From 2005-2015 (an age in Internet years), Wet Asphalt was as a literary blog (and originally magazine) run by Eric Rosenfield and JF Quackenbush. It had some high points (including being quoted in the Chronicle of Higher Education and having posts reprinting in iOS and covered by BoingBoing among many others).
I'm not sure if anyone's tuned to this channel anymore, so to speak, but if you're out there I (Eric) have started a new project.
It's called Literate Machine and it's a blog, newsletter, podcast, and YouTube channel that explores media through the lens of culture, history an politics, examining the ways capitalism, power, and ideology shape and are shaped by the stories we love. (Some of you longtimers may remember about 10 years ago I was part of an ebook distribution start-up with the same name. I still had the URL and decided to repurpose it.)
There are two episodes out so far:
- Vintage Season, in which I use SF writer Catherine Moore as a lens with which to examine the history of the Golden Age of science fiction and what it tells us about gig work.
- A Mind Forever Voyaging into Neoliberalism, in which is talk about a 1980s video game and the once heralded medium of text adventure games it was part of, and how it explored where Reagan-era policies were taking us with uncanny accuracy.
I hope you enjoy them.
Thanks,
Eric