#-I unironically feel like there are two entirely new people inside my brain that just woke from an almost 20-year nap.

[mosspapi]

In similar news, I just finished Ted Nivison's almost 2-hour all-Barbie-movies deep dive and my brain is entirely fried but not for the reasons you would expect. I think I need a drink.

[why-this-kolaveri-machi]

the wolf should’ve been afraid of me.

Titans 3.04

just under the wire! ... i hope.

like with the previous review, i’m typing this up as i see the episode. here we go!

spoilers ahead.

1. ... well. that was an interesting cold open.

1.25. i don’t know whether to admire this show’s restraint when it comes to gotham and its excesses, particularly arkham asylum. it’d be easy to go hammer and tongs, like suicide squad (2016) did, or any number of bat media did, at a tropey, colourful~~insanity~~ that can be quite damaging, casting mental illness in strangeness and criminality. it definitely shows gotham as... separate from the rest of the country, its own ecosystem of heroes and villains, a sort of rogue state. 

but that ecosystem is still human, with its heroes needing to clip parts of themselves away just to survive, growing old and needing to be recycled, its villains languishing in the same kinds of systems that fail everybody else who needs to be helped. it’s a quieter, tenser sort of wrongness: not strange enough that you can dissociate, but not close enough that you can completely empathise. gotham is its own creature.

1.5. i know that the reasoning behind this is more doylist than anything, but i’m so glad that joker was killed off with little fanfare right at the start of the season. he is the one man in the batverse that’s transcended its confines as this sort of ethereal boogeyman/eternal edgelord and to justify his presence in the series would mean giving him this tired, overblown importance and too much of a stab at colourful, tropey “madness” in this otherwise-subdued series. i wish all batmedia would follow suit and get rid of this fucker.

1.75. so jason is bucking scarecrow’s control! or reminding him of who exactly holds all the cards right now. circling back to what i talked about in the last review, it’s remarkable just how little time it’s been since jason’s “death” and he’s already got ‘minions’ and elaborately set up plans to track, break and kill the titans. just how long has he been planning this? when did he first look at WE weapons prototypes and think that’s something i can use to blow somebody up? and the most unsettling question: did he plan his own death at the hands of the joker just so that he could break batman?

at this point it’s obvious that the scarecrow at least started jason down this path, but it’s frightening just how far he’s travelled already.

1.8. aaagh, less than one minute in! i’ll shut up. 

2. conner washing his hands at the sink reminds me that he was directly in the line of explosion when hank got blown up and he’s probably got atomised hank-bits all over his skin that he’s desperately trying to wash off.

... you’re welcome.

2.25. conner, don’t you speak to gar fucking logan like that, sir, no!

2.3. if anything it’s the lex part of him that gave him the knowhow to recognise the weapon and build a de-activator for it. 

anyway, for that ‘half-breed’ and ‘talking tiger’ comment?

(i wish, tho, that we actually see conner more interested in the superman part of his legacy, like maybe listening to stories from gar, or even better, dick, so we get a better idea of the pressure he’s feeling to live up to that part of him and not the part that’s lex.)

((i talked about conner’s stages of moral development in his introductory episode last season, but i wonder if the next stage of his self-actualisation would be to further integrate the parts of himself and realise that they are only parts and he, conner, is an entirely different person unto himself that can make decisions on how to use what he has and what he knows. his superman abilities can be used to destroy. his lex knowledge can be used to save.))

3. oh dawn :((

3.25. is this the last we see of dawn and hank? i mean, we know donna is coming back; would it be a stretch to think they’ll try to have a go at resurrecting hank as well?

3.5. “deathstroke didn’t make us into killers.” good, because deathstroke didn’t make jason a killer either. there’s a missing step there you need to be looking for, dick. 

3.75. dick did try to break the cycle, step away from gotham, run from the possibility that he could turn into batman. it didn’t help; he couldn’t fully withdraw from his vigilante persona the same time he loathed it, and batman literally haunted him both asleep and awake. but maybe gotham doesn’t have to turn anybody into anything. maybe gotham has nothing to do with it at all. it’s about taking responsibility, realising some sacrifices are pure bullshit, and building an actual family instead of merely a team.

anyway: hugs!

(oh, also? mr “i hate flying”? i mean, there’s perfectly valid reasons to hate flying that’s not related to childhood trauma, but then again, this guy was literally a ‘flying grayson’ once. also also, remember that he also gets sea-sick. must’ve a lot of fun stories to tell.)

4. ooh that gar/kory confrontation was brief but cool!

listen, i have never seen a psychiatrist with that extravagant an office and SIR I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW HOW--

4.5. kory’s so unused to reaching out for help and it’s breaking my heart that HPG likely is some kind of impostor that’s maybe causing her symptoms in the first place. 

kory and dick have mostly been apart this season but it’s remarkable how their journeys have paralleled each other; kory processes her grief, isolation and existential dread into a determination to take care of this new family she has, no matter what it takes; dick does much the same, forging ahead with plans and solutions until he has no fuel left in him and spirals into a massive breakdown.

4.25. listen titans this really is a TERRIBLE continuity error. we aren’t goldfish; we can clearly remember that two minutes ago it was gar’s upper arm that was burned, not his forearm. COME ON.

“sensory deprivation tank” *SNORT*

anyway, gar is the BEST

4.5. i wonder where these visions of experimentation took place. was it on tamaran, or on earth, after she came to hunt down rachel/trigon and before she lost all her memories? is HPG a part of the scientist group that experimented on her? ... god, i hope not. i mean, i think he is, but it would be cool to have some positive therapist representation in media. 

5. you’d think the van transporting a dangerous supervillain that only batman could catch would be more secure but... i’m also not entirely surprised. 

5.15. i love dick gives ZERO shits about hiding himself or even ensuring scarecrow is adequately contained. just turns away after kidnapping him in BROAD DAYLIGHT and says ‘let’s go’. I LOVE THIS DUMBASS

6. lmao gar is having a really really shitty day SOMEONE GIVE THIS MAN A BREAK or just a goddamn story arc of his own

6.5. i’m really confused about the timeline here. so... sometime ago, kory came down to earth to hunt down trigon, yeah? at some further point down the line she and her sister were kidnapped and experimented on. THEN she somehow escapes but... loses her memory? a few months pass and then we see blackfire alive and well and free; she kills faddei, can impersonate other people, and is clearly seeking out kory. but now she’s still in the experiment facility...? what’s going on?

i’m not entirely surprised about the facility being mostly deserted. either the biggest investors in this project gave up on it and it was left to the most fanatic to carry on, or they were deliberately trying to lure kory and get her to free blackfire--expand the environs of the experiment, so to speak.

7. hopefully barbara is going to get something to do other than listen to various men give her Attitude

8. how do you terrorise a terrorist? well:

i love when dick is a scary-competent motherfucker.

8.25. ooooh, the attack on crane at arkham a ploy to get crane to blackgate? nice one dick, i didn’t even think of that. but why though? to protect crane from the titans? to intercept the van to blackgate and “rescue” him? seems likely--red hood was there, except dick got to crane quicker.

9. still reeeallly unclear about the komand’r situation. was komand’r captured after s2? is this all A TRAP?? if so, why are you stepping into the only thing that can contain you, kory????

9.25. so... definite parallels between dick/jason and kory/kom here. i’m just. i’m still. really confused. i’ll shut up now.

10. this may be my favourite dick look yet:

woodsman!dick in a beanie.

10.5. i unironically love how titans has made this bizarrely-devoted-to-his-moniker, toxin-spewing supervillain into a tamer version of hannibal, psychoanalysing his victims into submission. it’s of a piece with how inward looking titans is, the way all of its villains are obsessed with how our protagonists’ minds work, to the point where they would actually spend time inside of them. 

there are no big plots to end the world. no apocalypses or endgames here. these villains collect the titans’ insecurities like infinity stones. the way the titans defeat them is by achieving character growth--literally winning by the power of love. literally “the real superpower is the friends we made along the way”!

10.7. anyway, i’m betting dick is used to this bullshit from crane and is humouring him in the service of getting more information. the story about the wolf? an implicit threat, not to mention dick getting to control what crane knows about him and what methods he would use to manipulate him.

am i giving dick too much credit here? i don’t think so. he’s really impressed me so far this season.

10.75. like. there’s a real unreliable narrator vibe coming off with every person that talks about bruce (much like how the various members of the titans talked about jason’s motivations) and to buy into crane’s talk about bruce being a psychopath is to fall for the same manipulation that jason fell for. dick is the only person who hasn’t really psychoanalysed bruce this season, and i think some part of his detective brain is piecing things together into a bigger picture.

11. i’m glad kory rescued kom but did she have to kill the scientist?

(i mean, yeah, probably - the less people know that kom escaped the less likely they’re going to have the fucking govt on their doorstep, but still.)

11.5. dick’s gonna come back to wayne manor, stare straight at komand’r and go, well which room would you like? because the team might as well adopt ANOTHER person, yeah?

12. oh MAN that red hood/nightwing fight was AMAZING! and he did the thing! the boomerang escrima thing! i’m so delighted!

12.5. the anger and disbelief in dick’s voice when he says you told crane EVERYTHING?! tells me that he knew exactly what he was telling crane himself.

12.75. “everything you are is because of him” - oh that reminds me of halluci!bruce from last season. i hope we see halluci!bruce again--he is so vicious but so entertaining... so much more effective at tearing dick down than crane or jason combined. goes to show that dick’s biggest enemy is own fucking head.

12.8. oh no! dick’s shot! crane is in the wind with red hood! blackfire is now with the titans! i love it!

honestly this season’s pacing is such a big step up from the last couple. gold star, show.

[aestheticaxolotl]

V.I.L.E Headcanons

- Graham “Crackle” Calloway grew up in the poorer slims of Sydnee Australia where his parents struggled on a day to day basis to provide food for their 4 kids, Graham, being the oldest son felt the absolute need to help his parents provide for his three younger siblings. Doubling down in school, and getting the best grades he could (B’s and low A’s) and then diving into work as soon as he got out. -Graham started with small odd jobs until he got a part time gig with a rather cranky old electrician who had no love for anyone in his life. But he took Graham on as an apprentice because the stupid kid wouldn’t leave him alone. To his chagrin, the kid took to the job like a house on fire. This became important when he joine V.I.L.E -Tigress came from a troubled home to say the least. Her mom was an alcoholic and her dad was a blue-collared working class man who would gamble and chase after his dreams while squandering all the families money She resented her parents for these reasons and acted out as much as she possibly could, whether by robbing small stores or beating up younger kids on the play ground

-She started out trying to make a quick buck to help her momma pay the bills, not because she was showing kindness to her mom, but because the land lord had threatened to kick them out one too many times, and kept making lewd comments and suggestions that even Tigress would not allow her mother to take.

-El Topo’s story isn’t the happiest, seeing as his mother moved into America when he was very young, unable to afford to bring her husband and son with her at the time. Of course, El Topo’s father was not keen on being left behind and took his 12 year old son, attempting to smuggle him into America. Sadly, this would not end well seeing as El Topo’s father was shot and killed, and he was placed in foster care, unable to contact his mother.

-El Topo got out of the Foster care system when he was 18 and was homeless for a long time. He lived on the streets in Georgia, the last place his mom was having known working. He did everything he could to find his mom and was devastated to learn that his mother had moved to New York, remarried and had a daughter.

-Le Chevre’s mother died giving birth to him in Paris, France. His father being left alone to raise their one and only son, they had married young and had a baby younger, leaving the young father devastated and entirely loving of his young son. Le Chevre’s young life was full of music and love. His father worked as a caretaker in a French Theater, working up with the lights and the set pieces.    -Young Le Chevre wasn’t as fascinated with the acting as he was with being high up and above the actors, it gave him a feeling of power and meaning while his father proposed that he take lessons to play instruments for the plays. HE did for about a week to please his hard working father, but took the gold star in thievery. To this day he still leaves large amounts of money on his’s father’s doorsteps as thanks for such a wonderful upbriging.

-Dash Harber grew up with a love of fashion and the stylistic life of the rich and famous. His parents, both very wealthy and distant from him, showered their son with gifts and money for doing nothing but existing. His parents ended up sending him away at the age of 15 (At his request) to his aunt “Cookie Booker” so that he could have a better, proper upbringing. 

