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 (66/0)
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 McKnightabout a month ago in Fiction
- Top Story - April 2024
First Starlight of SummerTop 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 McKnightabout a month 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 McKnightabout a month ago in Fiction
So You Thought This Was My OnlyFans
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 McKnightabout a month 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 McKnight3 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 McKnight3 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 McKnight4 months ago in Geeks
- Top Story - February 2024
I Asked ChatGPT To Bully MeTop 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 McKnight4 months ago in Futurism
Tinder Travesties 2 - The Anatomy of Lawrence
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 McKnight4 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 McKnight4 months ago in Fiction
Lives of Unliving Things
A careless hand tosses you in with the other toys; to it, you are but one thing out of many it cannot bear to see in the bedroom now-childless. You watch paralyzed as the corners of the cardboard box fold in on each other, reduce the lovely lamplight to a faint sliver. You’re entombed there, alongside little plastic army men and the thick books Best Friend would sound aloud to you and Mom. The thinner books are in another box; Best Friend would whisper them quietly to you by flashlight some nights, before gripping you to his chest and falling gently asleep. You’d sleep, too, sometimes, as well as a sleepless thing could sleep.
By Steven Christopher McKnight4 months ago in Fiction