testset

• verified_user

This project was founded by multiple creators scattered across Houston, Philadelphia, Berlin, Beirut, and New York with one common objective: To test our own curiosity across the various mediums we are submerged in. With plans to initially launch in May of 2020, the Coronavirus had other ideas for us. Shackled to our desks, watching the world become more dangerous by the day, the next logical the next logical step was to ‘dance with who brung ya.’ For those of y’all that don’t know, that is Texas slang for ‘remain dedicated to your raison d’etre.’ For those of y’all that don’t know, that’s French for ‘the purpose for something’s existence.’ So here we are—a few disparate voices with a lot of ground to cover. Our ‘editorial direction,’ or rather lack thereof, is underpinned more so by what we preclude rather than what we include. No pseudoscience, no partisanship, no virtue signaling, and no sanctimony. We fancy ourselves as journalists time to time but sometimes dwell on the limited humanity of such a title. Imagine for a moment there was somebody in your life who ignored you until they needed something and then disappeared forever unless you had something wanted again. So goes the life of a ‘journalist,’ a seemingly harmless term and title that is now saddled with the sad reality of what journalists are in a human context. Human to human, person to person, journalists make formal, temporary relationships with those they need information from and then disappear into the Serengeti like the hyenas they are. We seek long term relationships with our subjects and subject matter and friendships that allow for candor that is otherwise withheld. We won’t spare you from hearing that we would rather be storytellers, archivists, ethnographers, and even sometimes, activists. Though we’re not sure what that even means anymore. We are firm believers that gallows humor is well important shit, and we have laid out a few expectations to help you better understand where we are going with this ‘thing.’ Our writers prefer cacophony to harmony. This ain’t no fuckin chorus. People here don’t agree with each other on just about anything. If you seek homogenized, congruent world-views, this is not the place. We have no boundaries. Nothing is off limits. If some necromancer could bring Genghis Khan back from his grave in Khentii Aimag, we would interview him. We’re not promising anything. We can’t promise when we will update this site. We can’t promise that it will be good. We can’t even promise we will try our best. What we can promise you is that we won’t promise you anything. No need to lower your expectations. We see the stuff the other guys around these parts are churning out and it seems your standards are already pretty low. We are going to fit right in. Just not in the way you think we will. We’re all in deep shit. If you are old enough to have lived through the fall of the Berlin Wall and 9/11, you are a lucky son of a bitch. That was the apex of Pax Americana and it is not going to get any better than that. It is probably true that if we do not get our planet in order we will need to get our affairs in order.