, Koth that bordered on the pastoral lands of Shem, Stygia with its shadow-guarded tombs, Hyrkania whose riders wore steel and silk and gold. But the proudest kingdom of the world was Aquilonia, reigning supreme in the dreaming west. Hither came Conan, the Cimmerian, black-haired, sullen- eyed, sword in hand, a thief, a reaver, a slayer, with gigantic melancholies and gigantic mirth, to tread the jeweled thrones of the Earth under his sandalled feet."--The Nemedian Chronicles

OVER shadowy spires and gleaming towers lay the ghostly darkness and silence that runs before dawn. Into a dim alley, one of a veritable labyrinth of mysterious winding ways, four masked figures came hurriedly from a door which a dusky hand furtively opened. They spoke not but went swiftly into the gloom, cloaks wrapped closely about them; as silently as the ghosts of murdered men they disappeared in the darkness. Behind them a sardonic countenance was framed in the partly opened door; a pair of evil eyes glittered malevolently in the gloom.

"Go into the night, creatures of the night," a voice mocked. "Oh, fools, your doom hounds your heels like a blind dog, and you know it not." The speaker closed the door and bolted it, then turned and went up the corridor, candle in hand. He was a somber giant, whose dusky skin revealed his Stygian blood. He came into an inner chamber, where a tall, lean man in worn velvet lounged like a great lazy cat on a silken couch, sipping wine from a huge golden goblet.

"Well, Ascalante," said the Stygian, setting down the candle, "your dupes have slunk into the streets like rats from their burrows. You work with strange tools."

"Tools?" replied Ascalante. "Why, they consider me that. For months now, ever since the Rebel Four summoned me from the southern desert, I have been living in the very heart of my enemies, hiding by day in this obscure house, skulking through dark alleys and darker corridors at night. And I have accomplished what those rebellious nobles could not. Working through them, and through other agents, many of whom have never seen my face, I have honeycombed the empire with sedition and unrest. In short I, working in the shadows, have paved the downfall of the king who sits throned in the sun. By Mitra, I was a statesman before I was an outlaw."

"And these dupes who deem themselves your masters?"

"They will continue to think that I serve them, until our present task is completed. Who are they to match wits with Ascalante? Volmana, the dwarfish count of Karaban; Gromel, the giant commander of the Black Legion; Dion, the fat baron of Attalus; Rinaldo, the hare-brained minstrel. I am the force which has welded together the steel in each, and by the clay in each, I will crush them when the time comes. But that lies in the future; tonight the king dies."

"Days ago I saw the imperial squadrons ride from the city," said the Stygian. "They rode to the frontier which the heathen Picts assail--thanks to the strong liquor which I've smuggled over the borders to madden them. Dion's great wealth made that possible. And Volmana made it possible to dispose of the rest of the imperial troops which remained in the city. Through his princely kin in Nemedia, it was easy to persuade King Numa to request the presence of Count Trocero of Poitain, seneschal of Aquilonia; and of course, to do him honor, he'll be accompanied by an imperial escort, as well as his own troops, and Prospero, King Conan's right-hand man. That leaves only the king's personal bodyguard in the city--beside the Black Legion. Through Gromel I've corrupted a spendthrift officer of that guard, and bribed him to lead his men away from the king's door at midnight.

"Then, with sixteen desperate rogues of mine, we enter the palace by a secret tunnel. After the deed is done, even if the people do not rise to welcome us, Gromel's Black Legion will be sufficient to hold the city and the crown."

"And Dion thinks that crown will be given to him?"

"Yes. The fat fool claims it by reason of a trace of royal blood. Conan makes a bad mistake in letting men live who still boast descent from the old dynasty, from which he tore the crown of Aquilonia.

"Volmana wishes to be reinstated in royal favor as he was under the old regime, so that he may lift his poverty-ridden estates to their former grandeur. Gromel hates Pallantides, commander of the Black Dragons, and desires the command of the whole army, with all the stubbornness of the Bossonian. Alone of us all, Rinaldo has no personal ambition. He sees in Conan a red- handed, rough-footed barbarian who came out of the north to plunder a civilized land. He idealizes the king whom Conan killed to get the crown, remembering only that he occasionally patronized the arts, and forgetting the evils of his reign, and he is making the people forget. Already they openly sing The Lament for the King in which Rinaldo lauds the sainted villain and denounces Conan as 'that black-hearted savage from the abyss'. Conan laughs, but the people snarl."

"Why does he hate Conan?"

"Poets always hate those in power. To them perfection is always just behind the last corner, or beyond the next. They escape the present in dreams of the past and future. Rinaldo is a flaming torch of idealism, rising, as he thinks, to overthrow a tyrant and liberate the people. As for me--well, a few months ago I had lost all ambition but to raid the caravans for the rest of my life; now old dreams stir. Conan will die; Dion will mount the throne. Then he, too, will die. One by one, all who oppose me will die--by fire, or steel, or those deadly wines you know so well how to brew. Ascalante, king of Aquilonia! How like you the sound of it?"

The Stygian shrugged his broad shoulders.

"There was a time," he said with unconcealed bitterness, "when I, too, had my ambitions, beside which yours seem tawdry and childish. To what a state I have fallen! My old-time peers and rivals would stare indeed could they see Thoth-amon of the Ring serving as the slave of an outlander, and an outlaw at that; and aiding in the petty ambitions of barons and kings!"

"You laid your trust in magic and mummery," answered Ascalante carelessly. "I trust my wits and my sword."

"Wits and swords are as straws against the wisdom of the Darkness," growled the Stygian, his dark eyes flickering with menacing lights and shadows. "Had I not lost the Ring, our positions might be reversed."

"Nevertheless," answered the outlaw impatiently, "you wear the stripes of my whip on your back, and are likely to continue to wear them."

"Be not so sure!" the fiendish hatred of the Stygian glittered for an instant redly in his eyes. "Some day, somehow, I will find the Ring again, and when I do, by the serpent-fangs of Set, you shall pay--"

The hot-tempered Aquilonian started up and struck him heavily across the mouth. Thoth reeled back, blood starting from his lips.

"You grow over-bold, dog," growled the outlaw. "Have a care; I am still your master who knows your dark secret. Go upon the housetops and shout that Ascalante is in the city plotting against the king--if you dare."

"I dare not," muttered the Stygian, wiping the blood from his lips.

"No, you do not dare," Ascalante grinned bleakly. "For if I die by your stealth or treachery, a hermit priest in the southern desert will know of it, and will break the seal of a manuscript I left in his hands. And having read, a word will be whispered in Stygia, and a wind will creep up from the south by midnight. And where will you hide your head, Thoth-amon?"

The slave shuddered and his dusky face went ashen.

"Enough!" Ascalante changed his tone peremptorily. "I have work for you. I do not trust Dion. I bade him ride to his country estate and remain there until the work tonight is done. The fat fool could never conceal his nervousness before the king today. Ride after him, and if you do not overtake him on the road, proceed to his estate and remain with him until we send for him. Don't let him out of your sight. He is mazed with fear, and might bolt--might even rush to Conan in a panic, and reveal the whole plot, hoping thus to save his own hide. Go!"

The slave bowed, hiding the hate in his eyes, and did as he was bidden. Ascalante turned again to his wine. Over the jeweled spires was rising a dawn crimson as blood.

Continued in One Week

We Need Writers | Write for HOUDINI Magazine

Date: 2025-07-05

We need writers. This is a call to action.

HOUDINI Magazine isn't the type of place where I can go on Fiverr and say, "Hey, write me some SEO-optimized bullshit to trick search engines." That's just not how this works. We're donation-funded. Right now, I can't pay you. So you've gotta believe in the cause. You've gotta show up and do it for free. And there's no path for exposure, you can't say "I was published by HOUDINI Magazine, so maybe you, Mr. Rich and Well Off editor at The Atlantic will publish me", we are building seperate, working class, radical infastructure. That's a hard sell.

Right now, we're doing about one article a day, sometimes one every two days. If we could ramp that up to two articles a day—if we had consistent content rolling in, a team of writers, a handful of semi-regular contributors, and a couple of dedicated regulars—that would make a huge difference. There's so much we could cover as a culture magazine. I want to publish pieces on skateboarding, tattooing, more bands, more album reviews, and more gaming content.

For example, I've got a writer coming on board to do a monthly column on China's film industry, using it as a lens to give readers a taste of life over there. That's not something you can just commission—it's something you have to find, or that has to find you. We're also looking for articles on goth history, car culture, and concert reports. Did you just see Acid Bath on their reunion tour? If you're in the car after the show, pull out your voice recorder and capture your immediate thoughts. We could publish that.

The more content we have, the more we grow, and eventually, we'll reach a point where we can pay writers regularly. That's the goal. And once we get there? We'll be unstoppable.

Video games? Fuck yes. We want 3-4 indie reviews a month, and we've got guidelines ready. If that's your thing, hit me up. It's a key part of this magazine's future vision.

The more we publish, the faster we grow, the sooner we pay writers. That's the goal. Until then? We're in the mud.

If you're down, email me: hederamusic@gmail.com. Or find me on Discord.

HOUDINI Goes Local // Imperialism Comes Home

Date: 2025-07-02

Alligator Auschwitz, Alligator Alcatraz — it's all over the headlines, but it's not really anything new. That is the sad truth of the matter. This is not new.

Does anyone remember reports of his directives ordering forced sterilizations happening to women in ICE detention centers, as they're called? Surgeons removing body parts and organs from women to prevent them from having children. This has been confirmed to have happened. When it happened, do you think it stopped? When it happened, do you think there was an investigation? No. Of course not.

The Alligator Alcatraz story is mostly spectacle manifesting itself. This is continuous. It has not stopped. This policy has been in place for over a decade. These internment sites are ramping up. It has been happening. It will continue to happen.

When we see drones used to survey and mark people as kill targets in Gaza, when we see aid distribution centers used as kill boxes, and when members of our police departments and immigrant enforcement agencies travel to Israel to train with those who are conducting mass killings in Gaza — using weapons created and sent by America — we must ask: how long until that violence comes home? How long until the fact that it has already arrived is noticed?

Because it has already arrived. How many people will die in the swamps of Florida in this concentration camp? People will die. They are building a concentration camp with funds relocated from emergency hurricane support funds. Your rural hospital is shutting down while they're laying concrete for internment sites. That's the tradeoff. That's imperialism.

We are already living in occupied territory. They are preparing for repression, accelerating even, preparing to detain tens of thousands, potentially hundreds of thousands, and send them to these camps and black sites outside the country.

We must ask ourselves in our communities: are we prepared for that level of repression? Because it will start with immigrants, then move up the chain — political dissenters, queer people, homeless people, the poor, the needy. Anyone who can be labeled a problem will be "solved" with their own final solution.

These are the hard questions we must ask. We are living in unprecedented times. We have been living in unprecedented times. We are only just now starting to see the shape of the noose.

This is why gatherings like the July 4th event HOUDINI Magazine helped organize is so important. All profits from the event will go to two organizations: a local Florida group fighting for immigrant rights, and the Palestinian Red Crescent Society. The struggles in Palestine are the struggles in our own communities against ICE. When politicians talk about stripping healthcare from the poorest among us while gorging themselves at the trough like greedy pigs, feasting on the bones and bile of the colonized abroad, understand — that's by design. That's imperialism at work.

They've already priced out the value of killing in Gaza. The value of denying healthcare. The value of abducting immigrants. The value of closing hospitals. The value of social murder. It's all on the ledger. And the profits from this event will go to those who resist that — to the Palestinian Red Crescent Society, real medics who've been mercilessly targeted by the imperialist regime.

HOUDINI Magazine reached across every available line to get the word out. Tampa DSA. Lakeland Mutual Aid. Miami PSL. We extended our hand to every socialist-adjacent organization in the region. Because common ground must be built. Space for cooperation must be carved out.

A United Front must be formed. We must work to strengthen our communities. We must work to rebuke imperialism. We must defeat the anti-life regime.

the Gaslight [chronicles] // HOUDINI Magazine's New Pulp Fiction Imprint

Date: 2025-07-07

HOUDINI Magazine is the most trafficked pulp magazine on Neocities.org. We carry the tag. We've earned the audience. But we haven't honored the commitment.

You've been sending us stories. You've been asking to get published. "Hey, I wrote this super sick body horror thing—can you throw it in the magazine?" And I'd tell you, yeah, yeah, we're doing a paperback, just hold on.

Keeping it a buck: the paperback model is slow. Capital-intensive. Logistically constipated. That's not where we're at right now. We're a snake. We slip through cracks. We move fast. So we recalibrated.

Click to View the Gaslight [chronicles] Site

Introducing: the Gaslight [chronicles] Hot off the digital presses. No waiting, no begging, no patience. Just human written stories straight from the underground—splatterpunk, sci-fi, noir, grindhouse, shit you can't sell anywhere else because it's too bloody, too horny or too weird or too real.

We're publishing stories individually. One by one. We're paying writers up front, some of them are saying "Take the work, I don't want to be paid." We're building our paperback backlog as we publish. The game has changed.

First Mondays are now Pulp Day. Every first Monday of the month, a new drop.

And anchoring it all—Night Fangs.

A reimagining of Dracula. A gothpunk descent into a corrupt city at the heart of a ruined world. If you fuck with Playboi Carti, if you fuck with Opium, if you're an old head goth, if you thought Anne Rice needed a bit more John Wick, if you've ever put on eyeliner and crooned to something by Siouxsie and the Banshees—you're going to love this.

Nightfangs is the flagship series of the Gaslight [chronicles], set in the city of New Gaslight, from which the imprint gets its name. The old heads will recognize the label. The new heads will see the future.

