Jake Shaw's Blog

I have my first ever (tiny) tabling event coming up on Thursday, April 2nd from 5pm to 7pm at the 15% Board Game Cafe in Tacoma! I’ll be selling prints and giving a shot at explaining myself in person to anyone curious who happens upon me.

Yesterday I was feeling really good and speeding right along to the sound of Nonagon Infinity by King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard. I 100% cosign this edit of a couple of KGLW albums:

I discovered the band while playing Ultrakill a bunch last...

“Let me ask you this: do you remember how it started?

I used to remember
The corporation calls it “quantum mechanic simulation” or something
It basically says we’re all just particles
We’re… we’re floating out there…

We’re just flying through space and nobody really knows where we are
And sometimes, every so often, we collide into each other
Then, all of a sudden, for maybe a second, we’re actually real
And then, it feels like we just float off again
Huh… as if I don’t even exist…

Let’s start ...

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In the cancerous and endless rush for a platform’s need to literally spawn meaningless wealth from thin air, Substack has taken Polymarket hand in hand and made the plunge deeper in.

End of an era.

Remember: nothing you have read on this little blog is real. I am not a real person, I’m the suggestion of humanity. These glyphs render the same pixels which change shape when horror requires your screen.

None of this is real. not in your inbox, not on this website. None of it....

There comes a time in every man’s life where he independently invents buzzfeed and listicles and reviews in a fit of need for content. I alone have the strength that many others have openly demonstrated do not, in that I will be exercising focus on a single artist today to wrap up my 2025 journey through art.

In no particular order, here is a list of things I have consumed this season that I find valuable or interesting.

The 1984 film from 1984.

Lovecraft Country, the...

Let’s try this properly.

I’ve written endlessly of my experience in Moab, Utah at the end of 2023. In trying to relate this experience, I feel I have failed over and over again in my attempts to truly collate and cook the book on that week. It is to the detriment of my soul that I haven’t been able to pull this off in a yet-satisfying way. I’d like to try it in earnest.

*****

I had gotten a new job.

At the time, my hellish working place was becoming untenable for me. I could poi...

I’ve read somewhere on this substack that I’ve never sat down to write one of these with a specific plan in mind. This is incredibly true! These essays begin out of an incredible compulsion to jabber away online about things that are going on.

If you’ve been paying attention to the last coupla posts, the tenor of what I’m publishing has changed up. It came to mind to do this principally because of Viagra Boys’ track ‘Troglodyte’ where one of the verses completes with Sebastian M...

none of this is real

*****BEGIN PGP AUTHENTICATED POST*****

[black screen. a low hum is audible.]

[click. a dangling light bulb turns on, illuminating a person locked in a statuesque pose, elbow still bent after pulling a chain to turn on the light. he is in his late 20’s, with long curly hair, wing eyeliner, and a short kept beard. he is wearing a white shirt with a black tie]

[in silence, the light swings back and forth, barely illuminating the wall behind the man of ti...

His keys jingled as he slumped through the door to the apartment: Hiram was beat from a long day. He dropped his briefcase and loosened his tie on the way to the bathroom, undressing before looking into the mirror to pick out the piece of steak leftover from dinner with his coworkers. Beyond the shower curtain, he could see in the mirror the outline of a man with long hair, silhouetted against the white tile glowing under fluorescent lighting. Hiram sighed, finally freeing the chunk of meat from...

I put together a song the other day.

I would be generous, I think, to call what I did ‘producing’ as most of it is manipulated samples from artists and packages I’m fond of. I’m getting better at using Vital, but my ambitions still exceed my skillset when it comes to audio. Also had a REALLY hard time getting Audacity to get a desktop audio loopback as an audio source for recording, and eventually it ended up breaking again. Oh, linux, you d...