#Also so the fuck what if some people do lack the same level of literacy or understanding of the particular work?

[dxxtruction]

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[dingodad]

Do you think it's an issue with hussies writing that so many people misinterpreted classpects this way or do you thinks it is just a lack of media literacy?

i wouldn't say classpect theory as we know it is the result of media illiteracy necessarily... being able to recognise that fantasy concepts like breath magic and light magic can have more than just literal meanings is a pretty important step along the path to deepening your understanding of literature. so it's easy to see why analyses along the lines of "john and tavros are both associated with the same motif and share some key character quirks, so this motif must be in some way symbolically linked with those character quirks" come across as really profound when you're young and/or just starting to get into seriously engaging with literature as a hobby.

this interpretation of homestuck isn't WRONG by any stretch, it's just kind of very juvenile, surface-level stuff. "everyone in the world is associated with one of 12 symbols that determine not only what magical powers they'll have but also the role they play in society" isn't really a thematic statement, is it? it's worldbuilding, which is not a thematic end in and of itself. classpect theory, at least to my eye, seems to want to dwell eternally on the "what" without ever taking the scary step into "why" territory. so it's really really good for writing fanfiction but not very useful at all as a lens for figuring out what homestuck is actually about.

and again, that's fine, your engagement with homestuck can be formulating the best ways to write fanfiction if you want it to be. it's just that homestuck is also really fucking long and at the end of the day it is easier for 99% of people 99% of the time to just read Posts instead of actually rereading homestuck; so if you spend 10 years not reading the comic and instead formulating your understanding of it based on Posts you're obviously going to come out with a skewed understanding of what it was trying to say. i think hussie communicated everything they wanted to communicate about classpects and that was enough to effectively communicate the vision; it's just such a huge decade-spanning vision that it's simply not realistic to expect everyone to give a shit about it. they're going to focus on the parts they like, just like i focus on the parts that i like and which generally tend not to include classpect stuff.

i just hope that maybe one day, if i make enough Posts, i can make everyone's favourite homestuck thing the same as my favourite homestuck thing, as opposed to the other favourite homestuck thing, which is wrong

[the5thcellar]

The crossing boundary performative stuff is what makes the PR over the top and what turns people off. THAT is the stuff that isn’t needed or required of them. It makes everything about their supposed closeness questionable now. Professional PR industry folk were even on Twitter questioning certain behavior and said it went beyond normal and could potentially cause blowback.

this is a prime example of how the "it's all PR folks" are completely contradictory. it's not required of them to act that way.... so instead of accepting that they're genuine friends who share a level of intimacy and trust borne of their unique experiences ... people assume it's all fake ???

ok cool cool cool cool cool.

I mean. if that one photo of Antonia has y'all so fucking worked up I can't imagine how y'all are gonna react when more photos of them together start popping up. next thing I know y'all will start questioning if Nic and Luke even talk outside of doing their scenes together.

the lack of ability to deal with complexity and nuance is painful to watch.

different things can be true all at once. Luke and Nic can ham it up in interviews for the PR to tease fans. at the same time they can ALSO be really fucking great friends trying to navigate the fine line between friends and ... something else.

they can both see other people romantically ... and also be really fucking great friends who feel some type of way for each other.

they can get MARRIED TO OTHER PEOPLE and have kids and live whole other lives ... and also one day find their way back to each other.

this isn't even an uncommon path. it happens in real life and it happens in the celeb world.

I can't believe y'all think that just because they played some parts of their relationship up for PR ... that everything is suddenly fake and that they were outright lying to fans and trying to deceive them ...

and please miss me with the professional PR industry folk bs. I saw those tweets and rolled my eyes. I work in PR myself. those people were feeding into the frenzy and saying whatever would get them the most likes. it's obvious that it's hyperbole done for clicks. it's like doctors saying "I'm a medical professional and even I'm stumped by this case." they say it as a bit. if you actually asked them for their thoughts they WILL all have long drawn out explanations on the PR strategy the show is taking.

that's why media literacy and the humanities are so important. if people feel lied to regarding the PR, it's because they can't differentiate between when moments are exaggerated and when things are real. it's because they're too used to straightforward narratives à la Marvel movies and think what they see is literally what they get, instead of recognising that these are REAL PEOPLE with real lives and REAL relationships that are complicated. it's because they're watching too many tiktoks instead of reading novels and therefore not knowing how to read between the lines.

one rotten apple doesn't make the whole tree bad. if you feel you're being lied to and that the PR they did was all fake... that's mostly on you. find others who agree with you and can offer you the validation you clearly seek.

because i definitely don't feel the same.

[hislittleraincloud]

I can’t STAND when people try to police a fandom. And I also can’t stand when people try to speak for their fave and act like they know what they’re talking about. 🤦🏼‍♀️🤦🏼‍♀️

*re: certain Jenna fans and WSSF and being so pressed about it

What I can't stand is that criticism is frowned upon because celebrity worship is too strong a compulsion for humans even in the year 2024. It's what ruined our damn country and made everyone dumber, and I hate that Imma die in a world where a fucking brainless imbecile's "been elected" to lead us into the ground again, despite us knowing how bad it was before. But as usual I digress.

WSSF will come out eventually, it'll be Ortega's 3rd bomb of 2024, and life will roll on, just as life's rolled on with Wednesday 2. Things will suck in terms of continuity (and those wigs, have they fucking learned nothing) and chances are — since there also seems to be a media literacy crisis as well as a general literacy crisis in this country — people will seagull around it like it's sliced bread until the next shiny, distracting thing comes along.

Fandom is as fandom does and there will always be weird strife, even in the most benign of fandoms (though I think the one that was most lacking in that kind of drama was Downton Abbey...I smelt no whiff of dissatisfaction with each other over there, it was nice). But I do gotta say that once I was given a glimpse of the Ortega fandom, I was ...impressed... by the levels of parasocial psychosis/protectionism regarding policing who she was hanging out with IRL. Y'all kids are on one hand yammering about protecting her privacy and boundaries and ya dee da but then go on and post the invasive pap shit everywhere, and/or continue to insist on shipping Jemma when one half of that ship has told y'all explicitly not to ship real people together.

And as evidenced lately, I say one thing about her nose — as if thousands upon thousands of people don't sit and yammer about other celebrities the same way — and suddenly I'm the weirdo again.

Okay, fine, I'm the first weirdo to fixate on the nose thing. I'm an artist (hyperrealistic at times) and a writer. Of course I fixate on details like that. My brain needs to know where things are in order to convey an accurate description, and when they change, I need to then adjust to the changes — which means actually acknowledging changes, which this fandom doesn't seem to care to do because it's cultish and no one should dare say anything "against" the pedestal princess, even if it's merely acknowledging her changes [to the very thing that is her moneymaker].

Anyhoo. I just realized that I have a lot of shit in drafts. Some of you anons that I thought I posted but didn't. LOL

[b00ket]

Hi World building time ❤️

Theres no fucking way after 20 years of lackluster rule and poor handling of a deadly disease would there NOT be a revolution. I’ll assess each section of Vesuvia individually to say how each handled Lucio’s rule and some better explanations to each. Along with some head canons. (Ngl some head canons deserve their own post to get people’s opinion ill make those later)

Heart District:

So this district holds the wealthy influencial people. Not much to say on protests or intentional corruption— in fact this place was most likely the source of corruption. Nobles are just as influential in shifting Lucio’s interests in Vesuvia as his consul.

Any funds or upkeep dedicated to places like the Flooded District were instead funneled into the Heart District. This place is leech for funding.

Heart District is the least diverse out of all parts of the city, with the usual monolith of the rich it is no doubt the rich intentionally widened the gap between other parts of the city and them, using Gold Grave to intentionally separate the poorer South End.

Visually a magical place. Very clean and red has since been a color of bad luck since the plague as discovery of what gave the red dye its vibrancy.

Education and Literacy are in the highest percentage here. (90% literacy) private teachers are a standard here. Along with plenty of public libraries.