Our first standalone drop: "The Black Mammoth" by Dr. Drugs. A modern descent into the rotten heart of the asylum trope. Medical sadism, institutional rot—filtered through a chemically scorched lens. Dr. Drugs. Fitting name. Fitting story. It hits hard, it hits fast, and it doesn't leave through the front door.

Here are five free codes for Night Fangs #1 - The Betrayal of Don Juan to start your descent.

https://houdini-magazine.itch.io/night-fangs-the-betrayal-of-don-juan/download/6KbmuEjp_Fn3YLKdIar3iwMwKSq7R6b4bisJsHJ_

https://houdini-magazine.itch.io/night-fangs-the-betrayal-of-don-juan/download/wpb_KTsB7QyuRnlw_DVAt9q0F1uWrxS3VONmbL_i

https://houdini-magazine.itch.io/night-fangs-the-betrayal-of-don-juan/download/3rRGS3lI4Le_D1Ta_NDvZyobbFUcGkjEXRnnshAr

https://houdini-magazine.itch.io/night-fangs-the-betrayal-of-don-juan/download/ggJxTm0jSavtpzJ3R9RK62xPQJChqadAi_GyUXZd

https://houdini-magazine.itch.io/night-fangs-the-betrayal-of-don-juan/download/iDEFUtZ5Vtgmqw3smDy_LIk6FESoS3GOiAbXTOzl

//DNGN// Conan the Barbarian | The Phoenix on the Sword Chapter II

Date: 2025-07-08

This month, HOUDINI's dragging you somewhere hot, humid, primal— not Florida—it's Hyborea, the blood-soaked land of grimdark sword and sorcery where Conan, Robert E. Howard's barbarian, carves his legend. 3 parts. 3 dungeon synth albums. 3 segments of //DNGN//.

Under the caverned pyramids great Set coils asleep; Among the shadows of the tombs his dusky people creep. I speak the Word from the hidden gulfs that never knew the sun Send me a servant for my hate, oh scaled and shining One.

THE SUN was setting, etching the green and hazy blue of the forest in brief gold. The waning beams glinted on the thick golden chain which Dion of Attalus twisted continually in his pudgy hand as he sat in the flaming riot of blossoms and flowering trees which was his garden. He shifted his fat body on his marble seat and glanced furtively about, as if in quest of a lurking enemy. He sat within a circular grove of slender trees, whose interlapping branches cast a thick shade over him. Near at hand a fountain tinkled silverly, and other unseen fountains in various parts of the great garden whispered an everlasting symphony.

Dion was alone except for the great dusky figure which lounged on a marble bench close at hand, watching the baron with deep somber eyes. Dion gave little thought to Thoth-amon. He vaguely knew that he was a slave in whom Ascalante reposed much trust, but like so many rich men, Dion paid scant heed to men below his own station in life.

"You need not be so nervous," said Thoth. "The plot can not fail."

"Ascalante can make mistakes as well as another," snapped Dion, sweating at the mere thought of failure.

"Not he," grinned the Stygian savagely, "else I had not been his slave, but his master."

"What talk is this?" peevishly returned Dion, with only half a mind on the conversation.

Thoth-amon's eyes narrowed. For all his iron self-control, he was near bursting with long pent-up shame, hate and rage, ready to take any sort of a desperate chance. What he did not reckon on was the fact that Dion saw him, not as a human being with a brain and a wit, but simply a slave, and as such, a creature beneath notice.

"Listen to me," said Thoth. "You will be king. But you little know the mind of Ascalante. You can not trust him, once Conan is slain. I can help you. If you will protect me when you come to power, I will aid you.

"Listen, my lord. I was a great sorcerer in the south. Men spoke of Thoth-Amon as they spoke of Rammon. King Ctesphon of Stygia gave me great honor, casting down the magicians from the high places to exalt me above them. They hated me, but they feared me, for I controlled beings from outside which came at my call and did my bidding. By Set, mine enemy knew not the hour when he might awake at midnight to feel the taloned fingers of a nameless horror at his throat! I did dark and terrible magic with the Serpent Ring of Set, which I found in a nighted tomb a league beneath the earth, forgotten before the first man crawled out of the slimy sea.

"But a thief stole the Ring and my power was broken. The magicians rose up to slay me, and I fled. Disguised as a camel-driver, I was travelling in a caravan in the land of Koth, when Ascalante's reavers fell upon us. All in the caravan were slain except myself; I saved my life by revealing my identity to Ascalante and swearing to serve him. Bitter has been that bondage!

"To hold me fast, he wrote of me in a manuscript, and sealed it and gave it into the hands of a hermit who dwells on the southern borders of Koth. I dare not strike a dagger into him while he sleeps, or betray him to his enemies, for then the hermit would open the manuscript and read?thus Ascalante instructed him. And he would speak a word in Stygia?"

Again Thoth shuddered and an ashen hue tinged his dusky skin.

"Men knew me not in Aquilonia," he said. "But should my enemies in Stygia learn my whereabouts, not the width of half a world between us would suffice to save me from such a doom as would blast the soul of a bronze statue. Only a king with castles and hosts of swordsmen could protect me. So I have told you my secret, and urge that you make a pact with me. I can aid you with my wisdom, and you can protect me. And some day I will find the Ring?"

"Ring? Ring?" Thoth had underestimated the man's utter egoism. Dion had not even been listening to the slave's words, so completely engrossed was he in his own thoughts, but the final word stirred a ripple in his self- centeredness.

"Ring?" he repeated. "That makes me remember?my ring of good fortune. I had it from a Shemitish thief who swore he stole it from a wizard far to the south, and that it would bring me luck. I paid him enough, Mitra knows. By the gods, I need all the luck I can have, what with Volmana and Ascalante dragging me into their bloody plots--I'll see to the ring."

Thoth sprang up, blood mounting darkly to his face, while his eyes flamed with the stunned fury of a man who suddenly realizes the full depths of a fool's swinish stupidity. Dion never heeded him. Lifting a secret lid in the marble seat, he fumbled for a moment among a heap of gewgaws of various kinds?barbaric charms, bits of bones, pieces of tawdry jewelry?luck-pieces and conjures which the man's superstitious nature had prompted him to collect.

"Ah, here it is!" He triumphantly lifted a ring of curious make. It was of a metal like copper, and was made in the form of a scaled serpent, coiled in three loops, with its tail in its mouth. Its eyes were yellow gems which glittered balefully. Thoth-amon cried out as if he had been struck, and Dion wheeled and gaped, his face suddenly bloodless. The slave's eyes were blazing, his mouth wide, his huge dusky hands outstretched like talons.

"The Ring! By Set! The Ring!" he shrieked. "My Ring?stolen from me?" Steel glittered in the Stygian's hand and with a heave of his great dusky shoulders he drove the dagger into the baron's fat body. Dion's high thin squeal broke in a strangled gurgle and his whole flabby frame collapsed like melted butter. A fool to the end, he died in mad terror, not knowing why. Flinging aside the crumpled corpse, already forgetful of it, Thoth grasped the ring in both hands, his dark eyes blazing with a fearful avidness.

"My Ring!" he whispered in terrible exultation. "My power!"

How long he crouched over the baleful thing, motionless as a statue, drinking the evil aura of it into his dark soul, not even the Stygian knew. When he shook himself from his revery and drew back his mind from the nighted abysses where it had been questing, the moon was rising, casting long shadows across the smooth marble back of the garden-seat, at the foot of which sprawled the darker shadow which had been the lord of Attalus.

"No more, Ascalante, no more!" whispered the Stygian, and his eyes burned red as a vampire's in the gloom. Stooping, he cupped a handful of congealing blood from the sluggish pool in which his victim sprawled, and rubbed it in the copper serpent's eyes until the yellow sparks were covered by a crimson mask.

"Blind your eyes, mystic serpent," he chanted in a blood-freezing whisper. "Blind your eyes to the moonlight and open them on darker gulfs! What do you see, oh serpent of Set? Whom do you call from the gulfs of the Night? Whose shadow falls on the waning Light? Call him to me, oh serpent of Set!"

Stroking the scales with a peculiar circular motion of his fingers, a motion which always carried the fingers back to their starting place, his voice sank still lower as he whispered dark names and grisly incantations forgotten the world over save in the grim hinterlands of dark Stygia, where monstrous shapes move in the dusk of the tombs.

There was a movement in the air about him, such a swirl as is made in water when some creature rises to the surface. A nameless, freezing wind blew on him briefly, as if from an opened Door. Thoth felt a presence at his back, but he did not look about. He kept his eyes fixed on the moonlit space of marble, on which a tenuous shadow hovered. As he continued his whispered incantations, this shadow grew in size and clarity, until it stood out distinct and horrific. Its outline was not unlike that of a gigantic baboon, but no such baboon ever walked the earth, not even in Stygia. Still Thoth did not look, but drawing from his girdle a sandal of his master?always carried in the dim hope that he might be able to put it to such use?he cast it behind him.

"Know it well, slave of the Ring!" he exclaimed. "Find him who wore it and destroy him! Look into his eyes and blast his soul, before you tear out his throat! Kill him! Aye," in a blind burst of passion, "and all with him!"

Etched on the moonlit wall Thoth saw the horror lower its misshapen head and take the scent like some hideous hound. Then the grisly head was thrown back and the thing wheeled and was gone like a wind through the trees. The Stygian flung up his arms in maddened exultation, and his teeth and eyes gleamed in the moonlight.

A soldier on guard without the walls yelled in startled horror as a great loping black shadow with flaming eyes cleared the wall and swept by him with a swirling rush of wind. But it was gone so swiftly that the bewildered warrior was left wondering whether it had been a dream or a hallucination.

Chapter III Concludes the Story Next Week

HOUDINI Magazine's Drac Pack I | 12 Underground Artists, One HOUDINI Exclusive Bundle

Date: 2025-07-11

This summer? HOUDINI Magazine is blowing the fuck up. We went from averaging 1,000 weekly readers to 30,000. Thirty thousand. And that's just the average. Some weeks? We're hitting numbers that feel straight-up unreal. It's safe to say we have something special with HOUDINI Magazine, and these artists all agree.

We've got a dozen artists—highly talented zinesters, painters, writers, digital creators, musicians, people who are with the shits. We didn't go looking. They found us. They came correct. And they gave us 12 highly curated projects. 12 full pieces. 12 bricks through a Starbucks window. And we said, yeah, that's a Dracula pack. That's a Drac Pack. Drac Pack.

This is what HOUDINI Magazine is all about. Making the space to push real underground art made by real people facing real struggle in late stage capitalism. We don't need the algorithm, we are the underground.

Pick up a Drac Pack to keep the underground alive. Money made from the Drac Pack goes directly to supporting HOUDINI Magazine's continued growth.

All Drac Packs are Free for Dracula Tier Patreon Subscribers

ARTISTS FEATURED: 11

Interactives: Is it Fent? (HOUDINI Magazine Exclusive) | OXY The Panopticon | Salty P. Slug Fleisch Larp | Mindape

Music: Scrape Tape EP | Gough Clown Rave Set | Nullifeye Clown Rave Set | DJ Sea DEMO | Loren Cass

Drac Pack Exclusives

LARDHEAD Street Art Pack (40+ street art images, submitted by HOUDINI Magazine readers)

Drac Pack Liner Notes Compiled From Each Artist

Emily Dickenson - I Felt a Funeral in my Brain Zine

2 Drac Pack Exclusive HOUDINI Printable Posters

Thanks for supporting underground non-algorithmic culture.

Learning to Love Your Art by Making

Date: 2025-07-12

Written by

Paige Leggett and the cast of Critique

@paigeleggett383

Photography by

Natalia House

@wis_natcoon.art

Support Indie Films Critique on Boosted

Heya guys! Art Director here from the film "Critique", my name is Paige Leggett, and we are asking for your support to help us make films you love, and films that celebrate the artistic process. Any money would be appreciated!

Introduction of myself and my practice?

Ko Paige Leggett toku ingoa, and I am a student and practising painter for the collective 'The Heratics'. My medium is primarily oil paints on paper. These media and modes allow me to speak to the conversational nature of painting. This is also why I love film and short film as a medium, as it inherently speaks to the nature of human storytelling, myths and legends. As someone who works to talk about the interview process and storytelling being linked, I am interested in the representation of these people being painted and shown through artistic media. Yet this was not always my practice and only came to be over a process of losing myself in hating what I was doing. This happened due to my not being mentally positioned correctly for making, as well as not being given the right support from the artistic intuition, which led to this negative feedback loop of unhelpful 'critique' in my work. I had to reset to remember what I love about art... Which is that it's a mode of communication and a way to express incredibly complex emotions without a word spoken.

My relationship to this film and what I'm doing in the process of making it?

My relationship to this project is through my art collective, the Heratrics{collective} and my friend and director of this film, Maggie Shore. I have been doing my BFA and now going into my MFA, and with the collective starting to make wind, we were asked to paint the piece for the short film "Critique". This project is one that I took on due to my connection to struggling to love the work I made in my 3rd year of the BFA, in which I hated what I made to the point that I destroyed one of my works, and later brought it back. In total, it was an eye-opening experience, where I had to reset and rethink how I make and process my own work and art practice so that I could make art that better represents me, as well as mahi that is more stimulating, which came from understanding the importance of practice being an ongoing process of understanding oneself.

