#retrospective division

[transfloppa]

more niche for u

original panel below cut

#dekoposting #sigh #im gonna properly tag this one but im not gonna like it #joy division #peter hook #bernard sumner #cate wurtz #lamezine #in retrospect i shouldve kept the MLP sheets for him

[suzukiblu]

. . . anyway I met a new soulmate AU concept and I'm gonna make it the Core Four's problem, natch.

It's kind of weird and awkward when Tim's Pocket shows up, because a) Tim's Pocket is Superman, and b) Superman is dead.

So that's . . . several kinds of weird and awkward, yeah.

"B," he says first thing into the cave, trying to sound professional and reasonable and not like he's kind of freaking out a little. Or . . . more than a little, maybe. "Can we, uh . . . talk?"

"Go ahead," Bruce says, not looking away from the Batcomputer. Tim really wishes he would. It would make some things easier to explain. Like his Pocket. Specifically his Pocket would be much, much easier to explain.

"My Pocket showed up last night," Tim says. Bruce nods in acknowledgement, still not looking away from the computer. His own Pocket is sitting on his shoulder, and at least she's looking at Tim. She also looks a little gobsmacked, which is saying something for her. Cat came from Selina, after all, and is very rarely gobsmacked.

"We'll get them a mask, then," Bruce says.

"Glasses might be better," Tim says resignedly. Bruce . . . pauses. Cat tugs his ear. He turns his head, and Tim tries not to die of embarrassment as his Pocket continues to hover over his head, peering curiously at Bruce.

He's Superman, still. The costume is a little different for some reason–there's black in it and different divisions of color and weird unnecessary-seeming belts and straps and gloves–but it's still undeniably Superman, big red cape and all.

Bruce looks blankly at Tim's Pocket. Tim's Pocket grins confidently back at him.

"What the fuck, Tim," Bruce says.

Tim does not in any way whatsoever blame him for it.

.

.

.

Cassie's Pocket is Superman and she has no idea how to feel about that. Superman's dead, for one thing. And also like in his thirties, at least? If not forties. And also dead.

"Uh, Mom?" she says when she comes down for breakfast. "Something . . . happened?"

Her mom looks up with a frown. Cassie's Pocket chirps a friendly greeting.

Mom stares.

"He's too old for you," she says immediately.

"Mom!" Cassie protests, and her Pocket cackles and swoops a circle around her head. "You–stop that, you jerk! And Mom, don't embarrass me in front of my Pocket, oh my god!"

"He should be embarrassed," Mom says darkly, glaring at Cassie's Pocket. He looks mildly offended. Cassie is very offended. To be fair, she also did not expect her Pocket to turn out to be a full-grown man with incredible alien superpowers and it's kind of freaky and a little off-putting, but that's her business, not her mom's.

Also, like, well . . . he's really cute, honestly. In a very weird way that she doesn't quite know how to reconcile with an adult man, but still. He's her Pocket, so there's no way he's a creep or a predator, and he's also Superman so there's definitely no way he's a creep or a predator, but the situation is really freaking bizarre all the same.

She's never even met Superman, so him being her Pocket really doesn't make sense. Especially because he is, again, dead. That'd be a really strong soulmate bond. Like, scary strong, Cassie thinks.

Though in retrospect, expecting Superman of all people to die was maybe kind of stupid of the world at large.

.

.

.

Bart is pretty surprised when his Pocket happens. It's Superman, he thinks? Which is weird. Superman's, like, super dead. Superman's from like . . . the twenty-first century, and Bart is definitely not.

And like . . . he's also just old. Like really, really old.

Lame.

"I'm gonna call you Soup," he decides immediately, poking his Pocket's curly hair. His Pocket looks just as immediately unimpressed and folds his arms. "What, you don't like it? Seriously? Okay, what about Soupy? Soupers? Soupette? Sou–ow ow ow stop!"

Okay, he's gonna have to workshop the name a bit, he guesses.

#core four #tim drake #cassie sandsmark #bart allen #kon el #dc robin #wonder girl #superboy #dc impulse #young justice #rinfic #wip: a pocketful of kons

[yonpote]

as someone who wasnt here at the time (was a fan from about 2011-2013) what exactly defines the "softlaunch era" pre-coming out that i hear you and others refer to?

you've come to the right place cuz this is the era when i truly became a Phannie... "gay softlaunch" is generally considered 2017-18, but to be more specific it was october 31, 2016-june 13, 2019!

before they came out this was also referred to as "post-baking universe" referencing the halloween 2016 monster pops video that had an (at the time) abnormal amount of raunchy humor and just general derangedness. nothing like it is today, but that point felt very significant and dan even brought it up in liveshows like yeah idk what happened there and when phil called a peach an ass in a gaming video dan said "we live in a post-baking universe" (i believe fans coined the term tho).

people have also called it the "glass closet era" which is a divisive name for a lot of people cuz "glass closet" can be seen as kind of a mean term and it implies like, stereotyping or speculating or the "we been knew" behavior dan had talked about in BIG. which i understand that feeling, but i don't think that's what was happening, because the way i see it was queer flagging. ways they could show a little bit who they really were without saying it just yet. they weren't Out out, but they were just like. openly talking about attraction to men and finding men hot and not calling it a Man Crush or anything. dan would bring up queerness more often in liveshows, which hes mentioned queer artists and stuff before but now it was also making jokes about like.. being in a gas leak man porn fantasy in his first livestream of 2017 LMAO. phil would make a lot more innuendos, which hes always done, but now he wasnt pretending like he didnt know what he was saying. dan started wearing a single hoop earring on his right ear. this is an old school form of queer flagging, in The Olden Days (im too lazy to look up when but like my 70-something year old history teacher knew about this) if a man had an earring on his left ear, he's straight, and if he had one on his right, he's gay. that one's pretty subtle if you don't know much about queer history and there were Great Debates over whether or not we should take it to mean he is gay, but personally i saw it as like. he was letting us know without needing to say the G word out loud just yet!

i think a really important part of this era was even outside of directly discussing queerness, they were both trying to become more authentic online and figuring out how to do that without compromising their own privacy. dan stopped straightening his hair and rebranded and opened up about his mental health. phil's authenticity journey seemed a bit slower and wasn't as overt or seemingly drastic as dan's was, but it was happening! he changed up his hair!!! which yes its kinda silly to talk abt dnp's hair but the emo fringe was Their Brand. phil in particular said that, the emo fringe was a comfort place but he was feeling like he was trapped in having it forever because it was Who He Was, so it was a huge deal for him! he opened up a little bit about his physical health, both of them were a bit more honest about all the stress and anxiety they were dealing with (the mukbang is a pretty good video where they talk about that and an interesting one to watch in retrospect) and their whole 2018 tour was themed around whether they should Give The People What They Want or do what they wanted to do.

god i talk too much ANYWAY then dan disappeared in 2019 and phil was manning the helm for a good five and a half months and then the Big Gay hit! the Hard Launch Era if you will :) and now i would say 2023-present is the Unhinged Era so i have no clue what the hell their next move is gonna be...

#ofc there were also signs before 2016 'wtf even is your sexuality' #but at that point there was still a veil over everything ykwim? #myrambles #also sorry im such a phillie i like barely mention dans authenticity journey BUT I JUST FEEL LIKE #IVE TALKED ABT IT A LOT BEFORE SO IDK WHAT MORE I COULD SAY #softlaunch

[vs120shound]

Natasha Marley, of Russian heritage, was a vision with Marlboro 100s and Virginia Slims 120s Luxury Lights Menthols and Non-Menthols!

VIDEO OF THE WEEK 🚬 🚬 (SF HALL OF FAME) 🚬 NUMBER 10 IN THE SERIES!

For the Week of 103023-110523

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆ | Four-and-a-Half "Stars"

From vs120shound staff | ★★★★★ (13 total: L)

Dual-Media 9-Post, 33-Pack Megapost!

Pretty Blonde with VS120s Luxury Lights Menthols!

Natasha Marley: A Vision of Pure Beauty!

