Frutiger Aero
The Internet raised me while I played God on Sims 3. I hold the Sims’ WooHoo mechanic responsible for my sexual awakening— bug-eyes fixed on the fuzzy pixel-porno I’d directed. Even God goes blind to the making of true love. This was my sexual awakening: warm bodies replaced by the cold glass of a computer screen. I hosted parties for my real friends, who were always impressed by my playlist full of Simlish pop. Here, language could be anything I wanted it to be. I could translate any sound into common ground and a false sense of community. Inside the screen, I could orchestrate my own social inclusion; a sense of belonging that never downloaded onto the outside world. Imagination was inexhaustible in the face of humanistic innocence, isolation was a memory. But it was destined to be ephemera; nostalgic even in its novelty.
My childhood backyard was the desktop home screen on the family computer, my sandbox was Frutiger Aero. The hills rolled skeuomorphic-green into the horizon, barricaded by carbon-positive super-skyscrapers. I took deep breaths beneath the branches of the almost-trees and relaxed into a spurious sunny day. With my arms rested behind my head, I watched the clouds drift to the corners of my vision like the DVD logo. Bouncing up…down…left…right…lost in a trance. I could happily lose days inside of this simulated world. Bubbles floated above my head like dreams I forgot to pop, while the butterflies fluttered glitter trails in their wake. I’d dance among them like we were one in the same: girls having fun. When my body tuckered out, I’d prance to the channel for a drink. In the water there I almost saw my reflection. It was perfect. Then the screen turned black, and I’d truly see her—sitting idle for far too long. How naive of me to assume a permanent symbiosis between the technology of nature and the nature of technology. How foolish of my inner child to believe it could happen again.
Now my eyes sail across the blue-light sea, trying to destroy the dam that separates information overload from sanity. Maybe later this week, I’ll break a personal record on the dopamine threshold; I’ve always been one to push the envelope. The feedback loop is a beast I will never satiate, so I submit.
In the midst of losing my juvenility, someone overrode the controls on my godhood. The powerful omniscience I once feigned on Sims as a child was no longer accessible. I forget my pixelated childhood dreams and transform them into virtual figurines, being bought and sold for sanctity. All the symbols are the same—even angel numbers read as advertisements, but I guess biblically accurate angels look more like algorithms than the things with wings. Commoditized bodies line up for prophecies, products artlessly crafted—just for you!—in a boardroom. They fit spirituality into a 16x12 Amazon box and trapped God inside the Internet. Creativity kills itself in the artificially intelligent consumerscape.
My friends tell me stories about receiving karmic symbols from God: golden ratios hidden in brain-rot, eternal knots captured in aura photos. They tell me it all starts with accepting cookies on my browser, with letting Meta know every interest.
Beautiful people waste their time trying to be young again. What was once 3-dimensional has flattened into a memory disk; my childhood compressed into a single file. I scroll endlessly trying to mute the voice in my head that begs for just one more sunny day, even if it’s fake.
I touch the world and neon pixels spring back. Utopia has lost all its texture; the future is smooth as a useless brain. Reality never rendered in, only nostalgia for an era lost to binary code. Only digital footprints remain, and me, forever tempted by the intangible.
from reflecting on how we choose to define gender in the context of ourselves. Are we ready to redefine it in our own authentic way or are we placing one foot over the binary while keeping the other one in our comfort zone?