Overview of the film

The film "Critique" is a short film about an artist struggling to love her work as she violently paints herself into what she perceives as a place from which the work will not recover. Through this process of emotional and anxiety-filled painting, a masterpiece has been created. Yet she struggles to see the beauty in her work, believing it to be a failure. But maybe quiet eyes will see what she can not. A mixed-media production, "Critique" delves into the experimentation of blending fine art and cinema. Rotoscope animation still by Maggie Shore I believe that this film is a very real and honest experience for a lot of artists, myself included. When we are blinded by the idea of perfection, we don't see the beauty in imperfection, or what we perceive to be imperfection. This makes this film, in particular, a raw expression of the artistic process.

Pushing through hating your work

In my 3rd year of the Fine Arts program, I struggled with a set of self-portraits on opaque surfaces, which led to this negative feedback loop where my work was conceptually too difficult as well as technically impossible. Yet due to my stubbornness and pride surrounding painting, and my insecurity about my skill and needing validation, I wouldn't give myself any leeway with my work. Thus making my work less thought out and creating a product that I hated. In the end, the whole year led to a body of work that better reflected my struggling mental health as I worked through medical issues, poor time management and lack of a support system, primarily due to late-stage capitalism making these necessities to recover as luxuries.

The block was a slog, and it often will be for most artists. But in my belief, I do think that we as artists who struggle to make good work and works we are proud of, need to keep pushing, as you often are on the cusp of a series of works that you will learn to love and for that your work will elevate itself. Also, remember art is about connection, with the audience, and with other practitioners, and through this, we as artists learn and grow.

Resetting and refreshing

After this push that I went through, I found myself making art for the sake of just trying something and not really caring about the outcome, as it wasn't graded or something I needed to hold dear. Resetting for me was taking time to work on myself and not pushing myself to pull super long hours in the studio, other than when I want to pull those hours. As well as remember that even though this is my career, not to take it too seriously and that there is more to life than said career, even when it comes to the arts.

Interviewing some of the cast and crew of Critique

With the emphasis on how important community is in the art world and with us being creators together, I felt it would be appropriate for you all as readers to get a look at the film crew and each of their practices. A full article (link here) will be available for those who donate to Boosted, on BTS and info on my time with the crew, as well as their full interviews. So here is a small selection of messages from those interviews. Hope you enjoy it.

Paige Leggett What is your name? -Arlo Andrew -Matthew Kelly -Cassius Snow (No relation to the President of Panem) -My name is D'Artagnan -Natalia House -Ilona Simpson -Maggie Shore -Alex Lascelles Davis

Paige Leeggtt What is your practice? Matthew Kelly Poetry Cassius Snow I am a Photographer and Filmmaker. But storytelling is probably the most apt description. Driven by a desire to create work that is both visually compelling and emotionally resonant. Natalia House My practice is based in photography, collage, and painting. I want to put out work into the world that feels authentic to me and the things I am inspired by. I also wanted to create art that disturbs minds and raises questions. My favourite piece thus far has been my grotesque wall collage titled "Hell's Radio", and I love it because of the meaning behind it and where the idea spawned from; it was inspired by my love of horror movies and specifically feminine horror and body horror. D'Artagnan Gould I'm DOP for this shoot. Ilona simpson Mix media painting with acrylic, paint pens and pastels- with some textile incorporation as well as photography and acting Maggie shore A filmmaker, painter and artist. I love writing, creating stories and finding fun ways to bring them to life. Alexander Davis Film & TV Producer

Paige Leeggtt What's the best piece you have made? And why? Arlo Andrew I am incredibly proud of the lighting in Fairy Bread. I think it's my best work so far. We (shoutout DP @jcksn.brela) really made great use of what we had and produced some awesome results. Matthew Kelly I've considered my poem 'Bravery' to be my best work for a while. It's the most meaningful poem I've written, for myself, so I'm certainly biased. Critically speaking, it flows well and has some powerful imagery which is both easy to understand and emotive. Maggie Shore I have multiple favourite pieces across mediums. 'Critique' hopes to be my 'best' work yet, with all the knowledge gained previously creating and the amazing crew on board of this project. Alexander Davis Sheepskin. It's a psychological short film highlighting the darker aspects of hospitality. It was at a luxury lodge, and the crew all stayed on site. And why? It is where I learnt that leading with human nature and empathy will not only create the best vibes on set, but the team will perform at a high level. Empathy and love are the true keys to producing.

Paige Leeggtt And what do you want to achieve with that making? Ilona Simpson Through my creations, I want to tell stories, evoke emotion and connect people. A large part of my practice and motivation is to create works that people can relate to and feel seen by. I want to be provocative and express life seen through multiple perspectives. Alexander Davis In my role, problem-solving is the main thing I do, and using that in a creative space with lots of variables is just so much fun. Communication and team inclusion is how I go about this most of the time, if I can.

Paige Leeggtt What drew you to this film? Cassius Snow Maggie has a very bold and distinctive artistic voice matched with a waterfall of creativity. Being around that energy on set is very inspiring and encouraging, so when I was asked, I of course said yes before even reading the script! Arlo Andrew The people. These guys are an awesome team, and I'm super excited to work with them again. Ilona simpson I love to act, and I've had this experience before Maggie shore In creating this film, I want to explore not only how fine art and other interdisciplinary techniques can inform film, but also the connective relationship to art between the practitioner and audience. I have heard many artists critique their work very harshly, whilst I have thought it to be beautiful or well-made, and I have been that critical artist. I think it's important to be kind to our work, to learn, to grow and to continue trying to create things that connect us as humans. Alexander Davis Director Maggie has such a uniquely creative mind, and having worked with her on two other short films before this, as soon as I heard it, it was a no-brainer. Aside from that, it was the message that spoke to me. All of us creatives struggle to accept something as perfect - our perspectives change if it's our creation, and sometimes it seems never to meet our expectations. Highlighting that to the public as well as showing artists that we see and understand, you made me just have to be a part of this.

Paige Leeggtt Where did your love of art come from? Natalia House My love of art came from my love of media like movies and music, my childhood, and my family, as we are all creatively gifted in different areas. The thing I would say to the people reading this...slow down. Really take the time to conserve your energy and remember that life doesn't need to be rushed. Everyone says to seize the day and make the most of your time, and you can, but also remember to be present in the moment. Be mindful. We are human beings, not human beings, so it's okay not to have the answer all the time. And be kind to yourself. I personally really struggle with my mental health, and as an artist, that can be both debilitating and wonderfully beneficial to my art-making process. It presents both challenges and inspirations to my work and who I am as a person. As quoted by Banksy, "I just want to make the world a better-looking place." Maggie shore My love of art has been a lifelong journey. My siblings are all following their own creative pursuits, and the arts have always been an important part of my life. I have always been drawn to music, art, poetry and film. I believe it helps explain the human condition and can make us feel a little less lonely in this big world. Alexander Davis When my parents divorced, my dad had us kids just for the weekends for a while, and there was something we did that became a sort of tradition. Every Friday, we would go to Video Easy, get a bunch of DVDs, set up mattresses in the lounge and camp out over the weekend watching movies. This is where my love for the screen arts sprouted.

Paige Leeggtt What would you like readers to know as a practising artist, and what challenges do you face as an artist? D'Artagnan Gould It can be easy to fall out of love with creating when just chasing the money side of things. It's important to find balance and continue working on projects that inspire you as an artist. Maggie shore As a practising artist, it can be scary starting out! But all we can do is remember to be kind, be open and learn. It is better to make something 'bad' and develop your skills, than nothing at all. Find those interests, develop them and continue trying. Your critiques are there to help you advance as a creative, not to kill your spark. Alexander Davis Acceptance - accepting what we've made is great, because as a creative, you want everyone to like it. But you gotta accept that everyone's different and not everything speaks to everyone. Accept that there are things you can't control - you can only control your own feelings about it. You made it, you did great, and whatever happens will happen. All is good

Paige Leeggtt Leave us with a line of wisdom or a quote about art. Arlo Andrew "People confuse 'pretty' with good cinematography" - Roger Deakins Matthew Kelly - "to point yourself in the direction of an art form you want to do, and start, however good or bad you feel you are. Trust that simply the desire to do it, in the long run, will be enough to see you to making something you will love and feel proud of... probably a lot sooner than you'd think, if not as soon as you'd hope. Speaking from experience, once you've made one piece (poem, illustration etc etc) that makes you feel good, the next generally comes quite soon after." - Unknown Source

Conclusion

I hope that, through hearing my story and why I am so personally invested in this film and the vision of Maggie's mahi. Is this experience of struggling to love your art, is just a fleeting moment in the whole process of being an artist? Without these big emotions and passion that we feel as creatives then we would never be the effective communicators of the emotion and beauty that we see in the world around us. We are called to be artists not because it is easy, but because we offer reflection to culture and hope to those after us. To those in this space currently, I see you, and you are strong because you care for your community. So use that love you have for your community back to yourself and remember you are human, you will make work that you don't love, and use those experiences to reset and make for making sake, we do this because we love it.

So help us do what we love and donate to this film production, so the arts from small and independent artists get the attention we deserve, you would be funding our careers and the continuation of our love of art itself.

THE RUNDOWN: Soulseek

Date: 2025-07-14

The rundown to SoulSeek? You've probably never heard of SoulSeek. Well, if you're a HOUDINI Magazine reader, or a KWSX Radio listener, you might be in that weird space where you've had somebody like me go, "Oh, do you use SoulSeek?" You're like, what are they talking about? Honey, you're still using YouTube to MP3 to get your DJ tracks. You're using the Deezer downloader. And you're looking for the rare Crystal Castles remix, it's no where to be found. But guess what? That motherfucker is on SoulSeek.

Just what the hell is SoulSeek? Is it a new dating app designed to micro-exploit your insecurities while commidifying your personhood? NO! It's a peer-to-peer file-sharing network operating way, way down in the depths of the underground. We're talking deep beneath the surface, deep in the mantle, where mainstream platforms never venture. Honestly, sharing this feels risky–like the moment someone makes a TikTok about it, the whole operation could be ruined.

But I know there are people who genuinely need this. So, for those select few, here's a quick step-by-step guide to getting started with SoulSeek, and what to watch out for.

Getting Started — Step-by-Step

1. Download SoulSeek Go to: https://www.slsknet.org/ Choose the version for your OS. SoulseekQt is the most current and stable version for Windows. For Linux, use Nicotine+. It runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

2. Install It Create a username and password. Don't overthink it.

3. Set Your Shared Folder Go to Options > File Sharing. Choose a folder (or folders) to share. You must share to gain access to good stuff. No one respects a leech. Share full albums. Share vinyl rips. Share oddities. That's your currency. It's DJs helping DJs DJ.

4. Search Top right corner: the search bar. Type artist names, album titles, track names, catalog numbers. Don't just download one song. Check what else that user has. Right-click > "Browse user's files."

5. Downloads & Queues Right-click a file and hit "Download." Some files download instantly. Some queue. That's normal. Be patient. Pay attention to the file quality and size. Do you really need FLAC? or is MP3 enough?

6. Building Your Network Add users you like to your "User List." These are your traders, your plug, your lifeline. DM people, join chatrooms. Create sharing groups.

7. Etiquette Don't message users begging. Don't share your Downloads folder. Share your own stash of tracks. Keep your filenames clean. Tag your files right. Respect the archives.

8. Port Forwarding Modern versions don't require manual port forwarding, but if you're having issues: Go to Options > General > Port Settings. Use a tool like https://www.yougetsignal.com/tools/open-ports/ to check. Forward the port in your router if needed. Most won't need this step in 2025.

9. Digging Tips Use wildcards: artist* finds all files that begin with that name. Search filetypes: type .flac or .ape or .mp3 to filter. Try alternate spellings and misspellings. While designed for music, you can find other things here too.

10. Protect The Temple Don't post about SoulSeek on TikTok. Do gatekeep. Don't piss in the pool. This shit is only possible because it's so deep in the underground.

You don't "stream" on SoulSeek. You dig. You share. You discover full discographies, unreleased demos, rare bootlegs, deleted Bandcamp tapes, cassette rips, out-of-print Japanese-only CDs, .ZIPs named things like "2003 DJ Set NYC (RARE)." It's the kind of place you'll get random DMs from unknown bands, DJs and even internet radio stations, telling you to peep their product.It's not for everyone. It's for freaks, diggers, archivists, and ghosts. Respect it, and it will change the way you relate to music forever. This is the best way to get new music, it's one of the best ways to share your own music. Homie, it's better to be pirated and played than never purchased and never heard. Your band's music, your weird avant garde noise tracks, your rare cassette rips, hell even those manga scans you did back in the day. The people of Soulseek want access. So, will you join the last bastion of true tape trading culture?

They've Been Gaslighting Us | Patreon Update

Date: 2025-07-13

They've been gaslighting us.

Not just about this recession, scratch that, depression. The last one—2008—hit when most of us were in middle school. Fifth grade. Seventh grade. Our parents lost jobs. Our neighborhoods decayed. Our schools shut down the art programs. The era of government grants is long dead. The economy took a shit—and it never recovered. They just moved the goalposts. They pumped your head full of bootstrap lies and told you to major in STEM. They told you to hustle. They told you everything was fine. But it's not. It never was.

That's why we named our pulp imprint The Gaslight Chronicles. Because that's where we live. Gaslight world. Nothing makes sense, and the people in charge want you to feel crazy for noticing that the economy is effectively Great Depression levels of cooked. They want you to believe you can hustle, lock-in, and grindset your way towards the lifestyle of the exploiter.

So we at HOUDINI Magazine? We'll tell it straight.

We know everybody's broke.

We know the number of unhoused people is underreported.

We know some of you are reading this from a fucking tent.

We know some of you have skipped meals this week.

We know some of you are broke as hell—and chances are, you're doing just as bad as us.

