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 (67/0)
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 McKnight26 days 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 McKnight2 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 McKnight3 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 McKnight5 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 McKnight5 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 McKnight5 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 McKnight5 months ago in Futurism
Tinder Travesties 2 - The Anatomy of Lawrence. Content Warning.
This article was declined upon first submission for "not meeting the quality standards." There were no other notes. I deleted a few sentences I thought could be problematic and reformatted, but it seems as though Vocal wants to censor this in-depth critique of Lawrence. We'll see if this article makes it past the censors this second time. I'll see you on the other side, friends.
By Steven Christopher McKnight5 months ago in Humor
Thrift Store Plaid
There’s Jesus-music in the air, praise to the same four chords recycling the same eighty half-rhymes about grace and peace and unquantifiable love. They sing about that like it means something, but love never was quantifiable. Art that points out that the sky is blue is neither interesting nor innovative, but it plays on Christian radio, so that has to be worth something. It presides over the air crisp with dime-store detergents and stale perfumes.
By Steven Christopher McKnight5 months ago in Fiction
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