-Through his ‘Aunt Cookie’, he met the Dear Countess Cleo, who he took a major liking to the Countess, having a childhood crush on her. Cleo found the young gentlemen quiet endearing and took him under her wing, giving him the life he had know that he’d desired at a very young age. This came to bit him in the but when he started working for V.I.L.E. His parent identifying him during a caper and he had to go into hiding for quite a while. (His parents minds were wiped after this incident, as far as they are concerned now, they never had kids).

-Paperstar’s mother was a prostitute in Japan, and gave birth to her from an unknown father. Paperstar was devoted to her mother, even if she was not devoted to her daughter. She was usually there when her mother brought a man home, covering her ears when ever, what her mother called ‘Business work’, started.

-Young Paperstar started stealing from the men who her mother brought home when she was seven, doing this for many years before one man noticed and turned both Paperstar and her mother into the police. This enraged her mother and she disowned Paperstar, leaving the girl alone and vengeful, only wanting to look out for herself. (She might have killed her mom too, I’m still thinking on that one)

-Mimebomb was born in Ireland with their twin brother. When they were young their parents moved them to France. This is where they saw their first ever Mime, their mother had stopped at a shop and 3 year old Mimebomb had wandered off and stopped to watched a man with paint on his face act on a street corner. They realized they were lost and the Mime just... Scooped them up to help them find their mom and twin brother. This REALLY enforced in them that Mimes weren’t scary or freaky. (Their WHOLE family disagrees to this to this day)

-Spoiler, Mimebomb grew obsessed with Mimes and this really worried their parents. They sent him to a Psychologist, one Professor Maelstrom who was doing freelance work. Maelstrom found the phenomena rather interesting and kept track of Mimebomb for a very long time, it was Maelstrom who brought Mimebomb to V.I.L.E and showed them what their true calling was.

-Boris and Vlad.... I don’t have much for them but what I do have is rather... Boris and Vlad grew up in a very unwelcoming community. Russia at the time was very hostile towards outsiders and while their parents (They are not related, family friends in my eyes) had both of them in Russia, they were still not well accepted by their community, often bullied and beaten bloody by other kids, who forced them to clean up the mess after they finished beating them.

-This horrible childhood instilled a rather off form of PTSD and OCD in both of them that leads them to see every mess that a V.I.L.E operative made was something they had to clean up. Somehow, it was their fault and they had to fix and clean and pretend nothing ever happened.

-Cookie Booker is the Aunt of Dash Haber, she ADORES her Nephew and spoiled him rotten when he was a child, basically taking him in when he asked her too. She took great care to raise him the best she could, never having been able to have children herself, an event that let to her husband leaving her and marrying another woman.

-Cookie was also the woman who introduced Countess Cleo to Professor Maelstorm, a very monumental occasion in V.I.L.E history.

-Neal the Eel was just Neal as a kid. His mom and dad were performers in a Circus, a Magician and his Assistant. He used to adore the circus and wanted to be part of it as a contortionist/escape artist. He was bullied for his hypermobility ( similar to double-jointedness, but if it is progressively more serious it can create more problems for someone.) Causing him to end up resenting his upbringing and parents.

When Neal was 16 he began to break IN to prisons and then BREAK BACK OUT with a TON of the criminals inside. This quickly put him on V.I.L.E’s radar and they decided that they really wanted to recruit him. They made the offer and he vowed that he would never be seen as a joke like he was with the circus.

-MooseBoy was not the brightest kid in school, often picked on for being slow or stupid when he was really just a friendly kid with dyslexia. He almost flunked out of school and would have if not for this dorky looking kid who called himself “Otter”. Thus, a tense and rather abusive friendship formed.

-Otterman was the only reason that Mooseboy was able to graduate Highschool. They were a team, he was the brains (Still is) and Mooseboy the brawn (Still is). HE hated the fact that he was smaller and weaker and really took it out on his partner. Their first crime together was breaking into the school and stealing the principal’s desk on a dare.

-Spinkick and his half sister Flytrap have the same father, and different mothers. Their father lived a double life with his paramours only six miles from one and other. This affair was discovered by their moms and the two women ended up murdering their children’s father and then (unironically) falling in love with each other.

-Flytrap and Spinkick’s mothers moved in and the two kids were forced to get along, they ended up really caring about each other and watching each other’s backs and defending each other in school. Their mother’s never got caught by the way, just think about that.

-The Troll never had friends as a kid and met all his good good friends online, including Player (Plot twist?). Player and Troll got along like peanut butter and jelly, becoming a tag team in learning to hack and work with the internet system. The Troll became invested in trying to figure out how to lock down security systems like banks or Jail facilities (Seeing as his father was put in jail for robbing a back and killing a man who tried to stop him).

-This took Player aback and he began to back away from his friendship with The Troll. This didn’t matter to The Troll, he managed to shut down the security system where his father was being kept. This ends sadly due to the fact that his father doesn’t escape, but ends up dying in the break out. This caused him to draw back from people and remain in his room for a very long time.

Thanks for reading my ramble about V.I.L.E Operatives, I’ll be posting one for the Faculty soon!

[steve0discusses]

S5 Ep13: How to Get Away With Cheating in the Card Olympics

It’s been a little while since Pegasus made a card that screwed us years after it was developed...and so it’s time for it to happen again. Good ol Pegasus, screwing us all and not even knowing he’s doing it.

First off, it took me until this episode to realize that Leon and Zigfried are German and Leon is playing a Grimm Brother’s deck. I guess I didn’t notice before now because Leon was hiding his identity. But now that I know his deck is because he’s just German it’s like...well OK. That’s kind of cute. Better than that time they had the American play a deck filled with guns.

And that actually...fully explains why they are all dressed old timey. I didn’t pick up on it until just now...they’re referencing old ass fairy tales. But wtv, I still like my reaching theories of why Zigfried dresses like...that.

PS, my twitter just notified me that lots of people are getting a ‘Hime Haircut’, which is exactly the doo that Zigfried wears this season with the cropped side bangs. And like...are we sure? I see Kpop wearing it and Tik Tok kids wearing wigs but...I have yet to see a Hime in the wild. Course I haven’t gone outside in like a year so...maybe tens of thousands of people really did do a Hime Haircut during the Quarantine.

But, damn it, I decided to look at some photos, and a bunch of them looked pretty bad, but a couple looked pretty dope, and now I’m a little bit tempted to get a Hime...but I feel like it took a decade to get out of my bangs phase and like...Do I need two layers of bangs? I have naturally straight hair, I could do this, this haircut was made for me, but...

I just don’t know if I should get a haircut that looks like I’m an anime cosplayer when I can’t back it up. Nope. Cannot get this haircut. I know this haircut was made for teenagers or artists in their 30′s, and literally no one else, but no, this will be a mistake just like the side bangs I gave myself in 2006.

(looks over at scissors)

(read more under the cut)

(get it? Cut?)

Leon recalls that his brother very nicely gave him a card, and he’s so excited to finally do any activity involving his crazy ass family, that he just blindly does it.

This entire episode is about Yami not doing a hellscape when he witnesses cheating, and like...it is S5...it’s been a little while since anyone’s done a real good cheat on him, and he opened the door to darkness, and they got devoured by their own Tamagachi. It’s been a while.

And like the curse of Episode 13 was just a theory I had--but this particular Episode 13 is probably the most tame of all the 13′s (and yet, the most un-tame of this arc, which is a pretty chill arc, overall)

Yet...while this episode still fits in with their universe because the Kaiba’s are very proud so they can’t admit their duel disk has a flaw and therefore can’t forfeit the game, it kind of stretches the imagination a bit for the sake of the plot. Straight up we have a LOT of characters in this arc and they all just stood there and watched it happened.

It could have been also because this is like...televised...that no one wants to start throwing this little boy off the nearest blimp. I just wish that was addressed in the episode, other than “listen...Kaiba must allow this card to be played...or all his Duel Disks are lies.”

His Duel Disk almost caused the end of planet Earth a few weeks back, so I think it’s fine. I think this is a negligible problem to have when your disk shoots projectiles out of each end and has sharp folding edges in the shape of a blade--almost attempting to slice your face off every time you wave that thing around.

Yes, he’s trying to restore his reputation after the whole Dartz thing...but this is like...not that bad in the scale of things that have happened in the past several seasons. Maybe it’s just the last straw that broke the camels back here? One thing too far--’your disk played a broke card, Kaiba, I am pulling my investments and I refuse to go to your theme parks. I was here when you blew up that island. I was here when your company was literally bought out by the illluminati...but if that duel disk can’t play cards correctly--we’re done here.’ And TBH...that’s a very Yugioh mentality to have.

Like remember that time that Elon musk threw a brick at one of his new weird looking cars and the windshield cracked? But he was like “Oh...that was just a...listen the windshields don’t shatter, you saw nothing.” and still released the car anyway? Was kind of reminded of that.

Now...he didn’t actually go into the Dev room, we’ll go into how the hell he got this card, but first, a visit to the Kaiba Dev room.

OOOOOOooooooooh

That’s so bright!

It reminds me of how in the 90′s, the only real thing I knew to do on my computer was change the colors of the UI, so I just used the ugliest ass UI known to man for my family’s computers. I hope these computers have a mouse that leaves a tail behind and I hope that mouse is in the shape of a flying sparkling dragon.

Anyway, Duke speaks what’s on our minds:

Meanwhile, Pegasus, watching this happen over a glass of wine from inside his bathtub at Castle Pegasus, takes one very long sip while sinking into a pile of bubbles.

Seto at first is like “I literally own this tournament so thanks for losing? I don’t know why you threw it out into the trash but thanks?” But Zigfried pressured him so hard that everyone on Earth would judge his ass, and tried so hard to change the definition of what cheating even is, that Seto relented almost as if to shut Zigfried the hell up.

Zigfried explained that, technically, it’s still reads as a legal card on the disk and isn’t reaaally against the rules. Even though the rules say it’s against the rules--what are rules anyway?

Thankfully we have the King of “I dictate what the rules are AKA the rules of the universe, which I would show you, I just don’t feel like it right now, and I’m a little worried about opening that Pandora’s box, but I clearly know the rules of this card game, as stated on this Home Depot plaque that Seto gave me after I won the last tourney.”

Leon gets pretty upset about this--not so much screwing Seto Kaiba, but over the fact his brother stole his only chance at trying to beat Yugi Muto fair and square. So, trying to retain what little card honor he has left, Leon tries to self sabotage so everyone can just go the hell home.

OK so...do you think he put a floppy disk into the paper card? Like straight up how did he do that? Feel free to post your theories because like...how do you hack a paper card? Like do we even have a canon explanation of what these cards are or what they are made out of and how they theoretically work?

Anyway, now that they’ve spent a good portion of this episode discussing if this card should or should not be played, and the ethics and philosophy surrounding that, we find out that none of this matters because Zigfried was actually just stalling.

(He hacked the card so it had a virus like straight up how did he DO that without making a new card?)

Huh.

Y’all, what if I could just delete Google?

Can you imagine?

Like I know this is a kid’s show so it follows kid’s show logic and I will absolutely allow this ridiculous master plan and I will not question it, but think with me for a sec:

What if you could just delete Disney?

Damn. That’s some Y2K scare tactics propaganda right there. That’s some good YA dystopian fiction stuff.

Yo is Zigfried the good guy? He’s not, but if this were a YA novel he would be, right? Good on him.

I...do not know how the logic in Zigfried’s brain works, but if someone deleted all the files in my collaborators company and showed up at my front door and was like “I heard you were looking for a new collaborator?” I’d stick him face first into a blank paper card.

Which is, logically, the next step to Zigfried’s plan that no one has bothered to tell him yet. You just don’t mess with Pegasus, especially after all the stuff he went though with getting murdered by Mai, and Dartz showing up, he’d be so pissed right now. He might not be technically magical anymore--but it’s clear after last season that he’s still magical enough. This is a man who’s let out into the wild maybe a couple of scary cards--but hell knows how many are buried in his huge ass castle just waiting to do a murder.

This is just Zigfried hassling a hornet and the hornets nest is like...right there.

And so next episode we are going to...destroy the card? Hell, next episode might be entirely a card game and I might only have 2 caps.

Anyway, just letting you know that I typed this last night, and then had dreams that I got a Hime Haircut and hella loved it, woke up at 5:30 AM thinking about that haircut, and have since been just...

