Matthew Arcilla, editorial mercenary

@experimentego.bsky.social

317 Followers 418 Following

Anglophonic Tsinoy | He/They | Twitch @ experimentego Just a cat in a human suit. The death of print magazines put me on retirement. Sometimes I still get to write words. "Aren't you, *the* Matthew Arcilla?" "I used to be."

EXCERPT:

"The Philippines’ anti-fake news bill is, in many ways, a copy of neighboring countries’ attempts to use the law to exert greater control over public expression on social media.

"In 2019, Singapore passed POFMA, or the Protection Against Online Falsehoods and Misinformation Act, which academics criticized as a “new form of authoritarian information control.” Meanwhile, Thailand’s 2016 Computer Cyber-Crime Act supplements its older Criminal Code by increasing penalties against those who criticize the royal family.

"In 2024, an opposition politician was convicted of violating both laws, prompting digital rights groups to denounce the “draconian nature” of measures intended to stifle dissent and legitimate criticism of the government.

"Thai political scientist Janjira Sombatpoonsiri has long studied these transnational trends, calling them “weaponized lawfare.” She has observed that autocratic and autocratizing governments “learn from each other” how to combine legal mechanisms with more insidious online armies to intimidate opponents and consolidate control.

"It is notable that House Bill No. 9465 gained new momentum following youth-led anti-corruption movements in the Philippines and across the broader region. Just as Gen Z activists learned from one another and amplified their causes — from Indonesia’s shaming of #NepoBabies to the Philippines’ anti-corruption #TrillionPesoMarch in 2025 — political elites across countries have also learned strategies of digital repression from one another."

A mostly white calico with black ears, a perfect black dot above her left nostril wearing a blue white and pink collar and a blue bell holding onto my shoulder for dear life

Jeffrey Jones as Emperor Joseph in Amadeus (1984), speaking to Amadeus Mozart (Tom Hulce). He says that there is "Too much game! There is in fact, only so much game one can play over the course of an evening."

The box for Spycraft: The Great Game, 1996. It is a black box with thin horizontal lines and in the center a crosshair fixed upon a man's face that is out of focus.

The tag above reads, "Danger and deception in the new world order." Flanking the crosshair are the names, "William Colby, CIA, Former Director," and "Oleg Kalugin, KGB, Former Major General."

Mental Age: 28
"The world is such a cold, scary place."

A three panel comic book page.

In the first panel, a blue-skinned man, known as the omnipotent Doctor Manhattan, looks up thinking, "It's 2018 and the World Cup is being held under a brutal oppressive regime."

The second panel depicts the same man but from a further distance. He is on Mars and is looking out into space. He muses, "It's 2022 and the World Cup is being held under a brutal oppressive regime."

The third panel sees him seated on a rocky pile thinking, "It's 2026 and the World Cup is being held under a brutal oppressive regime."

A villain from Mazinger Z named Baron Ashura. A single person made from the split halves of a man and a woman, dressed in a black and purple cloak

A very handsome orange cat. His name is Merlin.

The Superintendent of Springfield education astonished.

A still from Star Trek: The Next Generation. A starship with a disc like prow attached to a sloped midsection twin cylinders that house propulsion systems called nacelles, travels space along a drifting asteroid. It's the USS Enterprise. A caption in the classic episode title font reads, "To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar"

A middle age man with a bald head and glasses and short trimmed beard is sitting at a table a diner across his colleague, a young man in his twenties. It's Walter White from the iconic "what the fuck are you talking about" moment in AMC's Breaking Bad.

A soft cover copy of "How to Stand Up to a Dictator," by Maria Ressa.

A young woman with dark hair and glasses in a hoodie shirt with a denim jacket sits in front of a poster depicting various emotional states. It's Alex Chen, the protagonist of Life is Strange: True Colors.

A tattooed bouncer in a brown shirt points his finger disapprovingly at a young woman with brown hair wearing a dark jacket. The young woman is Chloe, the protagonist of Life is Strange: Before the Storm.

