#Decemberween 2023

[pikansanok]

Todayborweeve is Decemberweeve! To celebrate, I made a Decemberween YTP using a thanksgiving toon (Twenty Thanxty Six) as the base. Happy Decemberween, Everybody!

[classicsonic]

i need toJESUS HES TINY. i need to show of bob strong sad. 2023 decemberween costume leaked

[brookstonalmanac]

Holidays 12.25

Holidays

A'Phabet Day (a.k.a. No "L" Day)

Brumalia (Italy)

Carol Day

Children’s Day (Africa)

Constitution Day (Taiwan)

Day Beers Day (on Letterkenny,)

Delaware Crossing Day

Dia das Forças Armadas (Mozambique)

Dia de la Familia (Uruguay)

Dog Day (French Republic)

Family Day (Angola, Mozambique, Uruguay)

Feast of Winter Veil (In “World of Warcraft”)

Feria de Cali begins (Colombia)

GOAL Mile (Ireland)

Good Governance Day (India)

Grafelnik (Zephyrian Revenge Holiday)

I Purple You Day

National Colby Day

National Eva Day

National Joshua Day

Quaid-e-Azam’s Day (Pakistan)

Quarter Day (England, Ireland & Wales) [4 of 4]

Richard Starkey Day

Tulsi Pujan Diwas (India)

Food & Drink Celebrations

Christmas Pudding Day

National “Kiss the Cook” Day

National Pumpkin Pie Day [also 11.21]

4th & Last Monday in December

National Fireplace Day [Last Monday]

Independence Days

Federal Republic of St. Charlie (f.k.a. Kingdom of St. Charlie; 2008) [unrecognized]

Litvania (Declared; 2015) [unrecognized]

Feast Days

Abraham Bloemaert (Artology)

Anastasia of Sirmium (Catholic Church)

Birthday of Mithra (Persian god of light & wisdom)

Birth of the Sun

Boërhaave (Positivist; Saint)

Cardboard Box Appreciation Day (Pastafarian)

Chrismukkah (a.k.a. Weihnukkah; Germany) [Hybrid Holiday]

Christmas Day (a.k.a. ... 

Beermas (Brewing Community)

Boże Narodzenie (Poland)

Božic (Croatia)

Catholic Christmas (Balarus, Bosnia-Herzegovina)

Christougenna (Greece)

Christtag (Austria)

Craciunul (Romania)

Craciunul pe stil nou (Moldova)

Decemberween (from Homestar Runner)

Día de Navidad (Cuba, Puerto Rico)

Foolstide (Early Puritans)

Grav-Mass Day

Hari Raya Natal (Indonesia)

Heathen’s Fasting Day (Puritan)

Heaven’s Day (in “The Big O”)

Joulu (Finland)

Jul (Denmark, Norway)

Juldagen (Sweden)

Kalikimaka (Hawaii)

Kerstmis (The Netherlands, Suriname)

Koleda (a.k.a. Koliada; Big Christmas; Bulgaria)

Krishtlindja (Albania)

Krishtlindjet Katolike (Kosovo)

Multitude’s Idle Day (Puritan)

na Nollag (Ireland)

Natal (Brazil, Cape Verde, Macau, Portugal)

Natale (Italy)

Natividad de Nuestro Señor (Spain)

Nativity of Santa Claus (Church of the SubGenius)

Newtonmas Day (a.k.a. Reason’s Greetings)

Noël (France)

Noël Coypel (Artology)

Paul Manship (Artology)

Pождество (Russia)

Raphael Soyer (Artology)

Refrigerator Day (in “Dinosaurs”)

Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer Day

Saturnalia (Elder Scrolls)

Smekday

Superstitious Man’s Idol Day (Puritan)

Tananakuy (People settle grudges from the past year by fist fighting, then everybody drinks; Peru)

Vánoce (Czech Republic)

X-Day

Xistmas (Church of the SubGenius)

Xmas

Ziemassvetki (Latvia)

Dies Natalis Invicti Solis (Birthday of the Invincible Sun; Ancient Rome)

Ennead Feast (Ancient Egypt)

Eugenia (Christian; Saint)

Feast of Frau Halle (Germanic Goddess)

Feast of the Nativity (Orthodox Christian)

Festival of Fish-Fighting, Fisting and Felching (Church of the SubGenius)

Festival of the Invincible Sun God

1st Day of Noodlemas (Pastafarian)

Fred (Muppetism)

Hans von Bartels (Artology)

Holiday (Pastafarian)

Isaac Newton Day (Pastafarian)

Malkh Festival (Nakh People’s Sun God Festival)

Mithrastide (Pagan)

Robert “Bob” Leroy Ripley Day (Church of the SubGenius; Saint)

Sol Invictus (Satanism)

Twelvetide, Day #1 (a.k.a. the Twelve Days of Christmas or Christmastide) [until 1.5]

Lucky & Unlucky Days

Fortunate Day (Pagan) [53 of 53]

Lucky Day (Philippines) [71 of 71]

Prime Number Day: 359 [72 of 72]

Taian (大安 Japan) [Lucky all day.]

Premieres

Adam’s Rib (Film; 1949)

After the Thin Man (Film; 1936)

Akira (Anime Film; 1989)

Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom (Film; 2023)

The Aviator (Film; 2004)

Babylon (Film; 2022)

Batman: Mask of the Phantom (WB Animated Film; 1993)

Bedtime Stories (Film; 2008)

Bell, Book and Candle (Film; 1958)

Big Eyes (Film; 2014)

Big Fish (Film; 2003)

Box Car Blues (WB LT Cartoon; 1930)

Bridgerton (TV Series; 2020)

Canvas Back Duck (Disney Cartoon; 1953)

Catch Me If You Can (Film; 2002)

Chaser on the Rocks (WB MM Cartoon; 1965)

Damage (Film; 1992)

Devil Dan Thinks it Over or Feud for Thought (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S4, Ep. 190; 1962)

Django Unchained (Film; 2012)

Dreamgirls (Film; 2006)

Empire of the Sun (Film; 1987)

Evita (Film; 1996)

Flesh and the Devil (Film; 1926)

Galaxy Quest (Film; 1999)

The Godfather Part III (Film; 1990)

Good Morning, Vietnam (Film; 1987)

Grumpy Old Men (Film; 1993)

Hamlet (Film; 1996)

The Hateful Eight (Film; 2015)

Hidden Figures (Film; 2016)

How to Sleep (Disney Cartoon; 1953)

Into the Woods (Film; 2014)

I.Q. (Film; 1994)

Jackie Brown (Film; 1997)

Journey to Ixtlan: The Lessons of Don Juan, by Carlos Castaneda (Spiritual Book; 1972)

Kate & Leopold (Film; 2001)

Les Misérables (Film; 2012)

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou (Film; 2004)

Little Women (Film; 2019)

Magnum Force (Film; 1973)

Mike Fink Keel Boats (Disneyland Ride; 1955)

Mud-Munching Moose or Bullwinkle Bites the Dust (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S4, Ep. 189; 1962)

1917 (Film; 2019)

Old Yeller (Film; 1957)

One Hour in Wonderland (Disney Television Special; 1950)

On the Basis of Sex (Film; 2018)

Patch Adams (Film; 1998)

Pelle the Conquerer (Film; 1987)

Peter Pan (Film; 2003)

Peter’s Friends (Film; 1992)

Pippi Longstocking (Film; 1973)

The Postman (Film; 1997)

Samoa (Disney Cartoon; 1956)

Selma (Film; 2014)

Silver Linings Playbook (Film; 2012)

Soul (Animated Pixar Film; 2020)

Spies in Disguise (Animated Film; 2019)

Stars & Stripes Forever, by John Philip Sousa (March; 1896)

The Sting (Film; 1973)

The Sword in the Stone (US Disney Animated Film; 1963)

The Teachings of Don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, by Carlos Castaneda (Memoir; 1968)

To Kill a Mockingbird (Film; 1962)

Truckdrivers in the Sky or Follow the Fleet (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S2, Ep. 84; 1960)

Turn the Terrible (Animated TV Show;Jonny Quest #15; 1964)

Verse An Worse or Crime Without Rhyme (Rocky & Bullwinkle Cartoon, S2, Ep. 83; 1960)

We're Going on a Bear Hunt, by Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury (Children’s Books; 1989)

The Wolf of Wall Street (Film; 2013)

Wonder Woman 1984 (Film; 2020)

Today’s Name Days

Anastasia, Eugenia, Josefina, Natalis, Therese (Austria)

Hristina, Hristo (Bulgaria)

Anastazija, Božica, Božidar, Eugenija, Nikodem, Tea (Croatia)

Svátek, Vánocní (Czech Republic)

Natalie, Neida, Taale, Taali (Estonia)

Emmanuel, Manuel, Noël (France)

