#but it's mostly V because I love my little anarchist

[hacked-by-jake]

sometimes it's just you and your favourite little guy fawkes mask wearing anarchist against the world

[sennydays]

I said "fuck it" and made Hobie an MJ

Meet MJ AKA Martyn (Marty) Jackson

MJ is a photographer for the Daily Bugle in Spider Punk's universe. He is a fellow anarchist and close friend (and maybe a little bit more) of Hobie Brown.

I like to think MJ met Hobie at a rally/protest where the two bonded over their mutual anarchist beliefs and punk lifestyle. Marty definitely fell first but Hobie was right behind him. They aren't anything exclusive or committed/established (due to Hobie's "no labels or consistency" mantra), but the two don't see other people.

They like to make mixtapes for each other, mostly consisting of punk rock or songs that they like (Marty loves hearing music from Hobie's band), but every so often they'll slip in the occasional love song for each other (Both can be sappy and will add songs like "Your Song", "Everybody loves somebody", "Here you come again", "Then He Kissed Me", "Stand By Me", "Be My Baby", "L-O-V-E", "My Guy").

Marty found out pretty quickly that Hobie was Spiderpunk (it was pretty obvious to him because Spiderpunk wore Hobie's clothes). However, he kept the secret and in return Hobie let him take all the photos he liked for the bugle.

Because Marty knows his identity Hobie often worries for his safety. Marty often tries to help Hobie and take care of him because he wants to support him as a superhero (as much as Hobie rejects the title). Hobie often pushes him away, in hopes of protecting him from becoming a canon event he doesn't want. Marty worries that Hobie is doomed to fail as a lone hero in their world and does his best to support him. He hates having to watch Hobie get hurt and suffer not being able to do anything but comfort him. However, he's loyal and will stick with him till they can achieve their goal of freedom.

[angelholme]

V, V, V — Day 22 : Muppet

I’ve never entirely understood why muppet is used as an insult, because ever since I was a kid (which, lets be honest, is almost since the dawn of time — I am surprisingly old and while I know the universe has been around a lot long before I was born it does, sometimes — when people ask things like “what was life like without the internet?” or “what’s an LP?” or “did phones really have those wheels on them?” it does feel like I have been around since before the flood, or at least like I could have attended the crucifixion) the Muppets have been a guiding force in my life.

Not Sesame Street — I think because of the whole being British thing, we had far more Muppet Show than we did Sesame Street.

No — mostly we had The Muppet Show, which was typical Sunday night (or more accurately Sunday afternoon) viewing.

And it lead to the films, which is where I think I depart from typical wisdom, because I didn’t really like “The Muppet Movie” as a film, and as songs go, I don’t like “The Rainbow Connection” or “It’s Not Easy Being Green”.

I mean — don’t get me wrong — they are not truly awful songs, but if there is something you will have learned about me by now (and hopefully after three weeks of entries you have learned more than one thing, otherwise you may have to go straight to jail, do not pass go, do not collect 200 Galleons) it is that I am not that big a fan of sentimental schmaltz. And if there is one thing you can say about “It’s not easy being green” and “The Rainbow Connection” is they have schmaltz by the bucket load.

But other songs — Mah-na Mah-na, Simon Smith, Upidee, The Rhyming Song, Lady of Spain, Happy Feet (who doesn’t love a frog tap-dancing on a CD?) — these are songs that speak to me, even as a kid.

And then you have the Muppets themselves. We’re told they are family entertainment — and they do pass themselves of as such, given they are in a theatre, putting on a variety show.

However the entire premise is that they are anarchists (which, for reasons I am not certain of, I always tend to read as anti-christs). They rebel against the owner of the theatre, they rebel against each other and their entire purpose is to cause as much mayhem and chaos as possible.

And this is the management — once you get into the acts (who regularly eat the guest stars) it just gets even more entertaining and even more anarchic.

I am not entirely certain if my parents knew what the values they were teaching us when we were watching this — if they believed they were just showing us “good, wholesome family entertainment” or if they knew they were teaching us how to (basically, for all intents and purposes) rebel and blow shit up. And I mean that quite literally because…….. I mean — just look at Gonzo. And Crazy Harry. They live for blowing shit up.

