#2018 retrospective

[rb9]

happy 6 years to those who celebrate 🫶

[eyes-of-nine]

had a dream I was helping at some sort of restaurant/diner and I was already so so tired and then for some reason j*ke p*ul was there and I got so fed up and yelled at him so much I woke myself up

[bethrnoora]

Baltray, Co. Louth, Ireland (2018)

[sadaveniren]

.

[victoriasugdens]

was scrolling through your blog and saw a p!atd reference that gave me whiplash just thought you should know

oh my god akssjsjsjskdjd i’m sorry, but i’m actually not

[sapphirecastles]

Me in 2014: THIS YEAR I'll be able to move out and be free

2024 isn't over YET.

Me in 2018: next year I'll be able to move out and be free

Me in 2019: next year I'll be able to move out and be free

Me in 2020: how am i alive what the fuck

Me in 2021: next year I'll be able to move out and be free

Me in 2022: next year I'll be able to move out and be free

Me in 2023: next year I'll be able to move out and be free

Me in 2024: next year I'll be able to move out and be free

[2024skin]

Finally caught hazbin hotel trending on here I can't believe this is the official big budget Tumblr Show and I completely missed every mention of it on here until tonight

[arvidsgarden]

thinking it was the old kiva where one forgot stuff and it got rained on, I wrote this at the inception of an idea for a novel about what all multilayered narratives are—the comparing of two versions of reality (or oneself). I always have been brutally honest with myself in literature. This is both my burden and my release.

And so it was with flabbergasted wonder after quite predictably, though unintentionally, leaving it on some bench one afternoon, that I saw old-style journaling mushroom as the most appealing pastime to an entire span of generations.

[shahrwrites]

* Batman #50 (2018)

Bruce Wayne, CEO of casually making your father-figure tear up.

[also that “I can’t do anything without you, really. I never could. Or will,” really hurts now in retrospect.]

[valcubust]

in honor of scout harding's return

inktober day 20: [Underappreciated] Dwarves!!!!

[dcbrierton]

I recently listened to series 1 of Susan Calman's Mrs Brightside, a podcast involving Calman talking with various comedians about depression. A topic not unrelated to *gestures broadly* whatever this is. (Gestures meant to encompass myself, my patient population, various friends and family, our societal moment as a whole...)

It's an interesting project, in part in that it is very open ended. Some episodes are the funny and upbeat conversations about mental health that Calman seems to have been looking for. Some episodes are awkward, involving guests who, having shown up for the recording, now don't really want to talk about depression and, being professional public speakers, can go on an entertaining tangent for quite a long time to avoid it. Sometimes Calman has been friends with a guest for years; other times she's speaking with someone she's just met.

It is also a podcast that was released several years ago and makes very frequent references to Hannah Gadsby's show Nanette. So at one point I just stopped listening to whatever episode I was on and rewatched Nanette instead.

It's a good pairing. More than just comedians + difficult topics, they're both works about how comedy serves the audience and the comedian, but especially the comedian. What it allows them to say, what it doesn't allow them to say. What it feels like to tell the comedy version of their story over on repeat, and whether or not they tell the non-comedy version to anyone at all.

[annabelle--cane]

the thing I really enjoy about oliver banks is that he's got such a long character arc and we get three statements directly from him at distinct points along his path of becoming. we know other minor character avatars for similar amounts of time, but we tend to see them from outside points of view or get their life stories in retrospect once they've completed monsterfication, whereas oliver makes his own statements 1) when he's still mostly human in 2015, 2) just after he's properly crossed the avatar threshold in 2018, and 3) when he is decidedly mostly of his patron the apocalypse, all of which parallels the stages of jon's journey.

in mag 121, he makes a point of calling jon "jon" over "the archivist" because he says "archivist" is too formal, and in mag 168 he refers directly to jon two times. the first is at the top of his coroner's report, where he denotes it as being addressed to "the great eye" and "its archive, which draws knowledge of this suffering unto itself," referring to jon both with the more dehumanizing of his avatar titles and with an "it" pronoun. the second time is towards the end, where he calls jon "jon" and expresses that he isn't asking for mercy and that he would have offered this report willingly if that were still an option.

he never comes across as having any particular kind of feelings about the fear he harvests. he started off as quite anxious and desperate to avoid his patron, but it never turns into pleasure like it does with other avatars, he just stops caring, and I wonder how much of that is due to the nature of the end as a power and how much is due to the lack of choice he had in his path. some combination thereof, probably.

[linghxr]

Advice I would give my past self about studying Chinese

Recently I've been reflecting on my Chinese learning journey and how far I've come. If I could go back in time, these are 10 things I would tell my past self. A few are specific to Chinese, but most can apply to any language

It will get so much easier to learn new characters. I remember feeling overwhelmed because learning new characters was a painful process. Now when I encounter a new character, I can remember it with relative ease—it’s just a new combination of familiar components.