Natasha Marley, who grew up in the U.K. of Russian parents, is one of the prettiest women in the Greater SF World Community scene. We say she is among the 10 prettiest SF Models/SF Entrepreneurs/Social Media Smoking Darlings-Social Network Cigarette Girls. She landed at No. 23 on our "unofficial" official Top-25 all-time favorite SF models list published on vs120shound released in January 2023. That was too low on the list, ought to have been higher, we proclaim in hindsight (Ah! 20/20 vision in retrospect!). Expect to see her in the Top-15 the next time we get around to re-compiling "The List" many months or a couple of years from now. We'll let you digest this Video of The Week | Hall of Fame division post to assess and rate her beauty and smoking style/power as you feel, as you see fit, as how it strikes your fancy. We simply adore her look, style, elegance and classiness!

. . . well, Ms. Marley, now a mother of two young children and retired from the public eye, was one of the more prolific SF models on the Smoking-Models (U.K.) family of SF websites. She appeared in 29 projects, 17 on Smoking-Models and 12 for www.ElegantSmoking.com. Her term with S-M began on September 14, 2009 and finished on June 1, 2020 -- and we believe those are dates of the videos' release not filming or completion of production -- and her career with ElegantSmoking started on July 31, 2009 and ended on April 9, 2020.

Her Instagram account, IG@therealnatashamarley, nearly has been scrubbed clean of any evidence of her smoking. The informed guess is that she has left cigarettes behind for a healthier lifestyle and to be a better role model for her young, impressionable children. One image remains and that is an IG@smoking_temptresses post that was added, ostensibly by Natasha or the folk(s) running her IG page. Kind of stick out now, we'd say. Cannot pretend the past did not exist. It can be revisited and changes can be made in lifestyle, career and life paths from what was experienced and learned during someone's past. Could be the case here.

This is a grand Megapost! effort by us. Several others of them on our brand have had more packs but this is the most content. What is a pack exactly (not done elsewhere and we've never explained, so here goes . . . )?

A pack for our purposes is an SF image, and there are three kinds -- GIF; photograph; video. A "post" is also a pack but, of course, it almost never is one image, ordinarily several or many but not exceeding 30 photos because that's the tumblr maximum.

It might be nice to see others in the tumblr SF-Content posting realm move forward with such an approach but that is unlikely. We're fine with the standard, traditional one-photo or one-video or one-GIF style the everyone else employs; we continue to do it ourselves but rarely nowadays. We love the great SF blogs/vlogs/webpages on tumblr, from which we re-blog mostly now on vs120shound-2. Our favorites -- and we realize some of you who follow us are aware of our preferences -- seem to be recently thelibrarian120, gomerianworld, smokingscholar, rtpsmk, qwerty53421, thesmokegod (zeusbabes) and blackmaca13, to name a likely Top-7 for us. Those wonderful pages are one photo or one video or one GIF. And they are sensational, extraordinary at it. And there is a lot creativity out there, just not Megaposts!, which take a lot of time to prepare, produce and publish. We're fine with that. We are comfortable with it. It works for us. We do this for you all ("y'all" . . . lived in Texas for 18 months) and for us, for our entertainment.

Speaking of our favorite tumblr SF blogs . . . we thank smokingscholar whose post is "re-blogged" in our style for our VOTW | Hall of Fame division post here today! That post from "The Scholar" on April 27, 2023 has received 267 positive responses, likes/re-blogs thus far! That video we've seen before but in an edited down version, so it was a treat for us to see at full length. Hope you enjoy.

THE MEDIA!

Natasha Marley on YouTube!

From YT's "smoking girl" webpage, with Jenna Hoskins, in 2018 . . .

The 'Super' Re-Blogged Post from 'The Scholar!'

From vs120shound on April 27, 2023 . . .

Natasha Marley Posts on Our Network!

From lostlighter23 on June 27, 2023 (Photo of The Day) . . .

From vs120shound on August 31, 2023 . . .

From vs120shound on January 5, 2023 ("The List" -- Top-25 all-time favorite SF models, No. 23) . . .

From vs120shound on November 7, 2022, in a re-blog from a post by blackmaca13 . . .

From vs120shound on August 20, 2022 . . .

From vs120shound on August 15, 2023 (leading off the first two spots in a photo assortment of various SF models/actresses . . .

From vs120shound on June 21, 2022 (leading off another assortment compilation) . . .

From vs120shound on March 9, 2022, a re-blog from a post by thesmokegod . . .

Natasha Marley Nowadays!

From Instagram@therealnatashamarley on March 19, 2023 . . .

Video from IG@smoking_temptresses on December 16, 2022 . . .

ANCHOR PHOTO OF NATASHA MARLEY!

This VOTW | Hall of Fame division post is being published on December 6, 2023 at 11:12 a.m. EST. It was produced on Dec. 4-6, 2023 over a period of five-and-a-half hours but was well worth the planning, effort and energy! Thanks for your support and interest in our "work!"

#SF #Hot women who love smoking cigarettes #Smoking cigarettes #Smoking #The Video of The Week (Honorable Mention)! #The Video of The Week (HoF) . . . Hall of Fame! #Natasha Marley of ElegantSmoking (U.K.)! #No. 23 on The List for the Top-25 all-time favorite SF models! #Youtube

[quasi-normalcy]

For all that people complained about how bleak Star Trek: Picard was when it came out, I would say that its depiction of the Federation was just a culmination of all of the flaws that it was depicted as having on Deep Space Nine (and, to a lesser extent, Voyager and even TNG): Earth-centrism, disregard for the rights of artificial persons, and a willingness to regard entire non-Federation species as disposable if their survival is deemed a threat to the Federation (or even if saving them contradicts an abstract philosophical point). It’s a society that has clearly lost its way, and its annoying (at least to me) that the writers couldn’t have instead imagined the Federation getting its shit together, but the thing is: everything that’s wrong with it emerges organically from the Federation we’ve seen, and, most critically, it is problematised. Our heroes stand in opposition to this corruption. Picard, Rios, and Raffi all left or were cashiered out of service over various aspects of Starfleet’s authoritarian turn; Elnor is a survivor of the Federation’s neglect; Seven and Soji are both members of oppressed minorities and Jurati had her academic career derailed, all because of fear and reactionary opposition to cybernetics. And yes, it’s bleak, but it’s also fundamentally hopeful: they are standing up for what’s right, even in the face of bigotry and oppression, and what could possibly be more Star Trek than that? You can argue about whether it was successful or particularly well-executed, but its heart was very much in the right place.

And that’s why, for all that I’m enjoying Season 3--for all that I love seeing the TNG crew together again and paying-off character arcs that I’ve been watching play out over the course of my entire lifetime--it gnaws at me. Because the thing is: the Federation hasn’t gotten any better. The genocidal criminal conspiracy from Deep Space Nine is now considered “a critical division of Starfleet Intelligence.” This “critical” bunch of war criminals keeps a sentient AI comatose to guard its warehouse, and nobody even comments on how fucked-up that is. The captain of the Titan constantly denigrates his ex-Borg first officer and orders her to deadname herself, but it’s okay because he’s *traumatised* and kind of funny in his assholishness. You get to have a heartbreaking moment with Picard saying “I didn’t know...” when he hears the extent of Section 31′s war crimes, but then he and Beverly, in the face of 35 years of consistent characterisation, immediately compound the war crime by resolving to execute Vadic. No, the Federation hasn’t gotten any better; the heroes have just gotten worse.

I love the TNG crew. I love seeing Picard and Ro finally have it out with one another; I love having a lifetime spent shipping Jean-Luc and Beverly pay off; I love that we finally get to see just how deeply Data’s death affected Geordi, and that we finally get to see Data’s relationship with Lore and his “becoming more human” arc pay off in a way that’s so seamless that it honestly feels kind of obvious in retrospect. But at a deep, philosophical level, I would rather see an angsty story about heroes opposing corruption than a happy story about heroes going along with it.

#star trek picard #long post #united federation of planets #Jean-Luc Picard #Raffi Musiker #cristobal rios #Elnor #seven of nine #soji #Section 31 #agnes jurati #geordi la forge #data soong #lore soong #beverly crusher #liam shaw #vadic #star trek deep space nine #star trek the next generation #Worf #Will Riker #Deanna Troi #Ro Laren

[crepesuzette2023]

Do you have an opinion on what actually happened in Barcelona and John's motivations?

