Yeah, this one right here goes out to all the semi-colons, commas. Dashes, full stops with dramas (!)…Actually, this one just goes out to the quotation mark, which I intend to wield with an unapologetic and facetious fury today—one of the keys to unleashing its “unacknowledged power.” For instance, are a tenth of the UK’s 12-year-olds really “addicted’ to porn?” Is this Japanese artist actually being inspired by “real” food to make jewelry and accessories that are “good enough to eat?”
Okay, I’m easing off the quotation marks a little so that I can get “real”—virtual reality real, like artist and technologist James Bridle’s latest project, Seamless Transitions, which creates computer-generated replicas of some of the UK’s immigration processing facilities (although if you wanted to get “hyper-real” in NYC, removal proceedings are open to the public). Along the vein of “really real,” rapper Eminem got down with his feelings today and posted over 40 annotations to a collection of his and other rappers’ songs on Genius. “I don’t ever want to be too braggadocious. If I’m going to brag, let me pull it back with lines like ‘school flunky, pill junkie,'” explains Marshall Mathers The Third, light of my young adulthood. “I’m a fucking waste of life. I’m a waste of sperm…But I know how to rap. Other than that, I’m a fucking scumbag. I’m worthless. Or this is what I’ve been told.” Gosh, he’s the realest.
And then, finally, there are things that “can’t really be happening,” but are actually going down—Netflix is oh-so-close to ordering Fuller House, a 13-episode multi-cam continuation of Full House; an American woman is now topping the world’s oldest person list at 116 years of age; and Airbnb is listing homes in Cuba, which are averaging $43 a night. Unreal!