What’s in a name?

Hello and welcome to Fugue Plague! My name is Kaile Hultner, and I’m a writer from Oklahoma City. For the last five years, I’ve been the editor-in-chief of No Escape, a video game criticism website. And to head off any concerns at the pass: I still am! No Escape isn’t going anywhere. But I’ve been struggling a lot over the past year with how best to combine the two foci of my writing: the gaming side and the political side. Even with No Escape‘s focus on games as expressly political cultural objects, it’s markedly difficult to talk about something like, for example, anarchist resistance against the genocide in Gaza, in a video games/digital culture context. In short, it’s not that I haven’t had the words to talk about the fucked up world we live in; it’s more that I felt like I couldn’t adequately speak them in that other space.

I still believe that it’s possible to talk about games politically, but for the moment, I’m less worried about trying to make that synthesis work. I just need to talk about shit, man. This is in part how I decided upon the name “Fugue Plague;” it sounded like the exact nature of the storm of uncertainty and malaise eating up my mind over the last year or so. But I can’t take any credit for its initial formation: “Fugue Plague” is the name of the fourth song on The Quiet Earth, the third album by UK neocrust band MORROW, which is what I happened to be listening to this morning as I put this all together.

This brings me to the next bit: I miss really geeking out about music. I’ve been a punk rock obsessive since I was a child, and I used to write about music a lot more as an aspiring journalist/young freelancer. Now that I’m solidly and irrevocably in my thirties, the expectation is that I’m supposed to ossify my music tastes and turn into a curmudgeon; the truth is, I just really love music and want to talk about neat shit I’ve found/been turned onto.

Finally: I want to talk about anarchism on here. Not just as part of an analysis of the latest fucked up thing a politician did; but as a way of imagining and reimagining the world into something better. I don’t want to write about this as some kind of authority; fuck, that’s the last thing I want to be thought of as. I want to talk about it from the perspective of someone who is always constantly learning new things.

If any of this sounds good to you, then great! Stick around, and we’ll meet back here every week to fuck around and chat about shit going on out there. If not, uh, thanks for stopping by? I guess?

Anyway, just to make shit easy on myself, I’ve decided I’ll be posting real ones of these every Sunday. In other words: I’ll see you in two days!

—Kaile