Steven Christopher McKnight
Bio
Disillusioned twenty-something, future ghost of a drowned hobo, cryptid prowling abandoned operahouses, theatre scholar, prosewright, playwright, aiming to never work again.
Venmo me @MickTheKnight
Achievements (1)
Stories (70/0)
Stupid, Vapid, Meandering Thoughts
Do you ever just sit down to write an article or a post for this silly little website (or any silly little website, for that matter) and just come up empty? You just can’t get past the first couple establishing sentences? Maybe you have an idea for an article to write, but after the first paragraph, you think, “This is stupid, no one is going to care about this!” Or maybe you just can’t bring yourself to reach that lower word limit. (Eighty-two words so far, Steve. Good job. Over five hundred more to go. You got this.) I’ve been finding this to be the case more and more often, not just with Vocal, but with life in general.
By Steven Christopher McKnightabout 20 hours ago in Journal
One Piece and Killing the Bad Guys. Content Warning.
I’ve hit, at this juncture, a point of political disillusionment of late. Running the risk of becoming too political for this platform, I will simply say that I am exhausted in the face of numerous regressive policies and incidents being parroted and enacted by the opposite side of the aisle from me. The codified manifesto which the other side proudly displays as the guiding principle for if they ever gain power again—a more likely future than I would like to admit—hangs like a specter over the future that I perceive, threatens the way of life of myself and everyone I know and care about. And I can’t help but think, how do we fix this? Sometimes in my heart of hearts, I think it would be better if the “bad guys” were removed from the equation entirely after their decisive defeat at the ballot box, but that’s not how a healthy democracy works. Sometimes, I wish we could send the wannabe fascists to the actual fascist nation waging war in Europe, wipe the dirt from our hands, start anew. But that’s not how things work.
By Steven Christopher McKnight21 days ago in The Swamp
The Eye of Elddraugur. Content Warning.
On days like these Freyja stayed indoors; sun-filled days, brimming with life, where the chill of perpetual winter loosened its bony grip upon Draugavik. “Indoors” was inaccurate; there were no more doors, just holes in the stone where sunlight peered through every so often. On moonlit nights, she would wander the ash fields, trace along the scars of lava flows, leave traceless footprints in the black sand beaches, but not today, not on a day when the Sun would not set.
By Steven Christopher McKnight21 days ago in Fiction
I Finished Grad School!. Top Story - June 2024.
I finished my Master’s Degree! Did I learn anything? Arguably. Do I regret it? Not particularly. Will I use it? Not immediately. My Master’s Degree was challenging. I feel as though it precluded me from living out the life I’ve wanted to live these past two years: traveling the world, working abroad, seeing new sights. Was that what I was doing before I came to Binghamton University to start my Master’s Degree in Theatre? Absolutely, it was. Before coming to Binghamton, I was an ESL teacher. I’d worked in Ukraine the previous summer, and in Slovakia the autumn after that. That job in Slovakia broke me: the management was rude, there wasn’t much of a support system in place, and I’d gotten ill several times. That awful experience was what drew me to applying for Master’s programs to start in 2022.
By Steven Christopher McKnight2 months ago in Journal
When the Birds Come Home in Spring - The Overture
Having recently finished my Master's Thesis, I decided to take a deep dive into my Google Docs and dredge from its murky depths some of my old prose. This novel has been in progress for the greater part of six years. At first it was a short story, submitted to a fiction workshop in my sophomore year of my undergrad. Then a fellow student who I was trying to impress narrowed her eyes at me from across the room and said to me, "This feels like it should be more of a novel." So here we are. Every attempt I've made to start and restart When the Birds Come Home in Spring has fizzled out. So maybe we can start afresh and anew. This is, more or less, my masterpiece in the making. I hope you enjoy it, chapter by chapter.
By Steven Christopher McKnight3 months ago in Fiction
First Starlight of Summer. Top Story - April 2024.
