#and all i could say was dude i gotta get a masters degree from goblins university in paris

[crabsdaily]

the other day my friends and I were talking about grad school, and I said that I honestly hadn’t considered doing it at all

so out of curiosity we started looking into schools that offer masters degrees in animation and we found one in france called Gobelins (pronounced sorta like go-beh-lay? i dont know how to phonetically write things), however I didnt realize it was french and immediately yelled out “GOBLINS UNIVERSITY?????” upon seeing it

anyways, guess I gotta get a masters at goblins university

[sayitaintdoe]

grade8.

The thing I remember most about the eighth grade is white lights.  Doctors flashing them from one eye to the other, them obnoxiously beaming down at me from overhead in that godawful fluorescent way that only hospitals can master, the way everything behind my eyelids just sort of burst like fireworks before I hit the ground.  It’s a lot of white lights.  It’s the most present thing that comes to mind.

When I wake up in the hospital bed, my back hurts and my stomach feels violently angry – ripped up and raw and bearing its teeth.  I see my mom sitting by my bedside, flipping through a copy of People magazine and gnawing on her thumbnail in a way that’s very reminiscent of the way I do it.  I try to open my mouth, but I’m afraid that words won’t be able to come out.  The idea of speaking, of doing much of anything more than shifting my eyes one way or another, makes me ache.

She looks like she hasn’t slept in a few days, eyes dark under the rims and hair sticking out on  the sides, cheeks gaunt and lips chapped.  She looks absolutely nothing like the Glamazon she typically tries to put forth to the world, and for that, I feel responsible.  And yet, at the same time, I feel like a goblin for feeling honored that she would choose sitting by my bed over putting her face on.

“Mom?”

Her magazine falls, head raising and a soft, “Oh, mija,” slipping from her mouth as she nearly crawls out of her chair to get to me, to get her warm hands on my cheeks.  “Mija, you scared me,” she coos to my forehead, pressing her lips where she was just speaking.  I can feel her tears dampening my baby hairs, and I close my eyes and try not to start crying with her.  “How could you do something like this?”

By something like this, she means “stop eating,” and in my defense, it’s not like I did it on purpose.  If I wanted to be the asshole that I typically am, I could throw back at her that it only really started when her boyfriend of the season started reaching for my hand under the dinner table and making low comments on how “I’d sure grown up” over Christmas break.  I don’t say any of that, though.  Instead, I just shake my head back at her and breathe in a shaky breath, and I tell her, “I’m sorry,” because I am.

“They told me they’re going to…” Mom stops for a moment, putting herself together and pulling away.  I immediately feel our usual distance ever-so-slightly creeping its way back home.  “We have to put you in… in a treatment program, Dorinda.”

My mother is the only person that calls me Dorinda.  She is the only person who calls my brother, Sol, Solomon.  She claims that those are the names she gave us – for, you know, whatever reason – and that gives her the right to use them until she’s dead and buried.  I guess she’s technically right, but it doesn’t make me feel like any less of a ninety-year-old abuela.

“Can I have some ice?” I realize this isn’t the response she wants out of me by the way her eyebrow quirks at a nearly ninety-degree angle.

“You can have some food,” she replies curtly.  “Do you remember food?”

I do, as a matter of fact, but the idea of eating any is currently making my stomach churn all over again.  I look down at the sorry excuse for a blanket that’s draped over me, pushing myself up enough that I can sit.  “I’m not—”

“—I’m getting you food,” and she says it in a way that I know that I don’t get a rebuttal.  She grabs her purse from where it’s hanging over the back of her chair.  She looks grimly around the hospital room before looking almost pitifully back at me.  “Sorry excuse for a hospital.  Nobody’s even come to check in on you since noon.”  She reaches into the pocket of her purse, and when her hand returns, I see my enV staring back at me.  She hands it to me and I have to resist the urge to immediately flip it open.  “Don’t spend too much time on it.  You need you’re rest.”

She says this like I haven’t been in a borderline-coma for who knows how many days at this point.  I swallow down the cotton balls in my throat and nod back at her, waiting for her to retreat from the room with the click-clack of her heels on the tile floor before I’m flipping the phone open and staring at the notification staring back at me on the screen: NEW TEXT MESSAGES.