Anastasia, Christfest (Weihnachten; Germany)

Baltasar, Bethlehem, Christina, Christos, Chrysa, Chrystalla, Emmanouela, Emmanuel, Gaspar, Hrisavgi, Hrisoula, Hrysa, Melhior (Greece)

Eugénia (Hungary)

Christel, Natale (Italy)

Krists, Larisa, Stella (Latvia)

Eugenija, Genė, Gražvydas, Sanrimė (Lithuania)

Anastazja, Eugenia, Piotr, Spirydion (Poland)

Anastasia, Belén, Eugenia, Natividad (Spain)

Anastasia, Noel, Noelle, Hollie, Holly, Jesus, Stacey, Stacie, Stacy (USA)

Today is Also…

Day of Year: Day 359 of 2024; 6 days remaining in the year

ISO: Day 1 of week 52 of 2023

Celtic Tree Calendar: Ruis (Elder) [Day 28 of 28]

Chinese: Month 12 (Jia-Zi), Day 13 (Ding-Si)

Chinese Year of the: Rabbit 4721 (until February 10, 2024)

Hebrew: 13 Teveth 5784

Islamic: 12 Jumada II 1445

J Cal: 29 Zima; Eightday [29 of 30]

Julian: 12 December 2023

Moon: 98%: Waxing Gibbous

Positivist: 23 Bichat (13th Month) [Boërhaave]

Runic Half Month: Jara (Year) [Day 15 of 15]

Season: Winter (Day 5 of 89)

Zodiac: Capricorn (Day 4 of 31)

[homestarrunner]

babe wake up Michael getting his Decemberween gift 2023 dropped

(at the end after the guests say goodbye)

For the past 3 Decemberweens on Come On, Fhqwhpods! - A Homestar Runner Podcast, host Michael William Hunter has received a new copy of Deep Impact on DVD, despite his demands for Charley to stop sending them.

[talenlee]

Decemberween '23 — Smogon RBY Afficionados

This is pretty funny when you consider last month I wrote three thousand words about how I think Smogon has a fundamental problem in terms of its game design toolkit. Wa hey anyway.

I’ve talked about how when it comes to any given internet niche you run the risk of running headlong into the cursed distinction between ‘pronouns in bio :)’ and ‘pronouns in bio :^)’. There are a whole lot of spaces on the internet where you can always find someone who knows way too much about it and is happy to infodump to you about it, and for the increasingly pointed niches, those interests are usually represented by a truly sweaty nerd or some detail oriented queer person. It is in this space that I wish to proffer to you two people who make interesting material about Smogon.

Not only Smogon, but the part of Smogon focusing on a game mode which has three Pokemon that probably are 100% represented. That’s right, Red Blue Yellow, the oldest metagame of all, and the weirdest.

Let me show you the work of Plague Von Karma and Big Yellow.

Plague von Karma is a delightful channel if you’re into vtubers wearing plague doctor masks talking about thirty years of gameplay history. Which I guess I am. And statistically, so are you. Plague Von Karma’s channel is more brisk, with a lot of shorter videos designed to introduce you to the history of this game, documented in distinct ideas rather than long, broad overviews of a variety of topics.

The Rise of TobyBro | RBY Bytes

Watch this video on YouTube

This is also just coincidentally, an examination of when I engaged with the period of time, and therefore periodically I see people I know mentioned by name. Well, knew. I was a teenager. But like, I was there when the TobyBro arose and I hung out in chat rooms with Cat Gonk and it’s an incredible story to see as the narrative of the TobyBro endures for decades.

I mean, as a game designer I would have something of a problem if my game lasted that long with a generic piece like that but also, y’know, Chess got away with it, and we’ve never needed a Chess 2.0 (aside from how Pokemon is Chess 2).

If you look at the videos of Plague Von Karma, there’s a quantity of videos that are kind of meant to get you up to speed for what RBY is like, and why it’s like that, and when you understand those things you can approach the format more wholly. It’s not exactly positioned as ‘behold, I, an educator am here to get you involved in this format’ but it really feels like a good place to start that doesn’t involve reading the Smogon forums, which are…

Lively.

BigYellow is a lot more into these long form, dense and humour-driven kinda memelord treatments of the RBY OU format. It’s not quite a guide to getting involved – I mean, there’s really nothing to it beyond ‘you should probably have Snorlax, Chansey and Tauros on your team,’ but it’s still approached with a conversational mien and… like

it’s funny?

I think these videos are really funny. I watch them because BigYellow is charming and talks about Pokemon in a way that’s charming even as they talk about a format of Pokemon I think looks horrendous to play. I have the nagging suspicion that sometime I’m going to drop some joke somewhere in one of my videos and well after it’s gone up realise that I’m just copying this ginger Irish person who’s half my age and funnier as well.

Ice Type Pokémon in RBY

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BigYellow forwards what I think is one of the healthiest visions of Pokemon in the Smogon play space, where you should only ever consider the game to be a series of spaces you move between. If you want to play a Pokemon, don’t try and drag it into the ‘proper’ format, but rather look around for the formats where it is playable, then see if you can find a way to play that format. Charizard doesn’t have to be in OU for you to enjoy playing it, and if you start looking at Smogon tiers like playgrounds with some bumpers around them, you start to see some really cute, interesting metagame spaces to play around in.

It’s a diagnostic treatment of the tiering system. The game is not there to be proscribed, but described. There are ways the game works, there are ways it doesn’t work and some of the ways it doesn’t work result from silly people with weird grudges against Jumpluff.

But alright, sure, what if I’m not interested in a twenty-five year old Pokemon metagame that’s built out of emulators that are designed to implement bugs properly? Well, what if I told you that BigYellow also did videos about fight games? Oh, no? That’s not exciting? What if I told you there’s a 45 minute long video about the history of brown bricks in lego?

The Brilliant History of Brown Lego

Watch this video on YouTube

Yeah that’s right.

And I watched the whole thing.

And really, you probably will too, right?

I just can’t tell you what this channel’s identity is, not really. It’s BigYellow, who makes a game that I think sounds awful sound amazing. It’s about Lego. It’s about nostalgia. It’s about Guilty Gear Strive and how sometimes the weather being too severe shuts you out of playing the videogames you intended to play. It’s ultimately an insight into how one person who’s interested in stuff expresses that interest.

And that’s really cool.

Also, and this isn’t really important, but if you’re like me and you notice when you’re hearing voices that aren’t just More Americans talking about things, these reminders that the world’s culture does not actually stop at the edges of the mainland USA, then yeah, here are some channels discussing a Japanese game from places like Ireland and… I’m guessing Australia? But maybe New Zealand? I’m not about to say where or when.

The world is not a place where we intrude, it’s a place we share.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

Decemberween '23 — The Poorhammer Podcast

I don’t play Warhammer. I don’t have the little miniature boys, I don’t have the equipment for painting them, I don’t have the space to paint them, one of them cool little lamps for making them look good while you paint them. I can’t really identify the mechanical differences between Warhammer 40k and Age of Sigmar and what the point of the play experiences are and how they differ one from another. If I’m sitting down at a table with at least one friend and some miniatures and hours of investment, I’m going to play 4th edition D&D —

— the best edition of D&D —

and not the heavy metal gameplay experience that is Warhammer Of Some Variety. None of this is to say, however, that the game lacks appeal, and like a gawker on a roadside attraction, I still pay attention to the space. Mostly, however, through the podcast Poorhammer, which is about getting into the game while spending as little money as possible.

The Poorhammer podcast have a couple of threads of content, as many variety podcasts do. The conception of budget as it applies to Warhammer is an interesting one because the budget is not equally divided in the game mechanical system; there are expensive units that aren’t good, and there are good units that aren’t expensive, but also, there are definitely the inverse, and there are ways that your army can be constructed that reach a game state (minimum points required) that don’t necessarily represent a chance to play the game in a fun and balanced way.

They talk about it.

And it’s weird.

The $500 40K Army Challenge - How many factions can still be called AFFORDABLE?

Watch this video on YouTube

It’s one of the things that Warhammer has as a game that makes for a weird comparison to Magic: The Gathering. Like, you can take the cheapest cards for Magic: The Gathering, put them together, they’re pre-built, and play them against one another. They’re perfectly good, operating play devices and sure, players don’t have to play with them, but they work.

Warhammer is a strange thing where you can build an entire army and construct it and then the rules can change and your army is not only not valid, but it might not even be able to interact with another person and that’s after you invested labour in it. It’s not just ‘this hobby is expensive’ but rather ‘you can make errors in operation that involves extremely expensive pieces of hardware that wind up not being appropriate for you to use at all, and they don’t have much resale value.’

That’s what I find interesting about this podcast: In this episode, they talk about the idea of making a functional army for $500, from a newcomer’s perspective. And that’s $500! That’s a pretty expensive hobby for a kid! Or well, for an adult, but I don’t know what I spend on hobbies.