That's why we've reoriented the Patreon so that the Penny Dreadful Tier is the primary tier.

What does that mean?

You get the software.

You get the Anti-Style Blogging and Magazines Framework.

You get the Rack-O-Matic.

You get the Consciousness Webstream.

The tools and code that make this magazine possible.

That's a $30 value—yours for a buck. Just for backing the underground.

We're unlocking everything:

Drac packs.

Exclusive zines.

Soon: music releases through Patreon.

10,000 readers a week. If 5% dropped a dollar, this becomes sustainable. This becomes movement, not burnout. A dollar isn't support—it's participation.

The vision: Build a magazine, redistribute resources to those who need it. This has not, and will never be about me personally making 140k a month like some of these so called 'left' podcasters and media moguls. The has always been to build infastructure for artists, creatives and those struggling directly against late stage capitalism. It's not about the money, it's about the movement. It's not about the money, it's about the message. We believe that you are the sum of your actions, not the ideological label you give yourself. You can preach leftism all day, but if your money, your work, your actions don't align, what are you but another capitalist?

Some will say "communism/anarchism isn't a cult of poverty, we have every right to stack our bag". But here's what I ask myself: What would the Black Panther Party do with 140k a month on Patreon? What would they do with those resources? You'll quickly realize that we, the working class, have been bamboozled by these media types. You cannot represent the working class while making millions. Especially if the bulk of that money comes from the working class via monthly patreon donations. Many of these folks aren't transparent, don't make their numbers available, and sure as hell don't want you thinking about them as what they are, leeches on the left.

We pledge to use any money we make on this magazine to support real people in real struggle. We vow to keep our lifestyles the same. No LA mansions, no high fashion flexing, just money being put to work. If the left is to build cultural power, and I mean real cultural power, not gatekept by the algo-masters and Brooklynite failsons, then we need to embrace our obligation to do the hard work.

And here's the thing—with the zines on the Patreon, with the Anti-Style Framework, with the rack-o-matic, and a little bit of hustle, you can make cash too. Every zine I sell at a con or an event? You can print it out and do the same. Table with it. Trade with it. Sell it. Rework it. Whatever gets you fed.

This is a toolkit. This is mutual aid. This is our way of saying: We're all in this together. Let's get some fucking money together. You help me, I help you.

JOIN THE HOUDINI MAGAZINE PATREON NOW

//DNGN// Conan the Barbarian | The Phoenix on the Sword Chapter III

Date: 2025-07-15

When I was a fighting-man, the kettle-drums they beat; The people scattered gold-dust before my horse's feet; But now I am a great king, the people hound my track. With poison in my wine-cup, and daggers at my back. -The Road of Kings

THE ROOM was large and ornate, with rich tapestries on the polished panelled walls, deep rugs on the ivory floor, and with the lofty ceiling adorned with intricate carvings and silver scrollwork. Behind an ivory, gold- inlaid writing-table sat a man whose broad shoulders and sun-browned skin seemed out of place among those luxuriant surroundings. He seemed more a part of the sun and winds and high places of the outlands. His slightest movement spoke of steel-spring muscles knit to a keen brain with the co-ordination of a born fighting-man. There was nothing deliberate or measured about his actions. Either he was perfectly at rest?still as a bronze statue?or else he was in motion, not with the jerky quickness of over-tense nerves, but with a cat-like speed that blurred the sight which tried to follow him.

His garments were of rich fabric, but simply made. He wore no ring or ornaments, and his square-cut black mane was confined merely by a cloth-of- silver band about his head.

Now he laid down the golden stylus with which he had been laboriously scrawling on waxed papyrus, rested his chin on his fist, and fixed his smoldering blue eyes enviously on the man who stood before him. This person was occupied in his own affairs at the moment, for he was taking up the laces of his gold-chased armor, and abstractedly whistling?a rather unconventional performance, considering that he was in the presence of a king.

"Prospero," said the man at the table, "these matters of statecraft weary me as all the fighting I have done never did."

"All part of the game, Conan," answered the dark-eyed Poitainian. "You are king?you must play the part."

"I wish I might ride with you to Nemedia," said Conan enviously. "It seems ages since I had a horse between my knees?but Publius says that affairs in the city require my presence. Curse him!

"When I overthrew the old dynasty," he continued, speaking with the easy familiarity which existed only between the Poitainian and himself, "it was easy enough, though it seemed bitter hard at the time. Looking back now over the wild path I followed, all those days of toil, intrigue, slaughter and tribulation seem like a dream.

"I did not dream far enough, Prospero. When King Numedides lay dead at my feet and I tore the crown from his gory head and set it on my own, I had reached the ultimate border of my dreams. I had prepared myself to take the crown, not to hold it. In the old free days all I wanted was a sharp sword and a straight path to my enemies. Now no paths are straight and my sword is useless.

"When I overthrew Numedides, then I was the Liberator?now they spit at my shadow. They have put a statue of that swine in the temple of Mitra, and people go and wail before it, hailing it as the holy effigy of a saintly monarch who was done to death by a red-handed barbarian. When I led her armies to victory as a mercenary, Aquilonia overlooked the fact that I was a foreigner, but now she can not forgive me.

"Now in Mitra's temple there come to burn incense to Numedides' memory, men whom his hangmen maimed and blinded, men whose sons died in his dungeons, whose wives and daughters were dragged into his seraglio. The fickle fools!"

"Rinaldo is largely responsible," answered Prospero, drawing up his sword- belt another notch. "He sings songs that make men mad. Hang him in his jester's garb to the highest tower in the city. Let him make rimes for the vultures."

Conan shook his lion head. "No, Prospero, he's beyond my reach. A great poet is greater than any king. His songs are mightier than my scepter; for he has near ripped the heart from my breast when he chose to sing for me. I shall die and be forgotten, but Rinaldo's songs will live for ever.

"No, Prospero," the king continued, a somber look of doubt shadowing his eyes, "there is something hidden, some undercurrent of which we are not aware. I sense it as in my youth I sensed the tiger hidden in the tall grass. There is a nameless unrest throughout the kingdom. I am like a hunter who crouches by his small fire amid the forest, and hears stealthy feet padding in the darkness, and almost sees the glimmer of burning eyes. If I could but come to grips with something tangible, that I could cleave with my sword! I tell you, it's not by chance that the Picts have of late so fiercely assailed the frontiers, so that the Bossonians have called for aid to beat them back. I should have ridden with the troops."

"Publius feared a plot to trap and slay you beyond the frontier," replied Prospero, smoothing his silken surcoat over his shining mail, and admiring his tall lithe figure in a silver mirror. "That's why he urged you to remain in the city. These doubts are born of your barbarian instincts. Let the people snarl! The mercenaries are ours, and the Black Dragons, and every rogue in Poitain swears by you. Your only danger is assassination, and that's impossible, with men of the imperial troops guarding you day and night. What are you working at there?"

"A map," Conan answered with pride. "The maps of the court show well the countries of south, east and west, but in the north they are vague and faulty. I am adding the northern lands myself. Here is Cimmeria, where I was born. And?"

"Asgard and Vanaheim," Prospero scanned the map. "By Mitra, I had almost believed those countries to have been fabulous."

Conan grinned savagely, involuntarily touching the scars on his dark face. "You had known otherwise, had you spent your youth on the northern frontiers of Cimmeria! Asgard lies to the north, and Vanaheim to the northwest of Cimmeria, and there is continual war along the borders."

"What manner of men are these northern folk?" asked Prospero.

"Tall and fair and blue-eyed. Their god is Ymir, the frost-giant, and each tribe has its own king. They are wayward and fierce. They fight all day and drink ale and roar their wild songs all night."

"Then I think you are like them," laughed Prospero. "You laugh greatly, drink deep and bellow good songs; though I never saw another Cimmerian who drank aught but water, or who ever laughed, or ever sang save to chant dismal dirges."

"Perhaps it's the land they live in," answered the king. "A gloomier land never was?all of hills, darkly wooded, under skies nearly always gray, with winds moaning drearily down the valleys."

"Little wonder men grow moody there," quoth Prospero with a shrug of his shoulders, thinking of the smiling sun-washed plains and blue lazy rivers of Poitain, Aquilonia's southernmost province.

"They have no hope here or hereafter," answered Conan. "Their gods are Crom and his dark race, who rule over a sunless place of everlasting mist, which is the world of the dead. Mitra! The ways of the Aesir were more to my liking."

"Well," grinned Prospero, "the dark hills of Cimmeria are far behind you. And now I go. I'll quaff a goblet of white Nemedian wine for you at Numa's court."

"Good," grunted the king, "but kiss Numa's dancing-girls for yourself only, lest you involve the states!"

His gusty laughter followed Prospero out of the chamber.

Roblox Rave | Support DJ Sea

Date: 2025-07-15

Join the Discord for More Rave Info // HOSTED BY @407CYBERSPACE

A friend of the magazine, a fellow Dracula, and a seriously solid DJ—DJ Sea (as in the ocean, dolphins, whales, sea turtles...)—is playing a Roblox rave TOMORROW. I had to shout this out because this month's issue is loosely themed "Your Place in Cyberspace." Well, maybe your place in cyberspace is a Roblox rave! Maybe it's a Roblox rave vibing to hard bass, techno, EDM, house mixed by some killer DJs.

So, if you're on Roblox or if you've never experienced a Roblox rave, come show DJ Sea some love! She's a contributor, a friend of the mag, and we're totally here for the Roblox rave concept. We might even throw one ourselves someday—let us know if you're into that kind of thing!

Join our Discord for updates on potential future events, and join the 407 Cyberspace Discord for details on this rave. Yeah!

Be sure to follow DJ Sea on whatever platforms it is you use!

Underground artist? Here's where you need to be posting.

Date: 2025-07-16

Underground artist? Here's where you need to be posting.

1. spacehey.com

What if? Myspace but in a post-COVID world? That's SpaceHey. The userbase definitely skews younger, but those who are active here are active here mainly. Blogs, forums, custom pages, esoteric HTML, and a whole lot of elbow grease. It's a weekend project to get set up here, but cultivating a following here could be a strong play. Myspace was known for its massive catalogue of underground artists. Perhaps SpaceHey can carry that legacy, but only if artists join up. Bonus: Archive.org has a huge catalogue of ancient and semi-lost Myspace tracks. See for yourself what the peak of social media was before Facebook started uploading the RFK brainworm directly into your parents' brains.

2. newgrounds.com

Newgrounds has seen a large revival, in part due to a heavy focus on modernizing the entire experience, and by modernizing? I mean simply improving functionality on all fronts. It's like the opposite of enshittification. Oh yeah, AI slop is outright banned, so that's one big reason a motherfucker wants to be seen on that site, right? I mean, how dogshit is it to appear in a feed and be squished in between two images with that uncanny AI sheen? Don't devalue your own product. Newgrounds has no resolution compression, encourages curation, intentionality, and is used by those in the industry to scout others. Already on Newgrounds? We're looking for a 'scout' to help keep us in the loop—link us to the hot pieces. We also drop occasional tracks, art, and other works by artists in the magazine, so give us a follow.

3. HOUDINI Magazine

That's right. Us, the big dogs in the underground. We're pivoting our Patreon to push powerful culture for the impoverished. That's right—it's a buck to sub to the mag on Patreon, and we're looking to drop albums by bands that fuck with us. A zine with a burned CD-r taped to it, made digital. It's mutual aid in the depression age. Non-algorithmic, our readers, your music, and the growth loop it causes. Shoot us an email: hedorahmusic@gmail.com.

4. freakscene.us

Internet forum? Really? Yes. Very much yes. Freakscene is new to the block, and yes, big dog, this summer, the block is hot. Forums are dead until they aren't, and this seems like a place you'd wanna be establishing a name on early. It really is those things that makes you go, "How can I support this shit, fr?" Yeah, we fuck with the entire concept of Freakscene—use the internet as a tool to grow the local. It's a forum intentionally designed for those trying their damnest to keep the slopmasters from converting every essence of the human experience into a dataset to be fed to their anime-themed daemons. It's a space to link up with other like-minded real heads in real space, via cyberspace.

Notice lack of social media? Not telling you shouldn't be pushing power by gyrating for a TikTok clip, but you don't have to—and the more of us that seek alternatives, the stronger those alternatives become. Are you an artist or a content creator? Are you a TikToker or a guitarist? Are you a painter or a painting-reveal clip maker? You must decide. We did. We at HOUDINI Magazine see ourselves as the prototype, the tip of the spear. Maybe that spear can pierce some of the social media bloat. Maybe that spear can push through the noise and be a signal. These sites? These are armories. This is a call to war for every band, every artist, who's goddamn tired of being told how they can minmax the blackbox of 9/11 screams of dead and dying fucking algorithms. Hit the armory. Grab a spear and get to piercing.

Artposting | Toyen

Date: 2025-07-17

A Selection of Works by Queer Visionary and Surrealist Trailblazer Toyen, as Selected by Mindape

There was a point where painting / photography / etc was like a WINDOW to another realm, a vision. Contemporary art, probably brought to its pinnacle by the NFT stuff, is just the pure transactional — cost model without any of the commitment to a vision. Toyen was a person fiercely committed to the visionary view. Only got commodified and gallerified after their death because they were too dangerous to deal with in real life. I have seen this happen to a lot of radical visionaries. Wait until they are dead, write the art history papers, have the auction, boom, harmless and another money laundering scheme. Meanwhile contemporary art today is basically LinkedIn with attachments. Nobody even pretends its about vision anymore, it's literally just networking and ironic "conceptual" posturing. —Mindape

1936 Message of the Forest

1946 Safes

1961 Midnight, the Emblazoned Hour

1966 Paravent

Why Lakeland Florida? | The Reason for Relocation

Date: 2025-07-18

Why the fuck do you move to Florida? Are you out of your mind? Why did you move to Florida? You know Florida is like a war zone, right? They just take people off the streets in Florida. You can't be queer in Florida. And if I went to Florida, they'd hate crime me.

