#and i was inspired to write by watching ppl from the sidelines write

[neonwebs]

Friendly reminder so I don't have to pull out the block glock again

[laneyface]

🍬🪲🥤

🍬 ⇢ post an unpopular opinion about a popular fandom character

Oh god lol um . Im not super engaged with fandom so I'm not sure what opinions are popular and what opinions aren't but one thing about the db fandom that sticks out to me is that people tend to say x character has become a joke and x character is mischaracterized more than all else, to which I understand the frustration but I think ignores the fact that ever since Super has been released there hasn't been a single character that hasn't been brutally mischaracterized recently except for like.... Jaco of all characters. There's weirdly a lot of unnecessary division in this fandom. I'm answering this vaguely on purpose cuz I don't wanna get caught up on it. Ummm a more specific opinion is that I think Satoko Houjou is a well written character and everything that she does in SotsuGou is in character for her. Thanks

🪲 ⇢ add 50 words to your current wip and share the paragraph here

Too tired to do all that but here's something from the draft in general

“As his oldest friend, Pu’ar was the only one who noticed the slight clench of his jaw and the perpetual furrow of his brow. But whenever they spoke on it, their worry was met with denial. Yamcha already carried guilt for leaving them alone when he died. He wanted to comfort them, not the other way around. So they could never address it, never directly. They could only support him from the sidelines as they always did.

….. But when he was meditating, all that stress and fear washed away. His expression told neither happiness nor unhappiness. He carried the neutrality, the stoicism of a true martial artist. Something that Pu’ar could only describe as completely and undeniably cool. They were given the pseudo job of ‘keeping watch’ during times like this, if only to prevent them from feeling left out. Even knowing that, they took their duty as a lookout very seriously. With eyes on his expression, their ears were pointed backwards, listening for anything that might come too close.”

🥤 ⇢ recommend an author or fanfic you love

I'm behind on my readings BUT what I've read of Ningenkakushi: Lord of the Desert has been a huge inspiration to me as I keep writing my own work so I highly recommend ppl check it out. Link below 👍

https://archiveofourown.org/works/12278655/chapters/27908466

[jinkoh]

Pentagon - Friends to Lovers vs. Enemies to Lovers

SFW (one suggestive remark), Warnings: none, gender-neutral

anon requested: Who's more enemies to lovers and who's more friends to lovers?

a/n: so this came in a set with two other requests that I will get to later but the question was just so interesting to think about and I wanted to write down my thoughts immediately. I hope you enjoy these, anon! Also if anyone has thoughts about it pls let me know. I'd love to hear other ppls takes on this~

Masterlist

FRIENDS TO LOVERS

Changgu

I think he's literally THE best friend. Like show me a movie with a best friend and it's going to be Changgu. He has that classic sweet, friendly childhood friend vibe who always supports you and has your back. Would watch from the sidelines and wish for your happiness if you fell in love with someone else T-T

Yuto

Does this even need an explanation? He is such a sweetheart. Like how would you even become Yuto's enemy?? I think you'd have to try very hard for him to consider you an enemy and like. What kind of person would you have to be to want that? So, yeah, FtL because EtL is simply not an option.

Wooseok

While I can see EtL for him, I think he just has such a "friend vibe". I can picture Wooseok to be the type of person that doesn't fall in love that quickly and needs to grow more comfortable with someone first so FtL feels like a good trope for him imo

ENEMIES TO LOVERS

Hyunggu

I think this one is an obvious choice, isn't it? In all honesty I can't picture any scenario where you're his enemy and he doesn't flirt with you. It just goes hand in hand with him. Also not to be nsfw but he'd totally take the whole enemy/anger thing into the bedroom.

Jinho

Sure, Jinho is cute and all but he can also be pretty sassy. I think he'd be so arrogant and condescending and it'd get your blood boiling and your heart racing and- wait, what? There's just a lot of potential for arguing about opinions and views that don't match and I'm here for it.

Yanan

He is soft, he is sweet and he can be an absolute snake. He'd be the really petty type in this kind of trope and oh my god do I love that. So sassy to you at all times, but as soon as that romantic tension starts to appear he'd be completely lost and flustered.

BOTH

Shinwon

I think having Shinwon as a friend would include a lot of casually hanging out together, chilling on the couch or having cereal together at 3am. You'd grow so comfortable and get so used to sharing space. I think it would just naturally develop from there and someday you realize that maybe waking up in the same bed and cuddling and kissing is not something friends do.