The leech problem of the canals may be a myth if you live here. The eels show more of a threat (don’t worry they’ve hired people to handle those)

Center City:

The middle class and poor are in a mix here. The middle class being closer to the Heart District.

Lucio’s spies he most likely employed to learn about thoughts of descent and punish accordingly no doubt taught the people living there to stay quiet. Protests and gripes of the Count were shifted from verbal to books, art, music, and slang to refer to certain things. (Ex. The Parrot -> Count, Hounds -> Spies)

However the thoughts of unhappiness have only grown and become more concentrated as funds were even being shifted from them to the Heart District.

Education and Literacy are in a lower percentage here but still rather high. (40% literacy) The occasional private teacher was nothing unusual in the richer families, but most knowledge of reading and writing is now based from person to person.

Goldgrave:

Don’t have many thoughts on this one.

The creativity of this section of the city made spies ineffective.

Any pulled funding only made their creative ways to lampoon the Count stronger. Most books and music expressing anti government sentiment most likely came from here and spread. Literacy is higher here as well. (50% literacy) but these people are usually older and don’t have the patience to teach young thespians how to read a script

A sizable portion actually enjoys the lack luster rule (these are typically people who were deeply entrenched in the underground Red Market)

These people actually enjoyed the public executions. They were dramatic! And who doesn’t love drama.

South End

As shown in the game, sneaky and heavily dislike the government.

Similiar to Goldgrave, spies didn’t work.

Lack of funding only strengthened the illegal trade of goods that brought their own funding to this part of the city. (One reason they didn’t reach the same fate as the Flooded District)

The sense of loyalty and interconnectedness is strong here. Everyone knows the other.

Symbols are everywhere on the walls. While these could be mistaken for the graffiti of the Flooded District, these mean something to those involved in the Red Market. Signs for shop owners who are involved, places to leave deliveries etc. litter the walls.

Canals are often covered in boards for walking but guards remove these (just to fuck with people or to maintain law? Who knows)

Most new immigrants find a place here before moving to other parts of the city, though some do stay.

Temple District

The giving of money offerings and reliance on the rich religious Heart District citizens have left this part of the city well off despite being surrounded by the Flooded District and ash beach.

Religious leaders were Vesuvian red, showing the gods are on their side for them to avoid death. Many hold a negative opinion of Lucio, his disrespect of the dead being the core reason (he let Valdemar go ham with corpses and fed them to the plague beetles)

The poor are ignored. Though certain buildings host food banks and homes for the poor, they are growing more rare as Heart District regulars are pressuring for the removal of the homeless from the streets.

Flooded District

These people are bitter. They used to be the Shopping District, funding flowed through freely and they were well taken care of. The people here have a concentrated hatred for the Count.

Portions of the District are flooded, builders deciding to go up to avoid the sea floor. The constant erosion from waves threatens the stability of many of these buildings.

Makeshift bridges line the streets and some have been made to walk across buildings whose floor is below sea level. The water is teeming with leeches and eels (a blood drained rotting corpse or two is not uncommon.) and is generally dirty.

Funding is non existent here. And with the new areas of natural economy and trading being shifted away from them, its starting to resemble Ash Beach more by the day as more people abandon it. (To move to places of the city with more opportunity)

The plague wiping out large portions of the population. Increased moisture from flooded waters made the infection worse. Rodents and roaches quickly becoming a common sight. Parts of the district are said to be haunted, people with too much time on their hands go to investigate.

Graffiti is everywhere here. Abandoned houses lined with the vandalism of young people. Symbols are here as well, mostly obsolete as they were to mark off which places had infected/dead people (head-canon: not everyone wanted to be shipped to death island). Newer ones mark which buildings are too unstable to build or take refuge in.

Ash Beach

The smallest of all sections. Only a little larger than the lazaret.

The wiki does a great job of describing this place actually.

Also covered in graffiti with a distinctly younger style. There’s no meaning to them so they are more wild and colorful. Some magic circles have been made in the walls and floor. Most of them used to exude heat to keep warm.

Gangs made of children are common here. Has a Peter Pan vibe.

Less friendly gangs of sailors and washed up people also are here.

A bit more a communal energy to how people live.

[gwydionmisha]

On Subtitles and Dubbing

I watch a lot of shows and movies not originally in English.  I am one of those people who really likes subtitles.  I use them with English language stuff anyway, because it helps cover if I have sensory processing issues with the dialog, so watching subtitled foreign language stuff isn't that different for me.  Subtitles mean you keep the original vocal performance that can really matter.  

At the same time there are problems.  They with use white subtitles on white backgrounds or black subtitles on dark backgrounds, t which point, why subtitle at all?  They will sometimes make them too small, as if everyone is watching on a massive screen.  They will sometimes cover something essential with words that I kind of need to see.  (some productions will move the subtitles around so they stay in negative space.  Some subtitles with be white in a black band to cut down on the lack of contrast issue).

Then there are all the people subtitles don't work for.  My Mother's eyes weren't good enough the last several decades of her life, which was unfortunate as she was also HoH for about that long.  It sucked a lot of fun out of her life to have to give up anything with subtitles or accented English or muddy sound design.  There are people who don't have the vision or literacy level.  There are people with dyslexia and the like.

Yes, dubbing exists, but it's often, frankly a mess.  No translation is ever going to be perfect.  it's a fundamental problem with subtitles too.  No language maps one to one on another.  Information is lost and/or added inevitable.  Ambiguity is created or lost.  Often the dubbed performance is frankly bad voice acting.  

Sometimes it is an adequate performance, but doesn't remotely match the tone of the original performance.  I notice this a lot with things dubbed out of French.  I'm no longer fluent and mostly only speak it to cats, but I was fluent once and as long as there isn't a thick regional accent or too much technical vocabulary or unfamiliar slang or they aren't going extremely fast, I can usually still follow.  

There is a tendency to hire people with English received pronunciation type accents to do the voices for french costume dramas and the results are terrible.  You have all these restrained upper class English performances that not only lose the class and regional nuances, but they are sort of flat and restrained vocals over often intense physical performances.  It is so dissonant it hurts my head.  They lose the tone siblings use to tease and bicker; they lose the angry arguments between heroine and villain; they lose the passion and warmth between friends or lovers.  

A lot of the 19th century french literature I read back in the day would do these clever and often playful things with formal and informal language: describe something intimate in formal language, do something formal with bits of intimate language tucked here and there, that sort of thing.  There is a flavour to it that I often find in the french dialog and performances, that gets utterly lost in translation.  18th and 19th century English language dramas tend to go either formal or informal.  They don't play back and forth much.  Inevitably I switch it back to french.

I don't know if it's this bad for other languages, but it wouldn't surprise me.  But what if they decided to do better?  The foreign language things I watch most often are either Korean or French.  I frequently see people in major roles who I know also speak English well enough to act beautifully in English language productions.  Why the fuck don't they spend the money to hire them to do the dubbing for their own characters?  I know there are plenty of people who act in more than one language.  Speak German and french?  Why not dub the other language too?  I bet the original actor would be better at preserving the tone of the performance than a stranger.

For monolingual actors, you could hire someone with a similar class and regional accent who comes from the original language group but also speaks the target language, so there'd be a better chance of carrying original emotional tone and meaning across even where the words can't quite convey by themselves.

And hire people who are good voice actors instead of doing it the cheap.  Would it be perfect, no, but it would be better than some goofy sounding bad actor or a performance so off tone as to make it hard to watch.  It would be something at least.

[incorrect-ikevamp-quotes]

Do you think they would actually enjoy the modern world? Or would they want to stay in their current time period?