Finding Warhammer 40K's most expensive (and CHEAPEST) faction.

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(Really, I don’t.)

This vein is however something that generates data and the Poorhammer crew are willing to crunch it. I like this episode, with its heavy focus on breaking down every army into its numeric value and scale. It’s really interesting to me to see the way that an army can be treated as its component parts in a truly mathematical breakdown. This gives you a cool insight into the armies as they relate to one another, which can make it interesting to consider the kinds of things you want to build an army around.

(I have a bunch of nids in a box, forever unpainted, and they’re probably not ever going to be good, based on how I engage with them.)

Of course that doesn’t tell the whole story of what an army is, because they’re also a task to do – you know, you have to build the army, you have to plan around it, then you have to paint it.

(Well you don’t have to paint it, but you got into the hobby to paint things, right?)

The PAINting Tier List - Ranking Every 40K Faction by Painting Difficulty

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That’s where this kind of episode comes up. The hosts have hands-on experience painting a variety of armies. What’s more, they build armies based on the things they want those armies to do, which means that it’s not a hypothetical kind of conversation about the challenges of painting an army.

I couldn’t actually, like, execute on this information, but I think it’s really interesting to hear people talk about the material skills of painting. Plus, there’s ideas of different tools, which they expand on – this podcast has episodes about using photoshop to test out particular aesthetics, building paint techniques, and even how to avoid being ripped off by Games Workshop’s paint prices.

Particularly what I liked about this is the discussion of how the aesthetic of an army created a play experience. The meditative experience of painting your little dolls – which is part of the play – is a creative experience (paratextual to the game itself) – is a play experience they’re examining in terms of how it rewards adventure, how it lets you play.

The Infinite and The Divine - Book Club & Review

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Then there’s the other thing this podcast does, which is long form conversations about the lore of Warhammer 40k. In this case, I recommend this episode about The Infinite and the Divine, which is an example of a Warhammer book that is

Apparently

Good?

Like there’s an actual story about characters in the universe and they make choices and they have motivations and also they’re all skeletal death robots. In this case, the hosts made a reading club ahead of time, put a bunch of notices out so when they were going to start reading the book, and when the episode was going. That meant there was a sort of communal experience of people taking notes and sharing discord notes with the hosts, and then the hosts incorporate that into the episode.

This is how I engage with Warhammer 40,000. I check in, time to time on a podcast and see if it’s doing anything interesting. It’s a cool show, it’s well edited if you watch the Youtube videos, and it’s a fun time if you’re interested in a game with a huge demand without actually having to engage with the demands of that game. You don’t need to track the game, you don’t need to understand the game’s mechanics, but you can still understand how they talk about the ideas and ideology of the game’s world.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

Decemberween ’23 — The New Music From This Year

New Post has been published on PRESS.exe: Decemberween ’23 — The New Music From This Year

How do you listen to new music?

I understand it’s really common for most people to listen to music in their cars or using systems like Spotify, which I don’t like and don’t drive. That’s right, I don’t like cars and I don’t drive Spotify. I listen to podcasts when I travel, usually, and I listen to music while I work at my computer, because I want something that affects my mood while I’m doing, like, this work.

Frustratingly, just because it’s usually there and ad-free, I let Youtube throw mixes at me. Then when I’ve noticed I’ve done that enough that some songs are part of my personal lexicon, I go and acquire those songs some other way, whether bandcamp (in the case of small bands) or

I want to nakedly recommend an mp3 collection to you. You don’t need special software to manage it. You can just dump all your music in a great big heap and use the search function on any mp3 player you like to find the songs you want. You have paid for music, you have paid for the right to use it in different forms, spotify subscriptions are not paying artists and they are rent-seeking on things you can buy directly, or in many cases have already bought.

Anyway, here’s the stuff that I added to my mp3 collection this year.

The Lads are a Christian band from New Zealand I listened to as a kid. I re-found them on Youtube this year. They’d had a song that stuck in my head, an idea that I’ve been trying to stick to, which is if you need a reason to make a change in your life, anything will do. Why not make a big change on Arbor Day, a day you probably had no idea was a day on your calendar?

Arbor Day - The Lads // Arbor Day

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I mean this isn’t amazing music, but I like having it on hand, you know? The detritus of what we are. Not all of us were influenced by absolute bangers. Sometimes the idea that ‘you can make changes to your life for any given arbitary reason’ is a good thing and it doesn’t matter that much that I got it from a band of dorks who moved to Nashville to sing songs to megachurch kids (which is their spot now).

Sub-Radio - Stacy's Dad (Full Video)

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Next up, a parody song. Stacy’s Mom is a banger of a song about having a crush on an older woman (and the song doesn’t, like, go anywhere with it). Then we get a delightful genderswapped version here, which I hesitate to call a ‘parody’? It’s the same song, basically, it’s just a different orientation with the same comedy bent.

One thing I do find a little awkward is, now I’m starting on being ‘in my forties’ (man that feels weird to say), hearing someone talk about ‘is he learning about the Civil War’ like – so what?! So what if that’s a thing that interests me!? How did I get read like that?

AJJ - "Brave As A Noun & Survival Song" (KVRX Library Session)

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The band Andrew Jackson Jihad, for, perhaps sensibly obvious reasons, changed their name recently. This meant they made an announcement on Youtube at some point and I noticed that (‘AJJ on their name announcement?’ what did AJJ mean?) and that meant I listened to some of their music, annnnnd I like it! I’m told they make Folk Punk, which sounds to me like nonsense but I also am firmly of the opinion that there’s nothing quite so punk as making very specific categorisations that everyone around you must adhere to, right?

BANG! - Last Life AMV

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Thanks to the Last Life Youtube series of Minecraft Hardcore Lets Plays –

What are you laughing at –

I wound up listening to some cool music that was made as part of animatics by cool fans of the series, too. And while sometimes that meant learning about something cool like the band AJR (who are not the same thing as AJJ, thanks file sorting),

Curses - Last Life Animation

Watch this video on YouTube

Or something interestingly indie and creepily jazzy, like The Crane Wives (and I’m sure I’ve shared this before, surely it was in my list of new music last year),

W.I.T.C.H | Double Life SMP

Watch this video on YouTube

Or maybe even something else normal people like like Devon Cole’s WITCH, it did also mean I wound up appreciating a song…

Sharks | Life Series Animatic

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By Imagine Dragons of all people.

Animatics are great. They recontextualise songs and the recontextualisation means that now I have a story for these songs to be about and not just, like, Imagine Dragons’ latest car ad.

The Killers - A Pirate Looks At Forty (Jimmy Buffett Cover) HQ

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I think I shared this earlier this year too, but it’s the Killers cover of A Pirate Looks At Forty. I may be a bit overly maudlin about anything to do with Jimmy Buffett this year, since this is now the point at which I know that he’s had to leave the party.

Yofukashino Uta

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Also, this year I listened to a bunch of Anime OPs, because I was watching more anime this year. And the anime this year that I liked just happened to have OPs that I think are great, so I added them to my list. In the vein of ‘sounds like just cool music you might seem international and interesting for listening to,’ there’s the band Creepy Nuts! They do Japanese hiphop and, in addition to the songs from the Call of the Night anime soundtrack, you should also check out Song for the Prodigies.

Summer Time Render - Opening | FULL HD [1080p]

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The opening of Summer Time Render sounds to me like jangly folk rock? I think people call it College Rock? Problem here is I don’t even know this song’s name. It’s just The Opening To Summer Time Render, which is my favourite anime of the year, like it just absolutely whips ass, so I hear this song and I remember how that show makes me feel, from its first embarrassing opening of boobs and butts to its astoundingly sweet conclusion.

"Mobile Suit Gundam the Witch from Mercury" Textless version of opening "The Blessing" by YOASOBI

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The opening to Witch from Mercury has a similar effect, but I really like the way it has this, like, descending step effect? The staggering of it, it sings like dancing, and I love the way it feels like it’s responding to its own anxieties.

I have no idea what this song is saying.

TVアニメ『リコリス・リコイル』ノンテロップOPムービー｜ClariS「ALIVE」

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I think that the opening and ending of Lycoris Recoil whip ass. There’s this thing the opening does which I think anime openings love doing, which is this sort of crooning that turns into a high, wide arc and then abruptly stops and regathers its footing?

Paripi Koumei Ep5 ED

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Perhaps obviously, Ya Boy Kongming, an anime about music in Shibuya District, has nothing but bangers in its soundtrack. Everything, even the song by the Evil Bad Band That Sucks are good, but I especially like this cover of Kibun Jojo for the ending that adds instrumentation and a rap verse as the series progresses.