No strong, line-in-the-sand, until-here-and-no-further opinion, and not prepared to die on any hills, but here is a blurry snapshot of my current thoughts on the quote unquote matter. (And thank you for asking!)

I think the question of "what happened in Barcelona" has too long been mixed up with speculations along the lines of "was John gay" or "did they have sex." While I relate to the curiosity, I think these questions, due to the bigotry of the times, led to simplistic, un-gay alternative theories (alternative to 'it was a Lennon-Epstein sex vacation', that is), which further confused the matter.

I do not think going to Barcelona was a power move on John's part to vet Brian and establish himself as the leader of the group. By the time of the trip (April '63), Brian had been the Beatles' manager for a while. He'd changed their act, found them a recording contract, had a separate contract with John and Paul as songwriters. He was in. Similarly, at this point, Brian would have been familiar with the power structure within the band, including John's leader/founder status and the equality that was the basis of the group and Lennon—McCartney. They were not a front man and a backing band, and Paul and John were not competing for the status of leader/main decision maker. It was them, together. There was no motive at the time for John to get alone-time with Brian to defend or regain his leadership status.

In addition to that, I don't think it's likely the vacation was related to the order of the Lennon-McCartney writing credit. Did John go to Barcelona with Brian to gain leverage that would allow him to demand his name would always go first, going against his previous agreement with Paul and Brian (which stated the main songwriter's name would come first, and all royalties would be shared 50/50)? Hmm. To me, this doesn't fit with Lennon-McCartney presenting themselves as a team of equal partners during the Beatle years, and with John emphasizing the roots of the partnership as reaching back to their romantic teenage pact. Neither of them tried to hide that writing was something they shared. There was no overt struggle for dominance, or even a clear division of tasks (as in, you do the lyrics, I do the music; or: you do the ballads, I do the rockers). And they planned to keep writing after the Beatles were done. Given all this, I feel it's unlikely John would scheme and try to get Brian alone in order to get his name put first, with Paul then just accepting it, because Brian and John forced him to.

It's so important to remember that much of the Beatles story is told in retrospect, after a bitter break-up, and in response to sometimes deliberately dumb or salacious questions. Yes, Paul framed Barcelona as a power-play on John's part, but that was after he and John had been through their own history of struggles of a decade or more, all of it amplified by the press and biographers of all stripes. And yes, John claimed Paul overpowered his artistic vision and fucked with his songs, but that, too, was in a later, more bitter time. In April '63, though? Were Paul and John really fighting for dominance? For leadership? For being the star?

I'm not denying that power played a role in John going to Barcelona with Brian, but I think it was something subtle—something related to being different...to John being the one to spend time with Brian, John separating himself from the band; John being the one Brian wanted to take along. And John agreeing to go.

{side bar on how every Beatle splitting from the main Beatle blob to travel down his own path with someone or something else functioned like a battle cry or warning signal to the others cut for brevity reasons!!!}

And yes, I think sex played a role in that decision. John made the choice to spend time alone—not a weekend, but twelve days—with a gay man who openly fancied him, and had tried to take him on solo trips before. Now, after refusing earlier, John agreed to go along. Trying to put myself in John's place, I have to believe that he knew the issue of sex and attraction would surface and have to be dealt with in some way, and that it must have felt exciting, and a little scary, but also: that it was time to do it, instead of always wondering what if.

But, judging from the events at Paul's (and Ivan Vaughan's!) 21st birthday party, I think it's fair to say John felt conflicted about it as well.

What actually happened in Barcelona? I'd be surprised if they didn't have sex. Judging from Brian's apparent blushing and walking-on-air happiness after the trip, I hope it was good.

Where this all fits with John and Paul, God—I've no idea.

The truth is rarely pure, and never simple. — Oscar Wilde.

Here is a lovely picture of John and Brian.

photo: Harry Benson

#John Lennon #Brian Epstein #lennon mccartney #what happened in Barcelona? #asks #The Beatles

[schismusic]

Joy Division, or: how I learned to stop worrying and love New Order, too

Spring is weird as hell because one time you have this glaring sun that powers you up like being plugged into a wall outlet, then not five minutes later clouds begin to gather and you feel like you're going to die if anything goes south. So the most obvious combination to represent two sides of this same coin, emotional and meteorological, is Joy Division and New Order.

Sometimes you need Transmission or Shadowplay for the sunny days — impassioned jolts, sparks flying everywhere. Sometimes The Perfect Kiss hits harder on a cloudy afternoon, coming back home and in need of that extra push to not fall asleep in the train. It's surprising to realize the versatility displayed by both bands, or the same band in two different iterations according to whomever you ask. Peter Hook says, as late as 1993, that the laziest member of New Order is Ian Curtis. Or again this other person, in the comments under the Atmosphere official video on YouTube, who went to see New Order (Hooky-less New Order, which might be a relevant distinction) at the O2 Arena a couple of years ago and they gave an encore, says "Those of us who stayed got the privilege of watching Joy Division perform three of their songs". Interesting outlook on the matter. I personally saw Peter Hook and the Light play both Joy Division records and, I'm pretty sure, an encore comprised of just Love Will Tear Us Apart at the Arti Vive Festival in Soliera, back when it was still free to attend some of the events. I remember being pretty mad that Hooky had stopped to take pics with basically everyone and then left exactly as I was approaching. In retrospect I don't exactly blame the man, it was like midnight anyway. I remember nothing of the back trip home.

My first contact with Joy Division happened when I was thirteen and very much in my prog era. I was in Rome staying at an aunt of mine's place for my fourteenth birthday and she told me I could get a CD, since I had gotten some money saved up over time. Some Facebook page dedicated to Pink Floyd I'd liked (yeah, Facebook at age thirteen — I literally just wanted to play a fucking Flash game, back when Facebook allowed them, and I ended up getting to be terminally online. Crazy how things turn out) used to share a lot of memes and fanart relating to the Unknown Pleasures album cover, and me being a massive Pink Floyd head at the time I thought "I mean, if these guys are pushing this band so hard, that's gotta mean something". The album cover was pretty striking, admittedly: a far cry from the paisley ass paintings that I had grown to accept as the gold standard for the music I liked, but its simplicity struck a chord closer to The Dark Side of the Moon, or perhaps The Wall. Those were records I liked a lot, probably called them "the best records ever made" to more than one person, not like they aren't but that's a very bold statement to make when your listening experience consists exactly of

Madonna's Confessions on a Dance Floor when I was six;

Daft Punk's complete discography (minus Random Access Memories, which wasn't out yet) when I was twelve;

Pink Floyd's complete discography, courtesy of a CD collection coming out with some Italian newspaper, that same year;

a couple random classic rock records recommended to me by older friends and relatives usually well into their fifties or sixties at the time, random people on Internet forums — which, for clarification, I did not actively attend, preferring to just lurk from time to time — and the OndaRock "milestones" page.

So browsing through the surprisingly expansive CDs section of this electronics shop in Rome, and being mesmerized by a vinyl rack in the days when Music on Vinyl was the final frontier of pretending you could re-analogue the digital ("you mean to tell me these are like CDs, but bigger? Whoever designed these truly lived in the future"), I came across that very same album art that had stricken me so hard. I had listened to the first seconds of the album on YouTube, but that weird drum sound — so echoey, so distant, ultimately not particularly powerful, meaning it didn't really sound like Bonzo: it sounded more like my own band, which at the time didn't even exist yet — I didn't really know what to make of. This store I was in had one of those preview listening machines that would scan the barcode on the CDs and give you a small snippet of the song. I pull the CD up to the scanner, the scanner lights up green, I put on the headphones and the solo from this comes up:

Clearly they had to be kidding me. I had come to know, sneaking into infinitely many rehearsals with the band from my mother's town, what it sounded like when someone tried to play lead without something else filling up the arrangement (even though I didn't really know all that, or at least lacked the vocabulary to properly express it) and, for Christ's sake, didn't these guys notice rehearsing? It sounded empty, weirdly so, and it wasn't my thing, I thought. I put that CD away and picked up a band I knew I'd like — Genesis, specifically. So Nursery Cryme became the first CD I've ever paid with my own money, the very day I turned fourteen. Not a bad pickup. I remember being very impressed with the fast blurring lead guitar on The Musical Box and digging the sweet pastoral atmospheres of For Absent Friends and Harlequin. I still think of that record more often than one would probably assume looking at this blog, or my most played on Spotify. At the time, that was the best move I could take, really: why beat my head against a record that, as your average prog nerd ballbreaker, simply wasn't speaking to me?

