#OP & ED Single

[moeblob]

Would you believe me if I said I rewatched s1 of a silly isekai anime but refuse to watch s2? (it's true btw, you should believe it, I watched s1 three times now)

[emil1863]

Sabo

[batsarebetterthanpeople]

Ok since I'm trans girl Anne Bonny posting: the concept of a femme trans woman on a boat full of dudes and one butch is funny to me. There's a whole host of comical scenarios that could result from transitioning in such an environment. Imagine going dress "shopping" for the first time as a trans woman and the person you're mopping with is Calico Jack.

[flying-cat]

MASAYUME CHASING CHASING KOERO MOTTO JIBUN SHIJOU SAIKOU NO IMA WO CHASING CHASING SOU EGAITA JIBUN NI NATTE MOYASE MUNE NO HI WOOOOOOO

[killjoy-prince]

That scientist should not be 18 years old are you kidding me???

[homie-koyomi]

I genuinely think Kimi no Shiranai Monogatari may be my favorite song of all time. No matter how many times I listen to it it makes me cry.

[bazoonga-bazinga]

this playlist is going to singlehandedly ruin my spotify wrapped....

[lunimy]

why do so many of mha’s openings suck so bad

[asherasgayagenda]

why do people main tag their 30 posts of live reactions to lc.... neg

[languri]

Why do I attract weirdos?

[ashxketchum]

If I fall off the face of earth in the coming weeks, know that the whole reason I begged my dad to let me use the internet when I was 8 was so that I know more about Ash and Pikachu.

[burins]

Other Appalachias: A Booklist

As requested, the anti-Hillbilly Elegy booklist, plus annotations! When possible I tried to include books that were by Appalachians and got at lesser-known aspects of Appalachian life and identity, especially modern Appalachian life. When creating the original list I was also limited by books that were in the library network I work at, which is a) a public library and b) not actually located in Appalachia. Y’all get some bonus titles that weren’t in my library - hopefully they’ll be in yours.

A note: I have not read every single book on this list! This is the nature of creating booklists as a librarian. I trust the sources I used to find them, but if there’s something on here that you’re like “oh I read this and it sucks actually,” let me know. And if there’s a particular aspect you’d like more books on, also let me know!

General

Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy (Anthony Harkins and Meredith McCarroll, eds)

What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia by Elizabeth Catte

If you read any two books on this list (especially if you aren’t from Appalachia!) make it these two. The first one is a collection of essays and photographs, the second by a single author, but both are fantastic for the basics of “hey was your entire idea of a huge stretch of the US defined by Deliverance and some NYT op-eds? perhaps it should not be” 

Appalachian Fall: Dispatches from Coal Country on What's Ailing America by Jeff Young

Leans a little more “plight of the white working class” than I absolutely love, but this talks a lot about contemporary workers’ rights and local activism in Appalachia and is a good counter to Vance’s narrative of “everybody sits on their ass all the time.”

Belonging: A Culture of Place by bell hooks

Hey did you know bell hooks was from Kentucky? bell hooks was from Kentucky! As always her writing is deeply insightful about who is allowed to claim a place and what it means to have roots. 

Rx Appalachia: Stories of Treatment and Survival in Rural Kentucky by Lesly-Marie Buer 

The opioid crisis has defined the region (much as alcoholism came to during Prohibition); unlike a lot of writing on the topic, this lets people tell their own stories. 

Race and Sexuality

Another Appalachia: Coming Up Queer and Indian in a Mountain Place by Neema Avashia

Excellent counter to the narrative of Appalachia as unrelentingly white, and also painfully good writing on what happens when the folks you grew up counting on let you down. 

Loving Mountains, Loving Men: Memoirs of a Gay Appalachian by Jeff Mann

This 2005 memoir got a re-release in 2023, and thank god because it makes me cry. Really beautiful writing on what it means to come back to a place and carve out a space for yourself.

Y'all Means All: The Emerging Voices Queering Appalachia (Z. Zane McNeill, ed.) 

Another essay collection! There will be more; I like an essay collection for getting a sense of a subject beyond a single voice. Touches on everything from disability to race to Mothman. 

Deviant Hollers: Queering Appalachian Ecologies for a Sustainable Future, Zane McNeill and Rebecca Scott, eds. 

