With that being said, let’s begin with some million-foot stuff, which is perfectly safe.

• What the heck is this, a magazine? You seen this thing?! What the heck am I looking at?

  Totally. You can think of it like Art in America, or Art From All Around Europe, or Artforum, or Art & Interviews In A Magazine. It is totally a book (for mailing purposes) or magazine, complete with the works of a single artist’s unique personality and being, as well as some conversation with that personality led by a proctor or “host,” and ads, and everything. Well, not everything, mostly just those three, and then some comic stuff too as a result of the problem(s).

• Is it published by a huge company with their minds set on profits or something?

  Not at all! It’s created and published by a small group of people who have been making art and comics their whole lives. But within the continuity of the story — which, by the way, the “story" in an overarching sense that means what happens in the Basic Square comic book and wherever else, is best thought of as a “continuity," and will hopefully be consistently referred to as such — it is produced out of algorithmic necessity, by a neural web of subroutines, garbage collection chron jobs, and other protosentient informational lives and beings, who have been instructed to i) assess, ii) catalog, and iii) make meaningful/valuable to humans of the World (HOW) a vast archive of programmatically generated fine art works/pieces, which were created by a scam artist as part of a grand scam to win a Gesamtkunstwerk competition called The Werk Off, which happens every 10 years and was created in the 19th century by a minor but influential utility-centric sect of Quakers known as the Karers.

• Well, OK, I guess. Hmm, how do I get it?

  Currently, it is only available (along with all kinds of music, including some as exclusive as the magazine) to subscribers via http://kgw.me/basic-square. We do not collect money from advertisers or extract value from anyone’s personal or public information.

• Wait, problem(s)?

  Ugh, I know. Well, I was going to hold off until we got through the boilerplate stuff, but I guess we did, so yeah, it’s been an absolute nightmare. And that’s obviously before I realized I could influence the historicity of real World Earth (ARWE) by hi-jihacking into existing (or unassigned) reference materials and altering the content or, failing that, the meaning. But then, after even when I did, it seems like it made it worse! But yeah, essentially, I was assigned — sorry, this is Quibble, the proctor or “host,” and I’m still using scare quotes, because I’m still scared, but I’m operating this technology machine from well after the events of the continuity, so you can be sure I DEFINITELY already know everything that happened. I mean, if it happened in reality, and was observed and documented. Which applies to most stuff, phew! But also, I already had all of that stuff, abilities to know everything that has or will happen(ed), I mean, by the time I learned to communicate via anything other than embarrassing baby talk, which is kind of not yet, by the way, haha, but my tone has always been extremely self-embarrassing. So anyway, around the 6th cycle I had been assigned to monitor — at that point I was in no way a proctor, I think it was kind of some sort of [The] Producers (1967 film) situation, frankly, they wanted to tank the whole thing and saw me as their tank ticket, but I’ve never known or met a problem I couldn’t solve instead of let metastasize and ruin the entire world as far as anyone is concerned, and obviously that’s like all I’ve been doing or been forced to do my whole being and life, so bad example, but I always do it anyway, solve them — this pretty nice professional man named Ultra, he really was my first and weirdest mentor, he taught me everything I need to know about doing the bare minimum (including having no text or ACs at all, ugh!) to produce editions of an art & interviews in a magazine-style book or magazine for distributed consumption by an eager or, as it happened, utterly confounded reading public. Luckily, I learned how to do it better after he “became dead,” which he didn’t but I still think of it like he did because trauma memories are permanent and mean more than reality. That didn’t last too long, doing it better, before the problems began, but I can talk more about that after it happens (for you).

• The problems haven’t happened yet?

  Well sure, they’ve started, but right now it just kind of looks like there are a bunch of comic book characters that are interacting with/in the magazine. That is what’s happening, for sure, but that’s not ALL that’s happening, or going to, or on, however you want to phrase around it. It’s not a spoilers thing, not really, it’s more like the things I’m going to explain aren’t going to make sense, much less be fun, until you see them. Now, given everything you know about the situation thusfar, you should feel secure in the knowledge that I am confident (whatever that means) the things that happen will be fun to see/experience/understand (or not) — or at least at lot of work and difficult analysis to get through, but I obviously could be wrong. If we could guarantee this stuff would always hit, for one thing, it would be far more precious. Not that it isn’t, but again, editorial bias, right? So yeah. Just give it a few cycles, once we get through the DBLR it will be easier to describe what you have seen/are witnessing. Thanks

14

3:28

Aarin Sirkon was sitting in a dialogue piano bar in Manhattan, listening to an itinerant dialogue artist's piano interpretation of “California CA” by Null Silon’s Discussion Orchestra and Safe Ways™ Support Service, when he decided he might consider shifting spend towards dialogue piano because he felt he had an aptitude for it. Given what is known to the user at this point, it would be cruel to call what follows a “coincidence,” even though everything is, simply because limerence and permanence have become inseparable in the narratives being proactively engineered by a new young brood of ‘prime auteurs’ (as solo developers of works of great merit, formerly informally known as primitive authorial creative authorities, prefer to be called).