Shikimori's Not Just a Cutie - Opening | Honey Jet Coaster

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On the other hand, Honey Jet Coaster is just… like, energetic sugary pop music, it feels completely artificial and I have no reason to recommend it. Much like everything to do with Shikimori’s Not Just A Cutie you kinda have to get something out of it on a very superficial level, because there is nothing going on here.

(That’s a lie, the song is voiced as if it’s a boyfriend singing about Shikimori, but the vocalist is a woman who sounds like Shikimori, and it describes how Shikimori is a ‘better boyfriend than him’ but you know, so what.)

The Truck Got Stuck - Corb Lund

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Now a hard swerve from songs I absolutely cannot sing to songs I absolutely can. I learned about Corb Lund this year! He’s a Canadian country musician, who I learned about after a comedian who appeared on Behind The Bastards told a story about how one time, a racist on a neo nazi website reviewed his set he did opening for Corb Lund, and was so upset he realised that Corb Lund might not be racist enough for him.

Anyway, truck got stuck.

Roll Northumbria (Loud Version)

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Continuing Canadian songs I can sing along to, The Dreadnoughts dropped an album late last year, lot of good songs but especially good is this version of Roll Northumbria, which is a song I already liked, but this time rendered as a big loud stomping song.

Sidle Up

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Also, something that a lot of bands I like have in common is how good they get when they say, turn forty and stop carrying around a focus on high school. That’s what happened to the Littlest Man Band, which is actually a spinoff band from Reel Big Fish, a 90s Ska Band One And A Half Hit Wonder. I have liked Reel Big Fish all through the years, but on a few tracks, as a gag, they let their member Scott Klopfenstein just do a wholly soulful rendition of a totally different style.

And uh, then he went and made his own band that just does those songs and they’re great.

blink-182 - ONE MORE TIME (Official Video)

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Talking about things from the 90s that got better as they matured, Blink 182 have a single this year. Apparently it’s part of an album I have no interest in listening to, but this single, on its own, phew. Just fantastic vibes and a real improvement on their baseline sound. It’s Blink 182, but with just a lot more musical competence and fewer mangled half-rhymes.

I thought after I was done with single paragraph summaries I’d go back through the article and bulk it out with more details, to get up to the word count I wanted. Turns out I’m at one and a half times my word count, oops!

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

#Decemberween2023

[talenlee]

Decemberween ’23 — Dweebovision

We live in an age of external participation in games. Watching people play games is so long-lasting a practice that I literally cannot imagine a place it started. Even the earliest games have examples of people caring about the outcomes of games they weren’t playing, one way or another. The immense video firehose that is the internet and its significantly lowered cost to engage is a way we can take formerly niche games and present them to their audiences.

David Webb is Very Good at Scrabble and word games. In the ecosystem of British Television, he is a serial prize winner, showing up on various TV shows, and winning you know, teapots and houses, and whatever else British TV gives people as rewards for winning on their particular kind of game shows. If you don’t want to watch for reruns of 90s TV shows to see Mr Webb at work, though, you can tune into his Youtube channel, and watch how every few days, he presents a new Scrabble match against high-level players, with extremely detailed, clear step-by-step thinking of him trying to win the game aggressively and how he does it.

Scrabble Grandmaster's Showdown: Expert Insights

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If you’re used to videogame Lets Players, or streamers, you may be used to a lot more trash talk than Webb’s going to give you. He opens things with the same phrase (Scrabble, my opponent/I am on the play, let’s go), and then it’s just thoughtful, slow, methodical play of Scrabble. It’s with an online tool, which handles things like automatically checking terms; you can’t play invalid terms, and the game shows you the points return of a play, or the remaining tiles in the bag. There’s a lot of information and no real ability to bluff (more on that later). And Webb wins a lot of the time, but he also loses often too — when you’re playing against the best, in a game where outcomes can be influenced by random chance, what other options do you have?

What I find the most fun, and often I skip to, is when Webb finishes a match, he gives his seemingly-habitual analysis of the game (huge, huge, win for (me or my opponent)), then pulls up a move analyser. This involves replaying the game step by step, and he reasons through his choices, even honestly indicating where he gave up points and whether or not he thinks that’s a good idea. In this section there’s a shocked sound effect he plays any time he misses a bingo, where he realises there was a way to score a huge pile of points and didn’t get it. And he does! This is a guy who’s very good at Scrabble, he’s in the top rarified levels of this game and wins money playing it, when that’s an option, but he still misses seven letter, eight letter, and nine letter words.

Reassuringly, he also mentions how yeah, he’s really good at Scrabble, but the game is too hard for a human to play perfectly. It’s a very gentle attitude.

Join an Expert on a Journey through the Times Cryptic Crossword

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One of the funniest things on this very sedate, very British channel focusing on language puzzle games, is that Webb has expressed a concern that his audience, his fans, are made up of two separate streams of interests, and they don’t overlap much. See, in addition to playing Scrabble against other high-level Scrabble players on the internet, he also does a weekly solve of the Times Cryptic Crossword.

And like, I know it’s funny to me, but it’s also kind of true. I watch him solving the Cryptic Crossword and find myself getting angrier and angrier at the Cryptic Crossword. That’s meant to be solvable? That’s a thing a person is meant to tease out of understanding? How! How was that even vaguely tenable as an explanation of the term budgerigar?

It’s still good for learning how cryptic crosswords are made up of technical language, that you have to become familiar with to play. It’s not just a matter of looking at a puzzle and seeing what words fit, you have to learn how those clues are trying to justify being a clue for the word they are, and how little they want you to imagine that word.

5 OUTRAGEOUS nonwords that stayed on a Scrabble board

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This is a focus on online play, though. Face to face Scrabble (and other, non-dictionary-checking) Scrabble games involves an extra layer of strategy that involves not just playing words but lying about them. The rules in tournaments run that it’s the job of the opponent to monitor the board to ensure your word are valid. You play a word, and your opponent can challenge it, and if they challenge it, and the challenge is valid, the tiles leave the board and you lose the points. But if they challenge it and the challenge is invalid, they lose a turn. This is to keep people from just challenging too much.

Problem is this means that there’s an actual strategic element to choosing when to bluff, and when to lie, and that’s where this kind of gameplay comes up. I’m sure this feels unpleasant to a certain type of player; the idea that playing your opponent in a game that otherwise feels very asocial and technical is, no doubt, concerning!

I think I talk about Scrabble a fair amount. It’s a really interesting game because while its core principles are pretty stable, its pieces are really dynamic. For example, the scrabble dictionary used to reject a lot of alternate spellings of words. It also used to permit slurs. Now, it includes neopronouns and has opted to exclude words that are predominantly only meaningful as slurs. The pieces change, the core game stays, and top level play isn’t about understanding words as much as it is seeing words in terms of their relationships. There’s anticipation of potential pieces, there’s an awareness of a huge arsenal of possible terms, and there’s even room for bluffing in a game that ostensibly is about the most basic form of technical challenge.

It’s an incredible game!

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

Decemberween ’23 — Drawfee

If you’re passingly aware of being funny on the internet, a discipline started with Seanbaby, perfected by Loading Ready Run and then monetised by College Humour, you might already know about Drawfee. The Dropout network, the continuation of the thing that once was College Humour, has its own spinoffs, and its own subscription service.

I don’t have the subscription service, mind you. I just look at the stuff made by their artist spinoff, the artists who run a channel now known as Drawfee.

Drawfee is an artist channel, where the general gimmick, as repeated, is that they take your dumb suggestions and make even dumber drawings. They don’t, usually, the art they produce is full of character and life and there’s all sorts of ridiculous joy to be seen while these friends draw and talk to one another about drawing. There’s some stuff that talks about general trends in art – like the Octobertober, where they do a bunch of October art challenges, every day grabbing a bunch of random prompts from a different kind of art challenge, whether Cutegirltober or Inktober or Cringetober.

There are typically four standard artists – Karina, Jacob, Nathan and Julia – and they have distinct voices, art styles and interests. You’ll pick up pretty quickly who likes doing what, depending on the subject matter. Nathan has a very low key, chill vibe, Karina is a gremlin cat with a knife, Jacob is Standard Male Art Nerd, and Julia ignores the brief. And… that’s it. That’s the show. They show up, they make a video about them drawing, and that’s half an hour show, every few days. There’s a stream channel as well, for more long form art where they talk to one another, which has the energy of, well, hanging out with other artists.

Pro Artists Redraw Their Old OCs

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There’s a steady beating push towards appreciating art made just for its own sake, and seemingly a counterpoint to that, a willingness to delete art. It’s about making things and not being precious about what you made. Commonly, the refrain is repeated, don’t kill the cringe, kill the part of you that cringes.

