HOMEBREW GIRL TUTORIAL by Nora Hikari

HOMEBREW GIRL TUTORIAL

1. Low Bronze Girl Main

You'll develop a prodigious

obsession with artificiality,

predictably, and it manifests as a

displacement.

A white-knuckled infatuation with

robotgirl threads on /d/,

two undergrad theses on social construction

and etymology,

the bit-crushed snap

of nightcore and hyperpop.

Ironically, there's such a thing as reality sickness.

It’s drugs, then. Weed and molly

and watered down Everclear

and midnight Twitch streams

and climbing SR in Overwatch

and a few dozen scars.

A vicarious Tracer skin for every occasion.

2. Battlestation Selfie Thread

You wish it wasn't written all over your face

that you end your 3 AMs

building yourself through eBay auctions

but nothing says "homebrew"

like a knowledge of 2010s chan memes and not

knowing how to braid your hair.

You like to give your computers girl’s names.

You like to leave them naked and gutted

on a pile of textbooks. This is a self portrait.

The hard insides everywhere,

built for performance, a flippancy with aesthetic

and disembowelment as a maximization of airflow.

It's the nature of humanity to try to replicate itself,

even without a body.

You don't need to feel so guilty about this.

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Nora Hikari is an Asian-American trans lesbian based in Philadelphia. Her work has appeared in Small Craft Warnings, Feral Journal, and Visibility Magazine, among others, and her poem Deer-to-Fish Transition Timeline has been nominated for the Best of the Net award.