Hm, well, I think that may vary depending on each suitor if I’m honest! (I’ll be excluding Sebastian from this one, only because he is a modern man and I wager he would want to stay in the mansion in order to finish his thesis) 

Under a cut bc it’s a long boi:

I think for people like Arthur and Theo, for instance--who always seem to live in the fast lane--it might not really prove much of a problem. They would continue enjoying the night life and move with their busy schedules. Tl;dr: (For them? Same shit, different day)

Vincent would likely be doing just fine given how Theo often provides assistance in places where he struggles; to promote his art, to spark intrigue in the general public and benefactors. He might be a little overwhelmed by the influx of stimuli that comes with the modern era, constant noise and interaction and movement--perhaps worry that people are losing their ability to live in the moment. (Not to mention what’s being done to the environment...) There might be a learning curve/adjustment, but I think Theo would help him ease in. Plus, it would be a little easier to promote his art given the less stringent restrictions on public exhibitions. He’d still have to work for his fame, but at least the van Goghs wouldn’t have to live in constant unease in the proximity of the cutthroat academy.  Tl;dr: (Mixed feelings, but tries to stay positive about modern times)

Dazai is more familiar with this kind of life of quick turmoil and breakneck speed, if anything he falls back into his old coping mechanisms--hello writing, drinking, and smoking. An overwhelming influx of information and suffering would probably be hard for him to manage, despite how expertly he hides it. I think I would be worried he would lose himself in the dismal reality of diminished connection with other people. Yes I’m shoving him into therapy, I want him to start living for himself and taking care of himself ffs

That isn’t to say there aren’t happy possibilities for him, just that I think he really needs to heal first. I could see him very happy in a kind of writer’s circle with people he loves and trusts; less expending his energy in a desperate attempt to fill the void and please others, more cultivating his own happiness... Tl;dr: (Positive potential, but honestly part of me thinks the past quieter/simple/rural life suits him better...he still loves meme culture tho, he finds it so expansive and creative)

Isaac is in a similar boat as Dazai, I think! He has wonderful potential as a mentor and professor, and living in a world that has a little more patience and respect for genius might help encourage him to put himself out there. That being said, I think the pace of life would exhaust him though--he is very much the kind of person that prefers to keep to himself and just puzzle and tinker. Baby boy just wants to do equations, build little inventions, and read up on the recent discoveries in astrophysics (BRUH WHEN THE IMAGE OF THE BLACK HOLE CAME OUT HE FORGOT HOW TO B R E A T H E) Napoleon is the only reason he eats anything healthy or on any kind of regular schedule s m h. Tl;dr: (Not a lot changes, honestly? He was reclusive then, he still is now--he just has more toys/academic resources. If anything he might get a little too lost in his work because of it, somebody please make sure he’s eating/sleeping/socializing;;;)

Poor Jeanne is SUFFERING. Please release him from this nightmare he is begging. Jk jk, I don’t think it would be too bad for him--but I do think that he would have the aforementioned problem of too many stimuli and too much interaction. I think he would ease into it a little with Mozart’s help; he would just be awkward and wooden until he got the hang of it. Most people just find him quirky in an amusing way, and don’t think too hard about it. I’d wager he’d probably become literate at this point because of the abundance of resources and necessity to read/write (okay but imagine this baby with a little kid workbook iM GONNA CRY!!! TAKE ALL MY CRAYONS JEANNE). 

Can you imagine this mofo at a Starbucks??? Tall and stoic, dark and debonair (EVERYONE IS S W O O N I N G), and he just asks in a light tenor “can I have a mocha with eight shots of expresso” with a completely straight face. “Sir, that could kill you” “Don’t worry, I’ve been dead a long time” And he just moves to wait for his order. 11/10 cryptid I could watch an entire show just about his daily adventures

He works with Napoleon a lot given their similar skillsets. They coach kids at high schools that have fencing teams (it’s really REALLY cute bc if they’re on the younger side, Jeanne will very dramatically lose bc he wants to encourage them and the kids are delighted--but the parents are INCHES from laughing so hard they’re in tears). Otherwise, he mostly takes up gigs as a security worker/bodyguard, only really works for the money. He prefers to spend his time in ways that feel meaningful if he can, so don’t be surprised if you see him in foster homes and in social working spaces. He has an uncanny understanding about him, a kind of silence/patience that doesn’t stifle; it makes the kids/teens calm down in milliseconds. They really listen when he does talk, and he sets good and clear boundaries--he knows how to be firm when it’s required. He gives them the structure and placid grounding they’ve never had, and really pays attention to what’s important to them. Brings them little things he notices; brings flowers to the one that likes to draw, brings CDs (he is bad with technology, but they usually only have access to older/outdated stuff anyway) to the one the one that struggles to write with white noise in the house, brings little plushies to the ones that lose theirs. He’s simple but solid, and he finds a lot of meaning in helping kids overcome the similar kind of struggles he faced.  Tl;dr: (Steep learning curve, but he just sees it as all the same really--just more work to be done with the literacy requirement and adjustment to technology. Will be resistant at first, but when he gets accustomed and starts finding people who are important to him, he wouldn’t want to change anything/go back. But will admit there are some days he just wants to go to the most remote place he can access and just live there for a month with no human interaction whatsoever; people are inefficient and insufferable sometimes)

Mozart’s life honestly doesn’t change much? I feel like he would easily be able to keep composing and continue releasing his work as per usual. Given his quick capacity to schmooze and say what people want to hear when he must, he’d be more than able to network his way into success. I think the only thing he might struggle with now and again is inspiration, given the world operates on a very surface level in the modern era sometimes. Profound insight and depth are not quite as cultivated in many ways, and he can struggle to find something that just sparks motivation/novelty in his mind, makes him start composing at breakneck speed. He reads a lot and watches some TV shows/movies when he’s at really low inspiration levels, the kind of guy that sneers at Game of Thrones--but finds things like BBC’s Sherlock more passable (wants intrigue and complexity, doesn’t much enjoy the sensationalized drivel). When Arthur finds out he loves ATLA he about falls off his seat. “It’s a children’s show.” “Yes it is, with a remarkable level of depth and craftsmanship, what are you trying to say?” He begins to find a kind of rhythm in his composing, and Jeanne and Dazai often drop by with so many crazy stories he finds himself filled with music anyway LMAO Tl;dr: (Same as Isaac, really just keeps doing his thing without being impeded, and he enjoys the luxuries/conveniences of the modern era. Will be slightly resistant at first because of how alien some of the changes are, but will fall into the habits/customs slowly and surely. Fine with it, will whine a bit at the growing pains tho)

Leonardo actually canonically owns a bar, and does that really surprise anyone? He really enjoys the excitement of meeting new people and hearing about their myriad histories, the influx of cultures/languages/experiences. It’s a nice but lowkey place, people stop for a drink, listen to some good music--chat amiably and relax after a long day’s work--before heading out. There are regulars and people that just stop for that single day; tourists, vacationers, so on and so forth.

When asked, many people note a sleek black cat with sharp eyes that led them to the bar... Tl;dr: (Don’t Let the Existential Dread Set-in: The Prequel, adapts well to the modern era because of centuries of experience but also...he’s so tired...somebody please hold him I can’t watch him live like this, lord jesus)

Optimally, I see Comte filling his time with myriad pursuits; ranging from philanthropy, indulging in art/music/theatre (often a benefactor as well), and keeping track of his chirren (they may exist more independently now, but he still worries about them ;-;). Otherwise nothing much changes for him, still goes to galas and fancy gatherings, still enjoys fashion and spoiling people, still seeks to occupy himself with social interaction and care-taking--if he doesn’t have a family of his own. He’s basically just that meme that’s like DON’T LET THE EXISTENTIAL DREAD SET-IN. DON’T LET IT SET-IN!!!!!!!!! Tl;dr: (Not to repeat myself but also Don’t Let the Existential Dread Set-in: The Sequel, literally just desperately trying to fill the void please somebody help him he also just needs to be held fuck’s sake, I’m going to drag him kicking and screaming into happiness--but otherwise has no great trouble adjusting to the modern era. I feel like he would have a more minor form of what Dazai struggles with, maybe a lack of personable connection that he once had; fewer chances to be himself and relax. Also probably worried about the increasing unhappiness and turmoil building in the world in general...)

