An acolyte’s field notes:

-Is it that time again? The month’s end draws nigh, the owl screeches, an insomniac nightwatchman bellows out a delirious midnight poem, and in the charnel house a new From Utopia hatches.

-Absolutely killed it with the Devil and the Pope. It’s kind of brilliant because you could sort of picture both tarot cards in the back of your mind’s eye but letting the choice-based parallel formatting “shape” them rather than trying to depict them directly works amazingly well. It’s also kind of an intensification / satire of all those endless and increasingly baroque one page TTRPG pdfs you see on itch. 

-I also have to remark on some crazy coincidences because my partner and I have been seeing a lot of chocolate labs around town, to the point where we have been kind of analyzing their brainless expressions in depth. The last two we saw were yesterday and we discussed at length. Kind of amazing you make the Devil a chocolate lab, considering all the “black” dogs you might have been tempted with. For reference I believe Goethe made Mephistopheles a black poodle.

-As for your Pope, I am picturing a mix between De Sade’s libertine pope in Justine and some kind of overstuffed Rabelasian giant. Something oddly necrotic and satisfying about the Pope fork.

-There is a line in this month’s Romonde Contreras that declares “The Next Plague Cometh”. A few days ago I was reading Artaud’s The Theatre and Plague .
“In the theater as in the plague there is a kind of strange sun, a light of abnormal intensity by which it seems that the difficult and even the impossible suddenly become our normal element.

-The Smartthumb monster movie is a schizoid solution to the inanities of “black mirror” style tech-horror. Just an extremely funny, grotesque inversion of the usual “scary tech” trope by making it about the body. McLuhan did call mediums “extensions of man” after all I could 100% picture Brandon Cronenberg doing that picture. Thank the President N------ for making organs great again.