I don’t bother reading them.  If I see texts from my friends Teddy and Joy, I’ll just feel momentary guilt for not calling them first.  I immediately go to my speed dial, hitting the number two and waiting all of one and a half rings before my best friend’s familiar, cracking voice is filling my ears and sending tears springing to my eyes.

“Doe, holy crap, thank god.”  Preston doesn’t give me a chance to get a word in.  “I’m leaving for the hospital right now,” I hear his front door opening and shutting, the familiar scraping sound of him pulling his bike away from his front porch.  “I’m coming, okay?”

-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-/-

“I’m not going to break if you get closer, you know,” I say pointedly, because Preston Raimi is standing all the way across my room, pacing back and forth with his too long legs.

His head of curls is messier than normal – which is saying something – and I can tell that he’s trying to keep from shaking.  When he burst through the door four minutes ago, the first word out of his mouth was a nervous “hey,” and then he started laughing.  He tends to do that when he’s nervous or when he’s scared or when he doesn’t know how else to react.

“Not taking my chances,” he responds, waving a hand over at me.  “Besides, you look like a toothpick.  Who knows how fragile—”

“—oh, shut up, like you’re one to talk, noodle arms.”

He swallows, rocking back and forth unsteadily on his heels for a few seconds.

“Come here,” I change direction.  “Please?”

He can’t resist a good please, I know this for a fact.  I’ve known this for a fact since I was five and needed someone else to take the fall for breaking my mom’s Tiffany & Co. wine glass.  (Not that I knew what Tiffany & Co. was.  I just knew that it as “Mami’s very expensive cup.”)

And, of course, he listens.  He teeters forward, finally taking a seat on the edge of the bed before realizing it’s not quite good enough and curling all the way up, his head finding a home next to mine on the pillow.  His arm slings around my stomach, which is the most comfortable it has felt since they put me in this place, and his face is buried in my shoulder.

This is how we stay for a few minutes.  My eyes fall closed, already coming up with ways to convince my mom that Preston has to stay over.

We’re not, like, a thing or anything.  It’s not like that.  I mean, we did kiss over the summer.  And again, at Halloween.  And Christmas.  But it’s not like that.  He’s, like, my person.  Making him be anything other than that would just make everything confusing, and I think we both know that.  And anybody who actually starts dating in junior high is embarrassing themselves anyway, and yes, I’m including my own friends in that, because they know who they are.  But ever the same, even without us being a “thing” or whatever, this feels right.  This actually feels like the only good feeling I’ve had in a really long time, and I’m not ready to let that go.

“Did you tell your mom?”

And just like that, my eyes are open.

He doesn’t elaborate, but he doesn’t have to.  Preston might not have known that all of this was going on with me, but he’s not an idiot, no matter what he leads you and everyone else to believe.  He hasn’t liked Ricky since the moment he met him at a neighborhood end-of-summer cookout, and that only worsened when I broke down in tears to him on New Year’s Eve about what had happened over the past few weeks between the two of us.  He can put two and two together better than most.

“No.”

“Doe—”

“No.”

“You can’t go home to him.”

“I’m not going home period,” I fire back, and that catches him off guard.  He stills from beside me, sitting up a little higher before I’m yanking him back down next to me, immediately missing the weight on my shoulder.  “I… I like, have to go to some stupid treatment facility.  I don’t know.  Mom didn’t get very into detail.  But it doesn’t sound like it’s just going to be some weekend thing or whatever, so… yeah.  I don’t think I’m going home any time soon.”

Preston’s quiet for a minute, and one minute turns to two.  “Then I’m not going home, either.”

I snort.  “Yeah, because that’s how that works.”

“No, shut up, I’m serious,” his voice cracks with the words, but only a little.  It’s still enough to make my heart stutter in my chest.  “You can’t just, like, freaking scare the crap out of me like that and then just expect me to be like, Okay, cool, well I gotta get back to class tomorrow so hope you get to feeling better.  I’m not doing that.  I already missed class ‘cause I wasn’t focusing and that’s not going to just magically get better now, so.  Whatever.  If you have to do some stupid treatment stuff then I guess we’re both doing some stupid treatment stuff.”

I don’t have the heart to tell him that I don’t think that’s how it works.  All that’s floating around in my head right now is that I want to kiss him again, but that I don’t remember the last time I brushed my teeth, and I’m not that person.  I settle for placing my hand on top of the one that’s resting on my stomach, and I give it a little squeeze.  “You’re my dude, P.  You know that?”