...I mean I shouldn’t do it...I cannot give myself unironic Von Schroeder hair...

...

...but what if it’s dope though?

(and here’s the link to read these from the beginning in chrono order from S1. Wish I categorized in seasons but alas I did not have that forsight back when I thought there were only 3 seasons of Yugioh total. I have since learned.)

https://steve0discusses.tumblr.com/tagged/yugioh/chrono

[vaguely-concerned]

Twisted Fate/Graves thoughts 2 Electric Boogaloo because none of you can stop me

and I just have a lot of feelings okay

- t.f. taking an entire paragraph mid-fall during a harrowing life or death chase to give you the context for how much the imminent destruction of his boots is a  tragedy is the funniest and most endearing character detail and also irrefutable proof that despite appearances he, too, really does only have that half a brain cell, it simply pingpongs around in there much more than graves’ half (which instead finds one idea and GOES HARD for it no matter what lol bless him)   

also his pov is basically just a flippant ‘well this is a goddamn bitch of an unsatisfactory situation’ until graves literally forces him to have an honest emotion at gunpoint, and y’know... that be what love feels like sometimes when you’re like that as a person, extremely relatable, I feel for him so much

- I’m still just quietly astounded by the hmmm... implied intimacy? I guess? in the argument they’re having once they’re actually talking in burning tides. let’s look at what they’re actually saying to each other:     

T.F.: “Are you ever gonna learn? . . . Every time I try to help you, I-” and “ I tried to get us out. The rest of us saw the job was going south . . . But you wouldn’t back down. You never do.”

vs.

Graves: “You’ll run again. That’s all you’ve ever done.” and “You made out alright, though . . . You know why? It’s because you’re a coward. And nothing you’ll ever say can change that.” 

like them’s the sort of fraught fighting words you have with a spouse right towards the end of an ugly divorce, the full fruitless ‘why do you always have to --’ and ‘but you never listen to me!!!’ deal, especially from graves’ side lol. it’s the sort of hurtful you can really only be with someone you’ve been very, very close to, someone you know incredibly well. considering the whole backstory what graves is essentially saying here is ‘It’s your own fault people have left you; you deserve to be alone’.

(interestingly, in twisted fate’s pov it seems that what’s really messing with him is the part of not being listened to. he tried to plead with his family and they refused to listen, he tried to convince graves to run away with the rest of them and he didn’t listen, and here they are again and graves isn’t listening  a g a i n  and at that point t.f. clearly just sort of. gives up on actually being heard, in a slightly heartbreaking way. and from how graves reacts to seeing that I really think he’s not naturally cruel like that at all, he’s just in too much pain to think until this startles him out of it and then he does actually listen)

- through both stories graves is so desperately, enduringly horny for t.f. to be emotionally present and engaged with him without slipping away into his ~*cool magic gambler*~ persona and I find it weirdly sweet 

- graves immediately getting fond of this leaky battered old rowboat... hfsadkjfhasd he’s sort of adorable in a way? it’s also really cute how he’s got this really tight focus on tf and his mannerisms and how genuine he’s being at any given moment. it’s such a neat way to show what he’s feeling and thinking about, which must be hard with a character who’s so massively oblivious to the finer points of his own inner life lol  

ALSO can we talk about how tf literally winks at him at one point, right after they’ve sort of had a little moment of regained trust... like my good sir that is so deeply unnecessarily saucy of you, please control yourself (though in his defense graves somehow still isn’t picking up what he’s putting down so y’know maybe subtle isn’t the way to go here anyway haha)

- I wonder if t.f. used to go by his initials even before he changed his name -- graves calls him by it straight off the bat in burning tides and t.f. seems to consider his real name mildly embarrassing lol. (also intriguing that he does appear to think of it as his ‘real name’, and not ‘old name’ or something like that. it’s why I feel like we’ve got more of a dual identity going on here than a deadname situation, it feels more like two distinct levels of emotional vulnerability/availability to me. and so ‘tobias’ stops being relevant when there’s no one left to know him as that. ow.)    

- from reading his bio it seems like twisted fate has had to figure out a lot of the magic stuff on his own (except for the mention of his grandpa teaching him the fortune telling part of it -- seems like they had a bit of a special connection, really, if him leaving his old cards with the kid before they left is anything to go by). what I’m saying is that I would read thousands upon thousands of words of him experimenting with it when they were younger and graves hurriedly having to topple a table over and pull them both behind it for cover before they both explode lol 

(and then t.f. popping his head up afterwards like ‘hAH see I TOLD you I could do it!’ and graves disconsolately lighting a cigar from the burning rubble b/c the things one does for love partnerships huh)

- I’ve been looking over burning tides with a writing eye a few times to figure out what makes it work so well for me, and one of the things I really like is that there are a lot of small comments/details that are there or are framed in a certain way specifically to emphasize the familiarity and history between the characters. Just small details like He moves fast for a big man. I’d forgotten that and graves mentioning he’s never liked standing too close when t.f. does the teleporting thing -- not to mention t.f.’s name reveal, which if I understand this correctly was actually new information to the readers when burning tides was going on. (and yes it is still very funny to me that his actual name is tobias. the duality of man)   

(I also feel like there are HUGE differences in writing quality between the different POV sections -- I guess different people wrote for the different characters? Well, both of the first person sections are gold and that’s what matters to me in this story so I don’t really mind. Sadly the Miss Fortune parts read the weirdest and stiffest to me, which is unfortunate b/c I love her lore concept a lot and she’s so cool in double double-cross. WHO the fuck let an unironic ‘the crimson-haired siren’ slip through the edit, is what I really want to know. please, narrator, tell me about her cerulean orbs while you’re at it) 

- The man I used to know seems lost under years of hatred.

I don’t try to say anything else. I can see it in his eyes, now. Something’s broken inside of him.

still makes me SO SAD and I’m incredibly happy it turns out not to be true in the end thank GOD

- this might just be me reading into stuff too much, but I really like this sense that in moments of high emotion/genuine vulnerability, graves tends to sound older and more tired while t.f. sounds younger than he actually is, more frightened and hurt

- if his mind hadn’t been completely focused on partner-rescuing and open murder were in any way his style, t.f. totally could have killed gangplank right there and then before miss fortune even got to blow the fucker up haha. then again if that were the sort of guy he were he’d be dead along with all the rest of them

- it’s so good that graves tries to save miss fortune’s guy before they leave the cave but also isn’t broken up about it when it turns out he can’t, that feels like such a correct encapsulation of his moral character haha

- I really do enjoy graves’ POV so much not just because there’s something immensely comforting about how he refuses to be scared even in the face of death because he’s too damn grouchy and won’t give the world the satisfaction, but also because the language/cadence is so satisfying. he does have a way with words, in a gruff non-flashy sort of way.

It smells like the end of everything – sulfur and ash and death; cooked hair and melting skin -- the rhythm of that is so gooood and that whole section conveys the horror and destruction but also the awe of the scene so well. (I’m telling you graves isn’t actually dumb at all, just astoundingly unbendingly single minded once he’s got an idea in his head lol) 

- I keep thinking about the fact that the last two things twisted fate thinks about before he passes out from drowning is if graves is scared and ‘What would Malcolm do?’ and I’m feeling real 😭😭😭 about it

- I’m still so disproportionately intrigued by graves mentioning his mom in burning tides. considering how early and seemingly easily he left home (...not to mention that he brings her up in connection with someone punching him in the face) it might be a safe bet that they weren’t that close but like. she also seems to be one of the very very few non-revengy things he’s checked up on after getting out of prison. did he send money home sometimes? would he visit whenever they came back to bilgewater? did she ever meet t.f. and if so did she approve or was this a bit of a uncharmable mother in law from hell situation? I um. I want to know these things pls riot it’s for science

.

(First post is over here btw, if anyone’s interested!)

[iheardarumorxxx]

Midnight Sun, Chapter Ten - Theory

Alright, time to jump back in. Took a couple of days off, refreshed my brain, now I think I can handle more of this asshole.

instead of answering my demand

See that? See how Eddie just goes ahead and tells us that he’s being a demanding little shithead? More shades of that controlling tendency that he has all throughout the series, outright stated. This is literally the first sentence of the chapter, and he’s not even pretending to be subtle about it.

describe it so that she would understand.

Yes, because ‘I can read minds, but only if they’re relatively nearby, and it gets easier to pick out voices as I become familiar with them’ isn’t clear in the slightest. See that, Eddie? I just explained for you with 23 words, instead of going off on some dumbass tangent metaphorthat takes up an entire paragraph  like you do here because you think that the human mind is so small and weak that it can’t possibly comprehend cut and dry explanations.

The fact that Eddie thinks he needs to explain things in analogy for Bella because she won’t get it if he doesn’t really goes against this supposed idea he has about her being smarter and so above the other pitiful hooman folk. Either she’s too human to understand like everyone else, or she’s smarter and more rational and would get it without the metaphor. Pick one, Eddie.

I will say, one thing that I took from the Twilight series that still sticks with me is the phrase ‘Holy crow’. I do, in fact, use it unironically. It’s absolutely stupid, but I like the way it flows off the tongue.

Anyway, Bella just shouted it because Eddie is bending the car to his vampire physics again and going 100MPH, which, I would like to point out, she would have absolutely realized before now if she wasn’t so blatantly unobservent. She would have felt it, it wouldn’t have taken looking at the spedomoter to realize it.

“We’re not going to crash.”

Eddie is absolutely certain of this fact, and I am too only because SM would never let anything like that happen to her little woobie vampire and her SI Mary Sue. However, let’s apply real world logic to this for a sec. Just a sec because this story can’t handle real world logic for too long, but. They are presumably on a highway, going 100MPH at let’s say 930 to 10ish PM. I’ve never lived in Washington, but I’m going to make the presumption that there probably isn’t too much traffic this late, though, perhaps a bit more if it’s a Friday or Saturday night. Perhaps Eddie can keep perfect control of his own car, even going that fast, while most likely paying little to no attention to the road because he is constantly looking over at Bella in the passenger seat. He has his mind-reading power, which he probably uses to help him drive, and maybe there isn’t another car directly behind him based on how fast he’s going. 

He’s still not taking the other drivers on the road into account. What if the car in front of you that you are rapidly coming up on because you’re going so fast sees a turtle or a deer or some other kind of animal in the road and swerves to avoid it. Since this is real world logic, even if you see it coming with your mind reading power, you can’t make your car stop on a dime going 100MPH. You’re going to crash, and since you are going so fast, it’s gonna be a pretty nasty one. Your vampire body can handle that, because you’re a marble adonis god, but Bella over there is squishy and human. You slam those breaks, seatbelt aside, she’s gonna end up through the windshield or strangled to death by that seatbelt. 

He’s assuming that his vampire magic strength and perfectness is gonna be enough to protect him from literally everything. It will, because this book is not realistic in the slightest, but he’s still a dick for not taking into account the other drivers on the road. And not taking into account the fact that Bella is clearly upset and terrified that he’s going so fast.

Two and a half paragraph rant over one line. Check.

Bella spills about how Jacob told her the old story about the Cullens being sparkley, evil vampires who aren’t allowed at La Push because the wolves will eat them. And I have to say, because this story is the entire basis for Bella knowing that Eddie and his ilk are vamps, how the hell does it take her so long to figure out that Jacob is a werewolf in New Moon? Like, I know it’s because she’s stupid, but since she’s supposed to be wise beyond her years and smart and shit, why did it not click that both sides of the story must be true.

Rant for a different book, but.

I supposed this meant I was now free to slaughter a small, defenseless tribe on the coastline, were I so inclined. Ephraim and his pack of protectors were long dead.

This is it. This is the line I’ve been waiting for. I knew it was coming and it STILL pisses me off so damn much reading it. Do you see that? Do you see it? Eddie is talking about straight up genocide. He is literally talking about killing hundreds of people just because some teenage kid told an old folktale to a girl he thinks is cute to try and impress her. I would like to remind you of that line that Alice said earlier: “It helps if you think of them as people.” IT HELPS IF YOU THINK OF THEM AS PEOPLE, EDWARD!!! These people have done literally nothing to you! If you wanted to go, say, beat up Jacob Black for spilling your secret, that’s one thing (A terrible thing that is bullshit, even if Jacob gets a jerkass makeover in a few months) but you are literally la de fucking da over the idea of going down to the reservation and murdering every man, woman, and child there because of some bullshit technicality broken treaty. HOW THE FUCK DOES ANYONE THINK THIS GUY IS THE HERO? HOW DOES ANYTHING SEE HIM AS A GOOD LOVE INTEREST? HOW IS HE A PROTAGONIST? HE’S A FUCKING MURDERER, PLAIN AND SIMPLE SPELLED OUT RIGHT THE FUCK THERE! It was spelled out pretty damn well in that first classroom scene, but here we are reinforcing it, and this is the guy that SM said she was willing to leave her husband for. THIS GUY. 