An officer of the law -- Sheriff Dollard played by the late Chris Penn -- is mostly offscreen but we can see he is writing a list on a clipboard.

His list reads: "Places for Homos"

"1. Flower Shops
2. Ballet Schools
3. Flight Attendant Lounges
3. Restaurants for Brunch
4. Antique--"

Dollard's writing hand obscures the rest.

Text in the style of a janky capitalized sans serif font, like that of a classic anti-piracy ad from the 1990s:

"YOU WOULDN'T CUSTOMIZE A MILF"

A JPG of a middle aged man with unruly white hair and unkempt hair encased in a life support harness with massive tubes going in and out of it. It's Jeremiah Surd, the quadriplegic supervillain cyber criminal from The Real Adventures of Jonny Quest.

A black and white photo of Carrie Fisher, on the set of Empire Strikes Back when she was 23 years old. She is laughing while making eye contact with the camera.

A calico cat, mostly white with black stained ears sitting in front of a computer monitor. She is wearing a red and blue Spider-Man themed collar. On screen is a Bluesky post of her from a different angle, looking down at her.

A calico cat, mostly white with black ears and a little black spot on the right side of her nose.

Four panel comic, by Shin Electromilk

A person with dyed blonde hair, black roots showing is putting in a blue contact lens into their eye | "From our pathetic Western ideals"

A line of people in a queue all wearing face masks | "To our internalized self-hatred of being Filipino"

Several people working the fields their faces covered | "To how we accept the torture of our countrymen simply because it's not us"

Blood-stained tree roots, beneath one a limp, outstretched arm | "We are the fruits of a tree with long-suffering roots."

A temperature forecast that shows a day in which it will be 29 degrees Celsius at 10 AM, 32 degrees Celsius at 12 PM and 33 degrees Celsius at 3 PM. Projected precipitation is below 5%.

Also listed is a UV rating of 11, with the warning, "UV will be extreme. Limit sub exposure if possible."

Text in the format of a Neon Genesis Evangelion episode card:

"REVENGE
BEDTIME
PROCRASTINATION

EPISODE:12

"They refuse sleep to regain a sense of freedom late at night."

EXCERPT: "At the same time, reciprocity is a crucial part of real relationships, but for the online component of those relationships, it can be more of a guideline, one that’s getting looser as time goes on,"

FOLLOWED BY HIGHLIGHTED TEXT: "Sometimes I respond to a friend’s Bluesky post or Instagram story. But most of the time I don’t. Instead, I let these bits of content pass in one eye and out the other. I amass bits of knowledge about my loved ones—my sister’s boyfriend published a poem; my friend left her job—as a spectator, in the same way that I might learn about an influencer’s favorite books, or about Taylor Swift’s engagement."

"What ultimately broke me and my Blizzard career was I got called into the CFO's office and he sits me down and he says—he gives me a date which at the time was 2020 and was going to slip to 2021, but at the time it was 2020—and he said: 'Overwatch has to make [redacted] in 2020, and then every year after that it needs a recurring revenue of [redacted]' and then he says to me 'if it doesn't do [redacted] we're going to lay off 1,000 people, and that's going to be on you.' And that was the biggest fuck you moment I've had in my career, it felt surreal to be in that condition."

A small calico cat with mostly white fur and black markings on her ears and a single black dot on her nose. Her tail is as short as a comma. She is sitting by the glow of a computer monitor in a room bathed in yellow light.

Scanned copy of a card from 1996 CCG Netrunner. It reads "MRAM Chip," and features art of a digital person with a chip hovering by his forehead." It costs 1 bit and is a Hardware-Chip-Cybernetics card that gives Hand size +2.

The flavor text reads: "Your brain's just like any other appliance, chummer. Works better if you plug it in." - Joey Two-Tails.

Promotional still from HOUSE OF LIES (2012-2016), featuring Don Cheadle, Kristen Bell, Ben Schwartz, Josh Lawson and Dawn Olivieri. They are all standing together with partitions separating them, presumably among urinals.

