Kingdomz X Magazine to Neuerotica: A Journey
Photo by Wei Ding
(The following editorial has been edited for clarity and grammar on November 13, 2025.)
This editorial is months late, but if you’ve been reading these editorials over the years (ha), you know that it’s not out of the norm around here. But I have a bit of bad news. Thanks to the COVID pandemic, Kingdomz X Magazine will be no more. Everything began to slow to a crawl, and it seemed as if I would never again be able to regain the momentum I had built up over the years. The luxury years were amazing, and you probably wouldn’t believe me if I told you how awesome my life had been during those years. It was depressing having to surrender to circumstance, but I’ve always been the type to bounce back better. Maybe it was time for me to do something else that could be as successful as Kingdomz X had been.
I had nothing but time to do a lot of things during the pandemic, including exploring new music. That’s when musicians such as Girli, Ayesha Erotica, Sophie, and JACKIE EXTREME popped up on my radar. It was mind-blowing shit, and I was immediately hooked. This journey pulled me into the world of hyperpop, glitch, and the whole culture surrounding these new (to me) forms of music. What I wanted to do more than anything was write about these young artists. For a hot minute, I tried using my Kingdomz X Magazine name, but it didn’t align with the kind of articles I wanted to write. I was stuck.
“Kingdomz X” is a moniker that I’ve been using for more than a decade for various projects (as mentioned in previous editorials). We published great interviews and articles; our web design has always been stylish, I’ve received high praise (from people I would never have imagined would be interested in someone “small” like me), and I had expanded our reach to tens of thousands.
One morning, I woke up and realized the name of my magazine itself was a hindrance to my progress. The weight of more than ten years of history was a weight that slowed me down and held me back. So the name had to go, and on that day, Kingdomz X Magazine was no more, and Neuerotica came into being. Although I knew that it would be hell to rebrand my site, I was confident that I was making the right move to retire the old name forever. Surprisingly, I felt no remorse for undoing everything that I had worked years to accomplish, and doing away with the old moniker. Instead, I felt exhilarated knowing that I was embarking on a bold, new chapter in my life and work.
So, we are now “Neuerotica”. This is a neue thing, a queer thing, a youth-oriented thing, a future-facing thing, and, more importantly, a subversive thing. It will be what Kingdomz X Magazine (more or less) was supposed to be in the first place. No longer “the lexicon of lux”, our new tagline is “subversive pop culture”, which I’ll explain to you all in full once I’ve set up our “about” section. Rest assured, however, the new setup will be a party of epic hedonistic and political proportions.
Outta the Blue
The name came to me in an instant without me having to think about it: “Nurotica”! However, as luck would have it, there was already a site using the name and the domain (ironically, a porn site). Google Domains saved me a headache by suggesting an alternative (and satisfactory) spelling. Within minutes, I had begun renaming all of my social media accounts with the new name. In my excitement to get things going, however, I failed to notice that the new name had the words “erotic” and “erotica” right smack in the middle; it was my former photographer who pointed it out to me. I had only a vague idea of what I wanted the new magazine to be, and since the name of the site and our logo were the results of random occurrences, I was stuck with having to build an identity around both.
Soon, however, something that I couldn’t quite put my finger on began happening; it was an inkling of an idea that began taking on a life of its own. The more it grew and the deeper it went, the more I felt good about what was beginning to take form (where it led me to, I will explain in our forthcoming introduction). So, I did a little experimenting on Instagram by posting images of the types of subjects I intended to publish. When I was done, I reviewed all of the images, and at first glance, it kind of looked like soft porn. Whether it was fashion, art, photography, or even music, most of the images had lots of exposed skin. There are only a few actual erotic images interspersed throughout my Instagram gallery. It’s only upon closer inspection that one realizes that most of the images are not at all erotic, with no implication of sex. My Instagram posts did, however, create the illusion of sexual content (because we’ve all been conditioned to believe that exposed skin equals sex). This revelation now left me with a problem because (like my Insta account) the name, logo, and content, together with the Neuerotica name, give the perception of eroticism and sex. So, I did the only reasonable thing that I could do to remedy the situation.
They say that every problem has a solution, and I had one. Just like how people are going to pronounce the name of the site the way they want (“new erotica” vs. “new-rotica”), people are going to make their assumptions as to our identity, and they’re likely to think that we’re all about sex anyway. Why not lean into it? Naturally, I knew what erotic meant, but I wanted to be sure that it was a path I wanted to walk. The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines erotic as “of, devoted to, or tending to arouse sexual love or desire”. It wasn’t my intention to publish erotic content in the first place, and that definition confirmed to me that it wasn’t a good idea. But I wanted to keep the name regardless because I think that it happens to be a great name. It was at this point that I realized I desperately needed a second opinion, so I asked a good friend of mine, whose intellect and insight I respect tremendously, what she thought about my Instagram feed that I had configured to represent the kinds of articles that I’d be writing and publishing. Her opinion of it was that it’s “sensual, but not distasteful”, has a mix of “art and sexy”, and that it’s “subversive” (quotation marks indicate her words). So I made Neuerotica an NSFW publication, then changed our tagline from “embrace the neue” to “subversive pop culture”. Like every other stage in Neuerotica’s creation, the tagline was completely random. There’s no doubt that our Kingdomz X Magazine readers will be gone after having read this article and having witnessed the new direction we’ve taken. I’d like to thank you all for an excellent six years. I bid you farewell and wish you all the best.
Anyway… I’ve spent more time than you can imagine composing this article. Since first publishing this editorial, I’ve returned to edit it more times than I can count. It is now July 2. Right now, I have articles to write and people to interview.