This wide-ranging collection of essays wasn’t on the original list because it’s pretty hard to come by (academic queer theory is not a bastion of your average public library collection.) Just based on the table of contents I am going to try and get my hands on a copy ASAP. 

Gone Home: Race and Roots through Appalachia by Karida L. Brown

Focuses specifically on Harlan County, Kentucky, drawing on a ton of oral history interviews of Black residents to talk about the Great Migration, Blackness in Appalachia, and identity formation in the region and beyond.

Beginning Again: Stories of Movement and Migration in Appalachia, Katrina M. Powell, ed. 

This just came out in June! In a place so often defined by how many generations of your family have lived there, it’s worth considering who gets removed from that story.  

Their Determination to Remain: A Cherokee Community's Resistance to the Trail of Tears in North Carolina by Lance Greene

The history of Appalachia is pretty obviously incomplete without talking about the policies of Indian Removal. Greene tackles a tangled story of assimilation and cultural survival. 

Even As We Breathe by Annette Saunooke Clapsaddle

The only fiction book on this list, but the main goal of the list was to let Appalachia speak for itself. Clapsaddle is a member of the Eastern band of Cherokee; the novel, set in western NC during the 1940s, talks about (in)justice, assimilation, and belonging. 

History, Labor, and Environment

You can’t talk about the history of Appalachia without talking about coal, and you can’t talk about coal without talking about labor, and you also can’t talk about coal without talking about the environment. 

Ramp Hollow: The Ordeal of Appalachia by Steven Stoll 

An economic/environmental overview of Appalachia covering the shift from homesteading to resource extraction. To understand what’s happening economically in 2024 you need to understand what happened economically in 1750-1850, and this gives a general and fairly accessible throughline. 

The Battle of Blair Mountain: The Story of America's Largest Labor Uprising by Robert Shogan

An older book on the most famous event of the West Virginia Mine Wars, but is a very readable narrative that also touches on Blair Mountain’s wider context.  

Written in Blood: Courage and Corruption in the Appalachian War of Extraction, Wess Harris, ed. 

A much more in-depth look at specific aspects of the Mine Wars and labor history, rather than a general overview, but worth reading for its coverage of more recent events (it didn’t end with Blair!)

To Live Here, You Have to Fight: How Women Led Appalachian Movements for Social Justice by Jessica Wilkerson

Focusing on the 60s-70s and LBJ’s War on Poverty, a good discussion of historical grassroots organizing.

Digging Our Own Graves: Coal Miners & the Struggle Over Black Lung Disease by Barbara Allen Smith

Seminal text! First published in 1987, with an updated edition released in 2020. 

Soul Full of Coal Dust: A Fight for Breath and Justice in Appalachia by Chris Hamby

After being mad about black lung in the 80s, you can also be mad about black lung today, because it didn’t go anywhere. 

Desperate: An Epic Battle for Clean Water and Justice in Appalachia by Kris Maher

Very “legal thriller focused on one guy,” but extremely readable. A great book to get your liberal mom fired up.  

Mountains Piled upon Mountains: Appalachian Nature Writing in the Anthropocene, Jessica Cory, ed.

This list has been almost entirely nonfiction, so here is some lovely prose about what folks love about the region with both literary nonfiction, fiction, and poetry. It’s got a wide geographic focus to boot. 

Food and Culture

Appalachia on the Table: Representing Mountain Food and People by Erica Adams Locklear

Great deconstruction of how we talk about mountain food and culture (scandal! Sometimes great-grandmas used Bisquick.) Will make you hungry and also question what authenticity means and where your family recipes actually come from. 

Making Our Future: Visionary Folklore and Everyday Culture in Appalachia by Emily Hilliard

West Virginia state folklorist Emily Hilliard talks about pro wrestling, Fallout 76, songwriting, and coal camps. Appalachia in the 21st century. 

(Finally, a shoutout to the various bookstores whose lists I used as jumping-off points, especially Appalachian Mountain Books, City Lights Bookstore, Firestorm Books, and the Museum of the Cherokee People.)