Then all of a sudden in August of the same year my friend's dad hands me a 16 gigabyte USB drive, full of random music from all eras of rock. A lot of it remains inscrutable to me for a really long time, most notably Tom Waits (see related post), but I spent the whole month reading random folder names, seeing if something catches my eyes, and at one point I come across the Mars Volta. Open the folder up, read the names of their first three records, and my first thought is "Christ, these guys look incomprehensible. I'm about to have some fun". Long story short: I end up having a lot of fun, the Mars Volta turns into my favourite band at the time and finding out that they had previously been called At the Drive-In makes me gain some measure of respect for punk rockers: if they tried hard enough, I must've thought, they could prog as hard as anyone. In the meantime the ghost of Joy Division remains at the back of my head. I feel like I'm missing something, for the first time in my life: it's not them, it's me. Too bad that same realization didn't occur to me when it came to the people in my life until much, much later, but that's being fourteen for you I suppose. Early King Crimson and the Mars Volta were the pinnacle of violence to me, and not even the very few Metallica songs I'd downloaded just to see what would happen scratched that itch. It felt a bit too cauterized for some reason (I would later find out I had been looking in the wrong direction the whole time: the Black Album "sucked", according to my favourite metalhead of the time, who somehow catalyzed my interest from the very second I saw him in the school's courtyard. Hard to imagine why I would imprint on people like puppies do, but what the fuck, not like I've ever outgrown that anyway, I've just gotten better at managing it). But I felt there was more than violence to this, or different forms of violence. When Christmas came around and my relatives tried to get me presents, my mother asked if there was anything specific I was interested in, and I basically told her "look, if they can get me some CDs off of this list, I'm golden". It had some bangers on it, namely Noctourniquet by the Mars Volta — it's one of their best and I will die on this hill, be warned — and The Downward Spiral, which might as well warrant its own post in an ideal world. But the best of them all I think came from a random purchase, once again with the little money I had lying around at the time.

Closer appears to be, right away, a bit more concrete, and if there's something inexperienced music fans like is a pretty packaging that conjures a strong emotional response before they've even played the record. Compare a color-inverted graph of pulsar emissions to a literal funerary monument. Opening up the booklet I was shocked to see that Genesis was used as a negative point of comparison (bad omen, I thought) by people close to the band, and I came across much more detailed information about Ian Curtis's untimely demise — at that time, something far too removed from my experience to be faced with the delicacy and attention it deserves. Atrocity Exhibition hits like a ten-ton truck, a reference which at the time I wouldn't have been able to make for obvious reasons, and Isolation exposes all the nerve tissue under the skin. Passover comes in and strips everything even barer, and then A Means to an End turns… danceable, for some reason? Big emotional moment with The Eternal and Decades, which I thought actually took them closer to my usual tastes. And yet at the same time I kept looking at Colony, Heart and Soul and Twenty Four Hours as the most compelling cuts. Geometric assault sounding like sheet metal if it were music; rhythmically driven emptiness that serves as a minimal backdrop for depressed poetry, and finally a rocking ebb-and-flow that would probably inform a lot of my interest in GY!BE-like post-rock in the coming years. Very interesting to think that the same guys who'd done Unknown Pleasures could think of this. To this day, when asked, I still do think that Closer is the best Joy Division record, but what does it even mean when the records are exactly two, compilations notwithstanding?

It was around this time that it came to my attention that both Joy Division and another band called New Order had a record called Substance out, both published by the same recording company, both coming out within a year of each other. Looking it up, it turns out it's fully intentional, because New Order is simply Joy Division minus Ian Curtis. It would turn out to be a tad bit more complex than that. Anyway, I look New Order up and kind of have to do a double-take. Synthpop? In my Joy Division? More likely than you'd think, considering Isolation exists. But yeah, that sort of seals it — I wouldn't care about this New Order for a million years. Until all of a sudden a couple of years later David Sylvian bursts like a comet in my face, which of course leads me straight to Japan, the same year as I'd come across Berlin-era Bowie, and you can probably guess where this is going, right?

Well, you'd be wrong. I still don't check out New Order. There's a whole new world open to me — vaporwave and therefore R Plus Seven come to my attention, which leads me to dissect that record like an alien tool of unclear purposes. This of course leads me onto an ambient tangent, taking me back to my Tim Hecker listens of that same year, which has the effect of renewing my interest in "pure" electronic music and the then-rising post-dubstep movement. The sheer experience of sound, the dazzling modernity and innovation, is what's in at the time. I have no time for nostalgia-pandering dimwits: the future awaits. Then all that jazz from the first Godflesh post hits, then God pulls the funniest gag in the history of viral infections to my memory, and I have some time to actually look back, a bit less prejudiced. As it turns out, synthpop is not the devil, as some of you might have surmised by now, and as I relisten to Blue Monday I realized I have never listened to either of the Substance record. I do know some, most perhaps?, of the tracks on the Joy Division one, and I do think the New Order one has the more striking cover art — not to mention I knew, by this time, that this was the one to give Metal Gear Solid 2: Substance its name, and that Your Silent Face soundtracked one of the most memorable moments in Nicolas Winding Refn's Bronson. As the ultimate Hideo Kojima stan, I couldn't let this slide, so I pop the record on and get hit with this:

Way to go, guys. Holy shit. I knew that Ceremony was a Joy Division cut before they could record it, but what the hell — Bernard got it, too. It wasn't a matter of singing ability with songs like these, it's just getting it, finding the right energy. They had that right energy. And then it hit me just as many times these dudes have made Blue Monday over and over again before actually getting it right, and everytime I look into it it's funnier and funnier to realize just how many different attempts it took them to finally be Kraftwerk, but augmented — with the stellar results we all know. Everything's Gone Green, 5 8 6, Temptation potentially, all lead up to this one moment in the history of dance music where somehow three dudes and a girl hailing from Manchester managed to out-gay the Pet Shop Boys (by their own admission, apparently), to shake the whole world's collective booty, to do whatever it is they were supposed to do in this last comparison that would ideally make the previous one a bit less obnoxious but whatever, it's 3am as usual, you know how it goes by now don't you? But then after Blue Monday the record keeps going, and thank god it does, because it's banger after banger. How do these guys keep doing it?

So I spend some time with that record, then it fades down, then it comes back up last month, when the weather calls for it and its parent company. Which is when I find myself watching the Control movie for the first time, surprisingly enough seeing as I already enjoyed the work of Anton Corbijn as a photographer. Looking at all that, it is revealed to me that Joy Division never really having died is not a bug, it's a feature. Everyone is gasping, I get it, but please pick your jaws up and check this out: the band has never learned how to play their respective instruments. One might go so far as to argue they play their own stuff their own way, and that's basically it. Nothing could be further from the truth. These guys jammed, a lot; that's how Joy Division wrote songs, that's how New Order wrote songs, even going as far as having Bernard Sumner fucked up on acid so he could find the chorus to Temptation or the whole band bombed out of their minds on X in Ibiza clubs to write, basically, the entirety of Technique — and even then, not really, there's a couple jangly tracks that the X would most likely render unlistenable but what do I really know? Point being: it might now have been sparked by a music teacher or instructor, it might not have been the product of a process comparable to that within Television, which led them to organically seek out better, more "by the book" musicianship, but New Order were incredibly familiar with their instruments, had formed an element of comfort and understanding that counterbalanced the alien-ness to music terminology.