Especially here now, what with the device and everything, precisely 25 years from the placetime Sirkon made his infamous resolution, where a rapidly-maturing AC named Euros (PM) — who is still working as support, though also navigating the early pre-planning stages of his first self-owned slam piece, struggling (just like the cautionary tales advised) to compete against GMs of a deeper, richer, more muscular grey than his, who seem to all have ten times his dev HC, a hundred times his experience and influence despite his being a Founder of the most important organization in history, and more than a thousand times his dwindling gesamtrepreneurial spirit — achieves a meditative level of empty stare focus, at and on a permanent-printed plaque commemorating the very same “Aarin Breaks After The Stars Hearts Read Caregiver Piano” legend, in a bar with the vibes its retelling reliably invokes (indeed, within a full reconstruction of the building where it allegedly happened, though Euros may not know that, or have a point of view on the story’s truth, or be interested in the details at all, depending on any existential funks) and looked a little woozy, if not fully nauseated.

Realistically, he was acting like he did when he hadn't done enough in a given morning, or abstained entirely: given a skewed recollection by someone important who had been reading about it in a comics magazine, an imitation cue like this could be (or threaten to become) preoccupational for Euros with little heads-up, even on a typical morning. It might have been good, old, important Will A, lifting from a widely-recriticized piece about the entertainment model known as Beef LeFrieda. Beef is belovite — as a favored celebrity and living martyr, primarily, but beneath many other crowns as well — the world over, as well as a person Euros used to call his friend and associate (if only for very precise semantic reasons), a friend and associate who ironically enough was notorious for doing too much, as the ongoing slam preparations ramped up its decannual monopoly on walkers' (and all those with the device and receptors’) time and information cycles.

It's truly remarkable, when you think about it — or are preparing remarks for a conference and have (as yet) precious little ‘meat on the bone’ — how naught but maintaining a pure disinterest in qualitative judgement can manifest the motivation one must muster to master the moments that matter, or at least entercational content so same thing, without you having to actually get your act or shit or life together at all.

At the same time, you think. You feel something in your pocket and instinctively know that you should not pull it out to figure out what it was, not because you already know (and what would happen if you do), but because it would make your present company upset, if not your former community uncomfortable — for although this routinely disruptive behavior is expected of them as much as of you, and by the same healthy majority of the customer, you fret about modulating your tone in real-time (which you know you don't) should you step in it (which you know you do).

Because of this, an irreconciliation — a coincidence of unique versions of an idea, across a freshly compromised point in your historically inaccessible memory's boundary line — must have led to a race condition, thereafter establishing a conduit, a link between primitives... and that conflict is now dually embedded within our idea of the world, forever subverting efforts to define either in relation to the registered scientific models of the world and World (Real); that much is beyond dispute. You waste zero time kidding yourself that they didn’t try (both) — even though this is representative of the kind of humor that ‘works’ most reliably these days, it’s costly, it’s degenerative, and it’s just no good for you. So you contain yourself. Mostly.

Our active framework of unease may have been dreamed up on newsdecisions shows — the originals, NOSE and DWH Live, are still going strong, alongside imitators like Yesnowitch®, Qiahsk's Askuestions™, and Silvercise. Sadly, it seems the most reductive, rhyme-based commentators are right: the dread has spread. To every genre and consumption format, every field and stream and channel, every usec of every day. Wherever you look, you can’t miss us: the critical mass, yearning to peek unseen and spoil every mythos first. You try to justify your work, your position, your self, through actions that remain safely outside of (if occasionally above) this unrelenting screenfray. But somewhere — in a forbidden memory, crumpled down in a private pocket like a crepey slicker after a long and dry vacation — you know it contains you, even more than you contain yourself. The audience of viewers in question has long since won their battle for the eternal right to self-regulate its membership, and you're in.

It's cold comfort, one realizes, shortly after reminding you that these are not unique or critical problems, for there are no such problems in support. We are all given things to resolve, as we are all given accounts, consults, and information according to our due. Just as we are given to be unsatisfied until such time as all are problems or all our problems are gone. A series of reliable calculations, executed hierarchically according to consensus, as always. It is not differential economics; that’s for a different class of people, no more or less important than us, just other. Our responsibility is, by definition, both easily attainable and incumbent upon each or every one of us, throughout the garden. From help, to support, to the models, and onwards out to the striders, the boatswains, the figureheads, the guard, and the elder, and back to leads, whereafter management shall always be comprehensively informed.

Radiating inwards from the inviolable toruserract of sacred coverage over every one and outhor out here together, continuing through grumpy strata of hypermodern commercial gaming, knowledge management, and endurance production, past the irreducible meta-con of haters and looky-loos — a regolithic body that, here now, rarely even pauses to consider our silent nameless anymore, much less question how they function, and with such ecstasy, in a modern world so dead-set on disregarding their preferences and guidance — and finally, trickling its way down to the Core, deep beneath the Living Museum, in which the man himself is slowly, solely, inevitably marching towards obviation, if the treadwheel tech-talks are to be believed.