Welcome to the Dark Forest of the Sloth People
JUNE 4TH, 2026
Welcome to the Studio Slowcore Dark Forest space! We're excited that DFOS recently opened its doors to the public.
If you're just joining us: Studio Slowcore is a creative production studio that caters to sustained-attention interests. We write about slow culture, economic value flow, and public domain art.
Our Dark Forest curates browsing libraries with an eye toward highlighting evergreen work and enduring forms of value. We're setting up our DFOS space as the long-term HQ for Slowcore Press, our incipient publishing/curation entity. It's also the new comfy home for the Public Domain Art Portal, our most popular curation-by-slowcore-ethos project to date.
We're happy to have you with us amongst the pioneer Dark Forest spaces in the early days, and we're excited to help you get better acquainted with DFOS. Our DFOS is on track to replace our Substack in the near future, so you'll have the option to follow our work through email as well as through the DFOS app.
If you haven't already read it, check out our Dark Forest Intro for more info about what we do, and please bear with us as we rearrange the furniture and get properly set up for what we've got planned.
A Slowcore Ethos
Some things to know about how our DFOS works:
Slowcore = No Filler Content
Because we value human time, care, and attention (yours and ours) and respect the cyclical nature of creativity — including the fallow periods — we do not publish any "filler" "content." Nor do we strive to keep up with hustle-culture norms of consistency. If it seems quieter than you're used to in our DFOS space, that's a feature, not a bug.
What we do care about: creative integrity; attention liberation; reciprocity; long-term sustainability; privacy; antienshittification; finding joy in our work; and earning our readers' trust over time.
If you value spaces that offer respite from the info-firehose and the ambient pressure to "keep up," then you're the people we want here in our Dark Forest.
Slowcore = Highlight Evergreen Work
We do our best to highlight evergreen work that doesn't get stale — the kind of work that rewards repeat readings and letting things slowly percolate. So in our Dark Forest it's not perceived as weird or stalker-ish to upvote or comment on something "old," and in fact we encourage it! Feel free to revive comment threads whenever you have something to add. We notice it and love it.
Slowcore Value Flow = Gift-Value + Market-Value
All space members can browse all our gift-feeds anytime, free from ads and pop-up subscription nags. Those who would like to unlock our full browsing libraries and archives will soon be able to purchase keys. More on this in the coming weeks.
What's Next?
While we work (slowly and happily) on our first Metalabel release for Slowcore Press, we're also organizing and fleshing out our in-house collections. We're starting with the Public Domain Art Appreciators Group, which will be our first group to offer keyholders-only access to the full archives. (More on our reasoning here).
An early peek at folders in the "by theme" section of the Public Domain Art Appreciators Group (more soon)
Once the PD Art Appreciators Group is established, we'll look at setting up two other groups for keyholders: a vault for The Anticareerist (including 35+ essays from 1998-2023), and Slowcore Value Flow (aka Nerd Talk).
If these early efforts meet with success, we may write more about our processes, in order to help ease the way in for future spacerunners.
Note that "success," in our case, doesn't mean impressive follower numbers or internet fame. It means having the resources, infrastructure, and relationships necessary to keep doing the work we're best at.
In our pre-slowcore days, we got a taste of the "go viral" sort of internet fame, and found it exhausting. We'd much rather hang with our fellow humans in the Dark Forest.
The Sloth People (that's us) are just getting started here.
The Hospitality Suite
We try to keep our DFOS space free of ambient pressure for "engagement," in part because we want to emphasize the unseen but very real value that attentive lurkers contribute.
That said, do feel free to comment on posts or visit our hospitality suite (chat) if you are so inclined. We'd like to know:
- What do you think of DFOS so far?
- If you're building your own DFOS space, how's it going so far?
- How did you find us? DFOS discovery tool? Substack? Word of mouth?
- What other DFOS spaces would you recommend to our readers?
Thank you for joining us, and we hope you enjoy our Dark Forest!
Image: A three-toed sloth by Stefan Laube aka Tauchgurke (public domain)