I've heard a lot of things from a lot of people, from a lot of friends of mine. Why would I move to a relatively small town in Florida? Lakeland, Florida only has about 120,000 people in its population. In comparison, the city of Seattle has about 3.5 million people. So it's a significant size jump.

I bring up Seattle because that was one of the places I was thinking about moving to. I have some friends who run a game dev studio, and I've got some fucking homies out there who play a lot of Yu-Gi-Oh!. I knew that if I moved out there, I'd be able to find my folks, right? Because it really only takes knowing one person in a city to network and find people and be among your community.

Seattle was definitely on the table. So was Philadelphia. I have a friend who is now helping the magazine by providing a safe place for trans people to relocate—trans people who are maybe living in places like Arkansas, lacking healthcare. Through the network we've built with the magazine, she's helping those people relocate and get healthcare. That's very beautiful and powerful. But I didn't feel like Philadelphia was right for me. And to be fair, she also lived about 30 minutes outside of the city, so that was another factor.

Seattle and Philly were the two other choices I had in mind. And most people, when given those options compared to a place called Lakeland, Florida—which they've almost certainly never heard of—are going to say, "What the hell? Why would you pick Florida?"

Because here's the thing: This was a planned move. The exact day and timing? Maybe not so well planned. You can read the updates on my GoFundMe to see how much of a struggle relocating has been. But I'm starting to get more stabilized, more settled, and I'm feeling more assimilated into the community here. I've met some good friends, and I've met friends they already had.

The thing with a place like Lakeland, Florida—with a place like Polk County—is the repression is real. The repression is tangible. The repression is on the books. There are laws. There are seldom allies to be found in the halls of power. There are active attacks through those halls of power on our communities and our spaces. I know what it is to feel that repression, to internalize it, to be raised in it, and when I go to these Drag events, that's my way of living through someone who has been able to buck that repression better than I.

What I do with HOUDINI Magazine is based on the belief that our platform can make space to build infrastructure that supports the people who need it most. When I say I have someone in Philadelphia who can help you relocate because you don't get healthcare in Arkansas—and I've met both of those people through the magazine—that's what I mean by infrastructure. That's what I mean by networking.

Because here's the thing: There are queer people who live in Florida. There are people actively facing repression, facing the brutality of the state, who can't get their healthcare, who have to go through backchannel means or get it mailed in from a place like Seattle. Do those people have the option to relocate? Some of them. But does everyone? No.

If you were born and raised in a place, and that's your home, and you have a queer community, is the best thing you can do to just relocate when the going gets tough? To say, "I'm out, I'm dipping"? That doesn't bode well for real solidarity. It doesn't bode well for the people who don't have the financial, familial, or infrastructural means to move.

The repression in a place like this makes the underground scene that much more valid, that much more important. When there's an open drag night at the venue I frequent, the police have laws on the books that could let them come and bust that shit up. The repression can get real fucking quick—and in some instances, it already has.

That means supporting those spaces is that much more important. I want this magazine to serve that purpose—to serve the communities in the places that need it most.

In Seattle, there's already a duplicity of infrastructure for queer people. Yes, it's still a neoliberal hotspot—by no means some anarchist paradise. But Seattle is the city where we send people from Arkansas. Seattle is the city where we send people from Lakeland who are facing family issues, who need support, who need healthcare, who need to reconfigure to be themselves.

For that network to be built, someone has to be in the heart of the beast. Moving to Lakeland was an intentional play.

And there are other reasons too. I believe the nature of this city—being the fastest-growing in Florida, being so repressive, having this level of friction—breeds a sense of artistic creativity and meaning you might not get elsewhere. Throughout history, cities have popped off through the right combination of people, timing, infrastructure, and mindset. New art forms are born. New genres emerge.

Bristol, UK, in the 1990s—a city not much bigger than Lakeland. The right scene, the right people, the right timing, the right influence, the right network. Next thing you know, you've got trip-hop—a genre that still sees influence today. Portishead, Massive Attack, Tricky, to name a few.

Lakeland has that potential, in my opinion—especially because of the friction, especially because of the issues.

I want HOUDINI Magazine to be a tool of infrastructure. I want it to be something anyone can submit to, participate in, and be part of a collective-oriented experience. I want it to be a tool that builds networks. And I believe those networks are more important here than they would be in Philadelphia or Seattle.

Because of the repression. Because of the aging population here—Florida is retirement central. There's a generational gap between the crystalized fascist conservatism and the liberation-oriented anarcho-communist politics I pursue.

You talk to someone who's 20? They get it—especially in the spots I hang out at. You talk to the Uber driver who's 65? He doesn't get it. But that Uber driver is no less a member of the working class than the 20-something.

Figuring out how to reach the aging population in a place where they outnumber the youth is a challenge that needs to be confronted. At the very least, the lessons we learn can be applied on a more national front. Because, again, the generational gap is real—but it's not purely generational. Ron DeSantis is a millennial. Many peers my age love Andrew Tate.

The friction is important to me. The fact that a place like this could very well be shut down is important to me. The fact that there's an open drag night that's been scraped together—really scraped off the fucking concrete they've laid to smooth us down, to break us down—and these events still persist? That means the powers that be haven't smothered us out yet.

What you should take from this is that the queer community here is more militant, more radicalized, and more understanding of the stakes.

I moved to Florida for a variety of reasons. But primarily, I moved here because there is friction. And the magazine exists at its best in the friction. It exists at its best as a tool for other oppressed individuals to contribute, to be part of a collective forum, to be spoken through.

If you're experiencing the heart of the beast, the heart of the oppression, and you want to speak about it, I want our magazine to be where you go.

Where are the most oppressed people? Where is it the most real? Where are they building "Alligator Auschwitz"? They're building it in Florida—not far from where I'm at right now. That's what makes this state so important.

Lakeland is the fastest-growing city in Florida. It will almost certainly become a gentrifier hotspot. In fact, I could very well be one of those gentrifiers—the first wave. That's something I have to sit with. Despite my own struggles, I'm a transplant moving into a community that maybe isn't my own. That's something I have to reckon with.

But for me, moving to Lakeland was as simple as this: I know what we're doing with HOUDINI Magazine is powerful. Reach is important. And I know it's most important that we amplify the voices of the most oppressed, the most disenfranchised.

What better place to protect, amplify, and put your money where your mouth is than queer spaces in South Central Florida?

Lakeland exists between Tampa and Orlando. So while you might think I only have access to this one town, I actually have access to two major metropolitan areas. That's a win. That's by design. That's intentional.

Focusing solely on places that are already progressive is a losing strategy. There are more people in the working class than just LA, just New York, just Seattle, just Portland. There are more voices in this country that need to be heard.

And some of those people are in Lakeland, fucking Florida.

So I moved here with the hope and intention that my magazine could be part of the local ecosystem—to benefit the people who need it most. Because goddamn it, if I know someone who can help you relocate and get healthcare, if I can help one person get out of oppression, get out of the pit? Then we've done something worthwhile.

Just that one person having a better shot—that's why I moved to Lakeland. Because here, the friction is real. And where there's friction, there's fire.

On Planned Obsolescence | by M.M.F.

Date: 2025-07-20

M.M.F.

The postmodern break from the modernist "tenet" of the "firm distinction" between high art and consumerism does not also represent, as Linda Hutcheon argues, the triumph of the "marginal," the "different," the other. To render the work of art as a surface for commentary, criticism, reappropriation and nothing else is to situate both artist and audience in a space of no friction. If there is nothing outside of the text, there is nothing we make contact with except for texts. The subaltern cannot speak if no speaker is recognized as subaltern. If one cannot participate in collective movements when they put pen to paper or brush to canvas, so too do they lose membership in categories of social identification in their everyday lives. In our present moment of "late-capitalist individualism," Mattie Colquhoun writes, we have "left such things behind" in the twentieth century where they are thought to belong. Fredric Jameson thus presents the following observations on the harmony between the postmodern condition and what is called "consumer society," or more to the point, a society in which individuals think of themselves as consumers before anything else:

Marxists and non-Marxists alike have come around to the general feeling that at some point following World War Two a new kind of society began to emerge[...] New types of consumption; planned obsolescence; an ever more rapid rhythm of fashion and styling changes; the penetration of advertising, television and the media generally to a hitherto unparalleled degree throughout society; the replacement of the old tension between city and country[...] by the suburb and by universal standardization; the growth of the great networks of superhighways and the arrival of automobile culture—these are some of the features which would seem to mark a radical break with that older pre-war society in which high modernism was still an underground force.

I want to argue in this piece that the consumer protection campaigns of the 1970s served as a bridge between the New Deal postwar welfare state and the neoliberal turn initiated by Reagan and consolidated by Clinton, resulting in the reality of postmodernism that would permeate every area of Western culture for years to come. American liberalism had been premised on the ability of that welfare state to "win the peace" by maintaining consistent economic growth to stave off crisis and class struggle. After the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system and the onset of stagflation, the working class ceased to be a cohesive unit to which a political party could appeal; the status of the consumer was more accessible as a nexus of mass politics. So it came to be that Ralph Nader and Public Citizen commanded popular support in the seventies as Congress passed waves of consumer protection laws: laws that would protect the consumer from being "manipulated, defrauded, and injured" by unsavory business practices. Nader had conservative Republicans in Congress pressing FTC nominees to "become[...] real zealot[s] in terms of consumer affairs." He even hosted an episode of Saturday Night Live. By the time Jimmy Carter took office in 1977 with both houses of Congress under Democratic control, "perfection at last seemed attainable" for the consumer welfare movement. But in the end, it was not meant to be... or was it?

Carter managed to clock in four years as an early neoliberal deregulator, but it was not until the Reagan years that the political meaning of consumer society came into plain view. The Great Communicator nailed the point home to an audience of 80 million Americans: "Are you better off than you were four years ago? Is it easier for you to buy things in the stores than it was four years ago?" Atop a platform of welfare reform and tax cuts for the rich, Reagan was able to appear as more of a consumer crusader than Nader had ever been. Antitrust enforcement virtually disappeared with the proclamation that the Sherman Act was a consumer welfare statute before anything else. Tax cuts were welcomed by those who least stood to benefit from them; the freedom of one to make money, after all, ought to be the freedom of all to make money. And no one batted an eyelash when Reagan crushed the PATCO strike in 1981. The striking air traffic controllers were regarded as "outlaws," while the unions were depicted as "greedy." Just what were these cushy white-collar workers complaining about anyway?

David Harvey defines neoliberalism as a theory of political economy according to which "human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade." This is to collapse the class content of the traditional theory of the postwar managerial state into a single dimension. Economic growth, for Keynes, had been desirable precisely because "there would be more for everyone, rich and poor, labor and business," whereas in the neoliberal picture, there was no fundamental difference between rich and poor or labor and business at all: "people should be available just as consumers and producers, interchangeable cogs who will purchase all of the junk that's produced." A society permeated by such ideological premises is naturally immunized against class solidarity, the thing that, for Marx, was supposed to drive the engine of history. What the hell am I supposed to have in common with my fellow worker? He buys Pepsi. I'm a Coke man.

Indeed, the phenomenon of ideological structures acting as barriers to revolutionary agency proved to be one of the most provocative and contentious problems for Marxist theory in the twenty-first century. Against the dominant currents of so-called Marxist humanism, according to which human subjects are "somehow, in some last instance," the prime movers of social processes, Althusser proposed that the ideological apparatuses of the state were tools for subjective construction: ideology "interpellates" or "hails" the concrete individual subjects, creating the sort of subject it needs in order to reproduce itself. In the case of neoliberalism, as Richard Wolff argues, workers "had to be called to think of[...] themselves and everyone else as free market participants," and not as members of concrete social classes engaged in class struggle: "individual worth [is] measurable above all by one's achieved level of consumption," because one's consumption is "the appropriate reward for their individual contribution to production."

Marxism was supposed to herald the development of a collective subject, the proletariat-for-itself, and for a time, it seemed that the category of "consumer" worked well enough as a stand-in. The struggle of working people could be identified easily enough with a struggle against a corporate culture that sought to liberate itself from accountability to consumers. After all, such liberation entailed collective organization, perhaps even class consciousness, on the part of the capitalists: "boardroom Jacobins," as Perlstein calls them. Surely, the struggle of consumers against such concentrated corporate power could at least stand in for class struggle by proxy. But it was precisely this struggle-by-proxy that was so effortlessly hijacked by the forces of the Right. The individual subject constituted as a consumer could not be counted upon to develop class solidarity in moments where labor unions and welfare recipients were under assault, because the identity of the consumer is individual before anything else: consumption, after all, is something one does as an individual, on the basis of contractual relations with other individuals. This profound shift in political conception was felt just as much on the Left as on the Right. Wolff continues:

Inadvertently, perhaps, the US left generally gave little more than rhetorical lip service to the demand for an end to the exploitative class structure of capitalism. It succumbed to a consumerist ideology in strategies—often justified as "realistic"—that consistently overemphasized raising con-sumption levels[...] It seriously undervalued the power of ideology generally and the importance of the consumerist ideology for US capitalism in particular[...] In its own accommodations to consumerism, the left reinforced the capitalist-sustaining aspects of [the ideological state apparatuses] and thereby frustrated many of its own goals. It did not grasp the need for and necessary scope of a counter-capitalist (and pointedly anti-consumerist) system of values to be fought for[...] as a basic component of its political action.

