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The “Into the Gorge” mint includes an all-new short story + a 60-min audio episode + original artwork, all for free!

The true story of how I lied about my drinking for two years too long, and not in the ways you might think...

A review of Astro Dreams, a collection of VR art paired with 3D music, created by between visual artist Nygilia McClain and composer Phinestro.

It always starts as an interview, a silent interrogation of sorts. Who are you? I ask as I sit across the screen from the images and begin to scroll, click, zoom. What are you trying to say? What’s important to you? Where are your obsessions, your preoccupations? In any NFT art collection, I look for the unexpected, the unpredictable, for elements and images that recur, the hidden-in-plain-sight markers of any particular reference, philosophy, argument. Creative work requires immense courage because artists can’t help but leave their fingerprints on the things they make; they always risk being seen by those who choose to look.

Full disclosure—I adore the way that Browntopink portrays women. You don’t have to scroll through NFT art sites for long to find images of women doing explicit—or simply bizarre—things with/to their bodies. (In some cases, one can only assume that certain creators are DIY-ing their own soft-core porn and then trying to pass it off as art to the rest of us.) In contrast, Browntopink’s work presents the female form as the subject, not an object; the women in her pieces are the actors, not acted-upon. Her aesthetic is unmistakably feminist—in the sense that arguing that a woman can be the protagonist, author and narrator of her own story is apparently still a feminist idea. But this makes perfect sense, since Browntopink herself explains that her pieces “clearly take influence from that of fairy tales with a modern twist.”

“Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a forest dark, / for the straightforward path had been lost…” — Dante Alighieri, Inferno, Canto I

It was a Sunday afternoon in March and I wanted a glass of red wine more, I was sure, than I had ever wanted anything in my entire life. I was two months sober, the weather was shit and my nerves were shot. I had spent most of the weekend thinking that the trip to Munich was a mistake, that travel would never be the same again, that life was hardly worth living without a drink in my hand. Our last stop before boarding the train back to Frankfurt was a visit to Museum Brandhorst, a modern art museum in the posh Maxvorstadt district of north-central Munich.