Peter Hook recently uploaded a Yamaha-sponsored video to his Instagram, which I am pretty sure has a say in running, where he jams on a Yamaha bass and, you know, it sounds like Hooky alright, but it's never a discernible bassline until he kicks into the A major strumming that opens Love Will Tear Us Apart. Before that, he just strolls around the neck, leisurely strumming away at power chords imbued with that thick chorus and reverb combo he became renowned for. I would never, in my wildest dreams, have imagined I'd find myself thinking "okay, awesome, stop talking — I want to hear you jam a bit more" referring to one of the musicians who were part of possibly two of the craziest storiest in the history of contemporary rock'n'roll, also notorious for playing the rockstar whilst carrying the minimum possible baggage of technical knowledge he could. Once again, this is nowhere near a knock to the man — quite the opposite. Ian Curtis asked "persistence, well, what does it matter?", and Hooky (and, of course, the other members of New Order) found a way to constructively answer that question. Moments before Coil, but a bit later than Israel Regardie, they said "persistence is all" and built a brand on finding a way to consistently sound like splendid, eternal, golden children: "like crystal", impassionate, tightly-knit performers with the purity of a child's heart. Ian Curtis had, in certain ways (at least artistically), the purity of a child in his heart, which some might even argue was a distinguishing feature of most of his literary idols — if you think about it, William Burroughs could be your dirty-minded classmate who walked in on his parents sharing an intimate moment in the bedroom (had his parents been gay men, the metaphor would probably fly better, but that most definitely wasn't the case). So the heart of Joy Division remains untouched, if a bit more naked. Heroes of post-punk, sons of the silent age, you can sleep soundly tonight.

#schismusic #music #musica #long form content #schism writing #joy division #new order #post punk #new wave #Youtube

[shock-micro]

sometimes i really wonder what the future of gaming will hold...

i only realize this now, but a lot of my gaming experience recently has been in retrospect, in a way. i played celeste years after, i played hollow knight after all of my friends who'd played it insisted, i played rain world after years of hype from one of them, i played oneshot... you get the point.

the closest thing i've been to "cutting edge" in recent memory is tears of the kingdom, and as my backlog dwindles, i can't help but think of what lies ahead. will the idea of console wars die out, with so many defining games being indie, or otherwise released across all platforms? how will triple-a companies fare as they continue to get upstaged in unique gameplay and style by much smaller developers? will nintendo go back to a more traditional split handheld/home console model, or will everything they release from now on be iterations on the switch? conversely, will sony and microsoft innovate for once in their recent lives? take gaming in some bold new direction? or will they remain stagnant, as consoles become increasingly irrelevant, "evolving" away physical media and losing their greatest benefit in the process?

i don't even think i've touched my switch since tears of the kingdom. ever since, i've been immersed in so many different games, stories, worlds, created by passionate people who had something to say. i have no doubt in my mind that the indie community will keep thriving, but it's strangely bittersweet? that the greater video game industry, that once focused on innovation both in technology and in gameplay, is losing its way, with gaming companies as a whole stagnating, iterating in pure numbers instead of ideas. i suppose that's what happens when two of the major players in the console markets are global tech corporations, with gaming divisions, rather than a dedicated company like nintendo. but even with them, i'm almost worried by the rumors that their next console will just be a more powerful switch...

ah well, all of that text just to say, at least there are still folks passionate enough about games to keep that spirit alive, and with games like silksong and earthblade ahead, i'm not worried for gaming as a whole- just thinking about how we very might well be living through the end of an era defined by the big names in the industry. as sega once cast their dreams away, perhaps it's finally time for nintendo, sony, and microsoft to join them, to go out with one last hurrah, giving their console, their new games, all the creative energy they've got, in one final push for the finish line, before fading away.

[listen-to-the-inner-walrus]

okay so as suggested by @fromkenari (big thank btw), ive decided to make a post about one of my idols who happens to be a part of queer history i dont hear people talk about much.

and said icon is james whale.

he was an english director working in early hollywood, as well directing theatre and acting. his most well known films are probably the invisible man (1933), frankenstein (1931) and bride of frankenstein (1935).

(you might also know him from the road back (1937) if films about ww1 are your thing)

and while part of why i idolise him is those films and making horror art, i bring up the dates specifically because james whale was openly queer throughout his entire hollywood career.

said career began in the 1920s and continued up to 1950. he was pressured to step into the closet but he never did, and its likely a big factor as to why his career ended.

a lot of his films are packed with queer subtext, particularly bride of frankenstein. that film has so much camp packed into it and pretorius is so damn queer coded. theres a lot of queer readings of it you can explore, its fucking incredible.

and mind you, the hays code went into effect in 1934.

the hays code also happened to massively effect frankenstein in retrospect due to scene-cuts in re-releases, and bear with me on this one:

see the original cut had a scene where the monster meets a young girl named maria who asks him to play a game with her. in the game, they sit together and throw flowers onto a lake where they float. when the monster runs out of flowers, he throws his new friend, maria, in, assuming that she would float like the flowers. she doesnt; rather she drowns.

and this scene was specifically created by james whale in reaction to a then moral panic in america basically about the creepy man in the shadows who lures your child away and molests them. this deviant shadowy figure was essentially synonymised with gay men, who were falsely arrested on sodomy charges or died at the hands of mob "justice".

the flower scene challenges that idea because the monster isnt, well, a monster. in 1931, the monster was almost unilaterally perceived as this perverted evil thing that would steal your children; he was practically the same as these "predatory gay men", and then the monster wasnt a monster.

he was misjudged, he wasnt inherently evil, and he was unjustly punished. and if that applies to the monster, surely it applies to whale and all the other openly queer men.

as a scene in 1930s hollywood , it was so divisive because it portrayed the "villain" in a more morally grey area, and essentially said "hey, maybe this queer witch hunt is misguided"

unsurprisingly, producers at universal wanted to end the scene before the drowning. ending the scene there would leave it to the imagination as to what the monster did to maria, and given the sex offender moral panic sweeping the nation, the implication would be that he raped her.

but james whale fought for the scene to be kept and he won. specific states still forced the studios to censor parts of the film, but his film was intact.

BUT when this film was re-released in 1938, they entirely cut out this scene. and this fundamentally changed the character of the monster and the film itself.

by some fucking miracle, the scene was found in the british national film atchive in the 1980s, and modern cuts of the film now include. unfortunately, whale himself would not live to see that as he committed suicide in 1957.

what james whale did with frankenstein in 1931 was revolutionary in the same way that tod brownings freaks (1932) was. both men created films that portrayed the people society called monsters as real, complex beings who are not pure evil, and both faced censorship hell for it.

(go watch freaks btw, its so good)

and, you know, i get emotional talking about james whale. both because i have so much admiration for him as a queer person who refused to lock his queerness away, and because his name is never one i hear in discussions of queer history, and also because hes from the same area as me.

(im yet to find any clips of him speaking so i dont know if he has our accent or not. i like to think he did. he was the sixth out of a seven child working class family and first worked as a cobbler so its as likely as it could be.)

i would like for more queer folks to know about him because i think he deserves more of a legacy.

ian mckellen plays him in gods and monster (1998), and if youre ever in england with spare time, he does have a memorial sculpture. its in dudley which is where he was born, and if you know it, its right at castlegate.

but yeah no, this is my ramble post about a lesser known queer icon. originally i wrote an abridged version in the tags of a different post but @fromkenari was right, it deserves its own post.

#kai rambles #oh i have to tag this dont i #i did not think about that #james whale #frankenstein #frankenstein (1931) #bride of frankenstein #bride of frankenstein (1935) #the invisible man #the invisible man (1933) #queer history #queer icons #tw rape #tw csa mention #tw homophobia #does that cover my whole thing about frankenstein? please let me know if not #the hays code #hays code #censorship #tw suicide mention #moral panic #long post

[forthegothicheroine]

Interesting things I’m learning about the comic book moral panic (a post-World War II scare that comic books were going to turn children violent and/or gay, which resulted in the non-government censorship Comics Code):

Although it was set up as parents vs. kids, there were a lot of kids, especially religious ones, who were vocal and prominent in literally burning comics

It’s also not easily divisible along political lines; conservatives hated what they saw as immoral subtext, while more progressive types didn’t like the ‘might makes right’ vibe of superhero stories.

You know what? Crime Does Not Pay and Tales from the Crypt did in fact have lots of gore! I don’t think I would have forbidden my children from reading them, but I certainly wouldn’t have been thrilled about it.

The above does not mean I would want them banned, let alone that I’d lump everything from The Spirit (which was actually doing some innovative artistic stuff) to the worst issue of the worst forgotten war comic together. It just means these are still arguments we’re having today.

In retrospect, there doesn’t seem to have been that much of a rise in juvenile delinquency, which means that parents in the 50s panicking that their kids had attitude were REALLY not prepared for the 60s.