Napoleon is similar to Comte in that he often checks up on Isaac and Jeanne from time to time, and does the aforementioned fencing lessons with kids. He also takes a lot of basic security positions--for venues, concerts, museums--you name it. He dislikes the idea of sitting behind a desk a lot, so he prefers to do a lot of different things; he even cooks from time to time at the restaurants  that know him very well. One gig he particularly enjoys is battle choreography for movies/theatre! He tends to stay away from anything too historically close to his era of origin, but he has fun coming up with realistic (smaller scale) hand-to-hand combat scenarios and duels. Tl;dr: (This era doesn’t feel like too much of a change. It’s a little more intensive in terms of pace, but he manages to keep up pretty well, it just exhausts him from time to time--and he usually goes on trips or hikes to unwind when he needs to like Jeanne LOL they do not go to their happy place, they go to their high lonesome place).

Shakespeare also continues to do his drama thing, organizes troupes on tons of different levels--from community level to more intense, skilled groups that re-enact his own work. His life doesn’t change all that much beyond a new form of theatre logistics, and he adjusts to the technology fairly easily out of necessity. He’ll stop by Vincent’s place from time to time to show him recordings of his latest shows, but otherwise is almost always on the move. Tl;dr: (So long as he can keep following his greatest passion, he doesn’t really mind the changes in how theatre happens--he doesn’t have any sizable issues with the modern era.)

Ability with technology (phones mostly):

Arthur: more than capable, well-versed, loves to do everything on his phone no prob--maybe lives a little too much on his phone (Vine/TikTok/Youtube can kill his productivity RIP) also yes he has a fidget spinner on his desk, no I will not be taking any constructive criticism at this time

Theo: yes but with a lot of cursing at first, had to do it for work and now looks down on anyone that can’t keep up with him (except for Vincent)

Vincent: knows the basics, taking and sending pictures, writing things in notes for later, texting (tho sending emails is a little harder for him); he does his best but he can be slow. Really really enjoys the paint programs on his iPad for when he’s on public transit, but he starts setting alarms after he gets the hang of it (he’s missed his stops before because of it LMAO)

Leonardo: what kind of stupid question? Man knows how to pick them apart and put ‘em back together for crying out loud, uses it like a pro--comes to him naturally, and he’s the guy that keeps coming up with ways to jailbreak Apple products and thwart their money-grubbing tactics. Catch him playing Minish Cap on his emulator on the way to work, brah

Comte: just vibing, keeps up with the times easily since he’s been doing it for so long, much like Theo uses it to keep in touch with the people around him--he’s the “prefers to call instead of text” sorta guy though, he worries about losing emotional subtleties and he likes to hear people’s voices. Doesn’t do anything special on phones, more just a tool; will read/listen to podcasts/does have emulators (courtesy of Leo) and enjoys playing Pokemon when he’s bored

Jeanne: types one finger at a time, it will take a while--but he’ll get there (deleted all his contacts by accident once and Mozart was just. HOW.) He barely knows how to use a phone, and it’s a steep learning curve for him

Mozart: purely functional when it comes to his phone, refuses to rely on it beyond the necessities that only tech can do (for instance, sending emails or reading articles or uploading compositions) he still writes his music before making more polished digital copies. He will sometimes listen to pieces digitally, but prefers to play them in-person; he feels that a lot of the soul in a piece is lost despite the convenience

Dazai: you absolute fools. you baboons. why would you ever give him this kind of power. it is 3AM and he has been on a wikipedia trail spanning hours, started with Cleopatra being the seventh in her line with that name all the way to cotton candy being called “daddy’s beard” in French. please help him he hasn’t slept in years. Also probably binges anime and manga lbr. He’s the one making vine references every other second, always up to date on the memes^TM

Isaac: also mostly uses it as a tool for research and calculations; it’s a way to keep track of information. He also likes to play background music while he’s working, so he finds the device nice and convenient--plus less having to go around pestering people in-person. he does start to get interested in coding and tinkering with apps/programs eventually, too

Shakespeare: finds it a delightful little contraption, so useful because it lets him jot down ideas as they come to him quickly, and he can edit his texts much more easily with digital interfaces. also likes that performances can be recorded, because now he can analyze his staging more efficiently--it gives him a good sense of what needs to be adjusted, and encourages him to keep streamlining/try new concepts

Napoleon: likes it because he can keep in touch with people more easily, the kind of guy to drop a line before checking on a friend. he really likes to look up recipes and find out more about cooking techniques he’s never encountered before. Isaac starts making an Instagram account just to show Napoleon’s impeccable plating, and Napo gets quite the following without knowing for a while

[staticespace]

[Image Description:

Tags by painty-throws-a-fit

[hashtag] In my experience (in an american public school) i feel like the only english class that actually taught good media literacy was AP Lang

[hashtag] And comparing my skills to my non AP peers I can tell they're not getting the same quality of education [hashtag] which is fucked up

[hashtag] you shouldnt have to be an AP student to learn media literacy

[hashtag] my AP lang teacher actually made us come up with our own interpretations then discuss and write/defend them [hashtag] In a way that actually made us critically think about what we were reading and have to critically analyze characters and themes

[hashtag] But it was abundantly clear that the non AP students were not learning those skills [hashtag] hell even in HONORS English we didn't have as much of an emphasis on interpretation and critical thinking as AP (still some but not as much)

[hashtag] I cant even begin to imagine how bad the standard level english classes are [hashtag] Actually I can imagine cause i took one standard level english class freshman year

[hashtag] it SUCKED [hashtag] i didnt learn shit in that class! (also i was bored as hell and tried to get into honors that year but there was no openings) [hashtag] and dont get me started on the obvious wealth demographics in honors and AP courses causing lower income students to not gain such skills

[hashtag] I just got lucky to have a good early education that led me to being able to take honors and AP classes thus getting these skills [hashtag] more like i was lucky to live in the right area (ish)

[hashtag] This is a much bigger problem than just "you guys didnt pay attention" [hashtag] there's gatekeeping of knowledge for the "more intelligent" and obvious wealth divides [hashtag] And so many other issues that honestly I could (and kinda have) write an essay on it

End ID.]

As a note, I saw a post a few days ago about how both adult and child media literacy is decreasing in the U.S., and I can't help but wonder if it's because it's easier to control people who don't know how to read between the lines or interpret things on their own.

And I think to how I grew up in a church and got kicked out of children's church because my dad had already taught me how to interpret the Bible and I apparently asked too many questions.

So, yeah, I think it's purposeful to some extent. The consequences heavily outweigh any control benefits, I think, because reading comprehension is so much more than just looking at the words and context and coming up with defensible meanings to it.

It's learning how to take any new information and interpret it based on other available details. It's science in linguistics — coming up with a hypothesis, testing it, and checking the conclusion. With literature, the conclusion can be more vague (hence interpretations of varying quality), but we also use it for, of course, science, history, and even math. And if we don't continually teach people to not just look at information but to also look beyond the letters and numbers and prescribe defensible meaning to it, we get people who know how to do a job, but don't know how to correct an issue on their own based on the information in front of them.

For example, I was an English major in a Biology class full of nurses in training.

I heard their commentary throughout the class, from their lack of understanding of certain words to the inability to understand statistical variation and what informs those statistics. And no, I don't blame them.

I blame an education system that didn't prepare them to think thoroughly. To think beyond what they're told or what they're familiar with. To think beyond what someone puts in front of them.

Sure makes it easy to succumb to propaganda (everyone can, but lacking media literacy makes it easier), but also makes it more difficult if you want a quality medical professional, since they can't understand the pain you're expressing because it's not something they've personally experienced or something they've seen in the books, for example.