Wolff's point is that the Left resigned itself to a political program that could no longer testify to the contradictions of capitalist society. It is not just that the Left sidelined revolutionary demands in favor of reform and compromise, but rather that it formulated demands on the basis of a consumerist ideology designed to channel revolutionary energy into its own reproduction. What is a demand for higher wages, after all, if not a demand to be able to consume more? What is a demand for consumer protections if not a demand for better conditions for those who are already well enough off to consume more? Faced with such thorough interpellation as we see in contemporary "consumer society," the old model of class struggle feels like a fever dream. Where could one even start?

While the general public settled into its newfound identity of consumption, the managerial state ballooned, with no less than twenty new agencies created between 1970 and 1979 and a six billion dollar budget to keep them afloat. In 1984, the Supreme Court awarded these agencies the power to interpret the laws that governed them. The sheer size of the new administrative state coupled with the deferential legal environment under Chevron encouraged an "extremely aggressive" Executive Branch, no matter what party was in control of it, since any President would depend heavily on the agencies in order to enact any sort of agenda. The Reaganites were thus able to mount a campaign against regulation with the power of the regulatory state: Reagan could go around a recalcitrant Democratic Congress and relax environmental regulations by simply appointing Anne Gorsuch as the new head of the EPA. This newfound power of the state was met with confusion on a Left already suffering from the failures of 1968 that now found itself defending the "bureaucratic machinery of the modern state" from being "smashed" by the state itself, in an ironic reversal of Lenin's position in The State and Revolution.

As Reagan continued his assault on the labor movement and civilians continued to dislodge their own identities from their class relations, political reality became less like a site of mass participation and more like a finely-tuned product sold to a carefully-curated demographic of customers. Only about half of the country bothered to vote in presidential elections in the eighties and nineties, and by the time Bill Clinton appeared on the scene in a technicolor dreamcoat to rescue the country from Reagan's successor, another 18% had been peeled off by Ross Perot's independent campaign. Two years after that, the Republicans took control of the House in a "landslide for conservatism." 41% of eligible voters showed up for that one, and most of them hadn't even heard of Newt Gingrich's "Contract with America." Cultural positions became more heavily identified with "symbolic forms of political moralizing," because political participation was more about one's behavior as a consumer and less about one's position within the class struggle. Political positions, on the other hand, dissolved into bureaucracy: to be "on the Left" or "on the Right" had more to do with which public figures one would prefer to have in charge of the "state machinery," which in turn amounted to little more than which one of them one would like to have a beer with. Postmodernism reigned supreme, and its grip on politics was not going to be dislodged by some dirty hippy uprising in Seattle.

This confusion of the Left appeared within the space of cultural pseudopolitics as a psychological problem: critical consciousness sought to explain its own failures as if they were products of unhealthy minds as opposed to tactical missteps of actually-existing political movements. The activist Left attempted to come to terms with neoliberal austerity as the result of what Mark Fisher called a "deliberately cultivated depression," according to which one's social position was inevitably "their fault and their fault alone," while the academic Left engaged in what Christopher Hitchens described as "competitive solipsism," the "intersectional" discourses that could offer productive analysis on little more than the subtle white supremacist biases in Law and Order or the cop-friendly messaging of Christopher Nolan's Batman trilogy. These were now psychological as opposed to political problems because the radical currents no longer saw themselves as constructing a collective subject of history: critical thought instead turned inwards, focusing on membership of one identity group or another, on self-consciousness of one's own social biases and, ultimately, on what one might do or should do as a would-be "professional manager" of state policy. And yet even these psychological problems were simply taken for granted, in the same way that preferences and utility curves are taken for granted in economic models, as if passed down from on high as facts of nature. To think radically was to think of oneself exactly as the bourgeois economists thought of others: as black boxes with preferences and qualities defined in a vacuum, abstracted from all reference to the tides of history.

In every case, the neoliberal production of subjects appears to us as a transcendental horizon of possible experience. We know that it is going on, we can see that we are indeed interpellated in this way, yet we can never directly encounter the conditions for this interpellation because we are just as much beholden to those same conditions. When we try to imagine a life outside of consumer society, we run into the same sort of problems as when we try to imagine the universe at the moment of the Big Bang, with time and space compressed into an infinitely dense and infinitely hot singular point in an ineffable void of nothingness. Even our attempts to resist end up hopelessly subsumed within the very process we are trying to resist. As Steven Shaviro puts it:

The body of capital is not a particular phenomenon that we encounter at a specific time and place; it is rather the already-given presupposition of whatever phenomenon we do encounter. We cannot experience this capital-body directly, and for itself; yet all our experiences are lodged within it, and can properly be regarded as its effects. The monstrous flesh of capital is the horizon, or the matrix, or the underlying location and container of our experience, as producers or as consumers.

Slavoj Žižek's elaboration of Althusser's Ideologiekritik is particularly useful for translating these matters into concrete terms. In consumer society, he argues, there remains a possibility of a "moment of genuine protest," a possibility that can be glimpsed but not fully realized in, say, the London riots in 2011, in which protesters looted malls and storefronts across the city in a "violent redirection" of "consumerist desire." What was missing there was a materialist account of how these desires come to exist in the first place and, consequently, how they become "caught up" in the "deadly vicious cycle" of "violence and counter-violence" between consumerist desire which cannot be realized "properly" (by actually paying for whatever goods) and the ideological apparatuses which produce such desires that cannot be realized.

Work a standard 9 to 5 and you'll find out real fast what it's like to be caught up in this cycle. In the pilot of Taylor Sheridan's Landman, a series as brutal as it is unapologetic in its recurring depictions of working-class life in a deep red state, Cooper Norris begins a new job as an oil roustabout in Odessa, hoping to work his way up the ladder until he knows everything he needs to know in order to run his own oil company. His supervisor, Armando, invites him to dinner after his first day on the job. He tells Cooper that most of his new co-workers are ex-felons working to earn back the money they lost when they first went in. "It's better if you work for it real hard. That way, nobody can take it away." The next day, Armando is killed in a rig explosion. The episode fades to black as flames give way to smoke. No matter how hard you work for it, it can always be taken away.

Those who claim an authentic anti-establishment position today often find themselves in the same toxic feedback loop as Armando. As soon as you think you've figured out the right way to consume, the way to really get what you want, you run up against the limits of bourgeois society: you loot the mall, or else the mall loots you. But if we understand how we came to see ourselves as consumers first and people second, we might get a better idea of how to develop the opposite sort of collective subjectivity upon which any politics of liberation ultimately depends. If we understand the role we have played in the consolidation of consumerist ideology, whether as overt political agents or simply as normal everyday citizens of bourgeois society, we will be in a better position to pave the way for a more promising political project, a project with one eye to the past and the other to the future, a project that will maintain the revolutionary kernel of the Lefts of generations past while avoiding the pitfalls into which those Lefts fell. This is not to say that there is any "going back," that we might simply hand-wave away our interpellation once the curtain is pulled back. The genesis of the subject cannot be undone any more than a language can be unlearned. But to understand the mechanics of this genesis is to understand the ways in which the subject of consumer society can acquire autonomy from or otherwise "subtract itself" from the cold waters of the capitalist society that produces it. After all, if ideology is produced like a commodity, so too is it produced in order to become obsolete—like a commodity.

Footnotes

[1] Linda Hutcheon, "Postmodernism," in The Routledge Companion to Critical Theory 115, 118 (Simon Malpas & Paul Wake eds., Routledge 2006).

[2] Mattie Colquhoun, Narcissus in Bloom: An Alternative History of the Selfie 69-70 (2023).

[3] Fredric Jameson, "Postmodernism and Consumer Society" (1982), reprinted in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture 111, 124-25 (Hal Foster ed., Bay Press 1983).

[4] Ralph Nader, "The Great American Gyp" (1968), reprinted in The Ralph Nader Reader 235, 236 (Seven Stories Press 2000).

[5] Rick Perlstein, Reaganland: America's Right Turn 1976-1980 199 (2020).

[6] Id. at 202.

[7] Justin Martin, Nader: Crusader, Spoiler, Icon 190 (2002).

[8] H.W. Brands, Reagan: The Life 229-30 (2015).

[9] N.R. Kleinfeld, "The People Who Were PATCO," N.Y. Times, Sept. 28, 1986, at 4, https://www.nytimes.com/1986/09/28/business/the-people-who-were-patco.html.

[10] Glenn Houlihan, "The Legacy of the Crushed 1981 PATCO Strike," Jacobin (Aug. 3, 2021), https://jacobin.com/2021/08/reagan-patco-1981-strike-legacy-air-traffic-controllers-union-public-sector-strikebreaking.

[11] David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism 2 (2005).

[12] Bruce J. Schulman, Lyndon B. Johnson and American Liberalism: A Brief Biography with Documents 39 (St. Martin's Press 2d ed. 2007) (1995).

[13] Noam Chomsky, "Business, Apartheid and Racism," in Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky 88, 89 (Peter R. Mitchell & John Schoeffel eds., Vintage Books 2003).

[14] Stephen A. Resnick and Richard Wolff, "Marxist Epistemology: The Critique of Economic Determinism," 6 Soc. Text 31, 68 (1982).

[15] Louis Althusser, "Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes Towards an Investigation)" (1970), reprinted in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays 127, 173 (Ben Brewster trans., Monthly Rev. Press 2001).

[16] Richard Wolff, "Ideological State Apparatuses, Consumerism, and U.S. Capitalism: Lessons for the Left," 17 Rethinking Marxism 223, 230-31 (2005).

[17] Perlstein, Reaganland, at 188.

[18] Wolff, "Ideological State Apparatuses," at 233-235.

[19] Jodi Dean, "The Neofeudalizing Tendency of Communicative Capitalism," 22 TripleC 197, 197 (2024).

[20] Yanis Varoufakis, Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism 88-91 (2023).

[21] Jodi Dean, "Same as It Ever Was?" New Left Rev.: Sidecar (May 6, 2022), https://newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/same-as-it-ever-was.

[22] Varoufakis, Technofeudalism, at 211.

[23] Valentine Seebart, "From Marx, and Back to Hegel," Cosmonaut (Sept. 1, 2022), https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/09/from-marx-and-back-to-hegel/.

[24] Larry Kramer, "The Decade of the Regulatory Boom," Wash. Post, Dec. 29, 1979, at B3, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/business/1979/12/30/the-decade-of-the-regulatory-boom/1b7732a1-3cbb-474a-9cab-6fc472f0090e/.

[25] Chevron U.S.A., Inc. v. N.R.D.C., 467 U.S. 837 (1984).

[26] Brett M. Kavanaugh, "Fixing Statutory Interpretation," 129 Harv. L. Rev. 2118, 2150 (2016).

[28] V.I. Lenin, The State and Revolution: The Marxist Doctrine of the State and the Tasks of the Proletariat in the Revolution (1918), reprinted in 25 V.I. Lenin Collected Works 381, 431 (Stepan Apresyan & Jim Riordan trans. & eds., Progress Pub. 4th ed. 1974).

[29] Stephen Engelberg and Katharine Q. Seelye, "Gingrich: Man in Spotlight and Organization in Shadow," N.Y. Times, Dec. 18, 1994, at 1, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/12/18/us/gingrich-man-in-spotlight-and-organization-in-shadow.html.

[30] Michael P. McDonald, "The Competitive Problem of Voter Turnout," Brookings (Oct. 31, 2006), https://www.brookings.edu/articles/the-competitive-problem-of-voter-turnout/.

[31] Noam Chomsky, "Turning Point," in Understanding Power, at 363, 367.

[32] Fredric Jameson, "Theories of the Postmodern" (1984), reprinted in The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern 1983-1998 21, 32 (Verso 1998).

[33] Mark Fisher, "Good for Nothing" (2014), reprinted in K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher (2004-2016) 747, 749 (Darren Ambrose ed., Repeater Books 2018).

[34] Christopher Hitchens, Introduction to For the Sake of Argument: Essays and Minority Reports, at 1, 2 (Verso 1993).

[35] Chris Cutrone, "The End of Millennial Marxism," Compact (Jul, 1, 2022), https://www.compactmag.com/article/the-end-of-millennial-marxism/.

[36] Steven Shaviro, "The Body of Capital," Pinocchio Theory (Jun. 20, 2008), http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=641.

[37] Slavoj Žižek, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism 998 (2012).

[38] Id.

LABOR // There is Honor in Dishwashing | By Brian Siwka

Date: 2025-07-22

Brian Sikwa

Spare a thought for the common dishwasher. When one goes into a restaurant, the first thought is of food, it's flavor and it's price and how much is to be consumed, and never of the means by which the food is presented, except to complain that some vessel is impure for the food which is on it. Chefs get TV shows, books, their names on restaurants. Yet what is there for the one who ensures those glamorous chefs' succulent morsels musn't be consumd with bare hands like an animal? Let us examine their case.

The first seemingly simple question is what a dishwasher is. For some people, a dishwasher is a machine one inserts plates into and which spits out clean ones. This is typical of capitalist attempts to erase from the consumers' mind the existence of "unskilled labor." Others imagine a dishwasher somewhat more correctly as a man (they are almost invariably men. Why this is we can only speculate) who by hand washes each dish and utensil in the restaurant. In establishments like a bakery where the only implements which must be washed are the ones for cooking, this might be the case. Not so in any proper restaurant. Well then what is a dishwasher if not these things? We will return to this question.

