THIS FUTURE SUCKS

It’s a scary time to be an artist online. Gone is the wild west, gone are the days of free information and star trek forums, gone is the video of Saddam Hussein’s execution from youtube. Just this weekend, the UK (where, for our sins, we live) has passed a law requiring users to send a picture of their passport, drivers’ license, or something equally valuable to an overseas, non-DPA-compliant, for-profit third-party. Companies that make their business out of holding on to pictures of your face and monitoring your internet access. 

So, as we all install VPNs and wait for the inevitable data-damburst, Fixer Optional is proud to announce the release of our first short story, Virtua Pop. We’re posting it here, on our blog, in spite of the Shopping Mall-ification of the net where everything you look at is provided by the same three or four apps that will absolutely throttle any attempt to redirect readers elsewhere. It felt important to us that we post it here, on our site, and hope that you might have the finger-strength to click one more link to click even one more link, and get to whichever shop-sites we still have running by the time we hit publish.

We’d originally settled on itch as a store platform because, a) we don’t have the money to run a shop right through the wordpress, and b) it seemed like the best option, for consumers and publishers. And for a while it looked good, except that Itch is delisting “unacceptable” content, which includes anodyne LGBT content, facing pressure from MasterCard and Stripe. 

Anyway, Virtua Pop is available to buy now, and read right away, for everyone (not just mailinglist subscribers, who got it a week early). It’s on our itch.io, because we still have an itch account. It’s also available on our payhip, our gumroad, if things get really shit you could always email us and we’ll get a copy to you, somehow. I mean that. We’re unstoppable. The art will flow, no matter how hard they make it. 

Whatever you do, download it immediately. Save the file, back it up. Fuck, even run the thing through your work’s inkjet and stash the pages in the ceiling tiles for someone to find when the whole building is given over to urbex. We’d appreciate it.

Here’s the links again, in order of easiest to most annoying upload process (Bad Brains – Pay to Gum)

Payhip: https://payhip.com/b/2OR3M

Itch: https://fixeroptional.itch.io/virtua-pop

Gumroad: https://fixeroptional.gumroad.com/l/VIRTPOP