“That’s why I have to keep an eye on you,” he says, and while I feel like a lot of people say that about me like it’s a chore, he says it like it’s a duty.  “Can’t have you disappearing on me, y’know?”

I rest my head on top of his own, letting my eyes close all over again.  I’m not thinking about my mom coming back in the room, I’m not thinking about her shitty boyfriend, I’m not thinking about calorie intake or passing out in the bathroom.  I’m not thinking about the white lights or the hospital wallpaper.  I’m just thinking about this moment, right here.  Me and my best friend.  

“I won’t,” I promise him.  And I mean it.

[moistwithgender]

Monthly Media Roundup (April 2019)

April was a bit of a disaster month for me, and as such I didn’t get much of anything finished. Old wounds got reopened, I was sick all month, I had an unavoidably bad birthday, and a lifelong pet died. I didn’t engage with a lot of things, and mostly slept. I did play a lot of Breath of the Wild, but seeing as I didn’t finish that, I’m not including it yet. Here’s the things I did finish:

Games:

Blaster Master Zero (Switch): I actually first bought and finished this two years ago, and since the sequel has come out I decided to replay it with the Shovel Knight DLC character. While I genuinely like this game (I 100%’d it both times), I was not really in a good spot to enjoy this playthrough, and just kinda mindlessly pushed through it for nine consecutive hours, beating it in that single sitting. Playing as a DLC character removes the story, which is fine since they’re intended for replays, though I wonder if it added to my emotional disconnect. SK doesn’t receive fall damage, and so the precariousness of navigating the world outside of the highly-mobile tank doesn’t exist nearly as much, though the trade-off is that SK’s combat abilities in dungeons are hindered by an overall lack of range. The game is still rather easy, though, so I can’t say any particular level cadences or combat scenarios carved their way into my memory.

To the game’s credit, though, the things that are good about it are still good. If you have an attachment to the original NES game, or an interest in retro properties, or just want a nice, breezy platformer, it’s very good. It’s interesting in how it repurposes the altered plot of the US version of the original game (where it was its most popular), including even the plot of the little novelization that came out because Gotta Get Those Video Game Kids to Read Something. It has a fake out ending, and if you 100% the maps it unlocks a final map that is genuinely surreal enough to be the highlight of the game. Despite my sighing, it is a genuinely good time, and I’m very curious to play the new game, somewhat hilariously titled Blaster Master Zero 2.

Anime:

That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime: I chewed through the last four episodes of this so that I could say I finally finished the season. I didn’t watch the post-season recap episode. TenSura (the abbreviation of the Japanese title, which I will use to refer to it because satisfyingly abbreviating the english title is impossible) is not a very good show, but for about half the length of the 24-episode first season, it fascinates due to how it functions at all. TenSura is an isekai show, much like the other isekai shows, where a person dissatisfied with their life is brutally murdered (usually by a truck. USUALLY by a truck) and is reborn in a fantasy world that coincidentally gives them an absurd advantage over other people, allowing them to live out all the decadence they felt they deserved in the real world. If this sounds like the most boring kind of wish fulfillment possible to you, that’s because it is. It’s also extremely popular with consumers. Which is interesting! I think the isekai boom is indicative of how late-stage capitalism everyday people the world over, that we envision or escape to worlds where your efforts actually return appropriate reward. A bonkers concept, to be sure.

In TenSura, the formula doesn’t stray much. The main character is a man in his 30s (?) who has never fucked and gets knifed to death while HEROICALLY saving a coworker from a plot-irrelevant stabber dude who was running down the sidewalk with his knife out for no reason besides Main Character Needs an Inciting Incident Now. It’s actually pretty weirdly violent for the start to a show that is almost entirely light-hearted. Dude dies, his coworker dumps his hard drive in the bath out of respect (lol), and he wakes up in a fantasy world that works on videogame logic, including loot, skill trees, and class upgrades. He is reborn as an adorable slime a la Dragon Quest, but the personality traits he had in his previous life (and I guess his choice of dying words) scan to obscenely convenient passive abilities that ensure he’s not only invincible, but will never stop experiencing exponential power growth. Also he immediately makes friends with a final boss-level dragon and then eats him. That’s how he makes friends in this sometimes.