Also the “house band” — I admit I didn’t entirely get this at the time, but Floyd and Janice were most definitely…….  well I think their watches were set at 4:20 for most of the time, if you catch my drift.

Then finally you come to Waldorf and Statler. Two old fashioned gentlemen who were the height of respectability and who spent their entire time mocking the performers.

Again — this wasn’t something I was aware of at the time, because it was something that filtered into my brain via osmosis rather than direct learning, but I think that seeing two old men mocking the performers gave me the idea that a) it was fine to be cynical, sarcastic and generally snarky about almost anything in life and b) having respect for one’s elders was not something I needed to do because one’s elders were twats.

So as a result I grew up being cynical, sarcastic and snarky about almost everything in life, and having very little respect for my elders (at least by default) because of what I learned from The Muppets.

I know I have said this a lot this month, but The Muppets had quite an effect (affect?) on my personality growing up. (To be fair the reason I have said it a lot is because I am writing all about me, and so most of what I write about are things that have quite a big affect — effect — on me so really is it any surprise that most of them wrote themselves into my DNA?)

They also had quite an impact on my humour as well — Diana Rigg’s line from “The Great Muppet Caper” is one I’ve used over and over, as is Kermit’s from The Muppets Take Manhattan.

There are other works from the late and truly great Mister Henson that changed the way I look at the world — and changed the way I look at the people in the world.

“Through dangers untold and hardships unnumbered…….”

“When single shines the triple sun…….”

When I was a kid, you could generally complete one of these two speeches, but not both. And  (weirdly) — more girls could complete the first, and more boys could complete the second. Sounds odd, but it was true. Not sure if that is the case now, but back then I am pretty sure that was the case.

And, of course, one of the greatest and wisest beings of the time was….. a muppet. Even if he couldn’t talk proper. (Talk proper, he couldn’t).

For me, calling someone a Muppet is possibly the highest form of praise — they are the greatest heroes of our time. Better than the Avengers, better than The Justice League. They will live forever and when the world needs them they will be here to save us.

They are all we need. And perhaps — maybe — the vampire from Sesame Street.

Although, on reflection, they probably don’t need his help. So he doesn’t count.

[dujour13]

🛡️ ⛺ 🎼 please 👀

🛡: favourite build, or party setup?

I was overwhelmed with the mechanics and got into the lazy habit of Casual mode, so not proud of my build skills. In my most recent playthrough I tried to make Siavash a little less useless in melee by giving him higher Str and the azata power Heroic Might, but this is going against my RP instincts – I just don’t picture him coming in swinging? The things that are more in line with my image of him are Skill Focus – Persuasion 😏, Lingering Performance, and Metamagic Heighten with Believe in Yourself. He has Abundant Casting for buffs like haste and blur and Ever Ready for those AOOs.

I stuck with Eldritch Scoundrel for Woljif and gave him all the AOO feats and talents along with two-weapon fighting and improved critical and he’s in there stabbing everything that moves, it’s great. Love that “I didn’t know I had it in me!” moment. I use him for a lot of buff spells so he’s not casting in melee combat.

My party comp is also boring – never go anywhere without Woljif of course, but that’s pretty much true of Seelah, Lann and Daeran too. Mostly the last slot goes to Ember starting in Act V, but before that it varies, with a preference for Regill this time around because he’s hilarious.

⛺️: what’s your favourite camp banter?

People have posted a bunch of my favorites already but here are a few:

Daeran: "If you dressed up a little and scrounged up some saucy impudence, you could be a kept man in some noble's house. Easy work with very little risk. I hear they pay a premium for curls." Woljif: "What's that, sit in a house all day waitin' for the lord or lady to swan in? No way! I may be a cur, but I ain't house-broken!"

(PS in my headcanon his Gran was an anarchist so that spirit runs in the family)

Woljif: "You're just as dumb as you've always been... but I'm not embarrassed to be seen talkin' to you anymore. Actually the opposite, I'm embarrassed I turned my back on you. And now I've got this weird ache inside." Ember: "I'm happy it hurts, that means your heart that froze from loneliness is starting to thaw."

And the infamous cherry roll incident 😡

Woljif: "Looks like it's just you and me, cherry roll, alone at last! I've had to hide you from everybody for so long, but now I can finally enj… hey!" Wenduag: "Such a tasty treat you stashed away for me, runt. Today I'm going to act like you don't exist. You're welcome."