Your whole being is constituted by yearning. You miss the stars but have never seen a fully-realized night sky sparkle to life before your eyes. You write things, funny but short but profound, emulating the archaic cosmos that turns by its own unknowable calculus emulating love in all its celestial glory turning in that same cryptic way, but fully know neither and hardly know both, and it feels disingenuous, so you write about writers. It feels vaguely masturbatory, but it’s funny but short but profound and it impresses the people around you enough, so you run with it forever until you can’t anymore.
By Steven Christopher McKnight3 months ago in Fiction
The Music Is Reversible
I met a man who lived his life all backwards. The last day I saw him, he’d let me keep my bags behind the desk at the hotel, even after checkout, because my ferry left at 2, and there was still so much of Stornoway I wanted to see.
By Steven Christopher McKnight3 months ago in Fiction
So You Thought This Was My OnlyFans. Content Warning.
So! You clicked on this link thinking it was my OnlyFans. For those of you who don’t know, I have my Linktree in my Instagram bio, and on my Instagram story with the same caption. The button linked to this page reads “Spicy Content” with an array of sweaty, eggplant, and fire emojis. The ultimate goal? To get people to click on the Spicy Content. Which you did. Good job, you. Your curiosity got the better of you, and you have effectively netted me a halfpenny through Vocal, which is significantly more than I’d make through an OnlyFans anyway.
By Steven Christopher McKnight4 months ago in Confessions
PalWorld Doesn't Sit Right With Me
PalWorld leaves a sour taste in my mouth. There, I said it. Listen, I think that Nintendo are the bad guys in most situations. They shut down ROM creators who make some of the best takes on Pokemon games, they crank out uninspired mainline Pokemon games year after year, they make it difficult—even impossible sometimes—to acquire their best games from their golden age legally or cost-effectively, and they keep remaking Kanto. I won’t get on PalWorld’s case for being uncreative in a lot of their Pal designs. A lot of them are uncreative, I agree, and several of them are derivative of vastly superior Pokemon designs. The game was marketed as “Pokemon With Guns.” It’s going to happen a lot.
By Steven Christopher McKnight6 months ago in Geeks
Oh, No! I Burned Out!
Oh no! What happened? I was doing so well! I’m never going to make ends meet as a freelance author at this point! To explain, the first five days or so of February, while I was fully invested in creating new and amazing content every day, commenting on people’s stories, earning top stories and bonuses—What went wrong? How could I let that slip away? However will I get to twenty million views at this rate? Must the pressures of being a Master’s student always get in the way of the quarter of a dollar per day I am trying to make? It’s sad, honestly. So sad.
By Steven Christopher McKnight6 months ago in Humans
How To Get Into One Piece
In August, the One Piece Live Action dropped, quickly becoming the most-viewed show on Netflix at the time. I remember seeing in my YouTube recommended lists a lot of reviews from YouTubers who had never gotten into One Piece, who were watching the Live Action excitedly. I forced my ex-girlfriend to watch it, myself, and in turn she got her parents hooked. (Her dad’s favorite is Buggy. Everyone’s favorite is Buggy. Jeff Ward is a treasure. Jeff, if you’re reading this, I love you.) At around the same time, the YouTube channel “Dudes Talking Manga” started a series where one of the titular dudes read the One Piece manga for the first time in his life, reacting to it as the muse took him. One Piece is my favorite franchise; while I didn’t necessarily grow up with it, I did get into it when I was in my mid-teens, and it’s stuck with me this long.
By Steven Christopher McKnight6 months ago in Geeks
I Asked ChatGPT To Bully Me. Top Story - February 2024.
Artificial Intelligence really sticks in my craw, but for different reasons than you might think. I find it overly positive, civil, and unwilling to berate me. So I set out to make ChatGPT bully me. After all, if the robot is going to take my job, I may as well justify hating it. All things considered, here are my results:
By Steven Christopher McKnight6 months ago in Futurism
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