I hate it. I hate him. I’m not a happy camper.

And I’m gonna move on before I burst a blood vessel from how mad it makes me.

Bella goes on to tell Eddie that she flirted the story out of Jacob, and that she doesn’t care. He replies with “HOW CAN YOU NOT CARE! I’M A MONSTAH!” and she just shrugs and pops her gum. Eddie is just absolutely shocked by this because how could she not care? He even wonders if there’s something wrong with her. The answer is yes, she’s clearly a hybristophile, but that’s beside the point. 

The ‘how old are you’ ‘17′ ‘how long have you been 17′ ‘a while’ exchange is actually kind of cute, on it’s own. Had it been in a better book, it might have made me smile a little. But in Twilight it just felt like forced comedy, and here with Eddie being all Emo about being a monstah and also being condescending and clearly angry about Bella knowing his secret, it comes off a lot darker in tone. It could have come off as a playful exchange between people getting to know one another, and instead, it’s a darker tone and it’s almost uncomfortable. The movie had this problem, too, where they made it all dark and angsty instead of just being a cute little exchange that it should have been.

“I can’t sleep.”

This is more of that thrown away world building that SM does. First it was the Vampires never Change thing and now the can’t sleep thing. It could have been so fascinating to explore what not being able to sleep does to the psyche of these Pires. How different vampires get used to that sensation over different periods of time. Did it unsettle Eddie at first when he was turned and just couldn’t sleep anymore? Was Jasper already a night owl who barely slept, so it wasn’t much of a change for him anyway? What do they do to fill their time? If their hobbies and interests never change, it seems like they wouldn’t be using all that newly acquired time to learn new skills and hobbies, even if that particular ‘never change’ plot point isn’t explored either and never actually seems relevant to them. Has a Pire ever tried to sleep anyway? Just lay down and closed their eyes and waited for eight hours to pass, hoping they would drift off? This is interesting lore. It’s something that could have given depth to the vampires instead of being a throwaway plot point so Eddie could watch Bella sleep at night. I’m disappointed. I want a good idea to actually be used well.

Edward calls Bella observant and to that I can only say ‘Ha.’ 

Eddie finally realizes that Bella has the hots for him too and it’s so UWU and trite, but he has to go and bring up that stupid Hades and Persephone metaphor again and piss me off in the process.

The get to Bella’s house and take forever with their goodbyes, and right at the end Eddie goes on about how he’s got this new hunger in him just looking at Bella and feeling how warm she is and shit and it’s just him being horny again, but nothing happens and Bella heads inside. But don’t worry, Eddie assures us that he’ll be in his usual perch in the rocking chair later that night to stalk her and watch her sleep, so everything is well.

She couldn’t love me the way I loved her

GET IT? BECAUSE VAMPIRES ARE BETTER THAN YOU(tm) AT EVERYTHING INCLUDING HOW HARD THEY LOVE? Seriously, so damn sick of this idea that the vampires in this universe just do everything and see everything and smell everything and feel everything just so much more intensely than the pitiful hoomans. I still have a rant about it. It’s still coming. Don’t worry.

A casual throwaway mention of the Voltouri here, AKA the vampire Mafia that make and enforce the rules. They don’t actually matter or have any real power in this series, and they suck, but nice little nod to the audience as a reminder that there is supposed to be a governing body in the vampire world.

Carlisie and Eddie boy are off to take care of the rapist who almost got Bella, and the entire fucking drive, Carlisle is just sitting there thinking about how wonderful Eddie is and how he deserves happiness and it’s such bullshit for him to be thinking that way when he KNOWS that Eddie can read his thoughts. He’s literally just showering him in compliments for the sake of it just so that Eddie can hear them and puff up his ego. I don’t buy that it’s just passive thoughts. He wants Eddie to hear them.

We all know who Carlisle and Esme’s favorite child is.

We end the chapter with Eddie going back to Bella’s house to watch her sleep, deciding to take it upon himself to wander around her house uninvited, and the rambling on about how Bella clearly doesn’t have a guardian angel because she crossed his path and no guardian angel would allow that. Then he makes some crack about being her guardian vampire, talks about how, oh, it’s actually a good thing that he took it upon himself to break into her house to watch her sleep because he got her another blanket because she seemed cold, and smiles to himself when she mumbles his name in her sleep. 

That’s it, chapter done, I’m tired. I’m gonna try to crank out another one (maybe two) tonight, but no promises because this one really took a lot out of me. These characters just suck. Anyway, as always, feel free to message me or DM me to talk about the book, recommend future projects, etc. And you can always buy me a snack using the CashApp tag in my bio. Until next chapter, good damn bye.

[mylittleredgirl]

What are your favourite science fiction shows? (Besides Star Trek because I've already watched those!)

Okay I’ve thought about it and:

Space shows:

Babylon 5: WATCH THIS BEAUTIFUL POETIC SHIT i love it and sometimes it’s a bit terrible but if you just let go into it and decide that people do talk exactly like this in the future it’s so fucking good. Like upsettingly good. Somewhere along the way clunky dialogue gives way to in-universe shakespearean perfection that gives you the feeling that you’ve discovered a religion but you’re not 100% sure what it entails. At the end of season 4 pause and consider if you’d like to enjoy the feeling of completion and “yeah team good guys!!” you’re experiencing for a while before going on, because Season 5 reshuffles the cast of characters and muddies the waters in a way that never quite gets paid off. I never really got into Crusade but there was less of it to get into and because frankly I was still young and innocent in the ways of television and spent a few years heartbroken that I watched all the goddamn way to the end of Babylon 5 without the Talia Winters resolution i was waiting for. In the final accounting, I will always choose Deep Space Nine over Babylon 5 when asked to choose a favorite space-station-based epic war arc with religious symbolism, because B5 is right on the edge of how dystopic a future universe can be before I start to feel uncomfortable. most people call that edge “realistic”. 

Stargate SG-1: UGHHH Stargate SG-1 is a fuckin GIFT because it’s a little “what if a sarcastic highly capable military dude from the late 1990s travels to outer space with his brilliant weirdo friends to do battle with villains that would have fit in really well in classic Star Trek” AND “what if almost every planet was kind of a stereotype of earth at a specific time and place like classic Star Trek” AND that delicious 1990s staple of regularly subtexted white people het and slash and femslash combinations where nobody ever just fucking FUCKS. Seasons 3 and 4 contain some of the best episodes for het unresolved sexual tension seen outside of The X-Files. Everyone should watch it but be prepared that if you go online and start talking about SG-1 or Stargate: Atlantis a generation of your fandom foremothers are gonna show up on your posts wailing about the Before Times like we lived through some kind of fandom ‘nam and can never trust again. 9/10 everyone should watch this even though “Stargate SG-1” is not a very good title for a TV show.

and Stargate: Atlantis: if Star Trek is my religion i worship on Sunday morning then Stargate: Atlantis is the one I dress in leather and take to bed on Saturday night because I have never I mean ever shipped anything as long or as hard as I have shipped motherfucking John Sheppard and Elizabeth Weir in this goddamn show. out of every crumb the TV show gave us the fanfic writers cooked up a goddamn feast. not only have I never watched more than a handful of episodes in seasons 4 and 5 but I basically stopped watching new television entirely for almost a decade so, uh, proceed with caution after the midpoint of season 3 and I have like 285 favorite fanfics to show you.

Futurama …….. tbh i’ve never watched past the original seasons because i’d come to a place of internal closure and i fear change and it was inside the Stargate Atlantis hangover period discussed above, but that’s more psychology than anyone wanted to get into on this post. basically my ideal expression of humor can be found in “the farnsworth parabox” and whatever the episode is called with the neutral planet because that is some a+ loving sci fi trope mockery and i love every line of it.

That specific brand of earthbound sci-fi show where there are almost certainly aliens involved but our heroes never get to seek out new life and new civilizations: 

The X-Files: what can i say about the x-files??? this is INDUSTRY STANDARD fucking shipping territory fucking NO ONE does unresolved sexual tension better and honestly the day i will know i have met The One it is because they will present me with a non-fat dairy-free toffuti cutie rice dreamsicle and say “i have done my research and understand your romantic needs and expectations.” this shit is so formative that i literally watched the episode “jose chung from outer space” so many times that i wrote it out and then memorized it as the most perfect work of fiction i had ever encountered.the television without pity recaps of seasons 8 and 9 (which tbh i unironically love and consider an internal spinoff come fight me) literally kept me alive in a very dark period of time. “very dark” is also how to describe 98% of the scenes in this series so while on the one hand there’s some horror-style gore there’s only like a 50/50 chance you’ll be able to see any of it. i reblogged all the shippy gifsets about the seasons 10 and 11 reboot and did not watch any of it and honestly i feel pretty ok about my life and my choices. if you are willing to read fic written in the first person and don’t mind that 1990s-esque think-of-the-children notion that scully’s a virgin you will literally never run out of fanfic. 

Twin Peaks: this is my newest fandom love and I am loving the entire nonsensical ~aesthetic~ of it all so much that I can barely breathe. i don’t know what the fuck is going on. no one knows what the fuck is going on. i want to cross-stitch every frame on a pillow. twin peaks avoids being grimdark because it’s so stylized. the characters are all these perfectly odd creations and a handful of them are genuinely good people trying their best, but like it opens with the murder of an abused teenager and no one gets an unambiguously happy ending. watch this if you want to go along for a ride that will soak into your cells like pacific northwest mist dampening a flannel shirt and will leave you just a little bit stranger than you were before. in the back half of season two you’re safe to go make a sandwich whenever james, nadine, or dick tremayne show up on-screen.

Earthbound sci-fi shows that don’t involve aliens at all:

Jake 2.0: i’m literally never over the one season of this turn of the millennium sci fi geek fever dream where experimental government nanites give an IT helpdesk tech with a heart of gold the ability to control technology with his brain and the NSA kind of goes “… i guess?” and lets him live out the secret agent fantasy he is really not prepared for. you probably can’t find it anywhere. it’s a light-hearted found-family gem with more characters of color in positions of power than its network contemporaries, and the late-breaking discovery of four never-aired episodes include my favorite TV episode that was actually a fanfic (tied with the X-Files episode “Arcadia”). the most benevolent single act i have ever experienced in fandom was when someone burned the Lost Episodes to a cd-rom and sent them to me and now i can’t even remember who it was. i’m not saying that jake foley deserves a tumblr renaissance but 📢JAKE FOLEY DESERVES A TUMBLR RENAISSANCE. 

[supernoondles]

2020

A lot happens in a year, even when nothing seems to happen at all.

There's nothing new my commentary about a global pandemic (and the particularly frustrating experience of living in America during it, even with all my privileges of continued employment, owning a car, rent stability, and living in the bay area) will bring to the reader, but I will underscore this: my feelings aren't that 2020 is any kind of exceptional year, but the point where, hopefully, we finally realize that economic/climate/racial injustice has been a terrible problem for a long time, and will continue to be unless we enact massive collective change. A vaccine is not going to make any of those issues disappear, and I worry the people in power (including myself) will return to their comfortable life styles as if the next decade won't be even worse.

Anyway, general DOOM aside (RIP man), here's my year in specific!

From looking through my photos: January was off to a great start. I celebrated the new year with dim sum with J/M/M, as per tradition, and went on a foggy hike through SF with my family that involved my dad and J getting hilariously lost. Soon after I went to Sonoma with J/M -- for all my years in the bay, I had never explored north of the Golden Gate that much -- which was a wonderful trip seeing J's hometown. I helped my lab demo research at the Exploratorium, started growing my own microgreens, and went on more (to become semi-regular and my only source of cardio through the pandemic) bike rides with my lab mates. I finally saw Hamilton (though feel a need to justify here how "cringey" I think LMM is). I went to Genesis, my first gaming-related convention, and it was a lot of fun despite seeing no women. I did so many things, was making progress on research (I think? I don't recall any breakdowns) and my mental health was generally good.