🎼: opinions on the ost?

Superb! There’s obviously a special place in my heart for Starward Gaze / the azata theme (it had me sobbing at Threshold), but some of the other mythic path themes are frankly better – angel, demon, aeon… well, I could go on. As I’ve mentioned before the mythic transformation theme still gives me goosebumps after all those listens on repeat. Some of the ambient dungeon music is just awesome too.

[burgerpocalypse]

I've been trying to run through some free games I got from the Epic game store, specifically Grand Theft Auto V, Creature in the Well, and most recently Night in the Woods. I quit GTAV about 60% of the way because it sucked, and I can't beat the last area of Creature, so that leaves me to talk a little about NitW and the emotional turmoil it gave me.

Upfront, I'm not interested in games with heavy emphasis on story, least of all visual novels or whatever you want to call this game. However, I've heard mostly positive things about Night in the Woods here and there for the better part of the previous decade. That and the fact I got it for $0 convinced me to finally try it out.

Night in the Woods is an adventure focused on exploration and character drama. Mae Borowski, the protagonist, is a college dropout that just moved back to her Rust Belt hometown for mysterious reasons, and becomes entangled in suspicious happenings. The player will traverse the aged suburban sprawl and rural outskirts of Possum Springs, conversing with family, friends, strangers, and everyone else, uncovering secrets and opening wounds along the way.

Seeing as how Night in the Woods is primarily a story, I'll mostly be discussing that, so look out for spoilers, yo.

After spending two years away, Mae attempts to reconnect with her previously closest friends Bea (an idealist goth whomst had considerable familial and financial responsibility thrust upon her at a young age), Gregg (an anarchist punk with bipolar tendencies), and Angus (an incredibly nice man). Mae pushes the story forward by hanging out with Bea and Gregg, and sometimes Angus. This will often involve going to social outings, running errands, committing crimes, and so on.

Other than her friends, Mae will also have opportunities to interact with her parents, various citizens, and vagrants. whom provide flavor and history to the world while also bringing some of Mae's muddled past to light. The player will traverse environments through walking and jumping around, with the occasional platforming feat required to progress or access certain areas. Occasionally, you'll be presented with small minigames, like a Guitar Hero-clone or red light/green light shoplifting, and a game-within-a-game dungeon crawler that pissed me off to no end. While most activities in the town are benign, certain important events will move the day along and lock you out of further exploration.

Early on, Mae's group stumbles upon a discarded arm and some cryptic dialogue from a few characters. After each day, Mae experiences strange dream sequences that involve platforming segments and surreal representations of her friends and the town. Several hours of gameplay later, Mae witnesses a kidnapping on Halloween by what appears to be a ghost.

In the midst of all this, Mae hangs out with her friends and discovers what they've been up to in her absence. Bea runs the family business for her father, who broke down after her mom died, putting them in dire financial straits and preventing Bea from leaving Possum Springs; she bears resentment towards Mae, since she dropped out of college and came home for no apparent reason while also not maturing at all. Gregg is aimless, sporadic, and uninhibited, while his boyfriend Angus is neat, tidy, and overly helpful. Their relationship appears strong, and they are planning to move to a new city together, though Bea is convinced it won't last.

Mae does her best to strengthen bonds while suffering from a variety of stressors, like her family's money troubles, her self-destructive tendencies and dissociative episodes, and ominous celestial beings invading her mind. This sometimes leads to inadvertent and painful social situations, especially with Bea.

Mae attempts to investigate the supposedly supernatural happenings with the help of Bea, Gregg, and Angus, while her mental health steadily declines. Eventually, the group travels deep into the woods (at night) and stumble into a cult, after which Mae suffers a great fall and enters a coma. After waking up, Mae then attempts to confront the cult head-on, though her friends arrive to help. They enter a cave, find the cult again, discover the eldritch horror they serve and explore her personal connection to it, accidentally cause a cave-in and trap the cultists, escape the cave, and try to make sense of what happened after the fact.

