Most Sunday’s, weather allowing, I set up a mobile comic book shop at local open air markets. I have done it for the good part of a decade, in doing so you make unique friendships with people who you may only see every so many Sundays over the years, you might not even know their names but you know their opinions on things, what books they read, movies they watch and at times the turmoils in their personal life. In being a fixture, you can be both councillor and sound board or, for some kids, an adult for them to share budding and developing opinions with. It’s a fascinating thing to see the...

I spent a lot of time dealing with the victim of violence. That betrayal only a lover can express, the sinister switch from affection or at least the performance required to invent love, to twist into a tantrum of rage. The bruising and cuts, a secondary blistering to a pain that seldom heals. Perhaps can not heal. “I would die for you, I would kill for you,” such men squirm, maybe they believe it. At least when they are forged inside of their own egotistical certainty. Yet, despite such promises, they don’t protect their lover-victim from themselves. The imbalance is perhaps a calculation...

“Everything in my life is controlled, living is becoming too expensive. I have no dreams. My only joy is thinking about dying.” Ji-woo, nineteen years of age. It seems, especially to older generations, the youth are giving up. A malaise and wider apathy has taken hold among the younger generations of East Asia. In China it has been called, Tang Ping, or ‘Laying Flat’. In Japan, Hikikomori, or ‘Pulling Inwards’ and in South Korea, they have become known as the N-po generation or ‘Resting Youth’. It’s not that these sentiments are exclusive to East Asia, or any particular laziness found inside...

War is content, at least for those who are far from the explosions, acrid smoke and mourning parents. To those closer to the destruction and loss, it’s very real and inescapable. For most of us, the privileged, we peer into it whenever we dare, or should it come across our feeds. It’s a digital reflection of an unknown world. A place on our planet that may as well be across the universe, yet, in some small part we are complicit. Participants. Whether through endorsement, a cheerleader for gore, an active enabler of the regimes and governments which inflict violence as mechanism of policy, or...