#history #comics

[mywifeleftme]

363: R.E.M. // Murmur

Murmur R.E.M. 1983, IRS

Some Short, Disconnected Statements on the Matter of Murmur

1. Insert the following into Waring blender

The Velvet Underground, Pylon, the Byrds, Gang of Four, Patti Smith, the Feelies, Joy Division, the Method Actors, Big Star, the dB’s, the Monkees. Press “Blend” button. (I’ve never owned a blender; I don’t know what the buttons say.)

2. Easy formula for a great band

Having one temperamental genius songwriter guy sounds kind of hard to maintain. Have you considered simply getting four people who are really excellent and distinctive at the respective things they do (at least three of them great singers), who all write well, get along, lack substance abuse issues, have good taste, and modest egos? Why don’t more bands do this?

3. Notes on the early discourse

A lot of the things people wrote back in the early ‘80s to champion this band were dumb as hell. R.E.M. weren’t good because they didn’t use keyboards or synths; pop music didn’t need to be returned to its "honest" folk-rock roots; giving them a thumbs up for not wearing flashy clothes and makeup is dork behaviour.

They were good because they made weird music that derived organically from their time (early ‘80s), place (a college town in the South), and selves (bright, independent, adventurous, sincere, ¼ gay).

Anyone who listened to Chronic Town or Murmur, with their post-punky murk and lyrical references to Laocoön and Marat, and thought to themselves, “As yes, the second coming of Roger McGuinn, this will put those effete new wavers to flight,” was an idiot.

4. Veteran of the psychic war

Somewhere around age 22, R.E.M. took over the mantle Metallica had held as My Favourite Band in the World Forever and Ever, and I proceeded to be almost as annoying about them as I had been Hetfield and the boys. I posted a lot about them; rigged “best music” polls on random message boards I didn’t even post on in their favour; cornered people at parties; crowbarred them into playlists; grumpily chose to dislike bands I saw as stealing their shine; etc. etc. Some (some) of this is maybe cute in retrospect, but really: don’t be like this about music. If you love a band this much, learn how to play their songs on an instrument; write a few poems; paint something. Worst case: review them.

5. Learning nothing, 2024

6. Athens: Lyrics & Enunciation

The matter of what exactly Stipe was singing on the early R.E.M. records was a subject of intense speculation, and eventually, parody. Some of the mystery’s in the mixing, some’s in his Georgian accent, and some’s in his enunciation (never quite as mushy as people claimed, but not exactly Ella Fitzgerald either). But most of it’s in the arbitrary decisions he makes with regard to syntax that cause even accurate transcriptions to seem implausible. Stipe is probably a little bit autistic, which goes some way to explaining the impressionistic intuitiveness of his words, and also went to art school, which fetishizes that sort of thing, but he was always shy of people seeing the words to something like “Sitting Still” on the page because he thought he might be exposed as a nincompoop. “Up to par and Katie bars / The kitchen side, but not me in / Sitting top of the big hill / Waste of time sitting still,” goes the chorus, according to at least one gnostic sect, but the important passage is the one everyone agrees on, when the stream of impassioned babble releases into a howled “I can hear you / Can you hear me?”

Later on, when he would sing more clearly over airy arrangements, with the lyrics neatly printed in the booklet, he’d occasionally try one of those old sound-over-sense moves and embarrass himself (“Leaving New York was never my proud” still rankles). But Murmur’s eternal elusiveness is in the way fragments of sense catch your ear from out of its sleeptalk glossolalia:

“The pilgrimage has gained momentum” “Conversation fear” “Lighted, lighted / Laughing in tune” “Hear the howl of the rope / A question” “A perfect circle of acquaintances and friends / Drink another, coin a phrase” “Shaking through / Opportune” “Take oasis” “Heaven assumes / Shoulders high in the room” “Did we miss anything?”

7. Permission to be arbitrary

I remember sitting in the basement of my college house with my old hometown buddy Brad (mostly a metal/classic rock guy), playing him “Shaking Through” and explaining one of the things I love about old R.E.M. is that it’s great music to yell to. I don’t know how much he really got it, but we were drunk and it’s a catchy song, so we howled and made keening, wordless, Stipean noises along with it and the next few until one of my roommates came and asked us to keep it down.

Also: one theory for why cats purr when they’re injured is that the vibrations somehow reduce pain and encourage healing. From many experiences humming these songs while wrapped up in headphones and bedsheets in the middle of a day that’s passing like a kidney stone, I can confirm.

8. Note on the modern discourse: Influence?

Black Francis, Kurt Cobain, Bob Mould, Steve Malkmus, Bob Pollard, and Thom Yorke loved R.E.M. So did, to his own apparent consternation, Metallica’s Cliff Burton. Still, you sit down with someone and listen to those musicians with the goal of showing them the R.E.M. influence (don’t do this, why would you do this?) and it’s honestly pretty oblique. Most of the bands who directly aped aspects of R.E.M.'s early sound were at best pleasantly minor (see Captured Tracks’ Strum & Thrum comp), and the ones who seemed to be listening most closely to their ‘90s efforts were not who you want.

Their ultimate influence was probably simply showing what an art-first, indie-adjacent rock band could accomplish by sticking to their guns and bending the system to their desires instead of being bent by it. They were like a Velvet Underground for the college rock era, except everyone talented who heard them was inspired to start a band that didn’t sound much like them. They always used their spotlight to introduce people to other bands and, when they really got huge, they modeled how to deal with success. There don’t seem to be many R.E.M. stories, Peter Buck’s airplane incident aside, about them being anything other than kind. That’s a fundamentally less exciting type of influence than most other “great” bands have. But I do think it’s kinda cool they were the wise old heads for an entire national movement of alternative music.

8b.

Of course, it still bugs me people don’t think they’re cool. Murmur at least, should be considered cool. And Reckoning, mostly. Chronic Town for sure. Some of Fables. Am I crazy for saying some of Monster and New Adventures even? I’ll stop. I’ll go on.

9(-9). The music

They were a pop band, they were an art band; they sounded like children, and like craggy old men buried in kudzu weed; natural and pretentious; date-stamped and timeless. Decide yourself. Happy 41st birthday Murmur.

363/365

#r.e.m. #rem #michael stipe #peter buck #bill berry #mike mills #murmur #mitch easter #jangle pop #athens music #athens #'80s music #college rock #alternative rock #indie rock #perfect circle #self indulgence #music review #vinyl record

[nikethestatue]

Why do you think the fandom has become so divided? I mean I’m it it for elriel but if elucian happened I wouldn’t be devastated or anything and I’d still read the book. I don’t get how all this name calling, lack of reading comprehension my ship is better because of x y z even came about? Was it around before the 3rd ship entered the race or do you think it has more to do with the amount of time people have had to get so fully invested in a ship theyve lost all sense of civility. The thing with reading comprehension when it comes to yet to be written narratives is that it’s somewhat retrospective. Meaning if it turns out you were right u comprehended the txt correctly but if your wrong you didn’t. But this isn’t black and white because an author can drop storyline’s, change original storyline’s, retcon already canon events, have continuity errors etc and you interpreted it right but the author decided to take the storyline away from the original plan. But at present as far as I can tell the only things we know for certain because it was stated in actual canon is A) that elain and Lucian have a mate bond (wether this turns out to be a true mate bond or the work of a corrupt cauldron or something is yet to be determined) B) that elain is uncomfortable around lucian and isn’t open to the bond at present (altho obviously this could change if sjm wants to write that story) C) elains and azriels characters have a lot of interactions and there on page storyline’s are entwined with each other (he’s protective of her, her seeks her out, he didn’t hesitate to rescue her, truth teller all the stuff that came up in the bonus chapter etc etc etc) and this means something and D) Elain and Azriel are indeed attracted to each, but it was not stated in canon that he only thinks of her sexually, contrary to what some people say, there wasn’t enough on page information to make concrete claims like that (wether any of this will go on to mean something more is also yet to be determined) That’s why theories and txt analysis is suppose to be fun but it also needs to lean into canon, which is completely different than a headcanon which brings me to Gwynriel. There is absolutely and I can’t state this enough no canon evidence of gwynriel (wether they go on to be a canon couple once again is yet to be determined) but at the moment all “evidence” of this ship is based of of individual interpretation that has no actual canon backing. Thinking 2 people would be better together doesn’t make something canon, so this ship to me is a crack ship. I will say I think part of the reason the gwynriel ship is so present in social media is because the elucians decided to support that ship because it suited their narrative not because they actually think or care if they become a couple or not so it’s like 2 ships against one. If you took all the eluciens out of the equation I think the gwynriel ship fandom would be a lot smaller.