Don't feel bad about having uneven development in different skills. My listening and reading are significantly stronger than my speaking and writing. It’s super common and nothing to be ashamed of.

The best way to get over being too embarrassed to speak is to experience some embarrassment and realize it’s not a big deal. I used to be so afraid of making mistakes that I would avoid speaking in class. It was only by being forced to speak that I got over it. I'm much better for it!

It’s impossible to learn everything, and time is limited. You have to prioritize. You probably don’t need to know how to say “pawnshop” in Chinese, and trying to jam your head full of 100 words you saw once won’t work. They won’t stick.

It will actually be harder to read pinyin than to read characters at some point. When I helped a friend with a script for her Chinese class, I really struggled because she had written it entirely in pinyin. I had to write out the characters to read without stumbling! I know characters are daunting for beginners, but trust me, you will get used to them.

If you haven’t practiced or learned something, of course you won’t be good at it. I remember feeling so frustrated trying to navigate Chinese websites for the first time. In retrospect, obviously, I was going to struggle with something completely new to me!

If something isn’t sticking, move on. Why waste time on a word that’s not clicking when you could be learning five new ones? It will only result in unnecessary frustration. So unless you need to know it for your class or a proficiency test, drop it and move on.

Don’t beat yourself up when you have trouble understanding music, literature, different accents, etc. These can be challenging even in your native language. Of course you’re going to struggle more in a new language.

It's worth it to pay attention to things like stroke order and tones from the start so you don't form bad habits. Don’t stress about get it perfect, but it’s easier to do it right the first time than to have to correct your bad habits in the future.

Instead of feeling overwhelmed by all that you don’t know, learn how to express yourself with what you do know. It’s truly its own skill that requires practice. After all, in life you can’t always stop and pull out a dictionary.

I started learning Chinese a really long time ago, but I became more serious about it in 2018, so 5 1/2 years ago. I'm very proud of how far I've come, but I still have a long way to go! I look forward to revisiting this post in another couple of years 😊

[henrykathman]

The Miraculous Horror of Stop Motion

From the same artform that brought you Coraline and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, comes three stories that evoke the existential fear of art.

Original Music by Molly Noise

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[leporellian]

i genuinely really think that, besides my “musicals are what you get if you make operas not autistic” theorem (another thing for another day), there is One massive thing that stands in the way of me liking (modern) musicals and it’s the relationship they have to their texts vs operas.

with an opera, it’s kind of established that part of the big game is that every production is a negotiation and not a reproduction. it’s a conversation. there is no one “canon” version of an opera and it’s the audience expectation that every production will differ somehow. this especially kicks in when we’re dealing with operas that have harmful ideas either explicitly (madama butterfly) or implicitly (die meistersinger von nurnberg) because you can turn those works into ruminations on themselves. you’re dissecting the animal but the animal is conscious and fully consenting and marvels at your work as you go.

with a musical, meanwhile, there is usually a dedicated version you are looking at and an insistence on a CANONICAL way things are Meant to be interpreted. there is One Accepted Concept and branching into reinterpretations counts as “headcanons” or another modern fan term. a musical is not seen as “sociological/anthropological record of multiple time periods” but as “Content”

musicals have two problems. 1) they don’t have the gap in time that allows for that kind of retrospective look (which is fair that’s not a them issue), and 2) they have a fandom cultivated around them and are seen as Content. they also are so “concurrent” with our time (and also very fast) that they don’t have a sense of Allowing for reinterpretation. sure, you’ll have your regional/student productions that’ll do some minor detail like a character acting slightly differently or a silent interaction included- but you aren’t going to have your deconstructed heathers that pulls apart how it’s kind of immediately fallen apart in a post-2018 world, or a lion king performed as if it was a brand new text without any regard for the details of either the original film or julie taymor’s stage treatment. god forbid you start deconstructing your musical! that’ll make the fans sad!

and until we get to the de-fandomization of musicals and acknowledge them as sociological texts and not Content(TM), we aren’t going to get there. but alas that culture is baked into musicals, especially as the shows see shorter and shorter long-term visions as the machine of broadway grows hungrier for money and so brand identity and imposition of ‘fandom culture’ grow stronger with it.

(this is also why i’m so fascinated with chess the musical, which is a musical that doesn’t work So Much that nearly every new production is some extensive revision or another (usually making it somehow more incomprehensible in the process). the idea of “musicals can be reinterpreted” is there! we’re getting there! but it’s Not Quite. and i find that Fascinating from a dramaturgical context.)

Anyway if i had my way every new musical revival would be like the daniel fish oklahoma over and over and over FOREVER!!!! YOUR BRAND IS DEAD AND BOW TO THE NEBULOUS CONCEPT OF REGIETHEATRE AS YOUR NEW KINGGGGG