Now, don't get me wrong. I rather enjoyed Night in the Wood's story. I really liked all the characters. I loved the dialogue. Even the platforming and various minigames were fine, if simplistic and occasionally annoying. The structure of this paragraph seems as though it's leading towards a big 'but'. I just wanted to say that I really liked the game, even though I don't generally enjoy video game stories, and especially not video games primarily about a story. Though I'm not from a run-down midwestern town, and obviously don't have the same sort of personal relationships she does, Mae's emotional strife and insecurities really resonated with me. Her personal thoughts and reactions often made me just stop and think about the many mistakes I've made with the people I care about and all the relationships I've ruined.

However, if the plot wanted to spend so much time on Mae and her friends, it should have been about Mae and her friends. Conversely, if it wanted to be about a spooky cult in a small town, it should have spent much more time on a spooky cult in a small town. The plot is torn between two diametrically opposed focuses, those being Mae's struggles to maintain relationships and her dealing with suspicious supernatural occurrences in Possum Springs. So much time passes before anything really happens with the cult and cosmic horror that I feel some people might even forget there is a cult and cosmic horror, and Mae isn't just experiencing a psychotic break for no reason.

In the end, the cult goes unresolved, and it's unclear what the relationship is with the residents of Possum Springs, or what its powers even are. I don't need the game to explain every aspect in detail, but no one appears to be affected by the existence of the cult and its god other than Mae. My brain was going into overdrive looking for clues, making patterns, identifying red herrings, anything that might help me understand the mystery, when in reality there was no mystery to understand.

There is also a severe lack of actual choice or decision making in terms of dialogue, and a distinct absence of any real challenge in gameplay. I definitely felt that this story could have been more efficiently told if it were in a book, usually after spending a few minutes walking around trying to find something important and

It doesn't help that I sometimes accidentally skipped certain segments, since it's not always explicitly clear if an action will push the day forward and lock me in. I even completely missed a third of the investigations since I chose to check out the historical society building with Gregg second when the game expected me to do it last. This sort of problem led to me giving up completely on other story-focus games like Kentucky Route Zero since I constantly skipped and missed chunks of stuff or did things out of the intended order and ruined the flow of events.

Now this has obviously gotten a little too long, so I'll just wrap it up by saying that Night in the Woods is great and I recommend it. It made me feel feelings, deep feelings, like I was moments away from crying on more than one occasion.

Thanks for reading. I have a lot on my mind because of this game, so I hope it was worth your time.

[yikesharringrove]

Hey Yikes, can you rec some harringrove fics you’ve read (or thought about readin)g while you were in the desert? If you want to disclose your reading list (non fic) too, I’d like to see it please. Summer is on its way and I gotta read new stuff! Thanks!

So, I’m terrible at keeping track of fics. Consider everything I reblog a rec.

Here is a link to my Ao3 bookmark page, these are ALMOST all of my favorite fics, there were a few I read before I made an Ao3 that I wasn’t able to find to bookmark sooooo rip.

As far as non fic, here a few of my favorite books: (I mostly read music autobios, since that’s what I like soo, and I have Audible, so most of these I listened to since I’m not a v good reader)

Scar Tissue, by Anthony Kiedis and Larry Sloman Autobiography of Anthony Kiedis, frontman and songwriter for the Red Hot Chili Peppers.  Speaks very candidly about his addiction, his struggles with mental illness, and the history of the Peps.

Tranny: Confessions of Punk Rock's Most Infamous Anarchist Sellout, by Laura Jane Grace and Dan Ozzi Beautifully written, frontwoman and songwriter of Against Me! details the career of the band, how they went from being a beloved punk band, to being called sellouts by even the most devout fans. She chronicles her struggle with gender, coming out, and eventual transition. She goes into detail about song lyrics. Absolutely wonderful. I made my dad read it because of how deeply she discusses gender identity and dysphoria.

Hairstyles of the Damned, by Joe Meno A great look at the punk scene in Chicago in the early 90s. Deals with socioeconomic disparity, Catholic School (a real close to home vibe for me), and coming of age themes. For sure not for everyone, but I really loved it.

As You Wish: Inconceivable Tales from the Making of The Princess Bride, by Cary Elwes and Joe Layden Literally just stories from filming The Princess Bride, absolutely amazing, especially if you love the movie. Super wholesome. I recommend the audiobook, read by Cary Elwes, but excerpts read by other cast and crew members. Just makes everything super magical.