"we teach media literacy in schools yall just dont pay attention" did yall forget that the american school system sucks. yeah they sure TRY. they do it badly though

[imagesofthegreatgull]

Hybrid Rainbow

Joy has always been a rare and precious commodity. I would argue, though, that in the developed world (Wherever, exactly, that is), it has become somewhat less rare in recent times, as standards of living and education continue to go up. That’s an absurdly privileged thing to say, I realize, but I’m trying to start this thing as evenhandedly as I can. I understand about suffering and poverty; I’m reading A Tree Grows In Brooklyn right now, even! Okay, saying we’re closer now than ever to utopia is going to smack of ignorance no matter how you phrase it, but it also strikes me as undeniably true, in the grand scheme of things. I think most people--aside from the fascists--would refuse a one-way trip in a time machine to any previous era, or at the very least, would recognize that it wouldn’t improve much of anything for them. As unruly as our age is, it’s still probably the best one we’ve gotten thus far, and as the boot-heel of oppression starts to ever so slowly ease up its pressure on the necks of the long-suffering masses, the question has begun to enter into the collective consciousness: what is to be done with joy when it begins to fall, unbidden, into your life with something like abundance? What is to be done if moments of joy no longer must be pried with great effort and sacrifice from the rockface of life, but lie strewn liberally throughout our days, needing only the will and lack of embarrassment to seize them?

Thus far, the latter-day generations have faced up to this problem with decidedly mixed success. The idea that expecting anything other than the very worst leaves one vulnerable to the universe’s cruel whims has been stamped upon the human brain for centuries, and has left many sadly unable to recognize their own privilege (Which, by the way, is a big part of why a whole lotta white folks refuse to admit they have it better than anyone else and continue to dig their heels in against progress because to them it looks like cutting in line). It is still widely accepted that constantly finding joy and peace and purpose in one’s own life is the purview of children and children alone, that it is a naivete to be grown out of. We have the impulse always within us to be hard, to be warlike, to show the world that we’re not weak and frivolous but monsters to be feared, without emotions to be appealed to or ideals to be fallen short of.

Remedying this problem has turned out to be one of the primary functions of counterculture. If it is often unhelpful to simply look at the entire value system of one’s parents and say “Fuck that”, as it tends to foster a rather negative self-definition, still, if part of that value system is a deeply entrenched distrust of happiness, “Fuck that” may be exactly the response called for. The beauty of “Fuck that” is that it leaps past the slow loss of faith in something and arrives immediately at a flat rejection of it, and since much of the history of civilization has been bound up with blind faith in arbitrary and harmful things, the ability and the courage to flatly reject something, to give it no credit for however widely accepted it is but to dismiss it as bullshit from the ground up, is a step forward in human consciousness tantamount to the reinvention of the wheel.

The great irony of the end of the sixties is that all the hippies were miserable for no reason: they won. Rock n’ roll did change the world, it just didn’t immediately transform it on every level into an unrecognizable nirvana. For all the apparent emptiness of its utopian dreams, the basic thrust of the thing worked out just fine: that particular cat will never be put back into its bag, and those ideas are now out in the ether forever, always waiting for someone to find them and be inspired to change their own life and the lives of those around them for the better. The same goes for the punk rock revolution a few years later: they may not have brought the bastards down, but they did successfully bring personal liberation to a lot of people, and poured exactly as much gas on the fires of populism as they intended to. Culture, and in particular art and in particular music, cannot, unassisted, change the world, but it can change your world, and has been changing small worlds all over the frigging place at least since those mop-topped Brits set foot on American shores and probably since Johnny B. Goode learned to play guitar just like a-ringin’ a bell. 

The thread can get lost, however. Culture is always a reflection of the people, and the people still spend a lot of their time bored, frustrated, and terrified of letting on that they have feelings about stuff. Young people especially, formerly the eternal pirate crew waving high the flags of “Liberty” and “Up Yours”, in recent times have often capitulated and resigned themselves to no more than a few stray moments of fun pilfered from the fortresses of the almighty Money Man-Kings, usually in the form of drugs, sex, and reckless self-endangerment. The cost of the hippies and the punks giving up their battles is that the counterculture lost its intellectual leadership, at least until the resurgence in political literacy in the 2010s. In the wasteland following the 70s, there were no John Lennons or Joe Strummers to look to for guidance; even the people who were elected to speak for their generation seemed adamant that there was fuck-all they could really say. Yeah, it’s nice to know that someone else feels stupid and contagious, but that’s not really a direction, is it? The generation-defining message Kurt Cobain and his peers sent out was “We’re all way too fucked up to do anything about anything”, and that introspective moodiness pervaded American underground rock music from the invention of hardcore at least all the way up to the moment Craig Finn watched The Last Waltz with Tad Kubler and said “Why aren’t there bands like this anymore?” and set out with rest of the Steadies in tow to remind everyone that music can save your immortal soul and that hey, that Springsteen guy was really onto something, headband and all, and together they all successfully ushered in the New Uncool and now we’ve got Patrick Stickles wailing that “If the weather’s as bad as the weatherman says, we’re in for a real mean storm!” and Brian Fallon admitting “I always kinda sorta wished I looked like Elvis” and everything’s great, except it’s not, everything’s fucked, but rock n’ roll is here to stay, come inside now it’s okay, and I’ll shake you, ooo-ooo-ooo.

The point of all this is my belief that even with the responsibility rock music has to provide cathartic outlets for dissatisfaction, is has an equal or greater responsibility to provide heroes. I think it’s time we all got over pretending that we’re better than the need for heroes, because we all insist on having them anyway, imperfect roses by any other name, and we’d do a hell of a lot better selecting them if we just admitted what we were after. We don’t just want particularly talented comrades, we want King Arthur, Robin Hood, Superman, Malcolm Reynolds. Damn it all, they don’t need to be perfect, they don’t even need to be all that great really, and yeah, Arthur dies, and Robin never gets Prince John, and Superman can’t save everyone, and the war’s over, we’re all just folk now, and John Lennon beat women and Van Morrison is a grumpy old fart and John Lydon’s a disgrace, but it’s the faith that counts. The faith that there’s something greater than ourselves that some people are more keyed into than others, and that whatever they can relay from that other side is what’ll see us through. All the best prophets are madmen, and madmen aren’t always romantic fools; sometimes they hurt people, or fail at crucial moments due to a compulsion they can’t control. Let he who is without sin etcetera, right? Why not cast aside realism and sincerely believe in something or someone, huh? 

I believe in the Pillows. I don’t know hardly anything about them; my expertise of Japanese culture and history extends to the anime I’ve seen and that “History of Japan” YouTube video that made the rounds a while back. I can’t locate them within the Japanese music scene; all their western influences seem obvious to me, and the rest I know nothing about. They’re the only rock band from their country I’ve listened to any great amount of, I don’t speak the language they mostly sing in, I don’t even know their career very well. The particulars of any experiences they might have had that motivated them to make the art they make are not ones I could possibly share in, so, saying that I “Relate” to their work sounds a little preposterous. They ought to be a novelty to me, a band that clearly likes a lot of the same bands I do despite hailing from a foreign shore, marrying that shared music taste with a cultural identity I have nothing to do with, a small, nice upswing of globalism pleasing to my sense of universalism but not having any kind of quantifiable impact on me.

Yet I, like a good many other westerners, believe in the Pillows. I’m a little buster, and my eyes just watered as I wrote that. In fact, it’s likely because of the barriers of language and culture that exist between us that my belief in the Pillows is so strong. Pete Townshend, someone else I believe in, once opened a show by saying “You are very far away...but we will fucking reach you”, and though the Pillows are both geographically (At the moment) and culturally miles away from me, Lord strike me down if they don’t fucking reach me. They reach me in a way many of their American college rock peers, many of their biggest influences in fact, never have. Dinosaur Jr, Bob Mould, Sonic Youth, the Pixies, Nirvana--all these artists speak directly to the American adolescent experience, but though they have all moved me to one degree or another, none of them have produced a body of work I can so readily see myself in as that of the Pillows. Maybe it is the novelty of it, maybe I’m fooling myself and it is just my sense of universalism carrying me away, but there’s something I hear in the Pillows that I don’t hear in those bands, and though the obvious candidate for that thing would be the foreign tongue the majority of the lyrics are written in, when it comes down to it, I think that thing is joy.

