digital dispatches 003

Trial of Magneto #2 is out! and one of my favorite internet conspiracies.

Trial of Magneto #2 just came out this past Wednesday! Here’s a link to the issue preview on Marvel’s website.

Here’s my favorite non-spoilery moment from the issue:

Sidenote: I love Lukas Werneck’s Polaris so much. Lukas Werneck’s art plus Edgar Delgado’s colors makes a dream-team.

And heeeere’s what the panel description I wrote for this moment looked like in the script:

(Question—would you guys be interested in me doing a post that’s just a more comprehensive breakdown of how this book works from a creative team collaborative standpoint? I love bragging about my collaborators and always want to make sure their work gets the praise it deserves! I could do a whole post on Clayton Cowles’ work alone. Let me know in the comments.)

As far as what else I’ve been up to, well that brings me to….

My writing playlist for Trial of Magneto #5. I’ve been working on the script for the last issue of this miniseries while cultivating the correct ✨vibe✨, music-wise. I take playlisting very, very seriously—as do bff’s/fellow X-writers Tini and Vita. Soon I’m going to make a post about how music plays a huge role in our friendship as well as working lives as we collaborate, because it’s really special to me and I think people are interested in how the three of us work/play.

Also, remember how in my first post we talked about interesting mash-ups? I’ve had this shit open in a tab for weeks. Something about it tickles the back of my ADHD brain in the best, most satisfying way. I wish I knew how to download this so I could include it in my Spotify playlists. 😔 (Also, l m a o at OP saying they made this track specifically to be shitty…)

Mostly what I’m reading is highly-classified, and would 10/10 give eagle-eyed readers a huge clue as to what’s coming up in Trial of Magneto or even after that. But I’ve also been reading all of Jon Hickman’s old shitposts in the x-slack because AiPT has an exceptionally fun upcoming X-Men Monday planned. 👀 I want to say what it is but I don’t want to get in trouble so I’ll just say I’m having significant trouble narrowing my answer down. I may have even missed the cut-off point for submitting our answers by this point, but I rest easy at night knowing I’ve got a memoir’s worth of memories from the past two years working with Hickman as Head of X, and I have embarrassed him at every turn with all the nice things I have to say about working with him. (I have this rule, as praxis—if I have something nice to say about a person; I always tell them directly. I am brave with my earnestness!!!)

BUT—I’ve also been reading about one of my favorite internet conspiracies/mysteries, so I’m going to compile my findings below. This is a recent rabbit hole I fell down (again) while scripting ToM and then getting distracted.

The mystery is this website—https://yyyyyyy.info/.

It’s different every time I look at it. It’s become significantly more difficult to read over the past few months. If you use wayback machine to look at older versions of this site, you’ll see how it changes bafflingly over time. Here’s the twitter for this site. The twitter is relatively new—set up on March 2021. So it could be a fake, something a fan set up as this bizarre website gained cult fame online. But…that twitter is linked on the website itself, too. The web admin updated the website with it around the same time the account was made. As well as the hard-to-read words, “someone knew exactly what they were doing and have A LOT of free time.”

Those words I believe come from this 2010 4chan thread speculating about the site. (CW if you click that link—a myriad of casual r-slurs and f-slurs because “2010-era 4chan,” I guess.) But that whole thread of speculation is also linked into the mystery site itself now. Which feels like a pat on the head. "Yeah, good job, kiddos.”

What I find most interesting about that 4chan thread though is the sleuthing they did to locate potentially the creator of this website—an artist named Michael Guidetti. Here’s a link to some of his past exhibition work that does display a theme that could be connected to the website. Most of the old subnav page links discussed in that 4chan thread are no longer viewable and have been taken down, and now it’s harder to find any of the site’s navigation to different links—here’s one I found just by hovering my cursor over different parts of the page. Here’s another—sound & flash warning on this one. Sound, but no flash warning for this equally mesmerizing yet baffling additional page I found the same way.

“This website is art” is definitely my theory. It doesn’t read as nonsense to me, it reads as something I’ve never seen before—a measured chaos of code, a curated panoply of html. And it seems to have been sold as an NFT? But then again, maybe it’s art to me just because I am ignorant about web design—many things I don’t understand look like magic to me. I’m often content to leave it that way.