I’m being very cynical here, but the core narrative loop (and it IS a loop) of the series kept my interest for longer than I expected. Rimuru (the name of the reborn protagonist) goes somewhere he hasn’t been, astonishes the nearby (sometimes violent) inhabitants with his overpowered abilities, makes friends with them, and then improves their lives with community. Goblins, direwolves, orcs, demon lords. It stacks and builds upon itself to absurd degrees but it’s interesting that in a genre loaded with very problematic stories of disenchanted dudes finally getting the underage harem they’ve always wanted (aaaaAAAAAAAAA) that the main concept of this series is improving the lives of others and giving them closure for the ways life has hurt them. Even if. Sometimes that hurt was the main character’s doing? Like Rimuru absolutely decapitates a direwolf leader and then adopts the pack who from then on absolutely LOVE the dude. Also one of Rimuru’s abilities is that if he gives a monster a name, it class upgrades, which is generally and reasonably seen as a life improvement. Though, these class upgrades are almost always decidedly “less-tribal” or outright human, which smacks of some imperialist thinking. It’s also something I’m sure I never questioned in old videogames growing up. Meanwhile, there’s also a bit with a woman who came from Japan during that one really bad war, you know the one, and the closure she’s given as she’s dying is handled with actual delicacy. It’s a weird series! It’s only a shame to me that after most of the first season, there was less to talk about. Sometime after the halfway mark, you realize the show is never going to maintain tension for more than half an episode, that all problems are solvable (yes, even terminally ill children), and that the show isn’t going anywhere you can’t predict. It’s a checklist show, and the plot points are a list of achievements being checked off one episode at a time.

I don’t think I would actually recommend the show to most people, despite how popular it is. It’s not a great show, but it does weird enough things for a while that it generates conversations. Which is honestly pretty okay. It’s a pretty okay show. Also, Rimuru is effectively nonbinary (with he pronouns), and that’s… somethin’! (24 episodes, finished 4/17/19, Crunchyroll (Funimation also now has the dub I think? Clips I saw were pretty weird, Rimuru seemed to be characterized differently.))

Manga:

Nejimaki Kagyu Vol 1: You would think a manga that immediately starts with a reference to Phantom Blood would be, well, at least interesting.

Okay maybe invoking a beloved work doesn’t actually mean anything. I just wanted to share this blatant callback. Nejimaki Kagyu is a seinen manga about a highschool teacher whose tragically cursed to, uh, have all teenage girls fall in love with him. And the highschool-age childhood friend of his who has spent her whole life obsessed with him and learning super martial arts to defend his chastity. Her supers make her clothes explode.

…

I take no joy in this travesty.

Anyway, uh. The biggest tragedy here is that the art is actually really good, though the paneling is regularly squished around to hilarious degree. Let’s look at some pages and then forget this manga exists forever.

That horror face is how I feel the entire series should be portraying itself. The manga has a distinct lack of self-awareness.

The fan translation for this series appears to have dropped off halfway through and hasn’t been picked up for years, and based on reviews I saw on MAL talking about the directionlessness of the later volumes, I wonder if the translator got fed up with the series. Oh well!

Kyou no Asuka Show Vol 1: Oh god damn it I just got done with talking about a series about ogling the youth.

BLEASE STOP

Okay so. Kyou no Asuka Show, or “Today’s Asuka Show” is an older slice of life manga by the same author I mentioned previously who is doing an edutainment series about people working in a condom factory. Innocently-minded women in comedically lewdish situations appears to be his whole bag. I think Asuka is pretty charming, but I also know she’s designed to appeal to my monkey male gaze. Obliviously sexy is very much a mood, and in a more adult context I would be all for it. There have been a few chapters where I find myself at odds with the wisdom the author is attempting to impart, sometimes through Asuka’s father, who works as an adult photographer, and doesn’t want his daughter involved in anything that could cause her to be ogled. Like, that’s already something that requires a lot of unpacking in the modern day. Aforementioned wisdom sometimes takes the form of Asuka doing something stupid and innocent and ripe for objectifying, like wearing a school swimsuit in a rainstorm. Or she’ll work a job as a cute girl courier and inadvertently turn a shut-ins life around. Situations where, if it were in real life, I’d think “wow that’s weird and charming,” but by being a work of intentional authorship, it inherently loses some of that innocence, and becomes something well-meaning but problematic. Is that the second time I’ve used the word “problematic” in this post? Is this 2014?