Joy, to me, is the possibility glimpsed by rock n’ roll. Not hedonistic pleasure, not a sadistic glee over the outrage of authority figures, but real, true, open-hearted, “Freude, schöner Götterfunken/Tochter aus Elysium”--type joy. Buddy Holly had joy. The Beatles, The Who, the pre-fall Rod Stewart, they had joy. Springsteen’s got joy to spare. Those people have such profound love for their art and their audience that just the continual recognition of the fact that they have a guitar in their hands and they’re being allowed to play it is enough to make them ecstatic, and whenever they want to actually express something serious they have to get themselves under control to do it. Yet, whether it’s the unfashionability of those utopian dreams, or the simple fact that rock music has become accepted by mainstream culture and is now a commonplace, unremarkable thing, but half the people who have picked up an electric guitar for the past few decades don’t seem all that excited about it. From Kim Gordon snarling about how people go down to the store to buy some more and more and more and more, to Thom Yorke moaning about how he’s let down and hanging around, crushed like a bug in the ground, even up to Courtney Barnett asking how’s that for first impressions, this place seems depressing, it’s not really a given anymore, if it ever was, that people who make rock music are very joyful in what they do. 

Of course, I’m not demanding that our artists be empty-headed fluff-factories; far from it. The Pillows write sad songs and angry songs same as everybody else. But the important thing is this: every song the Pillows play is played with an exuberance and abandon that is immediately striking, regardless of the emotional content of each song. Channelling that kind of revelry into rock music is both to my mind the initial purpose of the genre in the first place and something which has become so rare as to be remarkable. A veneer of detached cool, a howling ferocity, a whimpering woundedness--these have become the hallmarks of American rock music, and they are nowhere to be found in the Pillows.

At the same time, the Pillows are the very antithesis of artlessness. Joy of the caliber they deal in is more commonly found in folky rave-ups, a lack of musicianship giving way to trancelike festivity. But the Pillows are skilled song craftsmen like few others; their sound has evolved throughout the years, but they tend to settle in the neighborhood of power-pop, abounding in glorious hooks and surprising structures. A hundred unnecessary, perfect touches seem to exist in every song; a pause, a solo, a bassline, all deftly elevating the song into a perfect expression of something sublime, something that always--always--takes ahold of the musicians themselves and imbues their performances with power and purpose the likes of which most little busters can only dream of feeling. It should be testament enough to their brilliance that upon first listen to a song I never know what most of the lyrics mean, but whenever I look up a translation, they always turn out to be exactly what I felt they must be; their songs are so musically communicative that they all but lack the need for lyrics. 

This dual nature is why I believe in the Pillows: by so utterly failing to neglect both the highest possibilities of musical composition as an unparalleled tool for capturing emotional nuance and the unrestrained id-like rush that is the province of rock n’ roll, they successfully attain the lofty realm that is--or ought to be--the goal of music in the first place. Never once is there a hint of straying into the realm of primitivism nor into overthought seriousness, and instead they locate themselves somehow exactly center on the scale between punk and prog, lacking the weaknesses and gaining the strengths of both. They make rock whole again by finally disproving the tenet initially laid out by their heroes, your heroes, and mine, The Beatles: the notion that growing up means having less fun. The viscerally exciting early work of The Beatles lacks any of the depth and vision displayed by their later records, but those records are so carefully and expertly crafted that they tend to lose spontaneity, and constantly second-guess themselves where the juvenilia they followed forged unselfconsciously ahead. That legendary career path has laid out a false dichotomy that every proceeding generation of kids with guitars has chosen between, save for the few who could see past it, the ones who heard the wildness in “Revolution” and the wisdom in “Twist and Shout” and realized that they were of a piece, were one and the same, not to be chosen between but embraced fully. Pete Townshend. Bruce Springsteen. Joe Strummer. David Byrne. Paul Westerberg. The Pillows. The real heroes are not those who champion one side or another but fight all their lives for peace between them, knowing that we have not yet begun to imagine what could be accomplished if that were made possible.

Just as they bypass the divide between what Patrick Stickles termed the Apollonian and Dionysian tendencies of rock (I prefer to think of the usual battle as being between the Dionysians and the Athenians, with the true devotees of Apollo being most of those heroes I keep referring to, except Dylan, who might be a Hermesian), so too do the Pillows bypass the Pacific frigging ocean. And the Atlantic, to boot. Their music quotes the Pixies and The Beatles directly, and obviously owes much to Nirvana and all their college rock predecessors who spent the entire 80s desperately stacking themselves until the doomed power trio could finally vault over the wall. Their first record is practically a tribute to XTC. They do speak a lot of English, too. I’m informed that much of western culture is seen as the epitome of coolness in Japan, which might explain their obsession with Baseball, and apparently sprinkling a bit of the Saxon tongue into the mix is far from uncommon in the music scene(s). Regardless, there is something ineffably touching to a distant fan in a foreign land about hearing Sawao Yamanaka spit “No surrender!” or exclaim “Just runner’s high!” It looks from here like a show of mutual effort to understand me as much as I’m trying to understand them. They’re generous enough to have already walked to the middle where they’re asking me to meet them, a middle where it doesn’t matter that I don’t have a suffix attached to my name or that they don’t wear shoes in houses. The invisible continent that all forward-thinking and sensitive people come to long for is where the Pillows are broadcasting from, because they’ve realized that its golden shores and spiraling cities are attainable. They’re attainable with joy, with the fundamentally rebellious act of refusing to let the fascists bring down even your globdamn day, because who the hell gave them that power other than us? I know enough about Japan and America to know that either one accusing the other of being imperialist and socially conservative to a fault is a fucking joke, and to know that we’ve done a lot more wrong to them than they’ll ever do to us and the presence of the Pillows amounts to a “We forgive you”, not an “I’m sorry”. Having watched a decent amount of anime, which is basically the result of Japan’s mind being blown by western media and then proceeding to show their love by often almost inadvertently surpassing their inspirations, I know that the only way to save our respective national souls and everybody else’s too is to put our knuckles down, have Jesus and Buddha shake hands like Kerouac tried to explain that they would anyway, and embrace each other’s dreams and passions and adopt them into our own. 

It takes better people to inhabit that better world, and in case that sounds like fascist talk, I mean we’ve got to do better, not be better. It’s no physical imperfection that holds us back, nor a mental imperfection exactly, as we all have our own neuroses and if we expunge those then we’ll be kissing art and lot of other vital stuff goodbye. No, it’s our discomfort with ourselves, our world, our neighbors, our aliens, that keep us from seeing that crazy sunshine. If we can’t even acknowledge the greatness around us, that surplus of joy I mentioned a while back that we just seem to have no idea what to do with, then we have no hope of ever achieving further greatness, of ever quelling man’s inhumanity to man down to an inevitable fringe rather than the basic order of the world. 

There was always more to do 

Than just eat and work and screw

But now that there’s time at last to do those things, we’re still afraid to, afraid that we’ll come up empty, that the search for fulfillment leads only to disappointment, better to hang back and play it safe, better not to risk becoming one of those people I shake my head at and pity and will secretly envy until I die. It’s a new world, and we must learn to be new people. I believe in the Pillows because I believe they make excellent models for that new kind of person. The way they behave in the studio and on the stage is the way people behave when they’re truly free, and we’ve all been set free already or will be soon, so if we’re going to try and learn what the fuck is next from anyone, I think we might as well learn from the Pillows. At least, that’s one of the places we could get that insight. There’s a lot of art and a lot of philosophy and political theory to sift through to in order to put together a workable 21st century identity, and the Pillows are hardly the only people to have begun making the leap. But because of a silly thing like the size of the earth, the infinitesimal size of the earth even compared to the distance between us and the next rock we’re gonna try and get to, not everybody is getting their particular brand of free thought and action, and I happen to think that’s regrettable, and it’s my will as a free individual to rectify it as much as I can.