To understand the work of a restaurant, it might do to imagine the work of a submarine for they are indeed comparable. Uncomfortably close quarters, constant moisture, strict hierarchy, occasional states of panic and chaos, and the constant threat of a largely unseen enemy are characteristic of both. And if a manager is then the captain, then the dishwasher is the first officer in fact if not in name. He exists in a state of separateness from all his comrades engaged in food preparation. Cooks, elbow to elbow and in constant cooperation and contest form either bitter rivalries or become brothers and sisters in arms the likes of which rarely exist outside of war time. In contrast, the dishwasher stands alone, and exists in a different rhythm from his coworkers. For when the rest of the crew is in a panic, the dishwasher is on his break, and when the rest of the crew can relax, the dishwasher is rushing like a madman. His life sense of time is like that of an owl or a bat in miniature, living in an opposite timeline from the rest of life but not so separate as to not be dependent on those existing in another way.

Managers and fellow workers alike can sometimes stand in awe of the dishwasher if indeed he is a proper one. His work is his own, and it is load bearing. Managers, dreaded and despised by common workers, speak softly and with respect to a skilled dishwasher in a way that they do not with simple cooks, cashiers, and waiters who may be treated as mere cannon fodder. But if the dishwasher should be a sloth or a fool, then all is lost and chaos reigns. One dares not detail the madness and rage a dishwasher must bear the brunt of if his job is not done speedily enough. True enough we all live such lives, needing rent paid, food consumed, sleep obtained in a timely fashion if we are not to lose ourselves to the great nothing. But for the dishwasher this demand of time is particularly acute and felt on a near constant basis.

But if we now understand a bit of what the dishwasher's social status is, we still do not understand what actual work he does. It may surprise the uninitiated to know that the act of washing dishes is only one small part of it, but it is worth examining first since it is the duty that is his namesake. One odd aspect of a dishwashing, is how much of it is done invisibly even to the dishwasher themselves. Most work is not done by simple scrubbing, towel in hand. Most work is more mathematical and high minded, done by arranging the dishes on washing racks in the most space efficient manner possible, and shoving them into a large machine, slamming it shut, and waiting while god knows what happens inside. Never open the machine while it works. Curiosity is not the dishwasher's friend. When the washing is finished and the plates cleaned, the dishwasher must remove them. A fairly simple process, to be repeated ad inifinitum until the day is done and there are no more dishes to conquer. It might seem odd that so much labor is performed invisibly and without explicit knowledge from the dishwasher. But consider your own life. Do you know the mechanics of the central banks that put money in your hand and take it back out? Where does the rain come from that waters the crops that become your food? What does the face of the delivery man who brings you your trinkets look like? Indeed the machinations that turn our world every day are only visible in a keyhole to even the most powerful and worldly. Do not turn your eye askance at the dishwasher's ignorance, for it is no more than your own or mine.

SEND US URBEX, SKATE AND STREET ART PHOTOS LARDHEAD@MAIL.COM

What, this simple? A trained monkey could do this labor, you might be scoffing, wrongly. For it is not so simple, indeed what is in this world? Reason might lead you to recognize that certain objects are too long or oddly shaped to fit easily into any dishwasher machine and must be washed by hand. This is true of course, and at the end of the day objects that your average diner would never consider the existence of, such as long cutting boards and tea dispensers must be washed with delicacy and by hand like dishwashers of yore would have done. Yet this is still monkey work is it not, could not any fool be trained in minutes to hold a towel and move back and forth? In asking this you only expose your own ignorance.

The real work of a dishwasher is not the work of towels, soaps, sinks, and machines. The real work is mental, a work of balance, preparation, mental mapping of what is where and who needs what when. Without going into the dining area to grab stacks of dirty plates, the dishwasher must have a bone deep sense for how many dishes are out there, and whether precious is time is better spent at the sink or retrieving more work for himself. He must operate with triage, like a surgeon in an army hospital, knowing whether his comrades preparing food will need bowls more than plates, or utensils more than sauce pans. Is this "unskilled labor" in your eyes still?

Yet this still only speaks of one duty, for the dishwasher must be a jack of all trades. In addition to dishes, every miscellaneous and ignoble task you can imagine and many more that you can't will fall on his shoulders. Wiping tables (the most hated duty), taking out trash, retrieving needed items from the feared walk in freezer, these are but a handful of his jobs within a job.

So the dishwasher is not an unskilled monkey, you concede, he is not simply the peon stepped on by all, he is a fool, given a unique status but made to work like a dog. Is it really so bad as this, and if so what could drive a man to labor this way? As with all things, the answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no, and the why is known only to themselves.

You can easily imagine the dregs of a dishwasher's existence. The dishes never stop, and the more you wash the more will simply come back later. This cycle can drive some to nihilistic madness and it's not few dishwashers who have utterly destroyed themselves for one reason or another. It can drive others to a zen like state of oneness with the dishes and acceptance of fate. But the emotional weight of knowing that your life is cleaning slobber off of plates that they might be slobbered upon again later can crush even the strongest of souls. Such daily humiliation can be compounded by sharp incidents, like an unnoticed napkin clogging the pipes in the machine, only to be removed by sticking a hand into water hot to the point of scalding. For God's sake my friends, think of the poor devil washing your dishes and be mindful of your napkins!

Then what are the highs of this life seemingly full of lows? For some the high is literal, and they enjoy a job where one can be intoxicated with any substance at any time and all that matters is getting the work done. But the wisest of them face the job stoically and carve out small spaces of freedom. As I mentioned, there is a degree of independence for the dishwasher not possible for others. Taking out trash allows moments of reprieve through smoking and hiding from responsibility, for most people don't really know how long taking out trash takes. I even once knew a comrade who constructed a small hut from boxes next to the dumpster that he used as shelter to smoke cigarettes in when the weather was too rainy or too cold. Others would rebel in the oldest way known to the oppressed, simple thievery. Managers would wonder why we always seemed to be short of utensils. The dishwashers knew. Those who were scoundrels (most are) knew those utensils had been pilfered one at a time to complete a whole dining set at home, but a kind of dishwasher omerta code of silence kept them safe. At the end of the night, my favorite moment was always to suck down each of the unsqueezed lemon slices which sat in the bowl by the tea dispensers. Everyone in the life finds such small moments of joy and revolt to interrupt the pervading drudgery where they can.

Then for all that, who are these dishwashers? Where do they come from? They come from everywhere and nowhere, like all of us on this wandering Earth. They are men recently out of prison or on their way to prison. They are immigrants, they are children, they are old men past retirement but too impoverished to ever enjoy golden years. They are piloting school instructors picking up extra money, they are directors and they are musicians, artists with a poetry in them of every kind. They are losers, bums, thieves, bastards. But they are men for all this. They are us and we are they.

Do you still say there is no honor in dishwashing? You say this, conjuring an image of a hunched over man with a cracked and aged face or a drug addled teenager, you say it imaging it alongside "unskilled" jobs like street sweepers, janitors, farm hands. If you persist in such thoughts, then you are more hopeless and crass than the most ignorant and devious dishwasher I ever served with. For they are called, they serve, and we consume only at their willingness. No honor in dishwashing? Then there is no honor in life itself, for what is this noble, unsung profession but a microcosm for all of us? Apart, unthanked, looked down upon by some, respected by others, yet able to find small treasures regardless, who among us does not live such a life?

COMIXXX // B3tty n Skel Issue 3 | Ultra Tetra

Date: 2025-07-24

HOUDINI Magazine Will Never Capitulate to the Censors

Payment processors are actively working to censor the Internet. They're doing it under the guise of respectability politics, cracking down on pornography. Make no mistake, this will be used to silence political dissidents sooner rather than later.

HOUDINI Magazine is working on a full briefing on this topic. In the meantime, know that we are taking steps to move all of our content that's currently hosted on platforms complying with these censorship orders, platforms like itch.io. We are looking for alternative means of funding, ie Monero.

This edition of B3tty & Skel is explicit, and the exact kind of content that's now banned on itch.io. It is our fuck you to the mealy mouthed moralists who fund genocide, but seek to talk about morality. The corporations will never control the Internet, no matter how hard they squeeze. No matter how hard they squeeze.

We will be moving the majority of our content from itch.io. We are seriously considering how deeply this censorship can and will affect this magazine. We will no longer be using itch.io for our zine rack backend. As you may have noticed, we changed our zine rack to primarily function as a means of distributing works found on itch.io. How long until itch.io removes it's pro-Palestinian content under the same guise of moral mandate?

The censorship of the Internet via payment processors is deeply troublesome, because ultimately even the hosting company we use—neocities.org—could comply with these new rules or with the chilling effect that's happening here. And it could very well lead to us being shut down too. This is the nature of the game. If you like what we do, consider joining the Patreon or making a small cash donation via Cashapp.

As it stands, though, we can post without consequence. If you are an adult content artist and you've been affected by this censorship, please send us testimonial feelings or just information on it, and that may make it into the article. You can email us at hedorahmusic@gmail.com. Ultra Tetra's works have already been removed from itch.io, by force, and without warning. Yet you are reading her works here, exclusively in HOUDINI Magazine.

Click to View Full Size Strip

Payment Processors Shouldn't Police Porn! | by Ultra Tetra

Date: 2025-07-24

Ultra Tetra

Just now, Itch.io announced that all adult content has been deindexed from their site. This has been caused by payment processors such as Mastercard and Visa attempting to crack down on how people use their services to pay and access NSFW content online.

NSFW creators are reporting that they can no longer can find their works listed on any tags, and some are even discovering that certain works have been suspended, meaning that they cannot be downloaded! This happened to me too just now! The files for my pro-ship Zine, "I Used to be an Anti, But Then I Grew Up", has just been suspended from the platform! My other adult works have yet to be suspended, but I wouldn't be surprised if that were to happen soon.

NSFW creators and sex workers have been speaking out about the disturbing rise of online censorship for years now, but the problem has only gotten worse and worse. Now one of the (previously) most queer and NSFW friendly platforms has now been defanged, and TONS of creators are being screwed over as a result.

As someone who has come to love and rely on Itch.io as a platform, it genuinely pains me to see this happening, and makes me all the more concerned about the future of freedom of expression online. Tons of people and their creative works are being censored and erased right before our eyes, and we're expected to be ok with that!

People who support this censorship will try to make the argument that it's being done to crack down on sexual abuse and the distribution of CSEM, but don't be fooled. Artwork depicting transgressive topics in fictional stories is not, and should NOT, be considered the same as material depicting horrible crimes happening to real people in real life. This is a modern day book burning that will impact marginalised creators first before screwing over everyone else. As a matter of fact, it already is! And it's only doing to get worse unless we do something about it as a collective! Entire genres of media - books, games, stories, shows, movies, you name it - will be censored and erased!

It's now more inportant than ever to speak out against this censorship, and to support NSFW creators (ESPECIALLY the ones who make trangressive art you might not like)! If you can, please sign these petitions and/or share them around as much as you can, especially if you are a SFW creator.

ACLU Change.org

Babe Ruth | by Erik Houdini

Date: 2025-07-25

Every time I write about Palestine, I want to legitimately crash the fuck out.

"Newborns are starving to death."

That's a heavy statement.

But to describe what that looks like in visceral detail, in some vain attempt to rally people to give a fuck, is just too much for me.

Do you know what it means for a newborn to starve to death? Do you know what it means when a baby suckles an empty breast for the tenth day in a row, not because she believes food will come, but because it's the only thing her body knows how to do? Do you know what it means to have nothing inside you, to be nothing but skin and bone and pain and crying? I watched an old man literally drop dead from hunger, give his last breath for hunger, and I watched it while I lay in fucking bed, while I scrolled Instagram reels. You know, when you're hungry—like really starving—your body begins to eat itself. It begins with the fat. What are babies known for? Baby fat. Can you imagine what a starved, malnourished newborn looks like? Can you imagine giving birth to that child in a tent, as the bombs fall, while you yourself are hungry?

It's not like I seek it out. It's not like I search "children starving to death en masse, video footage, 4K." It exists in our feeds because this regime is directly causing and profiting from what you are seeing. The powers that rule over us are using our resources to kill people just like you and me en masse, right now. Children are dropping dead from starvation right now, and there is a direct line of responsibility to me, sitting here, passively consuming that as content on a capitalist-owned platform. They are making good money from that man's death. The only question that remains is how long it will take for them to make good money off yours.

At a certain point, we need to stop thinking about brand deals and clout and who has the coolest newest shoes and whatever the fuck bullshit-ass beef you have with whomever is distracting you from this shit, and we need to start thinking about the logical conclusions of this happening in full view in front of us.

The people who are doing this live great lives. They make $270K a year. They have healthcare, private pools, golf courses, country clubs. They are living so much better than you, even at the lowest possible end of it all. I mean, if all the Palestinians die, if they all starve to death, if Israel bombs the rest of them, if the last thing you see from Gaza is Bisan's corpse—do we just go back to "Okay, I just need to lock in?" Do we go back to watching dropshipping courses?

What the fuck, man? I cry about this.

"A revolutionary must realize that if he is sincere, death is imminent due to the fact that the things he is saying and doing are extremely dangerous. Without this realization, it is impossible to proceed as a revolutionary." —Huey Newton

I don't have a solution.

I don't know what the fuck to do. I get people emailing me sometimes asking what to do. I don't know, man.

I just know I'm fucking tired of seeing dead kids.

And I know that my life is not worth more than the life of those children just because I was born closer to capital or because of the color of my skin.

It bothers me how worried some people are about absolutely meaningless language games when there is a need for serious organization to be built. When there is such a high degree of absolutely necessary work to be done.