I may continue reading this, but I really can’t recommend it to most people I know in 2019 without several disclaimers and also without probably getting some side eye. I think it’s worth a couple chapters to feel out what its doing before you decide whether you can siphon the charm from it, or would rather move on to something else.

Me enjoying myself when this manga tries to suddenly get up to some shit.

Blue Period Vol 1: This is the last thing on my list, because I don’t want to expand this list beyond the three mediums I’ve already assigned to it. Also, I actually finished this May 1st, but I wanted to talk about it now.

If I had the power to actually get people to engage with a specific work once per month, Blue Period would easily be the one I pick. That doesn’t mean as much when all the other things I finished this month were conflicted experiences, but I really think everyone would benefit from this series. Or at least anyone with even a passing interest in visual arts.

Blue Period (named for Picasso’s Blue Period) is about a highschool delinquent who has a knack for studying, a safe social life, and no interests in pretty much anything. He’s on the road to do fine in his life, and he doesn’t question it much, but that’s it, until he discovers art and realizes it’s the only way he’s ever been able to truly communicate his feelings. It changes everything about him, for more emotionally satisfying reasons, but also riskier ones. He only has one year of highschool to go to decide what he’s doing with his life, and Japan has a very strict education system. You’re not really allowed to just “get around” to things.

Apologies in advance if you’re tired of me spamming full pages but I really do wanna show this off. This is another series with an educational angle to it, though the emphasis is definitely more rooted in a personal narrative of growth. The explanations of art practice and the functionality of exercises and tools are both very informative and relevant to the characters, never feeling like the story is taking a backseat to explain. The characters are, hilariously, everyone I’ve ever met in an art class. There’s the kid who would rather exclusively draw the things they like, there’s the kid who likes art as a hobby but haaaates being given a project, etc etc. There are students who have an innate grasp on how to draw but haven’t internalized the Why of the exercises, and students who are receptive to the lessons but don’t have the ability to match. The narrative is extremely even-handed towards all of these different levels of skills, and places a lot more importance on why, emotionally, you should totally care about drawing apples and water pitchers for five hours at a time. It’s GREAT and I want to force it on every creative I’ve ever known.

Another thing I appreciate about this series so far is that while there has been something resembling sexual/romantic tension, it’s kind of not like that at all? In the first volume I haven’t been able to pinpoint where a potential relationship subplot would go, if at all. Two possibilities are this girl:

...who is a very likable character but surprisingly doesn’t fit into that box of “standard love interest”. The protag’s interactions with her have been exclusively respectful and admiring, which doesn’t even necessarily imply a romantic subplot, but would be pretty cool if it did? And the other girl:

...who is featured in decidedly more sexual tension-y contexts, is actually TRANS. The manga actually portrays them so uncompromisingly feminine that I didn’t realize they were crossdressing (the term used in the text) until the author’s notes at the end of the volume. I will partially blame this on me being out of it this month, since I just went back to their introduction and yep, they got misgendered and contested it. Given how the character is regularly framed (confident, attractive, skilled, nonstereotypical), I’m… pretty okay with this! If a romance blooms between a delinquent boy and a trans girl, that’s amazing.

I hope y’all understand where I’m coming from in expecting a shoehorned romantic subplot. I’m not hoping for one, I just know the product by now. And if it happens, the options are considerably more interesting than usual.

These are pretty good kids.

Manga licensing is a lot better nowadays than it ever was before, with lots of obscure series being picked up, old series getting re-localized, and translations being better than ever. I really really want this series to get licensed so someone can be compensated for it, and so more people might read it. Until then, I think you should look up the fan work.

---

So that’s all for April. If these posts included live-action movies, I’d have talked about Endgame, but I also don’t want to go spoiling anything for someone who still wants to go see that (it’s probably one of my favorite MCU movies, though). I read most of 1970-71 in Marvel comics, or at least most of the issues on my reading list, but I semi-liveblog about those, so you can just search my “curry reads comics” tag for that. Here’s hoping I have more interesting, more positive things to say about May in a month. I expect to finish Breath of the Wild by then, so I’ll finally talk about that. Thanks for reading, if you made it this far! Go check out Blue Period.