The House on Mango Street, by Sandra Cisneros I read this several years ago (in Spanish, La Casa en Mango Street). Details a young Latina as she grows up in Chicago through a series of little vignettes, slices into her life. Discusses themes of womanhood, socioeconomic disparity, immigration, and racism. Heartwarming and made me cry several times.

Red Dragon, by Thomas Harris First book in the Hannibal Lector series. Supremely well written, kept me on the edge of my damn seat. I think I finished it in a day. I love the Silence of the Lambs movie, so I read the trilogy (although the last book fucking SUCKS don’t read it. Stop at Silence) I really liked the antagonist, although there are many transphobic themes and a lot of child abuse. The book is just generally super heavy.

The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside The Room, the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, by Greg Sestro and Tom Bissell I first watched The Room maybe ten years ago? I was in sixth grade, and I thought it was supposed to be a comedy, and I hated it. Upon finding out it was supposed to be a drama, it immediately made it amazing. The book goes into much more than the film adaptation did, gives a bunch more background into Tommy Wiseau, and even delves into his early life, which is whack. I listened to this as an audiobook, read by Greg Sestro, and you can just feel him being like ?????? the whole time.

The Joy Luck Club, by Amy Tan Really beautiful story of four Chinese women who get together to play mahjong after immigrating to San Fransisco in 1949. They play and each woman tells the story of her family, typically a story of their mother. The movie is just as beautiful as the book. Wonderful stories of mothers and daughters, of loss and love and the grueling experiences they had to go through in order to make a better life for their own children. Showcases the experiences of first and second-generation immigrants with great care.

The Outsiders, by S.E. Hinton I talk about this book all the time. One of the best books I’ve ever read. Deals with male friendship, abuse home lives, socioeconomic disparity, found family, love, and softness. One of the greatest movie adaptations of a book as well. Basically said Johnny and Dally really said fuck toxic masculinity.

Ten Thousand Saints, by Eleanor Henderson Chronicles a young boy in the late 1980′s after he loses his best friend in a drug overdose. He is sent to live with his father in the East Village and discovers the world of straight-edge, the intersection of punk rock and Hare Krishna philosophy. Deals with themes of addiction, teen pregnancy, death, and the AIDS crisis.

I kinda read a lot of the same stuff (lol) but I hope you can find something you may find interesting in there!

[indielowercase]

hi i am from seattle, moved away about a year ago

-seattle has grown a fuck-ton in the last decade, both up and out.  there is always construction noise.  there are so many people my god.  we had to grow up or grow out and there are already white-flight suburbs directly outside of the city limits (mostly to the north)

-big caterpillar buses for many people on roads that are sometimes stupid-narrow.  if the caterpillar buses didn’t have the joint in the middle they wouldn’t be able to make a lot of turns without running into/over shit.  i love the caterpillar buses

-there are very few trees downtown.  seattle has a lot of cool little neighborhoods.  if you go to some of those neighborhoods there are more trees.  i recommend fremont, ballard, green lake, and columbia city.  capitol hill is the gayborhood but it’s also become the tech bro center so it’s kinda iffy sometimes, but it has just like ambient trees and volunteer park for more tree density.

you can take the light rail to columbia city then walk a few blocks over to cool spots like island soul and geraldine’s counter plus just like trees around in an ambient kind of way.  you can also catch the 7 bus but it takes sooooo looooong.  seward park is near columbia city proper, it’s a nice paved walking trail around a small peninsula with a forested area in the middle, but it’s a far walk from any public transportation so you’d probably have to drive there.

you gotta catch a bus or drive to fremont, ballard, and green lake but there are trees and water in all those places.  fremont’s got the troll under the bridge and the lenin statue, good food and both bougie and cool weird shops closer to the water.

ballard has mostly new bougie shops along market street, but golden gardens is a nice park on the sound.  hattie’s hat is a good diner/dive bar in the neighborhood though.  ballard also has the locks that lead from the sound to lake union so you can see water and boats; unfortunately you’re about a month too late to see the salmon running there.

green lake has a lake!  it’s small but there’s a paved trail around it, lots of trees, and some spots with good food just across the street from like the community center and the wading pool.

west seattle is also great but right now it’s really hard to get to since the west seattle bridge is closed, otherwise i’d say go to the alaska st/california st junction for good food and coffee, and lincoln park for puget sound and lots of trees.  i think the c line bus will still get you there, it just takes a while.  it’s quite a walk down to the water at lincoln park though, it is decidedly Not an accessible park for the most part

-downtown has an anarchist book shop called left bank books.  it’s at pike place market.  even though it’s very touristy there’s good food and coffee nearby; i recommend pike place bakery in the market for donuts, plus piroshky piroshky and mee sum pastry just outside for quick eats.  all cheap and delicious.