[probablyasocialecologist]

Ecuadorians voted overwhelmingly on Sunday to reject oil drilling in a section of Yasuní National Park, the most biodiverse area of the imperiled Amazon rainforest. Nearly 60% of Ecuadorian voters backed a binding referendum opposing oil exploration in Block 43 of the national park, which is home to uncontacted Indigenous tribes as well as hundreds of bird species and more than 1,000 tree species.

[...]

Sunday's vote makes Ecuador the first country to restrict fossil fuel extraction through the citizen referendum process, according to Nemonte Nenquimo, a Waorani leader. "Yasuní, an area of one million hectares, is one of the most biodiverse places on Earth," Nenquimo wrote in a recent op-ed for The Guardian. "There are more tree species in a single hectare of Yasuní than across Canada and the United States combined. Yasuní is also the home of the Tagaeri and Taromenane communities: the last two Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation in Ecuador." "Can you imagine the immense size of one million hectares?" Nenquimo added. "The recent fires in Quebec burned a million hectares of forest. And so the oil industry hopes to burn Yasuní. It has already begun in fact, with the Ishpingo-Tambococha-Tiputini (ITT) oil project on the eastern edge of the park."

[miabucky]

i want so much minutiae about bucky as the winter soldier… i want all of those classified files to be real so i can read them. i wanna know every single thing they documented… how long it took to break him and how long to put him together, how they trained him, how they punished him, what they experimented on him, how they attached the arm, how sensitive it was, what they fed him, how they kept him clean, how much he was allowed to speak, how many missions did he actually have, how much would he remember between missions, how many languages he knew and how he learned them, how much was he even aware of while he was doing it, did he even know he was human or did he think he was something else, how the soviets treated him compared to the americans, how many handlers he had, which one was his favourite, did he have favourites. did he like things and just know not to mention it or was he unable to even access whether he liked or didn’t like something.

i want fake journalism about this. i want medical journals about prosthetics and philosophical debates about agency and history books needing to be revised. whistleblowers exposing decades-old corruption in europe and investigative documentaries exposing the truth about the winter soldier and horror thrillers depicting a young soldier being captured and brainwashed. warring op-eds calling him a monster and a traitor vs those calling him a hero and a tragedy, and bucky thinking he’s probably all of the above. strange stories told by retired military officials from china and civilians from cuba, about a blue-eyed man who spoke their languages perfectly, who didn’t know how to smile but who gave scraps of food to stray dogs. stories their families had chalked up to trauma or old age or exaggeration, that when all pieced together create a very different picture of the man the media was calling a terrorist.

like bucky deserves privacy but the world would not give it to him. the winter soldier being a headline and an academic issue and a medical wonder and a folk tale and a ghost story and then maybe, eventually, a person.

[max1461]

Calling it now: we're in a cultural moment where therapy speak and "self care" ideology is pretty hegemonic—including in the dating scene and the corporate world—and when this cultural moment passes the backlash is going to be swift and ruthless. And there will be breathless op-eds by "real" therapists bemoaning the way their field had been bastardized and how this lead the public to turn on them. And I will not feel a shred of sympathy for a single one.

[empty-movement]

It's May, 1997. Revolutionary Girl Utena is Upon Us.

You are an Utena addict. You watch every episode the day it airs. You've raided your local Japanese anime store. And guess what? THE NEW ISSUES SURE ARE EASY TO FIND WITH OUR GIRLIES ON THE COVERS:

(It's a little lame that Animedia didn't put them on the cover, but they did give us this spread, thanks to @hotwaterandmilk! https://hotwaterandmilk.tumblr.com/post/71621932377

Let's see what we've got!!!

Newtype's beautiful six page spread includes an interview with Saito and Ikuhara that has been translated by Tuxedo Unmasked! I also scan, as always, the cover, ToC, episode summaries, ratings, and any adverts or fanart I find. Did you know the OP/ED singles drop this month??? Lucky for you you can grab them here. ;)

But the wealth? That's in Animage's May 1997 Issue, which not only have we scanned....we've translated!!! Spring '97's Revolutionary Announcement!! That's right it's MASSIVE. But you already clicked read more. Here's your chance. :)

You're all caught up on the newest information, and you are ready for the next episode!!! (I know I keep saying May, but shut up) LET'S WATCH EPISODE 5, AIRING TODAY, APRIL 30, 1997

The Sunlit Garden ~ Finale