Writing about music really is worthless, isn’t it? I haven’t said jackshit about what the Pillows actually do other than to vaguely qualify their genre and temperament, and the only more useless thing I could do than not describing their songs would be to describe their songs. If you don’t hear the bracing weightlessness in “Blues Drive Monster”, or the aching nostalgia in “Patricia”, or the soul-bearing cry in “Hybrid Rainbow” then nothing I could write about those would be more effective than “Little Busters is a really good album.” The better primer might be Happy Bivouac, from a few years later; it has the melancholic rush of “Last Dinosaur”, the ascended teenybopper “Whoa, whoa, yeah” chorus in “Backseat Dog”, and the intro that should make it obvious immediately that you’re listening to one of the best songs ever recorded which opens “Funny Bunny”. Those two, Runners High, and Please, Mr. Lostman are the classic era, selections from the former three immortalized in their biggest claim to western fame, the FLCL soundtrack, a brilliant use of their music that could warrant an equally long piece. Before and after those four are periods of experimentation and discovery equally worth your time, not all of which I’m familiar with yet. See, now I’m just an incomplete Wikipedia article; it’d be equally worthless to expound upon the individual bandmates, on the pure yawp of Yamanaka’s vocals, on the passionate drumming of Yoshiaki Manabe and the supernaturally faultless lead guitar of Shinichiro Sato, or the contribution of founding bassist Kenji Ueda, which was so valued by the others that when he left he was never officially replaced (They’re so sweet). I’m not here to write an advertisement or a press-release, I don’t really even know why I’m here writing this, but I know that I believe in the Pillows, that they’re important, and that people should write about them. I’m being the change I want to see in the world, get it? That’s all we can be asked to do.

It occurs to me that people believed in Harvey Dent too, and that didn’t turn out so well. Hell, let’s leave the comic book pages behind, people believe in Donald Trump, they think he’s a hero, and that’s all going down in flames as I write this. Having heroes can be dangerous, but I still believe it’s not as dangerous as not having heroes. “Lesser of two evils” sounds an awful lot like one of those false dichotomies between fun and intelligence or between misery and foolishness I mentioned earlier, so, let’s call it a qualified good. I’m not much of a responsible world-citizen if my only effort towards bringing the planet together is spinning some sweet Japanese alt-rock tunes and bragging about how open-minded I am, but if I do ever end up doing anyone any good, then I’d consider it paying forward the good done to me by the Pillows, among others. They helped me form my identity as an artist (Read: functional human being) and they made my adolescence a lot easier. Actually, that’s a lie: my adolescence was (And continues to be) pretty easy already, and the Pillows reassured me that I wasn’t avoiding reality by feeling that. While American bands sang about the downsides of being a mallrat or a non-mallrat, the Pillows offered a vision of teenagedome much like my own, one that was grandly romantic, in which suffering wasn’t a cosmic stupidity but a trial with pathos and merit, and joy was not an occasional indulgence but a constant presence, whether it was lived in or lost and needing recovery. 

That’s the old idea of youth, the youth of John Keats, the youth that makes the old miss it, makes it required that we explain to them that it’s still there, it never left, it’s a dream, a momentary affirmation, an attitude, a muttered curse word. So many of my peers, now no longer engaged in a constant race to stay out of the grave as their ancestors were, seemed intent on beating each other into their tombs, as if reaching walking death before their parents was the only way to outgrow them. There’s so much life just lying around and it’s just plain wasteful to let it lie in the sun and rust in the rain. There’s space enough to stretch, to not keep who you are awkwardly curled up inside yourself, to breathe the air and taste the wine and dig the brains of your fellow travelers in this loosely-defined circus. I found that space in the Pillows, having often suspected it was there, and while everyone is going to find that space in their own way--or not, still, tragically not--I have to think that experience was due in part  to some innate and unique quality of the music itself, not just a complimentary sensibility contained within myself. The Pillows are free, and that makes them freeing, it’s easy as that. Their liberation is plain as day; it rings in every chord, every snare-hit, every harmony; it’s up to us ascertain what we can do in our own limited capacity to hoist ourselves up to their level and give some other folks a boost along the way and a hand to grab afterwards. It’s the gift that art gives us, and the Pillows just give it more freely than most is all, which is why I think the suggestion to listen to them is more than just a solid recommendation. Like the insistence on listening to The Beatles, or The Clash, or any of the others, it’s a plea to save your soul, to learn the language of tomorrow and drink the lifeblood of peace and love and piss and vinegar, or else you’ll be lost, lost, lost. 

Can you feel? Can you feel that hybrid rainbow?

[dynamightmite]

Not a psychologist or a sociologist, but I do have a linguistics degree and I have studied childhood language acquisition more than the average person, and this stuff is incredibly fascinating.

To be fair to Hawks, he was taken in by the Commission during a stage where he could, theoretically, still have learned to read and write despite limited (to none) exposure to those concepts. Children have a developmental range for literacy, so while he would likely struggle more than the average child, it is possible he would be fully literate.

However; children's literacy can be very closely correlated to their socioeconomic situation (I can't say directly caused because that's not how these kinds of theories work, but you get the idea). There have been numerous, long-term studies that children born into low socioeconomic families actually know fewer words, by a significant margin (think hundreds of thousands). There's a lot of reasons for this (lack of exposure to language via their parents for a variety of reasons, lack of immersion, lack of resources, etc.), but the basic reality is that children in low socioeconomic households have a lot of language issues that aren't present at anywhere near the same rates in high socioeconomic households. Someone like Hawks, who was almost literally dirt poor, had practically no exposure to language outside his mother and occasionally the t.v. That is, developmentally speaking.... a bad fucking thing.

What's interesting is that, especially in western cultures (where I studied, but does more than likely carry through in Japan), the mother's education level has been seen to have an effect on the number of words/level of literacy a child acquires. (Why mothers and not fathers? Probably a mix between sexism in the studies focusing on mothers being the main parent, and also gender norms predicating that the mother is often the one doing the most hands-on parenting.) Considering Tomie may well have not even been a high school graduate, much less college or graduate school, the likelihood was already that Hawks was having more limited exposure to language than other children his age even before factoring in his levels of neglect.

Additionally, the stress of poverty and neglect is incredibly detrimental to children's development. When you're effectively in "survival mode" all the time, the brain can't prioritize fine-tuning language skills the way it needs to. To be clear, Hawks wouldn't really be a "feral child", because he did have his mother, and occasionally his father; he went outside, saw other people, was exposed to society, even if only rarely. The children that got dubbed as "feral" suffered neglect that was so acute they couldn't speak, which is very different from what Hawks deals with. You are right, though, that without a lot of those foundational skills (learning the alphabet, reading stories, learning to recognize written sentence structures and patterns) Hawks would be at a severe disadvantage.

So what are some of the potential side effects? Hawks probably can read in the sense that he can recognize words and formulate grammatically correct sentences, but he probably would struggle to follow narratives or create his own (for example, when writing a report, he would potentially have trouble creating a coherant, chronologically accurate retelling of events). A lot of literary concepts would likely be difficult for him to even recognize, like being able to follow a theme, identifying the parts of a story like the climax, and identifying major plot points, etc. His predictive ability with reading would probably be pretty poor (being able to rationalize what word would come next in a sentence), meaning a lot of his reading would be literally reading word by word, and he probably would have a lot of difficulty inferring the meaning/contexts of words he doesn't recognize.

Slightly unrelated, but he could also struggle with emotional issues, which have been suggested to be linked to a lack of emotion-relating language (not knowing how to properly, verbally express emotions can lead to difficulties recognizing them at all, and Hawks probably already deals with struggling to manage his emotions due to his abuse, neglect, and abandonment. Dude's almost certainly had a shit ton of therapy just to manage as well as he does socially).

My little dislcaimer: I'm not Japanese and I don't speak Japanese, so take all of this with a grain of salt. Culture and specific language do matter with a lot of this stuff, I'm just going off of what I know. I am by no means an expert or a specialist.

PLEASE talk more about hawks struggling with reading and writing

Glad you asked. If you're here from my bio, then a fic I wrote https://archiveofourown.org/works/42568599 is about Dabi finding out.