I'm not sure if Shinwon would have enemies per se, simply because I feel like he'd just leave you be if he doesn't like you. But there's so much potential for misunderstandings with him, so I think a story where you one-sidedly think that he hates you while he just doesn't care that much (or even likes you/finds you interesting) seems fitting.

Hui

I can really see him having a best friend trying to take care of him while he's exhausted and overworked. And then in the midst of being drowsy and tired and comfortable accidental confessions happen...?

For enemies-- Maybe more like a rival thing? Both of you would be desperate to win, but while you see nothing but a rival in him, he'd also see you as an inspiration to work harder and would still be able to genuinely congratulate you if you won.

Hongseok

It just so happens that my best friend and I are having childhood friend!Hongseok brainrot these days, so I can really picture this so well. He'd be super protective of you and get pouty if you spent too much time with other people (read: too little with him).

But I can also picture something like a rivalry. Hongseok is competitive and ambitious and he likes to win. He would see it as a friendly rivalry while you'd grow to dislike him more with each time he beats you. He'd always play fair, even if you didn't which would frustrate you even more.

Masterlist

[joemuggs]

Old is the New New

Not really. But the question of how and whether innovation happens in the digital age is a perennial one. I remember a drunken New Year’s Eve conversation a decade or more ago with a friend complaining that there was never going to be another summer of love or punk or acid house revolution, and me saying we’re too ready to pre-empt that in the UK now, but subcultural things like that could very well happen in places like Kinshasa or Kuala Lumpur or Kiev... and indeed music is a part of major cultural shifts around the world. 

Listening to the We Out Here compilation really got me going this year though. It’s so vivid and of the now, without having any of the high-tech signifiers that we of the post-rave generations have come to recognise as representing newness. But in the bodily movements of the players are encoded London life 2018, just as much as they are in drill MCs’ voices or whatever deconstructed club beat patterns are working for people right now. Though that perhaps only makes sense if you understand the soul-jazz continuum as it is woven through London music. Not that you NEED to, mind, because the music operates on an instant, pleasure-principle level too. My full review I wrote for the Wire is above... 

We Out Here by We Out Here

...but that review in turn then set off a few tangents, which became a Twitter thread, which I have tidied up as follows:

A short rant on people who use "innovation" as their primary yardstick for judging music. 

If you do this, you are judging music first of all as A Cultural Phenomenon - an abstraction - and sidelining both the sound itself and what it is doing for the real people who love it. If people still love to dance to / make drum'n'bass 20 years on, or deep house 30 years on, or jazz-funk 40 years on, or garage rock 50 years on, or R&B 60 years on, or whatever, and your first response is to accuse them of lack of inspiration, you've gone wrong somewhere. We can't always be in a Cambrian Explosion period like 70s NYC or 90s UK where globally important musical species are created seemingly willy-nilly. Comparing the normal pace of innovation to those explosive times is foolishness. And worse, it denies lasting value to music.

I've been thinking of this wrt the current buzz of what you might call "post-Plastic People jazz" - music which doesn't sound overtly new, but is still vivid with value in the here and now. Thing is, there's always been top parties where you could dance to jazz if you looked. And whether it was 70s, 80s, 90s, 00s, 10s, that music had the same instant value in the heat of a club, both for its direct effect on the body and from the fact that it tended to attract some of the most diverse crowds: something that always leads to a better party. Does it lose value over the decades, just because it's not the first time it's being played in that style? Christ no. Does sex become less good because you've done it a few times?

The motives of ppl who insist that newer ≡ better are highly suspect & usually proprietorial.

This doesn't mean things don't change. The concept of "timelessness" is metaphysical and equally suspect. OBVIOUSLY dancing to drum'n'bass at 4am in 2018 is different to 1998. But when the beat drops there's real continuity of physical/emotional/social experience. All of this is no shade on innovation, either! Indeed it's rly the "innovation is dead" argument that diminishes real & amazing developments. From Chino Amobi and Elysia Crampton to mainstream hip hop over the last decade to any number of 'developing world' sounds, it's rife. Innovation is vital, we celebrate it, we seek it out. But to use it as your main measure of social and aesthetic value is bullshit.

"Oh nice house you designed and built with your own hands there... BUT DID YOU INVENT THE CONCEPT OF HOUSES, HMMM??"

Aside from sidelining the value of craft, folk art etc in favour of a vision of "inventiveness" that is always tied up in a tangle of sketchy ideas about cultural superiority, it just suggests you're more wrapped up in your own valuations than in the thing you're evaluating. And with huge irony it's often nostalgia-based: people want to see the same kind of innovation that blew them away when they were first launching out on their own voyage of discovery. It's quite egotistical in these cases, it's centring ideas of progress around your own tastes. Tangentially, there’s probably a whole PhD thesis on compering the theory bro’s modernism with the tech bro’s disruption. But more generally, this desperation to repeat a particular type of innovation v often seems like attempt to isolate "modernism" or "innovation" as an essential quality divorced from historical context. And essentialism and ahistoricalism are bad.