The doing of things continued in February. After not going last year, I went to the Tet Festival in SJ (which was kind of sad). I joined a Chinese learning club and a crafts club and had a delicious omakase. N visited again, I went ice skating and tried to rescue a giant rat from string lights, and saw the Sonic movie in theaters (which would have been my last movie in theaters, sigh). After having a drink at Wursthall with T, I felt terrible (to the unaccustomed reader, not only do I Asian glow, my hands/feet itch whenever I drink and I feel like I want to die), and decided that was the last drink I'd ever have -- thanks to the pandemic that's stayed true. I went on a ski retreat with the lab that felt particularly special (and not just because I didn't have to pay). We (I, in convincing my mostly Asian office) wanted to make 元宵 on the eve of E's birthday, but it turns out that a bunch of CS PhD students really love singing karaoke for like 4 hours straight into the night, and at some point I was like, okay y'all, time to go to bed. So I hosted 元宵 making at my apartment the next weekend, and we watched another Bong Joon-Ho movie (The Host) to celebrate his Oscar win. Typing this out, it seems wild that this was even in this year. I also did sh*** for the first time, hallucinated white woman in the edges of my vision like a GAN, ate a lot of shaved parmesan from TJ, and let go of any stress I had about the UIST deadline to the abundance of nature and the world.

I break from the month-per-paragraph format now because we all know what happens next. M and I biked around campus to film a virtual tour for the newly virtual admit weekend. Being in Gates that Friday (three days before the bay area wide shelter-in-place order) was the last time I'd be on campus for a while. The next day I adopted 3 wonderful baby rats (my biggest brain move this whole year) and the day after that I moved home. I was counting down the days until Animal Crossing and then J and I were duplicating royal crowns in ACNH. At some point my hair got really bad. The months blurred together. Adjusting to WFH was extremely challenging for me, someone who had structured their whole life around the "I only do work in the office and I leave the office when I get hungry for dinner" logic. I would stop working at 6pm but spent the entire afternoon mentally prepping myself to do maybe 30 menial minutes of it. I binged AtLA. I gave up submitting to UIST. In May I hung out in the park with J, who came home from Seattle, which was the first time I saw anyone outside my family. Sometime in there I decided to become a Twitch streamer and had a brief revival as DJ Noon before I felt bad for roping my friends into listening to my music and ran out of interesting songs I wanted to play. In June I, like many others, took to the streets. For two weeks I donated $50 a day to a different organization. I couldn't get any work done at all and spent an entire advisor meeting sobbing so intensely that they felt bad and canceled it after 10 minutes. I emailed the university and got my housing back for the summer and I moved back to start my internship.

The internship was the break I needed -- working with W was a godsend compared to the struggle of my advisors. After reaching new lows at the start of the summer, my mental health was sloping positively again -- working on a new research project helped clear the emotional baggage of the last one. I was also getting more outdoor social interaction -- I went to Ocean Beach with M/D, Half Moon Bay with my family, and going on weekly bike rides with M. At the end of June, M, my roommate, her boyfriend M the clown (there are now 3 different Ms) and I waited for negative COVID results before going on a 2 day camping trip to Mt. Lassen, which felt completely surreal, and, at that time, completely necessary.

The summer dragged on and my mental health, at some point, began to slip. If I were to graph it it would probably look like the inverse of COVID cases in the US -- gradually decreasing, but with high variance from the day to day. I got an embroidery machine, I attended a workshop on docu-poetics with CPH that was so ripe with information my brain physically ached, I saw my lab mates again for the first time as we sat in a very, very wide circle to say goodbye to a post-doc who got a faculty job in Israel. Most weekends I drove to my parents' house and would take J on various hikes around East Bay so he could better appreciate his roots before he went off to Boston for college. He was taking the Switch with him, so in August I bought myself a new one and planned out my entire second ACNH town, which kept me busy for a while -- but surprisingly not as long as I thought, as with planning (and money from my old account) the whole project took I think less than 50 hours. The camping itch came back and the day before my birthday, which was also the day before J would leave for Boston, we went camping at a small state park in San Jose where he got heat stroke and we slept on top of fire ants. The entire experience reminded me how much I disliked camping -- but what else was there to do? I had a wonderful (and long, bless the folks who stayed) Zoom birthday party where I wore a mesh shirt I made and covered with worms on a string. The day after my birthday someone backed into my car, which, following the demands of a racist letter from the HOA, was parked in guest parking. (Ultimately this would be a blessing of insurance money, as the damage was mainly cosmetic and the person kindly left their contact information.) At this time I was also unironically watching ASMR videos to fall asleep, so I painted a two Bob Ross style paintings, one in my virtual art club, to pay homage.

Fire season this year was worse than it's ever been. Being trapped inside the house combined with my roommate moving out at the start of fall quarter and now living alone marked the second downward spiral of my mental health. The bad days were more frequent. I TA'd a game design course, my first time teaching at this university, where many students messaged me to complain that their 95s were not 100s. In the end the lowest grade in the class was an A- and 20% of the class got an A+. At some point I submitted a summer-long project I did with J and S to CHI; it is so much easier to produce work when I do not have to wrangle with M. (This paper gets accepted, but my silly grad student excitement is tampered both by general "why are we still trying to publish when society is crumbling" pandemic feelings and the fact that CHI will not be physically in Japan next year.) Maybe once a month I go birding. I feel increasingly as if there is nothing novel in my life; I am tired of it all and my body feels fatigued even though I don't do anything with my days. Some days it feels like if I don't touch someone I will explode. My use of recreational marijuana skyrockets. I start doing exercise videos semi-regularly with A. I briefly consider moving to Seattle with E, who is about to defend, before it's clear we have, as always, different boundaries and expectations. I look for places in Sunset/Richmond with M to little success.

In October I somehow pull it together and organize student volunteers for a 3 day conference that requires waking up before 5am every day. I do nothing the rest of the week. After we get flu shots and I let someone into my apartment for the first time since the pandemic started, I help E move up to Seattle. The trip is comfortable and we get to take care of each other; this fulfills a need in me. On Halloween J and I dance in a soccer field next to a combination anarchist recruitment center and homeless encampment -- now cleared by the cops -- and eat a mud pie that is too sweet. On my last day in WA I ask E if he would like to have sex, as friends, and he politely declines. I am pleased with how easily I emotionally accept this answer, how through time and therapy I've finally come to cherish our friendship without always looking for what could have been. I am extremely nervous on the flight home, and it's the first and only flight I will take during the pandemic, and the N-95 squishes my face so my head looks like a balloon, but I have the privilege of free 5 minute weekly tests through the university and I collect another negative result.

In November I fully embrace the hyperfixation lifestyle. My brain, always looking for novel stimuli, has given up on doing work entirely and instead thinks of Thanzag constantly. There is one day where I play Hades for 8 hours and I feel gross, as if I've completed my regression to my high school self. It takes 90 hours until I achieve all my goals, and with no more runs necessary to roll for RNG-based conversational triggers, I finally feel a sense of freedom. (My Switch tells me I have used it for 580+ hours this year, which is more than double last year.) The second SwSh DLC is a struggle for me to complete as I do not find catching legendaries enticing. J comes back early from university at my urging to avoid the travel surge, a week before Thanksgiving, and starts living with me. This helps a lot. My next hyperfixations come overlapping and staggered: I write 25k words of a second iteration of my 2015 NaNoWriMo with the protagonist I had developed in high school before I get bored with the story and realize I need yet another iteration; I buy a combination air fryer pressure cooker and ask my parents for a functional vacuum and bidet as early Christmas gifts and become obsessed with immaculate inside living spaces. This carries on to re-decorating my room at my parents' house, after installing a shelf in the closet and a curtain to close it off from the living room, and spending roughly 30 hours over December break organizing and cleaning their entire garage--they have not thrown out a single piece of paper or article of clothing since they set foot in this country over 20 years ago. My therapist quits the practice and my relationship with my advisors improve. I watch a few housewife vlogs and make my own. I have the revelation that doing research in a pandemic is basically just like any other creative project -- no one really cares that much if I get it done, it's just harder to do than, say, putting together a vlog in a few hours. This shift in mindset feels life changing to me, having before thought of research more as work, a taboo thing to pursue in a pandemic, and when W compliments me for the progress I've made in both the system and managing our meeting with M I do not know how to respond because no one has ever done that before. In the last two weeks of the year I start tracking my time. In our last session (that I almost sleep through), my therapist tells me that I seem stable to her and she is not worried about me. I believe her.

In 2020 I made a marked point to let everyone know that I didn't have goals. It felt lofty to have personal ambitions in the face of everything at a global scale. With this said I will now revisit the 2020 resolutions I wrote last year: (1) Intentionally seek out love: absolutely not, (2) Do enough work such that I don't feel guilty: also no, (3) sew one thing a month: no, but in the end I sewed 11 things total this year so I was close, (4) improve my Chinese: this was actually the only thing that did happen, and now my mom and I have better conversations because of it and I'm so thankful.

In 2021, however, I feel like I finally have it in me to have goals again. They are simple. (1) Get laid. (2) Submit the two research projects I've been doing forever. (3) Commit to writing down my thoughts that make me think, "Oh, that's interesting, I should write it down." Ideas are unfortunately such currency in what I do.

Last year I wrapped up this post with some candid, but embarrassing, optimism. I will offer no such high hopes for 2021, but I do ask the reader if they have noticed that I switched tenses from past to present halfway through this post. And that's 2021: an incidentally unintentional, but then consciously controllable, shift to the present.

[thebibliosphere]

✨Stay afraid but do it anyway.✨

And perhaps I’m a little touchy on the subject and maybe I hold Carrie a little too dear to my heart, but the reason I do is because Carrie Fisher helped me realize I was mentally ill.

Oh I knew I was crazy, in the same vague way you worry that you've left the stove on at home, despite not having cooked yourself a meal in weeks because you’re too depressed to eat a proper meal. (Except you don’t call it that, you call it “laziness” and maybe try and convince yourself it’s a new diet called “whatever requires the least amount of effort to put calories into my face”.)

Something was “off” inside my head, but no one seemed to care about it too much. Even when they threw me into eating rehab for a perceived eating disorder—despite lacking several of the vital criteria on the checklist to have typical eating disordered behavior—no one gave too much of a shit. I was just a girl who was “too nervous”, “too in touch with my emotions”, “too fragile”, I was “attention seeking”. And their remedy to this was ignore me and wonder why I crashed and burned at regular intervals, blame me for being selfish, then go back to not giving a fuck until it inconvenienced their life again.

I was crazy. But maybe I wasn’t. Maybe if I just tried harder...so I learned to cope. I became the one who Coped. I was There For Everyone. I became Reliable and above all else, I learned to be Funny and make It funny.

My mother still hates that. She thinks it’s crass for women to be funny. Personally I think I’m fucking hysterical, but then what do I know, I’m fucking nuts.

Later, now with hindsight and being able to look at my life from a safe(-r) mindset surrounded by people who care and want to help, I realize that what I was going through was (and is) untreated PTSD. Whether or not the PTSD caused the other issues, like the depression, the anxiety, the compulsive behaviors or the ADHD I think I might have, I don’t know. I likely will never know, because the Thing happened and shot my still developing child brain into a million tiny fragmented pieces of unparalleled terror and poor coping mechanisms. It doesn’t really matter at this point, all that matters is dealing with all of it as best as I can, however I can. But there’s a very real chance I might never have gotten to this stage if I hadn’t found out that Princess Leia, my childhood icon who helped me feel brave and strong while my world was ending, had written a book about living with mental health issues.

I wasn’t sure what to expect from it to be honest. I knew vaguely, that Carrie Fisher had issues. The word “junkie” had been used by my father—while unironically taking a drink from his self-medicating poison of choice and my mother tutted and tisked about how some people just ought to pull themselves together. 

Ten, maybe twelve minutes into the book locked away in my room, I can’t even tell you anymore whether I was crying because I was laughing so hard or if I was laughing because I was crying my heart out, but I was having a fucking revelation.

This was me, holy shit this was me, this was me, this was me, an unboken mantra in my head pounding to the beat of my heart, this was me, this is me—I do exist.