They don’t stop there, with the advice, though. They show old material the artists made, art from their childhoods and ‘awkward teenage years,’ and then treat that art as a meaningful source. It’s a form of reparation and recovery I find great, and which makes me feel, personally, just better about being kinda mid artist. It makes me reconsider how I felt about my old art as a child, about how that particular period of my life isn’t a thing to be discarded and escaped, but rather, a ruin I can pick through for more.

That’s really sweet!

Turning Medieval Words Into Art

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Some of the streams, I recommend because they’re funny and relaxing at the same time. The premise of ‘here’s a random-seeming prompt,’ draw what springs to mind is kinda freeing, because it gives you a basic limitation, a challenge to try and overcome while you put pen to paper. What can you draw that actually meets the requirements of what you’ve been asked?

It’s a source of modest frustration to me that sometimes, the artist will just draw whatever Julia wants, and that sometimes means that the artist seems to project an overwhelming ignorance. Pokemon, for example, are not these specialised interest material, Pokemon is one of the largest media franchises in the world, and an artist who can’t at least tell you what Pikachu looks like is weirdly ignorant, right?

But okay, that’s more ‘if you don’t know Pokemon, don’t join a Pokemon drawing challenge.’ That’s whatever. These challenges, though, where the drawing prompt is something nobody can be expected to recognise, they’re less frustrating, because, well… who could do better?

FOUR Artists Draw Characters Using the SAME Description

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Then there’s this kind of thing, where the artists are given the same prompt and everyone tries to come up with a new take on it. These prompts are deliberately kinda wonky, they’re made to have some kind of ambiguity about what they include. The artists aren’t exactly handing their work over to the Art Cops at the end, but the way they all express different ideas with common threads has this beautiful interaction that I find really exciting to watch in action.

And like, you can see the way the different people latched onto different words. What was important, what had to be fixed up in a detail later, what had to be given up on. Is there something in the design that disappeared, and became part of the post-script details?

It’s the kind of experience that makes me think – well, obviously – hey, what would I do with that prompt? How are my ideas related to this kind of thing? What would I focus on? I think the thing that Drawfee most powerfully instils in me is a want to draw. I want to draw more. I get itchy watching it, wanting a pen between my fingertips. I have a notebook, a notepad on hand and I want to doodle in it and, and, I just – it instills in me an urge.

It’s social, of course. It’s this weird kind of parasociality, of watching people draw out loud. Note that these people aren’t bad artists, far from it – they’re all incredibly practiced. You can tell by how often they draw a section of a line and then immediately undo it. They’re making these tiny corrections every step of the way.

I understand one of the enduring complaints of art streamers is the question ‘what brushes are you using,’ and man, I feel that curiosity. I can tell there’s something tangibly, texturally different in the drawing tools they’re using, and I can see it in the way they can give character and deform the shape of a line as they’re doing it. Some of it is absolutely tools. But even with these peak tools, these expensive and hard to make devices, they’re still drawing a line, not liking it, and drawing it again. It’s all just practice, and there’s no need to be amazing at it, if it’s just letting something in you out. It’s okay to just draw!

I wanna draw!

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

Decemberween ’23 — Urban Planning Youtube

Learning things is so cool. You come to understand things about the world around you and the way they operate and maybe this helps you make decisions going forwards about things that interest you. There’s a dark mirror to that though where sometimes you’ll learn about how a thing in your everyday life has been messed up for your whole life and it doesn’t have to be and…

Yeah.

Nobody’s doing anything about it.

Wanna learn about Urban Planning?

Wanna learn about one of many terrible things you interact with every day and how badly handled it is? And how the people who handle it badly want it that way, for bad and selfish reasons, and because they assume nobody knows or cares enough to address them?

Urban planning is something that’s been around you, almost certainly, your whole life. Even if you don’t live in an urban space, and your life and surroundings are rural, you’re still affected by the urban because the urban is where money concentrates and where operations of people get optimised. Rural locations are defined by being not-Urban, and therefore, services and needs for everything are presented in that contrast. Point is… Urban Planning is important.

And it is a subject with a bunch of deliciously nerdy specifics to dig into.

First up here’s Not Just Bikes, a channel from a Canadian expat explaining his life change in the Netherlands. This is a transition from North American car-centric corporate-driven road planning to a place where there’s a deliberate attempt to centre pedestrians.

Now it’s not that this is necessarily an economic cure-all, what with the simple implication that people being active and engaged in their space share community and spend money and that economic activity creates tax revenue and all that. That’s nice, but that’s still buying into a system of the world, the idea of capital as the fundamental way an economy pivots. But it’s important to recognise that just the lived experience of someone who can operate, and the way their life works is just… better?

Kids can hang out with one another, people can do stuff, a trip to the library is a trip to the library and they can just do that… people can spend time in shared spaces and it’s really nice and it’s just pleasant compared to the isolation of people you see in spaces where people have no parks, no places to go, no way to hang out in public.

Then there’s Strong Towns, which in a sort of teasing sense can be seen as the readings that Not Just Bikes is summarising. Strong Towns is the same kind of ideas from a city planner’s perspective, someone with the engineering information. Strong Towns is an American channel, focusing on an American perspective, and for that reason it’s positioned in a very American Political Position. Like, it’s arguing for its position, it’s making a case, and that’s going to involve sometimes, half-statements of cases, or presentation of positions within a particular framework.

Basically, this is urban planning for American Capitalism, too, and it’s done with the idea that you can’t just, say, break Corporations’ backs and demand they fuck off. It’s going to always have that tension to it, where the fundamentally twisted spiral around which the system is built is still going to think in term of taxation and earning and corporate rates.

There’s still a lot of interesting talk about things like speed limits, and road design and the planning that feeds into that. There’s an attempt to generate a political movement here, a base of information and political will that cares about improving city planning and having it so that this is one of many issues that American political powers don’t just assume ‘nobody cares about anyway.’

And where would this kind of setup be without someone who was willing to say something mean? I learned about Alan Fisher because a youtuber from my country, Economics Explained, expressed opinions about how actually, everything ever improving would be bad, actually, real classic ‘well, the results are bad, but the causes are good’ kind of nonsense thinking, and Fisher made fun of it.

This got him into my attention space and y’know it’s nice that there’s someone in this space who isn’t just a complete trains dork, with the permanently gentle demeanour of a person invested in just liking bikes so much. Fisher here is willing to mock. Which, given a lot of the responses to urban planner opinions like ‘maybe it is better if people can walk more’ are often ‘but I like my car, though’ or ‘but taxes, though?’ and it’s worth time throwing some of these dorks’ opinions in the trash.

I’m in Australia, I’m so very far from the actual problem as it’s possible for a person to be while still sharing essentially the same culture. I have public transport in my area, my city is bikeable, and I can walk to the store, the library, and the post office. I do not live in a place that has the same problems these people are trying to address, and I also don’t live in the Netherlands where I can assume my youngest family members will be able to bike to school safely.

But the fundamental issues these channels talk about are ones about who cares about where you live in, and how they express it. They’re about sharing spaces with one another, they’re about community, and they’re about the meaningful ways we can connect to one another in a society that honestly is doing what it can to keep us apart. There’s this term, alienation you’ll hear thrown around in the leftist spaces, and like…

… do you know your neighbours?

Like know them?

What are their names?

I know some of mine. I’ve tried to remember them. I want to make sure I know them.

… but I had to reach out and learn. I had to attend the social meetings, and share some snacks and bake some biscuits and slice.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

Decemberween ’23 — Adventure Game Speedruns

Sometimes a creator has a central hook to what they make videos about and it’s nice and easy to share. OneShortEye makes videos, at the moment, about speedrunning adventure games, a type of game that’s largely seen as not being about speedrunning.

And they’re great.

You can just watch the channel by glancing it any time you want. It’s just a list of videos, and you can pick the ones that interest you. I want to talk about the ones that interest me, specifically. And disclaimer: I like pretty much all these videos. Like, the Laura Bow videos are interesting. The Monkey Island ones are interesting. The Owl Quest one, which is a joke, is interesting.

But if you want a sort of sense of continuity across these things, I want to draw your attention to the near-complete anthology that describes the speedruns of the Kings Quest games.

King's Quest Speedrunning World Record History

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If you’re not familiar, the Kings Quest games is a series of videogames that basically encapsulates, in time, the entirety of my childhood. They’re graphical adventures, and thanks to their place in the game history, they have some unique strangeness, like their relationship to the hardware and software that makes them go. In the case of the early games, from the 1980s, these games are capable of running faster than humans can perceive. As a speed game, then, King Quest I is a question of trying to find out how little you can feather the brake on this game that’s nearly impossible to control.

I wrote about Kings Quest I earlier this year in the context of what ‘history’ really looks like.

