Micah Nathan

Remembering River Phoenix, 23 Years After His Death

It happened pre-Internet, but it seemed like we all heard the news before the story went to press: on October 31st, 1993, 23-year-old River Phoenix died on a Sunset Strip sidewalk outside The Viper Room. We heard that he convulsed for over five minutes, that his sister Rain tried mouth-to-mouth and threw herself onto his seizing body while his brother Joaquin, née Leaf, called 911. We heard Johnny Depp was nearby, along with Flea and Christina Applegate and Samantha Mathis and the lead singer fr

THE SITE MAGAZINE

Snapshots in the Context of Forever — THE SITE MAGAZINE

In this essay, Consortium9's Chief Story Officer Micah Nathan ponders architecture and immortality in the city of Khora, the de jure capital of the NOR platform.

In 2021 Brooks Brown founded a company called Consortium9 and asked me to join in my capacity as a novelist. He had an idea for a videogame centered on an immortal populace living in a billions-of-years-old city named Khora. The name Khora was inspired, in part, by the word khôra, whose original definition referred to any territories o

Kill Screen - Previously

Street Art and the 8-Bit Cool

Le Corbusier—that lovable Utopic genius, he of the inhuman furniture and unrealized plans to modernize Paris—would have loved Space Invaders. The 8-bit aesthetic was never more idealized: you control a ship akin to a flattened Chrysler Building, launching vertical dashes at rows of synchronized aliens composed entirely of right angles and negative space. The background is a flat black. The pace is plodding. The sound is sparse. Not a pixel of humanity is evident, yet only a human could have made