That’s a weird thought to have, right? I do exist. 

It wasn’t, “I’m normal”, because normal is not this. It’s not feeling like your mind is running a million miles a second in circles while simultaneously wading uphill through treacle and juggling chainsaws while trying to keep all your Life Plates spinning and oh gods someone just handed you a kitten to look after. What it is however, is fairly common, and suffered with varying degrees of severity by a rather sizable chunk of the world’s population. I mean, who knew? I sure as shit didn’t. I thought it was all in my head.

You know what I mean.

I’m told some people get up in the mornings and go through their entire day without once having an intrusive thought or struggling to do basic shit like take a shower and manage to remember to feed themselves. I know, seems fake right? It certainly does to me.

And here was Carrie, my Princess Leia, laying out her issues past, present and probable future, in what remains one of the funniest, most brutal attempts at self-lobotomy on paper I have ever had the privilege to read. I consumed that book in mere hours, I devoured her words and breathed them in like inhaling steam in a sauna and breathing out fire in their wake and moved onto her next book, then her next, then her next, and by then there was this blessed thing called Twitter and it should be impossible to be hilarious and poignant through 140 emojis or less, but that was the kind of brilliant she was. And this was me, this was someone like me. And she was witty and brilliant and funny and yes, things were difficult for her and yes, some parts of her life were an absolute clusterfuck of mistakes, addiction and general all round fuckery leading up to that point...but she was still there, y’know? She was still there.

And it breaks my heart a little every day, knowing that I’ll never be able to tell her how important that was to me. And to thank her for it.

So instead I try to pay it forward. Every day, from one day to the next, I try to be a little kinder, a little brighter—a little more like Our Lady Carrie—and throw two loving sparkly middle fingers up at the world that tries to stamp out and demonize the notion that mentally ill people like me, like you, exist. 

And we deserve to exist, and more than that, we deserve to be treated with human fucking decency.

And if you are of a mind that the latest news surrounding Carrie’s death means that she was any lesser of a vital energy force in this world, that she mattered less, that her words were less important or that she “deserved” to die because they found drugs in her autopsy report, it is with my profound and heartfelt best wishes, that I invite you to cordially:

✨🖕✨🖕✨🖕✨ Go Fuck Yourself ✨🖕✨🖕✨🖕✨

Don’t bother to RSVP.

[satireknight]

TMNT S01E04 - Hot Rodding Teenagers from Dimension X

AND... just like that, the titles started getting silly.

So the Turtles are planning to turn Baxter’s van into a mobile tracking station, using the equipment in Baxter’s lab. Is this legal? This doesn’t seem legal. I know technically they’re vigilantes, but this seems a little thefty.

So they do what anyone would do: they push the entire van up the stairs, and then Donatello rips the entire side of the van off like he was peeling an orange. Explain to me again why Michelangelo couldn’t get out of ropes in the last episode.

It also turns out that Baxter’s been arrested offscreen because “the authorities didn’t appreciate it when he tried to take over the city with his Mouser robots.” Well, that happens when you print your name on your murderous metallic T-rexes. Wait, take over the city? They didn’t do that! They just tried to kill Splinter and ate an apartment building!

Since Donatello is modifying an entire van all by himself while everyone else stands around chatting, he inevitably starts asking why THEY have to do ALL the work of stopping Shredder. I’d be asking why I have to do all the technical stuff, since presumably one of the others can work a wrench.

How has the Technodrome not completely hollowed out the area under New York, causing a catastrophic collapse?

Krang has finally had enough and is refusing to give Shredder any more new toys until Shredder ponies up a pair of opposable thumbs. Shredder acts high and mighty by saying that the body is just one of several experiments he’s doing... which includes more mutants.

I can see the benefits of a bat, since they presumably would have sonar or something like that. But why a lizard? Or a mole? How are those better than the ones you already have?

Shredder then remembers that oh yeah, Krang is from another dimension, and since that dimension is full of nonstop war, he can just get weapons from THAT place. Of course, since Krang also has an army sitting on the other side, he might end up with angry soldiers ripping his face off. Krang is somehow horrified by the idea of what might come through the portal.

In “Donatello is underappreciated” news, Donatello has just managed to whip up a personalized, highly-decorated, weaponized vehicle in mere hours. How do his bros respond to this? They want more shit like higher ceilings and pizza ovens so they can mess around while driving. Amazingly he doesn’t kill them all with his wrench set, and they careen down the stairs and straight into a fire hydrant. 

Shredder is apparently expecting to just open the portal right into an armory, but instead two flying cars come zooming through. These are the Neutrinos.

And I don’t know if people will agree or not, but I’ve always hated the Neutrinos, the futuristic alien elf people, even when I was a little kid. Part of it was their voices; they always sounded like they had a sore throat. Another was the antiquated slang that they used, which... I never understood the reasons for and is kinda cringey.

But the most glaring reason for me was that they never felt like complete characters. Think about it: when you strip away the weird way they talk, what are you left with? Who are they? What shapes them as people? Answer: we don’t know, because they’re not really developed. They are all basically the same bland empty character. Kala is particularly bad, because her only narrative function is for Michelangelo to occasionally crush on her. She’s not a real character on her own.

Let’s just say I prefer the Neutrinos in the IDW comic, where they actually have some character and function instead of “we’re fun-loving teenagers and the grown-ups oppress us!”

sigh

So they’re chased by a pair of rock warriors in a flying tank, and that sounded so much more metal in my head.

Rocksteady and Bebop blow up the tank, and a firefight breaks out as the Neutrinos escape. The Rock soldiers encounter Krang, who is upset that they’re seeing him naked.... and by naked, I mean just a brain on a little wheelie stand. Apparently he “lost” his body when he was banished to Earth... although I’m not sure how or why.

And then the awkward writing kicks in: Krang and the warriors talk with horror about how the Neutrinos hate war, won’t fight, and “encourage people to have fun.” Perish the thought. Oh Lord, the heavy-handedness is making my brain hurt.

Oh hai World Trade Center. You’re making me feel awkward and a little depressed.

So the Neutrinos drive right out of a subway entrance, and the Turtles immediately start chasing them, ultimately leaping right into their cars and forcing them to land. But then they find out that the Neutrinos have no idea who Shredder is, and are just a group of shrill-voiced tiny elves who unironically use terms like “daddio.”

So the Turtles do what any person would do with alien visitors: they take ‘em to... an arcade. Why? I have no idea. 

April sparks off a conversation about Dimension X, and another silly “all the grown-ups don’t want young kids like us to have fun!” conversation takes place. Look, is there any child with six brain cells who won’t feel pandered to by that sort of thing? Especially with idiotic ideas like them being chased because they trespassed on a battlefield.... um, getting onto a battlefield is its own punishment, because... you are going to die. Nobody’s going to stop fighting just to kill YOU.

Just then the Rock Warriors torpedo the building and put the scene out of my misery. By coincidence, all the humans in the building suddenly evaporate... so I’m going to assume they’re dead.

So the Neutrinos finally do something useful and start firing at the Rock Warriors, and Leonardo manages to wreck their vehicle with his amazing insta-growing sword.

That’s easily twelve feet long.

Just then the explosions, energy blasts and probable deaths of multiple people cause the police to show up. I wonder why.

Just then Leonardo mentions how weird it is that Shredder is able to connect to a different dimension.... NOW? YOU’RE GOING TO ASK THAT NOW? Shouldn’t you have asked that back before you were playing pinball and listening to the Neutrinos bitch about how mommy and daddy won’t let them zoom around in circles being obnoxious?

So yes, the Turtles finally break out of their “fun” brainfog and realize that they could be facing a global invasion, which is kind of important. It’s about time that tenuous plot finally reared its head.

“This is my Magic 8 Ball!” 

No, it’s actually a weather-making device. And then they’re attacked by the NYPD, who must be really fucking jaded if they don’t react to a couple of guys apparently made out of rock.

The Neutrinos tell the Turtles and Splinter about Krang, which explains the whole talking brain thing that came up in the last episode. Wow, that might have been good information to get from them BEFORE YOU WENT TO A FUCKING ARCADE. Sorry, these characters really piss me off.

Oh, and Michelangelo is crushing in Kala. Why? Dunno, because they’ve barely interacted at ALL, so I’m going to assume it’s because she’s the only girl he’s ever encountered who isn’t way taller than him. Also, her only defining trait is that she cries.

Wait, since when did they have a hydraulic platform inside a phone booth?! How do you even instal that without people noticing?

So the Technodrome that they previously spent hours or days searching for is now something they can just drive up to, and they are able to fly those flying cars right inside with no resistance whatsoever. Of course, while Donatello is diddling with the portal, the mook squad comes in and causes trouble for them, while the other Turtles encounter Shredder, Krang and the Rock Warriors.

I have no idea why Krang is bouncing with joy. It seems premature.

Also the Technodrome has a giant floor section with vanishing panels. Why? 

Finally the dimensional portal opens, which means the Neutrinos and their bad writing are going as well.

“There’s a barrel of silicone lubricant over there!” How did you know that? And why do I not want to know WHY it’s there?

“We want to stay with you, and have FUN!” Can you see why I hate this character with a passion?

The Neutrino with the gray hair says that they have to keep fighting Krang in Dimension X... which seems to go against two things we’ve been told. One is that Krang hasn’t been involved in the fighting since being banished, and the other is that the Neutrinos just mess around and don’t participate in any kind of conflict because it isn’t fuuuuuuuuuun.

So they zoom through the portal, and Michelangelo gets teary-eyed over the departure of someone he’s exchanged maybe ten words with over the span of a single day. I care sooooo much right now.

But unfortunately the weather-maker is still causing sufficiently bad weather that the ground is actually shaking. Right now there’s a friggin’ tornado in the streets.Leonardo handles it the way you’d expect - he leaps out of a flying car and almost dies so he can slice the thing in half.

And having pussed out epicly during the fight, Shredder finally throws a fit and declares that he’ll make Krang’s new body for him if Krang kills the Turtles.

And back in the Turtles’ lair, for some reason they’re back to sleeping in a quadruple bunk, while April reads them the same children’s story over and over again.

VERDICT:

This story is a big step down from the previous three, partly because it feels so schizophrenic. Parts of it, like that bedtime-story ending and the Neutrinos whining, feel incredibly juvenile and pandering to the child audience. But the other half is an actual threat of alien invasion and a dangerous weapon. 

And the two don’t mesh very well, which often makes it feel like the important plot is being sidelined for kiddie antics. It really just sticks out, especially since the characters we’ve been shown are not really the kind to respond to serious new developments by just kicking back in an arcade.

I already ranted about the Neutrinos and what shallow half-characters they are, but I gotta say again, they don’t really add much of anything to the story beyond a shallow insta-crush, infodumpage and some aerial action scenes. 

One thing that was much better in this episode is the animation, which has stepped back up from the last episode. And it has some nice moments like the police and military taking on the Rock Warriors, which gave us some good conflict and a sense that the world outside is bigger than just the Turtles and their issues.

Speaking of their issues, despite my bitching it was kinda fun to see the origins of their van, even if poor Donatello remains horribly underappreciated. He’s the kind of guy who could build a particle accelerator out of toaster parts, and people would complain because it doesn’t have an embedded clock.

Grade: C-

[iowamusicshowcase]

Written by Chad Taylor. Originally appeared on the Culture Myth website on March 22, 2016.