I think ACOSF happened.

It was a divisive book, needlessly so. It pitted the IC against Nesta and then Nesta with her 'found family' formed almost this separate narrative and a separate unit of girlbosses. And instead of unity, you have division in the fandom. Half of the fandom are older, Feysand-centric readers and then the rest are newer, Nesta-centric readers, who can pin all their hopes and dreams on Gwyn, who is single, straight, pretty and spunky. She is not some vision-seeing weirdo who likes flowers and cream buns. No! Gwyn is your generic, uncomplicated, easily digestible Miss Awesome. Nesta is mated and odd and too tormented, while Emerie would've been okayish, but now she seems to be no longer straight and she's got those ungainly clipped wings. (Let's not kid ourselves, there is plenty of misogyny and racism in this fandom). SO that leaves Gwyn and the last available batboy, who also had a monster cock apparently, the ubiquitous shadows and who is handsome and mysterious.

The relationship between the sisters isnt really resolved at the end of the book. It's fashionable to hate Elain even harder, because she was 'mean to Nesta' and because she is 'mean to Lucien'. So obviously such a revolting character cannot be paired with the handsome Azriel. But who can? Gwyn! Uncomplicated Gwyn, whom you are not allowed to critique in any fashion because .... SA!

And from there on, I think it just grew and grew.

Yes, there is no basis for the Gwynriel ship. But you dont need a basis, you just need access to others via social media, do a lot of posturing as an 'expert', highlight some random passages from the books, creating vague connections. and BOOM! you got a ship. And yes, the viciousness came with Gwynriels, who began acting like they were experts themselves and who descended on anyone who argued like a swarm of bees. They hounded numerous artists off platforms, others refused to even entertain the idea of painting Elriel art, they attacked people on every platform, they doxxed, they berated and insulted. 2021 was a crazy year.

Now they are all gone because they don't give a shit anymore. Other things came about that are more interesting.

The newer Gwynriels arent as psychotic or nasty. They'll argue, which is their right, but like they won't set your grandma on fire over Gwynriel. First Gen Gwynriels were something else. But so many people left the fandom in 21-22 because of the negativity, older fans, who were not into all of this.

There were a ton of Elriels, I remember, in 21-22 on here. Now, there is like me. And a few others, newer ones. From the OG group, there might be 10 left? Sad really, but it is what it is.

[scribefindegil]

If you have the spoons to watch it, I think you’d really enjoy this retrospective about Mob Psycho 100.

https://youtu.be/kfxhrOYAXqs

It’s like an hour long by Mother’s Basement, but it’s really good and goes over the themes and ideas of the series.

Thank you!! I finally had the energy to watch this the other day and I really enjoyed it! (I also really like the videos he did about the S1 and S2 openings, which were really interesting to me as someone who knows very little about animation!) I especially liked some of the stuff he talked about with Claw, like going into more depth about the proverb their name comes from and how Touichirou is wildly misinterpreting it.

Also. I want that man's Dimple shirt.

However! I was really excited to hear his thoughts on the structure of the show (at the beginning of that segment when he talked about it having a "chiastic ring structure" I gasped aloud in delight because I am a predictable nerd), but I feel like that's one thing I disagree with him on. Conceptually he's right, but his actual breakdown of the arcs and structures suffers because he needed to create something that would make a nice graphic (thus ignoring or glossing over a lot of complexity), he incorporates various flashbacks into "arc 1" instead of actually engaging with the structure of the show as written, and also he, like many people, doesn't seem to understand the importance of the aliens arc (it's not even mentioned in his structure graphic!! A failing!). The structure talk/graphic starts at about 20:37 in the video if you want to see what I'm talking about.

I might make a proper post on it at some point but my very basic thoughts on the chiastic structure are:

Club Recruitment (I don't think we have a name for this one specifically bc it's only one episode but it sets up Literally The Entire Show so) mirrors Aliens/Telepathy Arc

Lol Cult and Black Vinegar mirror Divine Tree

Big Cleanup and 7th Division mirror World Domination (Big Cleanup is a little messy and I feel like fits less neatly into this than most other arcs; parts of it are more closely tied to Divine Tree's themes of getting carried away, but the Ritsu and Shou plot during World Domination is very much in dialogue with Ritsu's Big Cleanup plot)

And the middle of the ring is the back-to-back mirrors of Mogami Arc and Separation Arc

Now, Confession is specifically outside of the ring composition; it's a synthesis of a bunch of important themes and character arcs that it revisits in order to provide resolution. Tbh it deserves a structural breakdown of its own; it has so much going on and it's SO GOOD.

Also obviously there is a lot more going on than the ring structure because the themes are very consistent and the parallels are EVERYWHERE; I have yelled at length about the Mogami/Divine Tree parallels and tbh you could probably do the same with any combo of arcs. But I Just Think Chiasmus Is Neat.

#conversations #mp100 #*jazz hands* ring composition!!!!

[dalloneveryday]

GLOOM DIVISION WASNT SUPPOSED TO BE RELEASED 💀

the first pic is someone elses screenshot on twt taken ~8 hours ago and the second is mine taken a couple minutes ago.

the option to pre save it on apple music is now gone. the only people who had screenshots of the album were apple music users.

the most damning so far, it only says “WHAT LOVE?”. i feel like it should have been obvious that the full album wasnt supposed to get out. from all the teasers and blatant information, all dallon has ever teased has been what love?.

so… fuck? but theres not much that we can do about it, and i dont blame people for posting about it. all i can say in retrospect is GOD DAMN THIS WHOLE THING IS SO UNBELIEVABLY UNFORTUNATE. YIIIIIIIIIKESSSSSSS.

at least the albums information was the only thing leaked though. i think it would have been a genuine travesty if anyone had been able to hear it early too. so, unfortunate, yes, the surprise is gone, but it could have been worse.

#idkhow #WE ALL REALLY FUCKED UP OMG💀 #i cant blame everyone for freaking out and spreading it. i almost did too. but OH GOD! JEEESSSSUUUSS THIS IS SO BAD #i know this is old news i just wanted to rant about it. #not a dallon post

[exeggcute]

sometimes i get so mad about online advertising being so lawless compared to other mediums (ex. television ads occupying specific spots in programming or a small fraction of the screen while online ads can sprawl wherever the hell they want And bog down computer performance) i find myself wishing for someone to enact legislation leading to their regulation, but how likely of a possibility do you think that actually is?

it depends tbh. we do have related stuff like CCPA and GDPR (obligatory meme that I have saved on my phone:)

...so it's not impossible for further laws/regulations to crop up down the line. my main thoughts here are that (1) adtech changes so rapidly that I think any specific legislation is almost certainly doomed to become obsolete before long (compounded further by the fact that most lawmakers barely seem to understand the internet, let alone a fucking RTB supply chain lol), (2) enforcement would be a nightmare considering there are literally several hundred billion bid requests generated EVERY SINGLE DAY (googled this stat to make sure I wasn't misremembering and got another dr. fou link lol. can't escape this guy) and (3) believe it or not, the online advertising industry is largely self-governing... or at least tries to be.

an organization called the IAB (interactive advertising bureau) sets a ton of standards around not only the logistics of buying and selling ads (they are, for example, the creators of the OpenRTB protocol for real-time auctions), but also the quality of the ads and ad space being sold. there are tons of initiatives they've proposed that have widespread buy-in among the industry, like ads.txt, which everybody who's anybody uses these days.

you do, of course, have to buy in to what the IAB is metaphorically selling, but their decrees hold a lot of weight among all sections of the ads supply chain—both reputable buyers and reputable sellers regularly adjust their behavior based on IAB guidelines. for example, two of the things you mentioned:

"ads can sprawl wherever they want": the IAB has about a million guidelines for where ads can physically go on a page, how they can run (e.g., video ads must be muted by default or they aren't IAB compliant), and what percentage of the visual real estate they can use up. publishers obviously can and do violate these guidelines, but third-party tools exist to make sure your ads aren't running on pages that pull that shit. and as a rule, advertisers actively dislike buying ad space on awful cluttered pages because they know the pages are shitty and the impressions are less valuable.