But if you want my reasoning- children should be able to read by 6 or 7. But for that to happen, it's extremely important for the building blocks to be put in place years earlier. That means playing with letters, parents reading them stories, looking at picture books, watching children's TV shows, learning the alphabet, associating sounds to letters. Note that most kids are in preschool 3-5 years old.

Hawks was taken in by the Commission around age 7 and before then we know his parents were extremely neglectful. The only thing I can give him is that he occasionally watches TV himself because of his misconception of pro heroes being fake characters. However, watching TV in general is not useful for written language. It's specifically kids programs like sesame street where you're meant to learn things that would help. And it's for that reason Hawks doesn't struggle with spoken language. His parents talked, they talked at him, and he could hear the TV, and occasionally escaped from the house. And this is less logic based and more headcanon but birds have the most similar vocal chords to humans and even aside from parrots, there are birds that will mimic us. I like to think that their capacity for copying language has helped benefit him learning spoken language.

So, wouldn't the Commission have taught him to read and write? Of course, it's essential to hero work. The problem is that there is a time period in life where your brain is working overdrive and the idea is "the sooner the better". There's a million factors at play when it comes to the human brain so there's always going to be differences and exceptions. You'll hear most commonly that 9 years old is the cutoff for fluency, some will cite 18, and others will say 30 is the real decline for learning another language at all, while differences at even 1 year old have been studied- but all of these studies are referencing children who have normal childhoods and the right foundations. Hawks did not have that.

Which makes me more inclined to look towards the concept of "feral children". Children who were completely socially isolated and no matter what kind of program they went into later in life, never were able to achieve the same level as other people and without continuous learning upkeep, they would actually revert almost entirely. It's a very interesting topic you can Google.

Hawks is very smart, we know his brain is levels above what's considered normal, and it's very safe to assume the commission worked on this relentlessly. That's why I would say he can read and write, but struggles with it. I'd assume he needs to focus far more than a typical person would and has to sound things out to compare it to a vocal word he knows, or has to read sentences twice. And because of that, stressful situations can completely mess him up. Like, say, an angry murderous villain impatiently staring him down.

Now I'm well aware Hawks read the MLA book and got a message into it but consider this, making that message was probably easier than actually reading it normally. The biggest problem would be the amount of time he spent piecing the letters together in his head because he couldn't write it down himself with the cameras. And because Hawks is so smart, once he gets the basic understanding down, he doesn't need to keep referencing the book. He can figure it out on his own and roll with it.

So yeah thanks for reading my thesis. I am not a psychologist or sociologist.

[chasevanhalen]

New Year New Me! They say that on average you only use a tenth of your brain’s capacity, and even less if you don't read. Unfortunately, I think I could count the total number of books read by me and my friend group since 7th grade on one hand. If you can’t answer the question of "what have you been reading lately?" within three seconds, we both know it was a movie.. So with this nugget of truth rattling in my head, I decided it was time to get back in the game. After an unsuccessful romp around the local book store, I began surfing the World Wide Web for a book that could quench my sudden thirst for knowledge.  I landed on a news article about a particularly troubled conspiracy theorist named Kyle Odem. Kyle was infamously detained for attempting to throw a flash drive containing his dark manifesto over the white house fence.

 Kyle Odem’s presumably first and likely only literary offering is aptly entitled, “My Story.” The highly criticized and not exactly acclaimed piece of work details a complex alien plot to take over American politics along with a series of detailed interspecies orgies, a moon colony and a sinister alien evangelical pastor.   Now, as someone who refers to himself as a writer, I must admit I do admire his bold marketing strategy. Half the battle is getting eyes on your content. If measured by that standard, his first book was a massive success.

If your book is so good that you are willing to get arrested throwing it over the White House fence like a hand grenade, I think it’s at least worth a toilet skim. 

If you are thinking about venturing back into literacy by picking up a copy of this shockingly coherent, interplanetary conspiracy manifesto, I think you should first look into the author’s personal life. Much in the same way that you should not pick up Mein Kampf without a bit of context. 

This ex-Marine puts the “traumatic” in Post-Traumatic Stress Syndrome. With three names like any serial killer worth mentioning, Kyle Andrew Odem was a real vandal. Graduating the University of Idaho with a degree in Biochemistry, Kyle managed to complete his degree while seemingly suffering from what is commonly referred to as “being fucking weird”

 Odem presumably spent all his free time in college researching aliens, American politics and acne medication. After 4 years of intensive chemistry and tireless masturbation, Odem came to the conclusion that not only were Mitch McConnell (believable) and a slew of other political figures aliens, but his local pastor was also a martian over lord attempting to control his mind using evangelical theological principals. 

A thought we have all had. Possible. Not likely, but for sure possible…

Being the true go getter that he was, after college Odem decided it was time to take matters into his own well moisturized hands. Although not documented, Im convinced that Odem had a number of sit downs with local detectives in which he attempted to convince them that his pastor was an alien attempting to control his mind. Im sure their efforts were taken very seriously by the local Idaho police force…

“Bill get over here. The crazy alien guy is on line 3!”

Unfortunately, the lackluster police in rural Idaho did not get the last laugh in this particular case. For Odem did in fact put on his Sundays best and shoot his pastor in cold blood...

In a quote from Odem discussing the murder, he claimed that he could not possibly be wrong about the evangelical pastor being an alien hell bent on mind control because he “graduated with honors.” Although graduating with honors does make for a solid addition to the notable achievements section of a resume to be sure, I am not quite certain that it is the most effective way to defend yourself in a murder trial. After committing the murder in Idaho, Odem then proceeded to drive to Washington DC. (Imagine that playlist)   —CD labeled in sharpie “K-moneys killer road trip jams” 

 I am assuming he grabbed some soul food on G-Street before hitting the monument circuit in what would be the strangest 80’s style montage ever. —Odem in a blood stained t-shirt pretending the Washington Monument was his penis. Running up the stairs at the Lincoln Memorial like Rocky. Spray painting ‘9/11 was an Alien job’ on the Jefferson Memorial. Classic comedy stuff. Imagine the satisfied look on Odem’s face after he lobbed over what he believed to be the greatest and most revealing piece of literature ever penned. His satisfaction, while unimaginable as it may have been, lasted all of three seconds before he was promptly detained by Secret Service members. 

For weeks, the document containing detailed descriptions of prominent political and media figures that were alleged to be aliens planted by a moon dwelling species of aliens hell bent of taking control of American politics, was kept under wraps as the FBI inspected the document. Eventually it was determined that there was no legitimacy to the bold claims, and minus some off color remarks about African Americans, gays, christians and a particular gas station attendant in Idaho, the manifesto was nothing more than a deranged mans obsession with aliens and his distain for the American political system.   The greatest quote I read was from a then incarcerated Odem emphatically calling for Obama to “tell the truth about the documents.” Days after these comments were made, the entirety of the manifesto was put on the internet. When asked about why the release of his manifesto had little to no effect on convincing the American public of the existence of aliens, Odem claimed that the documents had been altered and the media had successfully destroyed his credibility.

While I know we can all agree that Kyle’s decision to murder is unforgivable, I think its impossible not to admire his gusto on some level. I mean come on…   In a competitive market dominated by big publishing houses, this shanghai kid was able to stick it to the suites over at Harper Collins. Im not saying he should be invited to Idaho University to give a speech, but maybe a placard in the library.

It is my hope that in 2017 we all stop waiting for our dreams to come true and get out there and make them come true. Kyle Odem’s problem was not a lack of conviction, it was a lack of direction, mental stability and emotional/physical connection with the opposite sex. Regardless of Kyle Odem’s own personal shortcomings and poor decisions, don't let your motivation be stifled by a lack of conviction. Don't let your art go unnoticed. And Lastly, don't let your creativity be bound to the people around you. 

This is the year that you throw your own proverbial flash drive over the metaphorical or literal fences keeping you from attaining success.

Happy New Year