Why (almost) No One Runs this Game | King's Quest III Speedrun History

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Then there’s Kings Quest III, which is complicated by the game itself being extremely complex. Where Kings Quest I is at its heart a game where you explore to find a route for success and then find the best combination of those to win, Kings Quest III has this competing rats nest of genuinely random components. Oh, Kings Quest I has some randomness (hi, stair dwarf, you butthole), but Kings Quest III is full of competing randomness, where to give the game a sense of life, characters move around and appear in different places and then

There’s a fourteen minute

dead

stop

wait.

It’s an interesting run particularly because it’s actually pretty beatable, according to the people who play it. It’s the matter of having patience enough to endure the opening part, where you have to roll the dice a lot, then fourteen minutes later, make no mistakes and roll a few more dice.

King's Quest V Speedrun History

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Then when the games graduated from a CGA-compatible simple graphics, and a text parser, we got Kings Quest 5 with its indulgent full-screen videos and voice acting and upwards of twenty megs of compressed material.

The speedrunning history of Kings Quest 5 is the video that got me to tune into this channel at first. The game is difficult and has some real absurd logic built into it, and finding out that at one point you fail because you ate the meat and not the pie, or vice versa, means you’re not getting feedback from the game that makes working these things out easier. Basically, you have to guess, and sometimes it’s easy to imagine that the game might be broken.

Turns out it is!

Just you know, you need to understand it on a really deep level to appreciate how broken and get around its brokenness.

Weird, I wonder why these videos skip the even numbered ones? Oh wait-

King's Quest VI Speedrun History

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And oh boy are we talking about the games and unintended functions of interface elements, check out how in Kings Quest VI the memory handling of a spacebar key can create unintended consequences for routing around the game’s speedrun.

I think this is also worth checking out because Kings Quest VI is a game whose players and speedrunners form something of a cast you’ll see in all the other videos here. There’s even an evolution of things, watching as ‘Top Kek Shrek’ decided to y’know, change his name to TKS and move away from ‘Kek’, a term that has become uh… a red flag?

Why This Speedrun Makes You SING | King's Quest VII Speedrun History

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Then there’s Kings Quest 7, a new type of game with a new type of energy. It’s got this classical visual aesthetic, something that pushes the at the time current SVGA graphics card, and looks like… well, almost Don Bluthy? Almost Disney-ish? Style of animation. And it’s impressive, the needs of this game meant that the game had to get more complicated and the game getting more complicated meant it found new and interesting ways to break.

And well, how much more complicated could these Kings Quest games get?

How Speedrunners Broke the WEIRDEST King's Quest

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Oh hey, they tried to make Tomb Raider.

I’m not joking, Kings Quest: The Mask Of Eternity is an adventure game that wanted to weave in combat systems (which Kings Quest had always kinda eschewed) and free movement. The result was that in a time of 3d animation and level design being done by specialists who could handle the complexities of these systems, the Kings Quest makers had to pivot to trying to do something completely new with no previous grounding and the result is a game that’s…

Uh.

I know I’ve been using the word ‘broken’ liberally here and it’s only because it’s the language of the speedrun space. Realistically speaking, it’s the opposite of broken; these games are resilient. When you give them impossible or ridiculous demands they find a way to work with what you give them. When things in the system of the computer fail or the technology outmodes them, they still find a way to meet the demands you make of them and continue to exist as a game.

But it’s pretty easy looking at Mask of Eternity and feel, very clearly: This is not how they wanted this game to work.

I don’t know if there’s any plan to tackle the other Kings Quest games – two, four, and the more recent episodic adventures. I do think these videos are really interesting treatments of the complexities of these kinds of speedruns, and their historical explanation – talking to the people doing the speedruns and sometimes even the creators of the games! – is a great way to contextualise games that have been seeing play, regularly, for twenty to forty years.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

Decemberween '23 — This Year's ASMRtists

If you’re not familiar with it, ASMR is an abbreviation meaning ‘autonomous sensory meridian response,’ a science sounding name for a reaction that some people get to a range of stimuli. This effect can be caused by a whole host of triggers but at least in the community on Youtube there’s a body of people who engage with it because of its ability to affect relaxation and restful mindsets. If you’re not familiar with what this looks like, it looks like a bunch of people making long videos with a strangely hushed affect.

And I watch and listen to them, to help me relax!

If you are familiar with it, hey, here’s some of the artists I’ve been watching this year, as the ASMR effect shifts around in my head and how I respond to it. One thing that people who don’t experience ASMR might not realise is that you can rely only on the effect being modestly unpredictable. Some stuff may cause it reliably for months and then suddenly, nothing. It pushes me to partake of new things regularly, and to that end, every year, I try to look at what artists are ‘new’ to me that I haven’t mentioned before.

Here then are four artists that I started paying attention to this year:

ASMR "Criminal" Lawyer Gets You Out of Trouble | BETTER CALL SAUL Parody

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I feel like I’ve watched more Amy Kay, like maybe I watched her years ago and I never got around to mentioning her. That’s probably likely, because she has an entire queer-read story about you being some variety of monarch, who started out being referred to as a dude, and then as the story evolved, the woman you’re talking to starts referring to you differently. Then eventually the series splits into two threads, with one half referring to ‘my lord’ and the other ‘my lady.’

Oh and then a cult got involved, it was an interesting story.

Anyway, Amy Kay does a lot of different types of video. Some of it is very mundane, some of it is very fantastic, and you’ll know if it’s the kind you respond to. Also, and this shouldn’t be a thing, but in the ASMR space, there’s a common responsiveness to media trends. When a Harry Potter movie comes out, a lot of people will make Harry Potter themed videos. It’s just a heavy trend, and I try not to hold it too much against the artists who are algorithm-responsive, but I am grateful when I see people fade out on it.

Amy Kay does have some videos about Harry Potter content, but it seems to be a thing of the past for now.

ASMR My Friend Brushes and Plays With My Hair

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Cosmo is an ASMR puppet. Cosmo is not unique as an ASMR puppet, but Cosmo is a puppet that does ASMR. And it’s a big friendly kind of puppet. You’re not going to see stuff that you won’t see from other ASMRtists by the way. Cosmo does roleplays about Recent Events (hi, Barbie Movie Tie In moment) and Cosmo does hand-focused gameplay videos (like Solitaire and Rush Hour), and Cosmo even does draw-along and ramble videos. In every way, Cosmo creates the most typical and normal content any middle of the road ASMRtist can produce, except for the alienation that comes from Cosmo being a puppet.

Alienation is important to me in ASMR. Roleplays don’t want to be realistic because they can’t be. Sometimes there are people who aim for normal, everyday kind of vibes, or expected behaviours, but because ASMR content is fundamentally weird (why are we all whispering?), the closer it gets to normalcy, the less likely it is to land for me. Give me something weird, give me something that recognisably can’t be real, and let me patch the gap in reality myself.

Cosmo’s great, and Cosmo isn’t real, but Cosmo exists and is my friend.

ASMR | making comfort food for a cold day

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I’m really selfconscious about my ASMR habits, especially since a lot of the ASMRtists I follow are very attractive women, some of whom are markedly younger than myself, and that makes me feel… oogy. It does mean that when I find myself responding to an ASMRtist who isn’t a pretty white girl, I try to make sure I mention it, and share their work. In this case, ASMRdido got on my radar through long, patient, whispered explanations of mathematical game concepts – particularly, the Monty Hall problem.

The other thing he does that I find useful for study is long (long) videos of playing a softly sounded, wood-and-velvet game called Close the Box. Close the Box is a great solo game because it underscores how little pieces you need to make a game out of something and still make it engaging.

ASMR-The Vintage Ice Cream Parlor Role Play🍨(Spooky Creations)

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And finally, Lloyd’s ASMR is a channel that’s… I think deliberately weird. Lloyd really turns up the ambient sound so if you don’t like the SHHHHH of an empty room, you might not like these. They’re slow, deliberate videos, and usually you can see the structure being something Lloyd has props for, reiterated in a new form. Door to door salesman, visiting a store, visiting an old style store. It’s a bit like a comprehensive library in that if you like one thing you can probably find ten or twenty versions of the same thing, even if they don’t make sense. Like you don’t get door to door bakery salespeople.

Lloyd is someone I like because of his gentle demeanour and I like the way that I, forgive me, don’t have to pay much attention. There’s not going to be a really funny joke or something I need to respond to, the way that (say) survey question videos invite me to. I know what I’m getting and I know there’s a reasonably large quantity of it, but also that it’s not about to impress me. It’s just sweet background noise and I’m not going to need to be afraid of something shocking or funny happening.

There! Here’s some stuff I’ve been listening to this year and I think makes my ability to focus and study better.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

Decemberween '23 — Decay!

There’s a very real consequence to being my friend, in that I will bring you terrible things to point and laugh at, unless you make it clear I shouldn’t.