"big down computer performance": people call those heavy ads! the IAB sets standards around ad performance (the lighter the better, basically) and google chrome even implemented a feature that automatically kills heavy ads before they eat up your whole CPU. some performance based-issues are also caused by malvertising which is uhhh a whole other thing but no one likes it and everyone who matters is trying to stop it.

which isn't to be naive here or an industry shill or whatever because Fucking Obviously these problems persist. I actually had to email the advertising division at conde nast recently because I kept getting malicious redirect ads on their mobile site (they haven't responded yet... return my calls bitch!) so clearly even well-meaning reputable websites and ad platforms and advertisers continue to have issues with IVT and whatnot. the struggle is eternal.

but arguably so is the struggle against basically anything that's legislated, like property crime or whatever. I'm admittedly not optimistic that formal laws would fix digital advertising, only put a slightly hotter fire under people's asses to clean up their respective acts better. which is certainly a good thing, it's just a rapidly evolving game where the bad actors are always coming up with new tactics.

fun and related example: I read a recent retrospective about the kids behind the mirai botnet, which originally started out as a DDoS-for-hire scheme but pivoted to ad fraud when it turned out that was way more profitable. possibly the largest botnet ever (don't quote me on that though) and it was spun up by three teenagers!!!

#adtech #I need to go back and tag all these types of posts so I can find them later lol

[love-sapphirerose]

Naruto: Sasuke Was Right About the Hidden Leaf Village

While much of the fanbase tends to disagree with his actions, in retrospect, most of what Sasuke did had some merit and justification.

This month marks the 20th anniversary of the Naruto anime, making it the perfect time to look back on the franchise. Following the story of the titular character, Naruto Uzumaki, fans were taken on a wild adventure that ultimately ended up revolving around one friend trying to save the other from themselves. This friend who needed saving was obviously the infamous Sasuke Uchiha.

Sasuke Uchiha, while ultimately redeemed at the end of the story, is easily one of the most divisive characters throughout Naruto. As strong as he is, his behavior, especially towards Naruto, has led to the character's derision by fans. What's strange though, is that in many ways, the revelations that happen throughout the series pretty much prove that most of his actions were justifiable.

The Hidden Leaf Framed Itachi For the Death of the Uchiha Clan

Starting off with probably the most notable reason, Sasuke had every right to seek revenge against the Hidden Leaf Village for what it had done to his family. When he was just a child, Sasuke witnessed the massacre of his entire clan at the hands of Itachi, an event that set the stage for his character arc and acted as his main motivation throughout the series.

What makes this event so cruel isn't that the atrocities of that night were committed by his brother, but that the Hidden Leaf Village forced Itachi to do so. After receiving word that the Uchiha were planning a coup d'etat, Danzo went out of his way to eliminate the entirety of the clan, even though there were other methods available, such as Shisui Uchiha's powerful genjutsu. This is also ignoring the fact that the Hidden Leaf could have negotiated and tried to resolve things peacefully as well.

Instead of a peaceful resolution, Danzo manipulated Itachi into killing his family, stating that it would save the most lives, but also threatening to have Sasuke killed if he didn't do it. Feeling trapped, Itachi killed his clan, traumatizing his younger brother in the process, all in an effort to save him. To top it all off, not only was Sasuke not allowed to know any of this, but those responsible, mainly Danzo, weren't punished for their actions, even though the Third Hokage ordered him not to follow through with his plan. In the process of covering up the incident, the Hidden Leaf Village framed Itachi and made him out to be this evil villain that revels in cruelty, tarnishing his name forever.

No one loved Sasuke more than his brother, and the same was true for Itachi. Sasuke idolized Itachi and trusted him more than anyone else, which is why the betrayal hurt him so much. To make matters worse, Itachi went out of his way to torment Sasuke in order to push him to become as strong as possible. Itachi knew from experience just how dangerous it was to be an Uchiha in the Hidden Leaf, and wanted to make sure that Sasuke would be strong enough to protect himself without him there. It broke Itachi's heart doing so, something Sasuke only learned after it was too late.

He'd already killed his brother, only to find out that Itachi had spent his entire life trying save Sasuke from a similar and worse fate. He became the villain in Sasuke's life, hoping that his death would ultimately bring his brother happiness. If Sasuke killed him, he would become known as a hero of the Hidden Leaf Village, ultimately guiding Sasuke away from destroying their home. Even knowing that Itachi wanted Sasuke to be a protector of the Hidden Leaf Village, he couldn't shake away his anger towards it, and rightfully so.

The Hidden Leaf Had a Long History of Mistreating the Uchiha Clan

The issue that pretty much led to the vast majority of the events as far as Sasuke's journey was concerned was the Uchiha Clan Massacre. For a long time, the Uchiha had felt like the Hidden Leaf Village was treating them unfairly, as though they weren't really a part of the village, a sentiment that wasn't completely without merit.

By the time the coup was being planned, the Uchiha had already been pushed to the outskirts of the village, segregating them from everyone else. While this definitely had an "othering" effect, it wasn't the worst part of their mistreatment. This was all done alongside making them into the Konoha Military Police Force, a group designed to keep other shinobi in check and make sure they follow the law. While it was presented as a sign of good faith and trust by Tobirama Senju, it is also what led to the clans move, as it was decided that they along with the station need to be closer to the prison. This is also led to the Uchiha losing governing influence within the village.

In many ways, all of this was predicted by Madara Uchiha. While the main motivations of his belief were mainly selfish and derived from jealousy, Madara was still able to see the signs of where things were ultimately heading. He saw how the other clans in the village feared him and the Uchiha's power, and could see how this prejudice could lead to his clan's downfall. In a case of dark irony, the reason he and Hashirama Senju founded the Hidden Leaf Village was in order to avoid this exact situation. They both felt that if different clans could come together and create a shared home, leading to peace among all clans in all nations. Unfortunately, after Hashirama died, and even during his life, the Uchiha were still treated as a dangerous entity in the village.

This became more prevalent when Obito had the Nine-Tailed Fox attack Konoha. The Uchiha's Sharingan has the ability to control others, even the Tailed Beasts, through the use of Genjutsu.This meant that theoretically, any member of the Uchiha with a high degree of mastery over their Sharingan could have taken control of Kurama and stopped the attack, just like Obito did in order to start it. However, the village leaders in charge at the time forbade them entering the conflict, knowing full well the Uchiha were their best bet at quickly stopping the attack. It highlighted just how deep the mistrust ran, showing that to some, the Uchiha weren't really considered part of the village, because if they were, they would have been trusted to save their fellow Hidden Leaf citizens.

Quite frankly, the Uchiha Clan Massacre was entirely the fault of the Hidden Leaf Village, including the planned coup d'etat. The Uchiha were one of the founding clans that started the entire village system along with the Senju, yet were constantly treated as though they were dangerous and untrustworthy. There were many ways that their issues could have been resolved, but were all seemingly ignored because it would force the higher-ups in the village to view them as real citizens of Konoha. To make matters worse, most of the village's history seems to imply that Konoha went out of its way to blame their mistreatment on the Uchiha themselves, using them as a frequent scapegoat and justification to treat them unjustly.

Sasuke made a personal vow after the massacre to become an avenger. In that sense, the Hidden Leaf Village was always his true target. It was responsible for his family's death as well as framed his brother as some kind of sociopathic mass murderer. The franchise consistently went out of its way to show off the "good side of Konoha," but that was really all a lie. Regardless of what Naruto said or felt, Sasuke had every right to destroy the Hidden Leaf Village, and he honestly should have if he ever found the chance. In actuality, for all the characters trying to get Sasuke to see how they felt in order to convince him to stop, they hypocritically never once really tried to do the same for him. Hopefully, if fans watch it again, maybe to celebrate the anniversary of the anime, they will see Sasuke in a different light.

#sasuke uchiha #anti naruto #uchiha clan #anti konoha