Rae Davis booked Sara Routh's tour. All three legs of it, in fact. For this west coast swing, Davis focused on finding gigs close to friends houses, which allowed Routh and Davis to save a ton of money on lodging. We've talked about it before, but one can not put too fine a line on it: indie artists know they aren't going to make money on their self-funded tours, so every expenditure becomes vital to track. Anywhere you can find to cut costs, and potentially extend your tour one more day, you do it. This is what most galled indie artists who read about Pomplamoose's horrendous debacle of a tour back in 2014. For the uninitiated: Pomplamoose is a disgustingly twee indie duo who attained a level of success through savvy use of YouTube, an overly-saccharine Toyota commercial, and the fact that hipsters won't die. In November of 2014, the male half of the equation, Jack Conte, wrote a blog entry, detailing the band's recently completed, 28 day tour. A tour from which the band made $137,000 in ticket and merch sales...and finished over $11,000 in the red. On the surface, it's another sad reminder of how tough it is to be an indie band in today's market. But then you get to the bit of the post that details the band's tour expenses and, if you're an indie musician, you start to die inside. $17,589 in lodging expenses. Four rooms a night, in what Conte describes in a completely unironic and un-self-aware manner as "Best Western level hotels, nothing fancy." My bar napkin breaks that down to $125.64, per room, per night, for an eight-person road crew. First off, anyone with common sense immediately sees that getting rooms with two beds and doubling up from two people per room to four, you automatically cut your lodging expenses in half. Without touching a single other thing on the tour, you've nearly wiped out the entire loss amount. There are other things that make the average indie artist cringe -- the $17K figure is listed under "hotels and food," but there's also an additional entry for per diems for the crew to eat on (which came to another $4200); they were paying their crew roughly $1,500 a week per person in salaries; they somehow dropped $11K on parking and gas -- but for most people who have ever booked or embarked on a self-funded tour, it's that lodging expense that smacks them in the face. Make a friend. Sleep on a couple floors. Camp a couple nights. Think your band is too big to not have hotels of some kind? Look at that bottom line again. If Pomplamoose had constructed their 2014 tour with even half the common sense your average local musician has, they would have finished several thousand dollars in the black, even after paying everyone an effective rate of $78,000 a year. Routh and Davis are not spending $125 a night on Best Western-level hotels. They are staying with friends when they can and, when they can't, they are driving through the night until they get to the next city. Tonight is the one exception to the formula, and not because they splurged on a hotel. For the only night on the tour, Davis and Routh are staying in a city where they do not have a show booked. It wasn't for lack of trying, Davis spent weeks looking for a venue in Phoenix that could accommodate them on this date, and came up snake eyes. But the timing of the off day could not be better. After doubling their tour mileage in one day, and performing an average of once every 19 hours in the first four days, a chance to eat a home cooked meal, do some laundry and rest voices is about as heavenly a proposition as you could ask for. Before getting to Phoenix, however, there was a detour that needed to be made.

Turns out that Davis, a grown-ass woman with kids and a dog and responsibilities, had never seen the Grand Canyon. Seeing as it was kinda, sorta, more or less along the way from Santa Fe, it would have been ridiculous not to stop. If you've been to the Grand Canyon, you understand why. If you haven't, there's just no way to adequately describe it to you. So on this trip, it was decided that Davis would go to the Canyon. It is a twisting, beautiful drive from New Mexico to the Canyon's southern rim. The angle the highway takes obscures virtually all of the Canyon from view until you get there, and even the parking lot doesn't afford you a clear look. Instead, you're left almost completely ignorant of the view you're in for, until you're practically right on top of it. And when that finally happens...the first time someone sees the Grand Canyon, it's stupefying. It's so vast and so deep and so beautiful, you can feel your brain collapsing in on itself like a discount flan and you grasp madly for any words you can find that help get the idea across. For Davis, that amounted to: "holy shit, it's amazing, I should have peed before I got here."

And so, Routh and Davis walked along the southern lip of the Grand Canyon. They clambered out onto a jutting spur of rocks, took in the immensity around them; Davis lay down on the outcropping's edge, feet just dangling off into space, face open to the sun, and sighed. This wild moment of Lil Wayne-esque largess cost them $30 in parking, and another $20 in gift shop trinkets. They might come home in two weeks, tally up all the money, and find out that they finished the tour minus $50. They'll be ok with that. Conte still brandishes the term "indie band" like it means something to Pomplamoose. In that blog post, he uses the term in the same paragraph where he calls any band that doesn't get $9000 in tour sponsorships a hobby act. Davis and Routh aren't hobbyists. Neither are the thousands of other acts from hundreds of other cities who are just like them, and who are self-funding shoestring tours all across the country. The crowds may be smaller, the miles a little longer, and the venues not as prestigious, but then again, they aren't losing five figures on this trip, either. After leaving the Canyon, Davis and Routh continued on to the Phoenix area, where they stayed with the parents of a friend back home in Des Moines. They were welcomed in, fed, given a place to shower and wash clothes; given a soft place to sleep. Tomorrow, the road calls out again and the tour continues into California. But today was a day of rest. A day to be thankful. And on a tour that already neither artist will ever forget, it was a day for giving one of them the memory of a lifetime. And nobody even got a per diem. Miles traveled: 1,880

On or near the 10th and 25th of every month, we reprint a post from Chad Taylor's blog, Culture Myth. Chad Taylor was the music reporter for Cityview magazine in Des Moines, and has also written for other publications like DSM Magazine.

The Culture Myth website: http://culturemyth.net/ Rae Davis (Fehring)'s home page: https://www.raedavismusic.com/ Sara Routh's home page: http://www.sararouth.com/ Other IMSC posts featuring Culture Myth: http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/search/label/Culture%20Myth Other IMSC posts featuring singer/songwriters: http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/search/label/singer%2Fsongwriter Other IMSC posts about performing: http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/search/label/performing PREVIOUSLY ON IOWA MUSIC SHOWCASE: IHEARIC VIDEOS - Some Prog Rock and a Guitar/Violin Duo http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/ihearic-videos-some-prog-rock-and.html IOWA MUSIC SHOWCASE PODCAST - Episode 63: Iowa Country and Folk Music http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/iowa-music-showcase-podcast-episode-63.html JAZZMAN JOE VIDEOS - Beaver Creek Jazz Ensemble at the Union Park United Methodist Church in Des Moines on Apr 12, 2018 http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/jazzman-joe-videos-beaver-creek-jazz.html IOWA BLOCK RADIO PODCAST - Episode 2 https://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/iowa-block-radio-podcast-episode-2.html IHEARIC PODCAST - Episode 19: Come to Our Concert this Friday (04/15/2018) https://iowamusicshowcasesongs.blogspot.com/2018/04/ihearic-podcast-episode-19-come-to-our.html One week ago... IHEARIC VIDEOS: Two Classical Performances and Dana Telsrow Too! - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/ihearic-videos-two-classical.html Two weeks ago... YOUR OWN PRIVATE IOWA - Episode 28: T&A - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/your-own-private-iowa-episode-28-t.html One month ago... YOUR OWN PRIVATE IOWA - Episode 23: Moonrabbit - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/03/your-own-private-iowa-episode-23.html One month ago... CULTURE MYTH - Day 3: Oklahoma City http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/03/culture-myth-day-3-oklahoma-city.html Three months ago... YOUR OWN PRIVATE IOWA - Episode 17: Bryon and Rachel Dudley - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/01/your-own-private-iowa-episode-17-bryon.html Six months ago... IOWA MUSIC SHOWCASE PODCAST - Episode 54: Happy Hawkeye Halloween 2017, Part 3 of 4 - The Van Meter Visitor and Other Iowa Dragons - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2017/10/episode-54-happy-hawkeye-halloween-2017.html One year ago... PLAYLISTS: Iowa Science Music - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2017/04/well-besides-being-big-geek-on-music-i.html Two years ago... PLAYLISTS: Artists who Submitted (But I Still Haven't Put on a Podcast Yet!) - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2016/04/playlists-artists-who-submitted-but-i.html Three years ago... IOWA MUSIC SHOWCASE PODCAST - Episode 8: Iowa City Children's Album - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2015/04/episode-8-iowa-city-childrens-album.html OTHER IMSC WEBSITES AND LINKS: Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/IowaMusicShowcase Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Iowa-Music-Showcase/364796883703114 Twitter: https://twitter.com/iamusicshowcase Instagram: https://instagram.com/iowamusicshowcase

[iowamusicshowcase]

Written by Chad Taylor. Originally appeared on the Culture Myth website on March 22, 2016.

Rae Davis booked Sara Routh's tour. All three legs of it, in fact. For this west coast swing, Davis focused on finding gigs close to friends houses, which allowed Routh and Davis to save a ton of money on lodging. We've talked about it before, but one can not put too fine a line on it: indie artists know they aren't going to make money on their self-funded tours, so every expenditure becomes vital to track. Anywhere you can find to cut costs, and potentially extend your tour one more day, you do it. This is what most galled indie artists who read about Pomplamoose's horrendous debacle of a tour back in 2014. For the uninitiated: Pomplamoose is a disgustingly twee indie duo who attained a level of success through savvy use of YouTube, an overly-saccharine Toyota commercial, and the fact that hipsters won't die. In November of 2014, the male half of the equation, Jack Conte, wrote a blog entry, detailing the band's recently completed, 28 day tour. A tour from which the band made $137,000 in ticket and merch sales...and finished over $11,000 in the red. On the surface, it's another sad reminder of how tough it is to be an indie band in today's market. But then you get to the bit of the post that details the band's tour expenses and, if you're an indie musician, you start to die inside. $17,589 in lodging expenses. Four rooms a night, in what Conte describes in a completely unironic and un-self-aware manner as "Best Western level hotels, nothing fancy." My bar napkin breaks that down to $125.64, per room, per night, for an eight-person road crew. First off, anyone with common sense immediately sees that getting rooms with two beds and doubling up from two people per room to four, you automatically cut your lodging expenses in half. Without touching a single other thing on the tour, you've nearly wiped out the entire loss amount. There are other things that make the average indie artist cringe -- the $17K figure is listed under "hotels and food," but there's also an additional entry for per diems for the crew to eat on (which came to another $4200); they were paying their crew roughly $1,500 a week per person in salaries; they somehow dropped $11K on parking and gas -- but for most people who have ever booked or embarked on a self-funded tour, it's that lodging expense that smacks them in the face. Make a friend. Sleep on a couple floors. Camp a couple nights. Think your band is too big to not have hotels of some kind? Look at that bottom line again. If Pomplamoose had constructed their 2014 tour with even half the common sense your average local musician has, they would have finished several thousand dollars in the black, even after paying everyone an effective rate of $78,000 a year. Routh and Davis are not spending $125 a night on Best Western-level hotels. They are staying with friends when they can and, when they can't, they are driving through the night until they get to the next city. Tonight is the one exception to the formula, and not because they splurged on a hotel. For the only night on the tour, Davis and Routh are staying in a city where they do not have a show booked. It wasn't for lack of trying, Davis spent weeks looking for a venue in Phoenix that could accommodate them on this date, and came up snake eyes. But the timing of the off day could not be better. After doubling their tour mileage in one day, and performing an average of once every 19 hours in the first four days, a chance to eat a home cooked meal, do some laundry and rest voices is about as heavenly a proposition as you could ask for. Before getting to Phoenix, however, there was a detour that needed to be made.

Turns out that Davis, a grown-ass woman with kids and a dog and responsibilities, had never seen the Grand Canyon. Seeing as it was kinda, sorta, more or less along the way from Santa Fe, it would have been ridiculous not to stop. If you've been to the Grand Canyon, you understand why. If you haven't, there's just no way to adequately describe it to you. So on this trip, it was decided that Davis would go to the Canyon. It is a twisting, beautiful drive from New Mexico to the Canyon's southern rim. The angle the highway takes obscures virtually all of the Canyon from view until you get there, and even the parking lot doesn't afford you a clear look. Instead, you're left almost completely ignorant of the view you're in for, until you're practically right on top of it. And when that finally happens...the first time someone sees the Grand Canyon, it's stupefying. It's so vast and so deep and so beautiful, you can feel your brain collapsing in on itself like a discount flan and you grasp madly for any words you can find that help get the idea across. For Davis, that amounted to: "holy shit, it's amazing, I should have peed before I got here."

And so, Routh and Davis walked along the southern lip of the Grand Canyon. They clambered out onto a jutting spur of rocks, took in the immensity around them; Davis lay down on the outcropping's edge, feet just dangling off into space, face open to the sun, and sighed. This wild moment of Lil Wayne-esque largess cost them $30 in parking, and another $20 in gift shop trinkets. They might come home in two weeks, tally up all the money, and find out that they finished the tour minus $50. They'll be ok with that. Conte still brandishes the term "indie band" like it means something to Pomplamoose. In that blog post, he uses the term in the same paragraph where he calls any band that doesn't get $9000 in tour sponsorships a hobby act. Davis and Routh aren't hobbyists. Neither are the thousands of other acts from hundreds of other cities who are just like them, and who are self-funding shoestring tours all across the country. The crowds may be smaller, the miles a little longer, and the venues not as prestigious, but then again, they aren't losing five figures on this trip, either. After leaving the Canyon, Davis and Routh continued on to the Phoenix area, where they stayed with the parents of a friend back home in Des Moines. They were welcomed in, fed, given a place to shower and wash clothes; given a soft place to sleep. Tomorrow, the road calls out again and the tour continues into California. But today was a day of rest. A day to be thankful. And on a tour that already neither artist will ever forget, it was a day for giving one of them the memory of a lifetime. And nobody even got a per diem. Miles traveled: 1,880

On or near the 10th and 25th of every month, we reprint a post from Chad Taylor's blog, Culture Myth. Chad Taylor was the music reporter for Cityview magazine in Des Moines, and has also written for other publications like DSM Magazine.