"Confident in my ability to properly tennis, I take the court. I smile at my opponent. Serena does not return the gesture. She's be prettier if she did, I think. She serves. The ball passes cleanly through my skull, killing me instantly."

Quote tweet of YouGov, in which original tweet reads: "One in eight men (12%) say they could win a point in a game of tennis against 23 time grand slam winner Serena Williams."

(From Quest for Glory IV: Shadows of Darkness, 1993)
Confessions of a Master Thief by Matt "The Cat" McMaster

Okay, so you want to be a Master Thief like me, yeah, sure, I know, I heard it a thousand times before. So you work on your climbing, your sneaking, even your lockpicking, and think you're really hot to trot. You practice the Thief Sign until you can do it in your sleep. You got your lockpick kit and your oil for greasing squeaks, your rope and grapnel for getting up steep walls, and figure you got everything you need. That's what you think.

Let's get this straight. I'm a real Master Thief, and I know a lot more than punk kids like you. So clean out your ears, sit down, and shut up while I'm talking.

First of all, there's your lockpick kit. What's going to happen to you the first time your try to pick a lock that has a trap on it? You're right. Poison traps get the rookie every time. You need to get yourself an Acme Mark II Toolkit with the Trap Disarming Tools. It takes some practice to learn how to find and disarm traps without seriously killing yourself, so visit your local Thieves' Guild and spend some time trying out their traps first. If you survive, you'll be a better Thief for it.

Next on the list of things you got to do well is Acrobatics. You never know when a flip and a twirl will save your life. Whether you're trying to cross a burning tightrope, or to leap an alley between building tops as you run away from the coppers, Acrobatics is something you can't do without.

Then there's Thief Marks. Those are the things a smart crook uses to communicate with fellow members of his profession, seeing as how most of you can't read. Those are the scratches made in the wall and the floor which warn you to look out for things. If you don't look for them, you won't know what you missed... (OUT OF ALT TEXT SPACE)

A pile of PC game manuals. From upper left, clockwise: MetalTech Earthsiege manual, Sim City 2000 User's Manual, manual for Diablo II: Lord of Destruction, Vault-Tec Lab Journal from Fallout, game manual for Baldur's Gate and a Vault Dweller's Survival Guide from Fallout.

A calico cat, mostly white fur but with black topped ears stares directly into the camera. It is unclear whether there are any thoughts behind those eyes.

An ginger cat resting in the folds of a pillow with one paw hooked forward. A 40+ year old man or Asian descent lies down behind the cat with only his head and face visible.

A group of Filipino teenagers dressed in vintage (1980s) youth apparel.

A sign at the Greenbelt 3 Mall in Ayala, Makati CBD photoshopped to say: "This is a private controlled environment. Poor people and other disturbing realities strictly prohibited."

A woman is on her back on the street by a sidewalk, looking at her smartphone, her face illuminated by it. It's Jill Valentine from Resident Evil 3.

A tentacle from off-screen is wrapped around her leg, dragging her across the pavement.

An insectoid bipedal with dragonfly wings is hovering above the jungle while firing a biomechanical pellet gun. His name is "Slim," a genetically altered Basilisk Soldier and veteran of the Third Mutagen War.

EXCERPT: "These are people who experience whiteness as a protective blanket from consequences. They expect it. They are not crazy to do so. They are following the logic of their lives lived as white Americans — the unchallenged agreement that says white innocence is assumed as a default in the same way that Black inferiority is. And she has not been corrected because the only thing white America is addicted to more than white supremacy is pretending that it’s not as big a problem as it obviously is."

A calico cat -- mostly white with black ears -- wearing a cyan collar with pink and white hearts is watching a computer screen. On display is a Twitch stream featuring a man whose face I've blurred speaking in front of a background of a bar.

An orange cat curled up with a shirt tail around his hind paws. He is on a couch that is covered in a thick blanket that has an astrological pattern on it.

From left to right: Hulk, Captain America, Iron Man, Hawkeye, Black Widow and Thor leap into action against a group of soldiers in a snow-covered forest.