Twitter has been a strange part of my life, in that it is simply put, a bad space and the actual reach and improvement it gave my life, while tangible, is hard to quantify versus the effort it took. I try to think of it less as a product I spent my labor on and more a play space I used, and try to ignore the ways in which whatever chemistry drove that place also absolutely scrubbed layers off me in the process of its operation. But Twitter is something I think of as a site I used, and my account only persists so when someone inevitably links me something because they’re not off the site either.

Anyway, one of the friends I made on Twitter was Decay, and Decay is great.

I don’t really know what Decay ‘is’, like if you ask Decay what their title is, what job they have, they wouldn’t give you a ‘oh I’m a software engineer’ or something. In fact, I think Decay starts with ‘an anarchist’ and then moves on to refer to their job as ‘computer toucher.’ But also sometimes I’ll see them show up like ‘hey, sorry I went quiet for a month, I was building a stage that we set on fire’ or something like that.

Decay is one of those many people who I think of as ‘my cooler friend.’ And I maintain this relationship by periodically dropping into discord a link to something the dumbest person on earth said today, with the same energy of a roommate finding something terrible in the back of the fridge that neither of us remembered putting there, and insisting, ‘oh, you gotta smell this.’

I don’t do this with most of my friends. That’s not how I deal with Doc, who I show cool movie clips and funny things I find about guns in anime. That’s not how I deal with Fox who I sent video of pandas falling over. It’s not how I deal with Karen, who I send scriptural verses for our shared Bible study group. But Decay? Nope, Decay is the kind of cultural raccoon who loves when I can bring them a moment of Alex Jones faceplanting on air and leaving fifteen seconds of dead air when an academic expert refuses to play along with his lies.

Part of it is also just a matter of a common internet age. Decay and I probably started on the internet about the same time, but their original experiences were more social and a bit less focused on, y’know, #Christian-Chat-Canberra. We’re both veterans of the USENET newsgroups, we’re both familiar with the Forum Days of the internet, and yes, this is to a degree ‘two old people on a couch mad about a thing on the TV’ nonsense. But it means that there’s someone I can talk to, who I can bring opinions to and who I know doesn’t need me to explain to them how computers worked in, say, 2002.

Look, Decay is one of the most fluent speakers of Senior Cardgage I know.

Decay knows more than I do about computers and math and anarchism and a lot more about political theory and the realities on the ground of American life and politics. And you need people like this that you can talk to, you need to be able to talk to in a private space where if you say something unhinged, a friend can say ‘hey, that’s unhinged, here’s what you’re missing.’ And that’s important to me, because even if my emotional reaction to something is real and exists and feels like it matters, often I’m basing it on something I don’t truly understand.

But okay, I think Decay is great. I love and am proud of them. I am grateful they’re my friend. I trust them to kick me in the teeth if I’m being an asshole to people. But what does that mean aside from the general taunting from me of haha look at this I have a friend and I have put effort into maintaining a relationship and sometimes that involves reaching out to start a conversation, nyeh.

This is Decemberween, though. This is a chance for me to celebrate people who I love and why and not necessarily do it because of the hash tag content. But if you are interested in things like complex math, Decay has written some EffortChosts about those, and a useful guide to how hat size relates to danger in Touhou, which you can see on Cohost, if that’s a platform you use. They also have a website of their own where they’ve produced some writing about topics like The Brown M&Ms situation from the Van Halen tour.

Decay is also just an invaluable sounding board for me making sure I can explain my academic work to a person who isn’t about to quote Foucault in common conversation unless they have to. Just from our conversations, I have such gems as:

“Hon hon hon, je suis so raciste zat i fuck up my own thesis” where Decay had crunched through Caillois and found the part where Caillois in a book explicitly argued for European colonialism but then also universal liberation in the name of global communism.

“in anino ths tieh,” where we tried to get an AI image generator to do anything with the phrase ‘anarchist meme.’

“Haha dude don’t bogart the suicide juice,” where we found the story of someone taste-testing a friend’s end-of-life drugs at an assisted suicide.

“system clocks are bloatware,” where Decay explains to me just how some people relate to their operating systems

“Verdi’s Pitch,” where a major figure in right-wing politics espouses the idea that literally all music is wrong.

Multiple times when I approach with a math problem that seems to be the halting problem. Or the time I asked a question about combinatorics that resulted in us winding up in the territory of Open Problems in Cryptography.

Decay rules! Decay is cool and funny and great! And thanks to Decay, this year, I learned about LIGMA!

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

Decemberween 2023 — Nixie IV

Hey, you know Nixie right? I talk about her about once a year, it seems. You know, the one who likes planes. The one who likes guns. The one who watches anime and recommends I check some out. The one who contributed to my Air America article, the one who contributed to the Nicolas Cage Month Con Air article, and the one who has gotten an article multiple Decemberweens in a row now.

It’s not just because I get to use pictures from Ascendance of a Bookworm because they remind me of her.

Anyway, this year, Nixie went to China and became a pirate.

It’s been a year of the social media collapse. Twitter, the place where Nixie and I first found each other, has gone from being a sort of expected ongoing failure everyone participated in to a website that literally pays Nazis for pissing people off, and I was one of those lucky enough to be in a position to easily rip off that particular bandage and extract myself from the place. As far as I know, Nixie hasn’t.

I don’t know.

Nixie has two frontends for making things on the internet, as far as I understand it. She produces stuff on Patreon, and she makes long, long, long threads on twitter. Archiving that twitter is itself a fundamentally challenge thing because like, it’s a thing that needs a specific skill to derive it and another skill to know how to store it for access. And even then you’re not going to rely on people paying attention to what you’re saying, right? The thing Twitter had going for it was that it was a subscription service to Me that everyone could run, which meant that while you may be mixing up a potpourri of whatever immediate concerns or interests you had, the whole space was still a place you could put stuff and that stuff was in a place where other people willingly and openly checked on the regular.

Losing that is a real problem, and it means that I can’t readily point you to just ‘hey, here’s what Nixie’s been up to this year.’ I don’t have it in me to put that all together and I do run a blog where I can put together a bunch of information. Hell, you’re four hundred odd words into this post and it’s just all about how as awful as it is to admit it, I owe Twitter for introducing me to Nixie, and even if I don’t need it to talk to her now, I know that its loss creates a void for Nixie and it’s one she hasn’t yet done anything to address.

I can’t fix that.

I can’t apologise for that, either. I don’t feel bad about using Twitter when I did because, like, it got Nixie into my life and Nixie is a wonderful delight. Even though I know before the point where Twitter sucked complete shit, it still sucked pretty bad and was responsible for a lot of bad things. None of those things are in my grasp.

So I’m just gunna tell you a story.

I’m at the bus stop. It’s a grocery day. I’ve mapped my time properly, but it’s the weekend for me, a Saturday morning. DST hasn’t kicked in yet here or there. I know I’m shaving times a little here. I had to check a few more stores than I normally would and that was frustrating. I mean, it’s the bus, I know the bus is going to happen on its own timing, and this being a weekend, it might be a little late. But that little bit late can create elasticity; there are just fewer buses on the weekend, and that means if something holds one up a bit, then it might take ages for it to catch up.

I could walk home.

It’s not that far.

But if I start on walking home, and I’m not right about that, and this trolley slows me down then I’m going to make the wrong choice and how much am I overly worried about what I’m doing? Why am I so worried about this?

Because I don’t want to miss her recital.

Nixie is getting ready to perform, in a choir, in front of dozens of people. It’s not her first. It’s not going to be her last – at this point, Nixie and I know full well that she wants to do more of this. She loves the recitals, she loves choir, even considering the complications and the challenges getting to go.

And so.

The bus arrives.

I get home in time.

I start the livestream so I can watch my friend performing with her choir, songs I don’t know from cultures I don’t understand and expressing ideas I can’t tell. I have to set up software to record the video, so I can capture her moments. I watch her file into place, I look for her in the big crowd of people, and zoom in and realise what I’m doing. Like, I didn’t grow up in a place with recitals per se. There were one of two but they were like the really privileged kids of architects or something like that in the church. They’d set up basically a unique event for their kid who’d play some piano and we’d all clap and I have no idea why I was there. But that was also the family that could afford a camcorder, and where I could see someone proud of someone they loved, reaching out and trying to make sure that they were there for this moment, they were there to encode and preserve this memory.

Nixie has spent this year learning Chinese, getting another name (ask her about her Chinese name, it’s sick as hell), and learning to sail. She has escaped the internet we know to Touch Grass, and in so doing she has learned more, seen more, and embraced more. She told me about how great the food was in China, about how the exercise excited her, and about how the Great Wall smells. I am not there but I am present, because Nixie has taken her memories, and her stories, and spread them before me to share.

I couldn’t be more proud of her and I want to be there to help encode more and more of those memories.