-fuck starbucks.  any starbucks is too many starbucks imo, but downtown has an oversaturation of starbucks.  it looks like seattle coffee works downtown, located directly across the street from the OrIgInAl sTaRbUcKs is temporarily closed which is too bad because they’re great.  cherry street coffee has 4 downtown-ish locations and they’re v good.

-also if you’re downtown or nearby i’m not sure how you haven’t seen puget sound yet.  the hills and buildings might be in the way though

sorry if this isn’t something you were interested in but i like playing tour guide, even if it’s from a different city :)

Things abt seattle so far

- jesus fuckin christ yall theres so many gddamn people here. "major city" means things in words sure but have you SEEN it

- WHY ARE THE BUILDINGS SO TALL WHO LET THEM BE THIS TALL. WHAT DO U EVEN DO W ALL THOSE FLOORS

- the last time I was up here was like a lil over a decade ago so I have like, 3 memories of here and I do NOT remember shit being this biglarge

- there is noise all the fucking time forever. I thought my hometown was noisy at night bc u can usually hear the highway from my house. But there is always SOME KIND OF SOUND happening here

- there was like 4000 jesus signs on the way up here and idk what I expected but it wasnt that

- I cannot stress how fucking tall these buildings are. This should be illegal. What the fuck

- I want so badly to just vanish into the woods and go completely off the grid where are your gddamn TREES. we went from like the most beautiful old growth I've seen outside of my mountains to just conk crete.

- the fuck is w the jointed busses. They make me think of caterpillars kinda? Idk why they like. Have them like that but they're neat

- I've seen like. 40 starbucks. Why do you need 5 on one street. I dont get it

- speaking of the streets these ones are so LONG

- I feel like looking up at the wrong time shouldn't be able to blind you bc the mega fucklarge building caught a sunburst at exactly the moment necessary to ensure your retinas now have a tan

- this feels like my downtown but multiplied by like 1000

- (I did the math and this city is like 25× larger and that's just. So much)

- I was told there was gonna be ocean near here and yet have not seen ocean :(

- I havent even been like. Out and about, this was just shit on the way to the hotel, gd help me

[thewadapan]

Are You Happy: one year later

Today marks the first anniversary of Are You Happy, a dumb web series I made in a terrible bit of animation software. In celebration, I’m... un-unlisting the series and writing a post to pat myself on the back. Huh.

Normally I wouldn’t bother with this kind of thing, but I think my own general appraisal of this series has shifted somewhat since I put it out into the world. I’ve yet to receive any feedback of any kind from the internet at large, but a few friends of mine have ended up watching it at various points - the last of whom suggested that I should “totally” make the videos public. Well, fine, now I totally have.

I’ve rewatched the series a handful of times since its release and have come to the conclusion that it’s a pretty mixed bag. I’ve come to like many of the individual episodes a lot more, but as a whole the series doesn’t come together for me. In this post, I’m gonna build on what I wrote in the original commentary by briefly shooting through the episodes one by one.

As the first episode of the series, “I Hate You” is pretty much just me getting to grips with the program. I like the way Chris storms out, gets as far as the elevator before he starts feeling bad, and comes back - only to find that, naturally, Samir also left. Back towards the tail end of secondary school, my friends and I got in the habit of just hanging around in classrooms outside of classes - the teachers weren’t technically supposed to let us do that, I think, but they did. I figure that’s what Chris and Samir are doing here - just standing about in a quiet spot. Chris does something annoying, Samir slaps him... business as usual for these two.