I see posts from these "Good Trouble" protests, talking about how the goal is to be peaceful, to work with the police (the same ones who train with the IDF) to report people who engage in disruptive behavior.

Where are the ten motherfuckers who chain themselves together to shut down the Brooklyn Bridge? Where are the port seizures?

And now, we have ICE entering the fray in a heavy-handed way. Taking people, disappearing them. The reports coming out of "Alligator Auschwitz" are nothing short of horrifying. Brown-skinned people being brutalized for capital. The same exact shit you saw in Gaza, happening here. Still, the narrative is about peace. Whose peace?

Imagine having your parents taken by ICE, having to spend what little money you have just to figure out where they are. There are rumors that some of these flights are dumping people into the ocean. Let's hope they are rumors, because we know Pinochet did this in Chile. We know that the Coca-Cola company hired death squads to kill union leaders in Colombia. We know the Pinkertons were hired to do much the same here, over 100 years ago. We know the stakes, and yet—no realization. No action. Nothing but hollow actions and false gestures.

I am just as guilty.

"During the Vietnam War, which lasted longer than any war we've ever been in—and which we lost—every respectable artist in this country was against the war. It was like a laser beam. We were all aimed in the same direction. The power of this weapon turns out to be that of a custard pie dropped from a stepladder six feet high." —Kurt Vonnegut

None of the people I read about won.

None.

Assassinations, deaths of despair, decades of imprisonment, or simply the defeat of reformist compromise.

Mandela/Slovo, two I've been studying deeply. Is South Africa communist? No. Were they able to do land reform? No. Has systemic whiteness been dismantled? No. It is hard to say they "won."

Imagine you are on the street. You are wearing 40% polyester pajama pants you bought from Walmart because it's warm and that's what you could afford. You've spent the last seven hours essentially walking from one part of town to another. You have not eaten, and the only thing you've been able to drink is stolen hose water and a single 89-cent Polar Pop from the Circle K, along with two stolen refills. What the fuck does revolution mean to you?

Imagine you are from West Virginia. You were born in 1999, grew up in a town of 400, and got the education that goes with that. You land a job in the mines—it pays decent, better than the Dollar General. You have no future aside from the same despair you see take the elders around you, and your livelihood, the same that will kill you, is the same that is killing the very land you're so deeply connected to. What the fuck does revolution mean to you?

Imagine you are from South Louisiana. The Sackler family got your parents before you knew the difference between a Vicodin and a Perc. You moved every year because that's where the work was. You decide to work offshore—after all, it's better money than Dollar General. You, like your uncle, end up so damaged from the labor that you live on disability, never able to hold more than $1,000 in a world where that number feels smaller and smaller by the day. What the fuck does revolution mean to you?

The reality is, the same systems that genocide abroad brutalize at home, while those who claim to be allies to the brutalized seek moral absolution via the placement of blame on the brutalized. It is not our fault as leftists—no, no, no—it is the working class. No, scratch that, there is no working class! There's only a Starbucks in my suburb, and those workers? They can't be working class. No, no, never mind the vast expanses of fields that edge this town like a bad porno made with a purple-haired girl you wish you could find where she uploaded that shit.

The suburbanite posts to the 4chan thread. The Starbucks worker reposts an infographic about how the "Mexicans" do the "work no American wants to do" and how we should be "grateful they work so hard," not realizing she works hard too. Not realizing her progressiveness is predicated on the same colonial structures that abuse those farm workers, who live lives just like hers—fathers, brothers, workers all the same, now ripped from their families for working and providing, as any human wants to do.

They both see the same feed, the same brutal realities, the same genocide abroad.

ICE comes to her coffee shop—janitor, maybe a few others on the cleaning crew, she doesn't know. Coffee she serves made possible by death squads; profit margin on her paycheck made possible by her wage labor exploitation. She texted her dad that morning: "Love you, pops." He's in his 50s, same age as the janitor, same age as the cleaning crew foreman, same text message he sent—"Amo mi hija"—before being taken. She asks if they have a warrant. She resists, if just for a bit, but it was signed by a judge, and she has to comply. He's taken as the news in the lobby talks about the starving children in Gaza.

There is only struggle. This is the only constant. The accelerationists were right: things will only get worse, and will continue to get worse faster than predicted. Historical materialism tells us the same. The struggle has been ongoing far longer than any of us have been alive, and, in my own relative first-world, white-skinned privilege, has been fought for longer than I can truly conceptualize.

"We should rid our ranks of all impotent thinking. All views that overestimate the strength of the enemy and underestimate the strength of the people are wrong." —Mao Tse-Tung

All that I can do is embrace the despair, I suppose. Take the grillpill. Stack some paper, make some cash. You know, maybe donate to a charity or three along the way. That is what they tell me. But they would be so very incorrect—the type of incorrectness that can only come from a man who has the heart of a coward. To embrace the despair and wallow in the impossibility of change, the nihilist doomerdom of many, is no less pathetic than a dog begging for a burrito on a summer Sunday. There is simply no place to beg for space from the people doing the killing, because to do so is tantamount to doing the killing yourself.

"I must fling myself down and writhe; I must strive with every piece of force I possess; I bruise and batter myself against the floor, the walls; I strain and sob and exhaust myself, and begin again, and exhaust myself again; but do I feel pain? Never. How can I feel pain? There is no place for it." —Harry Houdini

Imagine if someone like myself were to surrender to the abyss. With all the comforts therein. With the comfortable bed, the shade, the means to escape the heat, the shelter, the shower, the running water, the fridge, the space to hang out, the friends who will spot me $10 for food no matter what, the food that I can buy with those $10, the power that powers the microwave, the television playing SpongeBob.

"Are we supposed to take out Spider-Man and SpongeBob? They don't have any heroes. We have a country in front of us with a large population and a large landmass, but it doesn't have any heroes. All of their heroes are cartoon characters—they're all fictional." —Iranian cleric, Shahab Moradi

Anyway, HOUDINI Magazine is dropping two new hot indie game reviews! That's right, folks, we've got two itch.io gems reviewed exclusively for HOUDINI Magazine by a brand-new writer, Paruko!

Do you see how disconnected it all feels?

My friend, when I was growing up, this was a good friend of mine. We'd always chill, we'd watch Dragon Ball Z together and shit. Trailer park. His pops was strung out. Mad strung out. He lived on a diet of chicken nuggets. Always burnt. Why? Pops would be passed out, nodded off from the H after putting the chicken nuggets and the absolute cheapest shoestring french fries you can imagine in the oven. Sometimes, hot dogs to change it up, but still the same. The days when his dad wasn't nodded off? He was a mean son of a bitch. I remember the taste of those nuggets, because they were always somewhat burnt, because we would have to be the ones to take them out. There was never a timer.

He laid drywall, did odd jobs, and despite the addiction, never failed to provide some type of substance to his kid (and to me!). What does revolution mean to him? What does revolution mean to my friend, who just wants his dad to make something like the blessing that is four nights a week of leftover spaghetti? There's levels to this. Never forget that.

There can be no struggle without the mandate of the people. No hope to win without a mandate. The consent of the governed to be governed by the government—this no longer exists. Yet they have over 300 military bases around the world. Yet they spend billions to kill and billions more to collect souls for the slaughter in their soon-to-be-finished yet already operating swamp execution camps, where people are being forced to eat from dog bowls naked under the guards' watch. The Nazis hid their camps; we sell merch for ours.

"Good Trouble," the protest sign says. I grab some McDonald's on the way to the march—a quick snack, a large fry, nothing major. We get down to the march. "Hands off NATO" (all members have funded the genocide). "Back the Blue," one of the boomer signs near the police pop-up says.

We march. There's an energy. The sirens escorting us. The feeling of struggle as we cross the bridge.

I spot another sign: "Kill 'Em in the Midterms."

The midterms are about a year and a half away. It takes less than a month to die from starvation. All but five members of Congress voted to send an extra $500 million to the entity.

My favorite streamer told me to vote for one of the people who voted for the funds sent to the entity. After all, we have to start slow when we move the people to the left!

Another decade passes, another species extinction. Another degree hotter. Another dozen miles of coast lost. Another mass-televised genocide to post about.

Ecocide.

Genocide.

Ecocide.

Anyway, here's Peter Thiel to talk to you about birth rates! Did you know you can get a salary advance if you donate your eggs? This video is brought to you by SunnySide. We know eggs! White women under the age of 25 get a $500 sign-on bonus! Use code MUSK during sign-up to claim your reward. That's code MUSK for a $500 sign-on bonus! That's what, like a quarter of your rent? Come on, just let us harvest your DNA data already! **Not valid in the state of Texas due to the new "We Really Do Not Like the Idea That Women Are People Act." Please have your male escort provide his banking details upon sign-up.

They killed Joe Slovo's first wife, Ruth First, as a means to demoralize him—which says as much about the evil of the men who have the power as it does about the way they view women and their relation to men.

The level of sacrifice required by those who know what is required of them to enact the change they desire is often too great for those who seek the change they desire. This is the nature of the game. And yet, the sword can still parry; the single strike is not a death blow. The blood is felt in the throat. The brain and the stomach become equals, and the fight continues with teeth bared like a wolf. Gaza is bombed, blockaded, and starved, yet even still, the Palestinians plant olive trees. This is the only way forward.

What is revolution to any of the people mentioned? It's not a single battle, a single action, a single protest. It's the fucking refusal to stop swinging. Even when your hands are broken. Even when your throat fills with blood. Especially then. Tell Nat Turner he is hopeless. Tell Hamas they have no reason to fight. Tell John Brown there is no point. Doing so would be a farce. There is nothing left in the face of despair but a raw optimism, a revolutionary optimism. This is the only way forward. Perhaps we cannot win, but by struggling, we cannot lose.

"Who is the Joe Rogan of the Democrats!?" they run headline after headline. All I can think is, "Who is the Babe Ruth of guerrilla war?"

Game Review | Into the Deep Web

Date: 2025-07-28

Review by Paruko

Into the Deep Web is a short indie game by Jon Topielski where you, the player, shrink down and dive into your computer to explore "the deep web." It's weird, charming, free, and only takes about 10 minutes to play through.

It's a roguelike dungeon crawler with turn-based combat, but the twist is dice. Each action—dealing damage, stunning enemies, healing, shielding—is tied to a random dice roll. As you progress, you gain upgrades that can help you roll larger numbers for greater effect, building up a strategic, fast-paced combat rhythm. It's easy to get the hang of and intuitive without needing a bloated tutorial.

The game's style is based off of the retro internet—grainy pixel art, lots of greys and blues, and an arcade-chiptune soundtrack. The enemies you fight are cleverly named after the sorts of hidden documents you might find on the deep web, from unpublished blogs (Blog Man) to government records (Govern Man).

Overall, Into the Deep Web is simple, short, self-contained, and confident in its own design. It's wacky, weird, and a very satisfying play.

Play Into the Deep Web Now

Release | Temple of Ra Archives eBook

Date: 2025-07-29

This archive collects all of our Goat Format Yu-Gi-Oh! articles, zines, clippings, challenges, and more from the now-defunct Temple of Ra imprint of HOUDINI Magazine - our dedicated retro Yu-Gi-Oh! project that focused on the Goat Format community.

Now available for $1.99 on itch.io (with a launch sale at $0.99) Coming soon to Kindle

If you followed our coverage of the rowdy, stylish and steezy world of competitive Goat Format dueling, this is for you.

Special thanks to: Kuhb Games, Janjo Zone, LuuBuu, Kerem, Blah, Bsocks, and all the Chads in the Goat Format community - especially the Cyber-Stein players.

Get it here

For magazine readers: Download a free 8.5" x 11" poster: Graverobber Poster

This ebook free for Patreon Members

//DNGN// Conan the Barbarian | The Phoenix on the Sword

Continued in One Week

Shem Shelley's From Utopia XXX

FROM UTOPIA IS YOUR MONTHLY DOSE OF ANTI-CULTURAL WEIRDNESS FROM A MIND TUMBLING OUT OF REALITY

ISSUE XXVIIII contains:

We Need Writers | Write for HOUDINI Magazine

HOUDINI Goes Local // Imperialism Comes Home

the Gaslight [chronicles] // HOUDINI Magazine's New Pulp Fiction Imprint

(new) WHIPPETS | QUICK THOUGHTS THAT LEAVE YOU SWEATING

//DNGN// Conan the Barbarian | The Phoenix on the Sword Chapter II

Chapter III Concludes the Story Next Week

HOUDINI Magazine's Drac Pack I | 12 Underground Artists, One HOUDINI Exclusive Bundle

Learning to Love Your Art by Making

Introduction of myself and my practice?

My relationship to this film and what I'm doing in the process of making it?

Overview of the film

Pushing through hating your work

Resetting and refreshing

Interviewing some of the cast and crew of Critique

Conclusion

THE RUNDOWN: Soulseek

Getting Started — Step-by-Step

They've Been Gaslighting Us | Patreon Update

//DNGN// Conan the Barbarian | The Phoenix on the Sword Chapter III

Roblox Rave | Support DJ Sea

Underground artist? Here's where you need to be posting.

Artposting | Toyen

Why Lakeland Florida? | The Reason for Relocation

HOUDINI Magazine Presents | ormEviE, an interactive art experience by Mindape

On Planned Obsolescence | by M.M.F.

Footnotes

LABOR // There is Honor in Dishwashing | By Brian Siwka

COMIXXX // B3tty n Skel Issue 3 | Ultra Tetra

Payment Processors Shouldn't Police Porn! | by Ultra Tetra

Babe Ruth | by Erik Houdini

Game Review | Into the Deep Web

Release | Temple of Ra Archives eBook