The New Garage Chronicles

It's honestly very funny to me that in 2016 or whenever Clearview came out, I didn't like it and was sad about how my once favourite band was going in a direction I didn't like

And then two years ago I listened to it again for the first time and realised that Oh, wow, no, I was just super fucking depressed back then and the album fucks.

It's now my second favourite Poets album. Lmao.

One technology I wish I had access to is freeze drying for the explicit purpose of making treats for myself and nothing else.

But having seen the Technology Connections video on freeze drying, I understand that for now that time is a beautiful dream for the future.

I love trying to describe my job in the smallest words possible because it sounds like nothing.

I loosen and fasten screws and bolts all day.

The new post interface jumpscared me with an "unclosed tag" banner as I was editing a post and once again I am so unbelievably glad this site exists.

Like IDK if the complaining about the "fetishisation of queer men" just results in there being less porn of men, that's not exactly the progressive victory people act like it is. The hiding of male subjects from pornography is shit I get from mainstream porn already, and it was the one thing that was unequivocally, inarguably good about the proliferation of yaoi about every property ever.

And it's not like the straights are stepping up to make porn of men (the thing I want to see) because the conventions of straight porn are incapable of representing men as desireable. That's not the point, the point is almost invariably the gratification of a male audience, and that male audience isn't interested in looking at other men. Gay porn, at least, likes looking at men.

This is also not something GL and yuri can give to me, because again, those genres do not give a shit about men!!! And those fucking genres also have been dealing with backlash over being made to gratify a male audience, but just like with BL, I question if trying to make that distinction is even useful if the thing the genre does is represent a specific kind of subject as desireable and erotic, regardless of who the audience looking at that subject are.

The effect is that there just is no porn of men where they look like they're having a good time, because I am 100% not getting that from straight stuff. Men in hentai are fucking boring. They're barely characters. They almost never act like they're actually enjoying themselves, and at worst are taken over by a porn personality so they can become a fucking machine made of flesh to adorn yet another female subject.

It really does feel like everyone is going "well all porn is for men so we don't need to see men enjoying themselves in porn", and if there are men enjoying themselves in porn then we can't have that, that must be fetishisation.

Oh boy we're about to head into a host apocalypse.

RIP Tumblr you were genuinely a good site in many ways and people blame you as a platform for things that are problems with literally every other site on the internet while being a big tent that finally let me actually make friends in fandom.

I'm still kind of getting used to drinking alcohol, and one of the things that throws me the worst is that logically I know a tallboy of cider has more alcohol than my fancy drink with very little sugar I mixed with a bit of berry or caramel liqueur for taste, but every time I end up feeling offended about the former going to my head, like, immediately, and the latter taking its sweet time and sometimes not even giving me a buzz.

I just realised that maybe the fact that I've had a headache almost every night since the beginning of December may be contributing to the fact that I can't get anything written in the evenings.

(My neighbours smoke indoors. No, nobody is enforcing the "no smoking" rule. No, complaining about it hasn't helped. No, I can't move. No, I haven't talked to them about it because I straight-up don't believe it will do anything because my neighbour told me they've been complained about for years.)

It's been an exhausting week of existing in fandom so I want to take this time to make a statement that I'm almost certain nobody following me needs to hear but that will probably feel gratifying to hear regardless.

Ahem.

DEAR STRAIGHT ALLIES. REJECT GUILT BY ASSOCIATION. TRUE SOLIDARITY LIES IN RECOGNITION OF THE OTHER WITHOUT ANY BEARING TO YOURSELF. DO YOUR PART FOR A BETTER WORLD BY POINTING OUT THE ROMANTIC SUBTEXT BETWEEN TWO MEN TODAY.

I'm taking a pickaxe to my anime backlog, continuing from Planet With to Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight, and I'm once again forced to admit that everyone who said this would be my exact shit was super duper right.

To explain the whole premise would be to spoil the plot twist of episode 1, but just the setting of a highly-competitive all-girls performing arts school competing for the lead in the play of their extremely prestigious school festival play was already super fucking appealing to me as someone who loves a good rivalry and is always thirsty for female character centric battle shows and loves magical girls.

What I didn't expect is that the highly symbolic magic system of this show would be so appealing. I tend to be annoyed by allegory, always finding it overly ambiguous and never delivered in the right range of anvil-on-the-head. However, the magic in Revue Starlight being both place-dependent rather than character-dependent, and also theater-based made it interesting until I actually started to comprehend the underlying metaphor -- which I'm always slow at picking up in maybe-mundane-maybe-magic stories. If anything, I think it could be taken a little further. Like, I don't think these girls are old enough yet to have this kind of keen understanding of the limitations of theatre as medium, I would imagine they still have eyes bigger than their hands when it comes to the creative potential of whatever it is that they excel at.

I'm not quite done yet, I just wanted to get these feelings out now because I don't actually care how the final conflict between individual ambition vs the inherently collaborative nature of performing arts is resolved. I don't think whatever Revue Starlight actually has to say about that will change my mind about how good this show is, a rare for a show that wears its metaphor right on its chest like this. I'll be reporting back if it screws it up somehow, but for all the airtime is spent on character interactions, I do think this show understands its own messages well enough.

My only real gripe is that once again a show about theatre is stuck in the frame of the "single perfect performance" rather than really contending with the fact that out of all the performing art forms, theatre is the most alive and most immediate. It doesn't have second takes because it doesn't have to, because you don't run a show just once. I had this same problem with the theatre arc of Oshi no Ko, and I think it's just the problem with doing stories about characters dabbling in theatre rather than a show about a real theatre company. A school festival play is a thing you do just once, and I'm not gonna say that's not "real stage acting" or whatever -- it totally is, I'm not a snob -- but it's a fundamentally different kind of stage acting than the kind you perform over and over during a season, which I've yet to see a good representation of.

Happy New Year!!!

I somehow sat down and read the entire backhalf of Homestuck over, like. The past 2-3 days and I delighted to report that this piece of shit comic is still very, very good.

I understand the point being made, because Shinigami Eyes does brand itself as an "anti-transphobia" tool rather than an anti-transmisogyny tool, but I don't actually think reviewbombing and trying to convince the devs to take issues that face non-white non-perisex non-trans women seriously is going to do anything. Shinigami Eyes is a tool that only works for those and on those with public platforms. When it's being used against other marginalised people, it just becomes a purity test of whether or not a sufficiently public trans woman approves of your statements.

I think if people really want Shinigami Eyes to be better, they should fork it and write up actual rules rather than telling people to go with a vibe of whether or not someone thinks a trans woman is a man in a dress. All the code is on Github and I've entertained the idea of forking it in the past for personal use, but I also think that the crowdsourcing method for using a tool like this is always going to limit its functionality and it's effectiveness.

I don't actually think trying to convince someone that they're capable of hurting other people is worth the effort ever. Otherwise we wouldn't have to keep having the conversation about white feminist victim complex literally any time someone says that women are capable of being bad sometimes.

On the one hand I went an almost even round four years without catching covid once so, like, in a way this was inevitable

but I've never felt so sick in my fucking life.