Sigh. SIGH. GRUMBLE even. Hey, I wrote about how it’s hard to link Nixie’s work? Well, she did that after I wrote this article so here’s a link and anything else that makes no sense in the above is because of that.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

Decemberween '23 — Shelf!

It’s funny to me how my skill for making the mundane into the histrionic, one of the only skills I really acquired in church, is something that I always want to employ in the benefit of showing off how great my friends are. I want to raise the rafters and woo the crowd and sway the senses as I tell you, as I extol to you, as I exhort you, about how the good and wellbeing of my social circle or even just people I think deserve attention but are too shy go get it for themselves, are great things, and how my friends, these people around me deserve your attention and respect and praise and at the very least, a monument here, in this year, to show that I know they matter to me and that they are so important to my own heart and soul that it stymies me. That whole skillset jerks to a halt when I have to get too sincere about something I love. Or in this case, someone I love.

I know I’ve mentioned Shelf before. I’ve mentioned Shelf when talking about cancer and I’ve talked about Shelf when learning about failed medications and I’ve talked about Shelf when sitting late in the dark, afraid for my friend who is without power in the storms that make Canada colder than Mars. Shelf is almost a regular fixture at this point, you could probably go through and map a bunch of Shelf content on my blog.

But I couldn’t not talk about Shelf this year. I wrote down the people I wanted to talk about, the way my heart sings thinking about the things and people and ideas that have made this year better, and here, closest to Christmas, I just… couldn’t not talk about Shelf.

How do I make a thousand words about Shelf? I don’t want to tell you Shelf’s story this year. I guess I could mention that this year, Shelf and I both played Multiversus for an hour or two, that’s a historical moment we shared. We watched all of Gravity Falls together. We told stories, we hung out, we swapped recipes, we discussed how to manage our diets best at the ages we’re at. But this isn’t a friendship where like so many of them, I’m standing next to someone of dizzying radiance, someone who creates amazing, beautiful things and I want you to see it.

Don’t get me wrong, Shelf makes cool things and it’s always a delight to me to see people reacting to those things, but it’s not like that’s important to us.

There is an urge, a challenge with this kind of post, especially in Decemberween, to use this space to foreground friends making things, but also, to give you a story. To give you some kind of narrative, some kind of complicated and carefully constructed sequence of events from this year as if every day with everyone I deal with is just oozing with inspiration, as if that there is some way in which my friends are magical moments that I can hold caught in time, press flat, and then email to you.

It’s not.

Shelf is just great and amazing and I love being Shelf’s friend.

I guess the thing I want to harp on, in this year of crumbling social media spaces, where the recurrent message of these articles is how important it is to hold onto people, that Shelf is someone I wronged, and who came back and gave me another chance. Shelf is someone I think I speak to almost every day now, and I love those conversations. I love the time I spend. Inasmuch as friendship can be measured, from both when it started and how much it matters, Shelf is one of my best friends.

And this is a friendship that is not in fact, about grand sweeping romantic gestures. It’s got all sorts of components you can just have in a friendship, if you ask for them. We strive to communicate clearly, across the disambiguation from text media and also just when one of us says something the other doesn’t understand. There are times when one of us doesn’t have the time or energy to do anything and says so and the other says something to the effect of ‘that’s cool, I’ll be here.’

I know in my own version of the story, there are other details. Other parts of my life and parts of Shelf’s life and the ways we’ve interacted that taught me lessons. Mostly how to respect people, to think about and care about friendships, and just being able and willing to say sorry.

But that – that important lesson? That’s… like, years ago at this point. There’s no big dramatic moment this year. There’s no ‘oh, thank goodness Shelf was in my life this year because otherwise this event on this day would do differently.’

There’s just: Thank goodness Shelf was in my life this year, because every day I talk to Shelf is a better day than the ones where I don’t get to talk to Shelf. Thank goodness my friend cares about my life and thank goodness I have been gifted the chance to care about theirs.

I love my friends. I love that I have gotten better at loving my friends. I love that my friends let me love them and let me love the things they share with me, and I love every time I am given a boundary, where every time I am told ‘hey, that’s too far,’ I am being told ‘I want you in my life, here is how we can keep each other.’

Shelf is amazing, Shelf is great, and you can’t like, go download a Shelf. A relationship, a friendship like this, a deep and abiding love and care is something you have to grow. But it’s there, waiting for you, when you close the social media website you hate or when you finally open the messaging app and send someone ‘hi’ and that’s okay. And you might heck up and not be a great friend. But you learn how to be a better friend through practice.

Anyway, happy Boxing day.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!

[talenlee]

Decemberween '23 — Jason!

I think about these friend posts from time to time which runs the risk of making my really cool friends who are constantly doing things and making stuff in the day to day, like, more likely to get attention. And that’s not a terrible thing, after all, this is still the attention economy or whatever, by posting about my friend Amber, I might direct attention to her online presence and her cool cosplays, or if I post about my friend Nixie I might get people looking at her Patreon, all that kinda thing.

I wanna talk, today, this close to Christmas, though, about a friend who doesn’t really put himself out there on the internet, and who isn’t here to ‘sell’ himself. Sure, we’ve done that kinda thing, we’ve all had fun doing things… but

like

Some friends I want to talk about, and who I think about, because they’re my friends and I love them and that’s really cool and really good. Because my friends are great.

You probably don’t know Jason. Jason’s a friend of mine, from in America. Jason draws, Jason plays videogames, Jason likes Star Wars a lot (and that’s been a source of some tension, I suspect). Jason likes Star Trek – really, that’s why I’ve been watching Star Trek at all, as one after another, these series have been made part of my experience and I get to set aside a space of ignorance. Even now, we watch Lower Decks together, which is my favourite piece of Star Trek media.

It’s real funny watching people complain that Lower Decks relies on in-group references for its humour because like, I think those people may have just pickled their brains with those references. I like it a lot and I don’t know if anything in the show is old. I just ask Jason when we’re done watching the episodes.

Oh, I’ve been rereading the Ranma 1/2 manga? And that’s partly because we’ve been hanging around on the Ranma 1/2 subreddit and talking about it. Which is extra weird because that’s how we met, back when I was a kid and Jason was also a kid but the kind of kid who would go ‘I’m not a kid, huff.’ But still, the kind of person we’d look at now and both go: Well, we were kids.

Anyway.

Hey, remember how I mentioned I’ve been trying to draw more? You might have seen it, seen me posting art of just random things that strike my fancy. That’s partly because drawing is something I used to do a lot and I liked it, and part of why I drew so much was because it was something I shared with Jason. Now, don’t get me wrong, Jason is way, way better than I am, and there was a time when I even felt discouraged from drawing because Fox and Jason were both just better than me. Why have my own skills brought to bear when other people were just doing it better?

But Jason, in the early days, was someone I drew with, because I wanted to draw things and wanted to share them with him and, that encouragement came with its own joy. Restarting drawing like I have lately, I haven’t quite gotten back to where I was, but I mean, back then I was drawing strictly because I wanted to draw cool characters with huge boobs or amazing butts or both. There’s time to just enjoy the drawing, as I draw things more and more that I like. I owe that to Jason, Jason is someone who made me remember how much I just like drawing.

And we play City of Heroes! In fact, Jason is the person who got me into City of Heroes. This game that at this point has been part of my life or influential in my life, for twenty years, is a game that I ultimately only started because my friend recommended it, and said hey, we can play together! I write about City of Heroes and I use it to make OCs and I love this game and its universe and it informs a lot of how I think about videogames and about how I think about heroes in superhero stories, and I owe it all to my friend.

Jason is one of the earliest people I drew with when I was a child. Like when I was sixteen, I think, I reached out to a stranger, on the internet, who had a shared interest with me, and that became a way to talk about it, and honestly, it shaped my days. It shaped a lot of my internet habits too. I remember from back then a story about ‘who messages first’ and what that represented. This is really early internet days for me, when a .txt file someone put in their signature on Usenet was imparted wisdom from an older, more serious generation than I had ever encountered. I remember at the time it lodged in my brain that if you message the other person all the time, you want to talk to them more than they want to talk to me.

And anyway, years on, I have learned: That’s stupid.

This year has been a rough one full of people talking about their social networks dissolving. Tumblr is full of ‘jokes’ about how people who have never had a conversation are friends, are mutuals, are beloved and yeah like I get it, I get that human relationships are fluid and complex and take a variety of forms. But you should reach out. You need to put work into those friendships.

If you find yourself unwilling to do that… like, that’s okay? Maybe that’s the emotional level you want that friendship at. That’s okay.

But I have this friendship that has lasted longer than my students have been alive, and part of that is reaching out, and holding on.The platforms you spend time on don’t get to dictate how you should act. You can reach out! You can say hi! You can be nice and friendly!

One of my best friendships started that way.

Check it out on PRESS.exe to see it with images and links!