The Culture Myth website: http://culturemyth.net/ Rae Davis (Fehring)'s home page: https://www.raedavismusic.com/ Sara Routh's home page: http://www.sararouth.com/ Other IMSC posts featuring Culture Myth: http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/search/label/Culture%20Myth Other IMSC posts featuring singer/songwriters: http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/search/label/singer%2Fsongwriter Other IMSC posts about performing: http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/search/label/performing PREVIOUSLY ON IOWA MUSIC SHOWCASE: IHEARIC VIDEOS - Some Prog Rock and a Guitar/Violin Duo http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/ihearic-videos-some-prog-rock-and.html IOWA MUSIC SHOWCASE PODCAST - Episode 63: Iowa Country and Folk Music http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/iowa-music-showcase-podcast-episode-63.html JAZZMAN JOE VIDEOS - Beaver Creek Jazz Ensemble at the Union Park United Methodist Church in Des Moines on Apr 12, 2018 http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/jazzman-joe-videos-beaver-creek-jazz.html IOWA BLOCK RADIO PODCAST - Episode 2 https://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/iowa-block-radio-podcast-episode-2.html IHEARIC PODCAST - Episode 19: Come to Our Concert this Friday (04/15/2018) https://iowamusicshowcasesongs.blogspot.com/2018/04/ihearic-podcast-episode-19-come-to-our.html One week ago... IHEARIC VIDEOS: Two Classical Performances and Dana Telsrow Too! - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/ihearic-videos-two-classical.html Two weeks ago... YOUR OWN PRIVATE IOWA - Episode 28: T&A - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/your-own-private-iowa-episode-28-t.html One month ago... YOUR OWN PRIVATE IOWA - Episode 23: Moonrabbit - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/03/your-own-private-iowa-episode-23.html One month ago... CULTURE MYTH - Day 3: Oklahoma City http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/03/culture-myth-day-3-oklahoma-city.html Three months ago... YOUR OWN PRIVATE IOWA - Episode 17: Bryon and Rachel Dudley - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/01/your-own-private-iowa-episode-17-bryon.html Six months ago... IOWA MUSIC SHOWCASE PODCAST - Episode 54: Happy Hawkeye Halloween 2017, Part 3 of 4 - The Van Meter Visitor and Other Iowa Dragons - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2017/10/episode-54-happy-hawkeye-halloween-2017.html One year ago... PLAYLISTS: Iowa Science Music - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2017/04/well-besides-being-big-geek-on-music-i.html Two years ago... PLAYLISTS: Artists who Submitted (But I Still Haven't Put on a Podcast Yet!) - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2016/04/playlists-artists-who-submitted-but-i.html Three years ago... IOWA MUSIC SHOWCASE PODCAST - Episode 8: Iowa City Children's Album - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2015/04/episode-8-iowa-city-childrens-album.html OTHER IMSC WEBSITES AND LINKS: Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/IowaMusicShowcase Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Iowa-Music-Showcase/364796883703114 Twitter: https://twitter.com/iamusicshowcase Instagram: https://instagram.com/iowamusicshowcase

[iowamusicshowcase]

CULTURE MYTH - Day 5: A rest https://ift.tt/2I01qq3

Written by Chad Taylor. Originally appeared on the Culture Myth website on March 22, 2016.

Rae Davis booked Sara Routh's tour. All three legs of it, in fact. For this west coast swing, Davis focused on finding gigs close to friends houses, which allowed Routh and Davis to save a ton of money on lodging. We've talked about it before, but one can not put too fine a line on it: indie artists know they aren't going to make money on their self-funded tours, so every expenditure becomes vital to track. Anywhere you can find to cut costs, and potentially extend your tour one more day, you do it. This is what most galled indie artists who read about Pomplamoose's horrendous debacle of a tour back in 2014. For the uninitiated: Pomplamoose is a disgustingly twee indie duo who attained a level of success through savvy use of YouTube, an overly-saccharine Toyota commercial, and the fact that hipsters won't die. In November of 2014, the male half of the equation, Jack Conte, wrote a blog entry, detailing the band's recently completed, 28 day tour. A tour from which the band made $137,000 in ticket and merch sales...and finished over $11,000 in the red. On the surface, it's another sad reminder of how tough it is to be an indie band in today's market. But then you get to the bit of the post that details the band's tour expenses and, if you're an indie musician, you start to die inside. $17,589 in lodging expenses. Four rooms a night, in what Conte describes in a completely unironic and un-self-aware manner as "Best Western level hotels, nothing fancy." My bar napkin breaks that down to $125.64, per room, per night, for an eight-person road crew. First off, anyone with common sense immediately sees that getting rooms with two beds and doubling up from two people per room to four, you automatically cut your lodging expenses in half. Without touching a single other thing on the tour, you've nearly wiped out the entire loss amount. There are other things that make the average indie artist cringe -- the $17K figure is listed under "hotels and food," but there's also an additional entry for per diems for the crew to eat on (which came to another $4200); they were paying their crew roughly $1,500 a week per person in salaries; they somehow dropped $11K on parking and gas -- but for most people who have ever booked or embarked on a self-funded tour, it's that lodging expense that smacks them in the face. Make a friend. Sleep on a couple floors. Camp a couple nights. Think your band is too big to not have hotels of some kind? Look at that bottom line again. If Pomplamoose had constructed their 2014 tour with even half the common sense your average local musician has, they would have finished several thousand dollars in the black, even after paying everyone an effective rate of $78,000 a year. Routh and Davis are not spending $125 a night on Best Western-level hotels. They are staying with friends when they can and, when they can't, they are driving through the night until they get to the next city. Tonight is the one exception to the formula, and not because they splurged on a hotel. For the only night on the tour, Davis and Routh are staying in a city where they do not have a show booked. It wasn't for lack of trying, Davis spent weeks looking for a venue in Phoenix that could accommodate them on this date, and came up snake eyes. But the timing of the off day could not be better. After doubling their tour mileage in one day, and performing an average of once every 19 hours in the first four days, a chance to eat a home cooked meal, do some laundry and rest voices is about as heavenly a proposition as you could ask for. Before getting to Phoenix, however, there was a detour that needed to be made.

Turns out that Davis, a grown-ass woman with kids and a dog and responsibilities, had never seen the Grand Canyon. Seeing as it was kinda, sorta, more or less along the way from Santa Fe, it would have been ridiculous not to stop. If you've been to the Grand Canyon, you understand why. If you haven't, there's just no way to adequately describe it to you. So on this trip, it was decided that Davis would go to the Canyon. It is a twisting, beautiful drive from New Mexico to the Canyon's southern rim. The angle the highway takes obscures virtually all of the Canyon from view until you get there, and even the parking lot doesn't afford you a clear look. Instead, you're left almost completely ignorant of the view you're in for, until you're practically right on top of it. And when that finally happens...the first time someone sees the Grand Canyon, it's stupefying. It's so vast and so deep and so beautiful, you can feel your brain collapsing in on itself like a discount flan and you grasp madly for any words you can find that help get the idea across. For Davis, that amounted to: "holy shit, it's amazing, I should have peed before I got here."

And so, Routh and Davis walked along the southern lip of the Grand Canyon. They clambered out onto a jutting spur of rocks, took in the immensity around them; Davis lay down on the outcropping's edge, feet just dangling off into space, face open to the sun, and sighed. This wild moment of Lil Wayne-esque largess cost them $30 in parking, and another $20 in gift shop trinkets. They might come home in two weeks, tally up all the money, and find out that they finished the tour minus $50. They'll be ok with that. Conte still brandishes the term "indie band" like it means something to Pomplamoose. In that blog post, he uses the term in the same paragraph where he calls any band that doesn't get $9000 in tour sponsorships a hobby act. Davis and Routh aren't hobbyists. Neither are the thousands of other acts from hundreds of other cities who are just like them, and who are self-funding shoestring tours all across the country. The crowds may be smaller, the miles a little longer, and the venues not as prestigious, but then again, they aren't losing five figures on this trip, either. After leaving the Canyon, Davis and Routh continued on to the Phoenix area, where they stayed with the parents of a friend back home in Des Moines. They were welcomed in, fed, given a place to shower and wash clothes; given a soft place to sleep. Tomorrow, the road calls out again and the tour continues into California. But today was a day of rest. A day to be thankful. And on a tour that already neither artist will ever forget, it was a day for giving one of them the memory of a lifetime. And nobody even got a per diem. Miles traveled: 1,880

On or near the 10th and 25th of every month, we reprint a post from Chad Taylor's blog, Culture Myth. Chad Taylor was the music reporter for Cityview magazine in Des Moines, and has also written for other publications like DSM Magazine.

The Culture Myth website: http://culturemyth.net/ Rae Davis (Fehring)'s home page: https://www.raedavismusic.com/ Sara Routh's home page: http://www.sararouth.com/ Other IMSC posts featuring Culture Myth: http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/search/label/Culture%20Myth Other IMSC posts featuring singer/songwriters: http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/search/label/singer%2Fsongwriter Other IMSC posts about performing: http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/search/label/performing PREVIOUSLY ON IOWA MUSIC SHOWCASE: IHEARIC VIDEOS - Some Prog Rock and a Guitar/Violin Duo http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/ihearic-videos-some-prog-rock-and.html IOWA MUSIC SHOWCASE PODCAST - Episode 63: Iowa Country and Folk Music http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/iowa-music-showcase-podcast-episode-63.html JAZZMAN JOE VIDEOS - Beaver Creek Jazz Ensemble at the Union Park United Methodist Church in Des Moines on Apr 12, 2018 http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/jazzman-joe-videos-beaver-creek-jazz.html IOWA BLOCK RADIO PODCAST - Episode 2 https://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/iowa-block-radio-podcast-episode-2.html IHEARIC PODCAST - Episode 19: Come to Our Concert this Friday (04/15/2018) https://iowamusicshowcasesongs.blogspot.com/2018/04/ihearic-podcast-episode-19-come-to-our.html One week ago... IHEARIC VIDEOS: Two Classical Performances and Dana Telsrow Too! - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/ihearic-videos-two-classical.html Two weeks ago... YOUR OWN PRIVATE IOWA - Episode 28: T&A - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/04/your-own-private-iowa-episode-28-t.html One month ago... YOUR OWN PRIVATE IOWA - Episode 23: Moonrabbit - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/03/your-own-private-iowa-episode-23.html One month ago... CULTURE MYTH - Day 3: Oklahoma City http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/03/culture-myth-day-3-oklahoma-city.html Three months ago... YOUR OWN PRIVATE IOWA - Episode 17: Bryon and Rachel Dudley - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2018/01/your-own-private-iowa-episode-17-bryon.html Six months ago... IOWA MUSIC SHOWCASE PODCAST - Episode 54: Happy Hawkeye Halloween 2017, Part 3 of 4 - The Van Meter Visitor and Other Iowa Dragons - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2017/10/episode-54-happy-hawkeye-halloween-2017.html One year ago... PLAYLISTS: Iowa Science Music - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2017/04/well-besides-being-big-geek-on-music-i.html Two years ago... PLAYLISTS: Artists who Submitted (But I Still Haven't Put on a Podcast Yet!) - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2016/04/playlists-artists-who-submitted-but-i.html Three years ago... IOWA MUSIC SHOWCASE PODCAST - Episode 8: Iowa City Children's Album - http://iowamusicshowcase.blogspot.com/2015/04/episode-8-iowa-city-childrens-album.html OTHER IMSC WEBSITES AND LINKS: Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/IowaMusicShowcase Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/pages/Iowa-Music-Showcase/364796883703114 Twitter: https://twitter.com/iamusicshowcase Instagram: https://instagram.com/iowamusicshowcase