Critterlab
Alex MacFadyen is a muppet-identified writer, bookworm, and creator of strange liminal creatures. You can find more of his creations and musings at Critter Lab on Wordpress.
“And we’ll hate what we’ve lost but we’ll love what we find…” – from “Featherstone” by The Paper Kites Sometimes I feel like the joy and value of ephemeral things get lost in an all-consuming preoccupation with things that last. Perhaps it’s rooted in a desire to avoid […]
The whole process of finding your true nature is one continuous mistake .– Shunryu Suzuki Roshi ‘Tis the day after Christmas and as my thoughts turn to the start of another year, I find myself ruminating on the definition of success and how hard it is to predict […]
Puppets + Halloween should equal something right up my alley, but oddly in scary movies it frequently does not. I do love Henry Selick’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, which achieves the exact combination of creepy, cute, and quirky that I’m looking for, but it’s not puppets. Some of […]
Watching tv and movies as a trans guy, I often feel like a mythical creature. There are stories about me, but no one ever sees me. I’m like Bigfoot: shy and reclusive, rarely photographed, frequently demonized or misrepresented, and somewhat traumatized by human society’s reaction to me. I […]
You might reasonably think that as one of Netflix’s top 10 shows of all time, Bridgerton season 3 is not exactly Gutter material, but I ask you: is there anything more gutter than millions of people obsessively listening to a classical string arrangement of a Pitbull song they […]
I’ve decided to round off Switcheroo Month at the Gutter with ghosts. Are ghost stories reputable, you might ask? As a genre, not really, but as a literary device they’ve been used to explore some of the most serious themes imaginable, from personal tragedy and grief to unresolved […]