NONE of this is to say that retroism, revival, tradition etc etc are worthwhile qualities in and of them selves, of course. You still have to make aesthetic and cultural judgements yourself about what you're hearing and how it's consumed! Being familiar or traditional in itself doesn't make anything good, any more than it makes it bad.

Here’s another thing. Old things can still smash preconceptions. If you’re so jaded you think Sun Ra or Kate Bush or The Butthole Surfers or Coki don’t have something new to say to you, let alone a 15 yr old hearing them for the first time, I feel for you. These things, heard in the right light, can be as modernist as they ever were.

A tangent, on the job of music critics, and how we value the music of the past:

I think we all to one degree or another internalise the notion that popular music is aesthetically "cheap" because of the illusion of infinite availability, as compared to art or "art music". If you watch art/history on BBC4 you see Andrew Graham Dixon or Janina Ramirez waxing lyrical about the qualities of the pieces of art themselves, as expressions of their time. In BBC4 pop music history – unless it's one of those very specialist musicological things with Howard Goodall – it very much tends to be biographical and social history above all else. Can't help feeling that's because there's a reverence for the artworks, that comes from not everyone being able to go to Florence or New York or whatever and see them in the flesh - but everyone can hear "Purple Haze" or "Strings of Life" any time they want, right?

And to my original point about modernism vs retro, I suspect that adds to a cultural forgetting of how radical, say, "Purple Haze" not only was, but STILL IS. Isn't there a value in talking about it not in a Classic Rock way, not in a cultural history way, but in the way we'd talk about a Picasso? "Purple Haze"/"Strings of Life" perhaps are not good examples actually, because they DO at least get the historical reverence treatment on occasion (though this, too, is more based on historical context than aesthetic antalysis). There's thousands upon thousands more records that - if criticism is going to have any purpose - deserve to be looked at, over and over, AS ARTWORKS.

Especially DJing for Big Fish Little Fish parties I listen to & play a lot of what might be called cheesy dance classics, and I continually listen to them closely as a result. The diff between listening hard to Music Sounds Better With You or the Hardfloor mix of Yeke Yeke and just HEARING them as background in a bar or on the radio is like the difference between seeing a Miró or Warhol full sized and up close, and seeing a postcard of one. And actually those records are as great as works of human intellect and instinct as most Great Gallery Art. When you are up close to - in fact INSIDE - those records as they were built to be heard, their sense of balance, scale contrast, movement, balanced chaos/control, etc etc etc is up there with a Kandinsky or Braque. Obviously Capitalism doesn't value it as such, mind... And I think we (critics) unconsciously undervalue that too. So we talk about the past as movements, moments of cultural significance, but all too rarely about how the patterns and tics and structures of X record embody that and what power they still have now. People often talk of the job of critics as just being either explainers, enthusers, conceptualists or a glorified recommendation algorithm. But if the WRITING part of writing about music is ever to have any value, then what about just discussing and bearing witness?

All of which brings us back to the thing about fetishising innovation. We live in a world where thousands or more of people globally are hearing Nu Groove reissues, or rediscovered tapes from Benin, or some twisted Catalan synthpop record from 1981, FOR THE FIRST TIME. While at the same time, in mainstream and underground, soundcloud rapper and Elysia Crampton records are startling and scaring with newness. And elsewhere people – let's take the 100% Silk label or Dekmantel in Amsterdam as prime examples – are maintaining past sounds as living folk traditions. When you hear a set of Robert Hood type minimal techno, even if you don't share his spiritual beliefs and sense of the eternal, you can certainly feel it as being several steps away from the microhistorical cycles of hype. Because of course devotional or ecstatic music is consistently resistant to - or doesn't need - innovation. A shaman chanting in Uruguay, Sufi dancers in Pashtun country, a choir in Hereford Cathedral, Niyabinghi drummers - what do THEY care for the Shock of the New? But from the global 'old' music forms to the crate diggers' early house compilations to the super innovative post-Arca electronicisits, all of these things ARE our present. It's an extraordinary musical-historical moment to be part of. Scary, unpredictable, best of times / worst of times, etc but fucking extraordinary - including the presence of the past, whether unearthed or transmitted through living tradition. We should bear witness to that!