Anyway, I showed that first episode to one of my friends, and he helped me out with “The Meaning of Life” by offering a Genghis Khan quote and sitting around as I made it. Plotagon has relatively few options for direct interaction between characters, and I immediately pegged the “slap” action as the funniest of these. It’s even funnier when combined with a sharp cut and a scare chord.

Back in school, we had these two acronyms: WALT and WILF. These stood for “What Are (We) Learning Today” and “What I’m Looking For” and were used by our teachers to lay out the objectives for each class. I guess it seemed funny to me to go completely in the opposite direction for “What are we Learning Today?” - it’s the student who has to try and poke the teacher into giving the class any kind of information whatsoever - but the execution’s poor. This episode is funnier if you imagine the five preceding minutes of silence, during which Mr. Hernandez is having a completely undetectable internal meltdown.

I knew that the stuff I was making would be quote-unquote “in continuity” - but I wasn’t particularly expecting it to “have continuity”. That changed with “Why Nobody Likes You”, which establishes that Lizzie and Chris are friends of a sort. I like to imagine that Lizzie is one of just two people Chris ever talks to (the other being Samir), and that the only reason they interact at all is because they happen to be the only people catching their particular bus. They really have nothing in common, and struggle to hold an actual conversation - although I figure that’s mostly Chris’s fault.

A fair bit of time has probably passed in-universe between the first and second times Mr. Hernandez and Santa meet on-screen. In “A Bad Teacher”, Santa seems a little more chill - rather than sitting at a distance on the bench, he’s standing. Perhaps Mr. Hernandez just treated him to a coffee, or something, and they’ve just exited the shop. Whatever. I’ve suffered my fair share of bad teachers, and one of the things they all have in common is that they’re completely oblivious to the fact that they’re bad. It’s like... bad students exist, but if (as a teacher) you honestly think your entire class consists of bad students, that’s the point where you should realise that you’re the problem. I think that tendency to place the blame on the students is the kind of thing that leads to whole-class detentions, which are a hallmark of bad teachers.

I’d originally pegged “White-Hat Hacking” as my least-favourite episode - for reasons outside of my control, it’s the first to break the one-minute mark - but upon subsequent rewatches I’ve come to feel more positively about it. Jessica’s line about V for Vendetta and zip bombs always takes me off guard, and I like the way Detective Raymond describes himself as “the smartest and most controversial detective”. It’s also funny to me going back to the source file and seeing a ton of lines marked “JESSICA (flirty)” and a single line marked “JESSICA (surprised)”.

My opinion on “The Faculty Bathroom” hasn’t really changed. As far as self-contained concepts in this series go, “insecure teacher talks to himself while on a smoke break, then dies in a fire” is easily the strongest.

Of all the episodes, I think “Nobody to Talk To” is probably the most forgettable. It opens with Chris, who’s lamenting the destruction of the school (mostly because it means he's even more bored than usual). There’s a medal hanging above his bedside table - I like to think that he bought it himself, only to find that he couldn’t think of something to get inscribed on it. Maybe it just says “CHRIS”. Anyway, the rest of the episode is a soliloquy from Lizzie - I’m not sure how exactly the idea of her being a well-connected anarchist came about, and the way that aspect of her character is introduced here feels a little jarring in retrospect. Still, I guess this episode does slightly redeem itself with a surprise appearance from Detective Raymond.

I’m gonna have to take a few paragraphs to talk about “Ever Get Tired of Movies?” - there’s a lot that I failed to cover in the original commentary. In terms of sound design, it’s probably one of the most ambitious episodes - all the sound effects come from the TV, so there’s nothing in the way of ambient music - but I’m not convinced that having the movie drown out the dialogue at the beginning was a good choice. I still love that Katia and Philippe’s colour schemes each match those of their sides of the room; I didn’t design the characters that way!

In the last commentary, I mistakenly said that I’d forgotten to use Ms. Green - when in fact, I’d used her as the reporter in this episode. I repurposed Plotagon’s “convention booth” scene as the newsroom, which works surprisingly well - combined with Ms. Green’s dialogue, which was intended to sound entirely unlike that of an actual reporter, the overall effect is one of a really incompetent production team on the show. This is entirely accurate: the production team consists of me.

Katia and Philippe have an odd role in the narrative - they’re basically an atomic unit from a completely different story. Of the teens in the series, Philippe is the only one who’s happy with where his life is; Katia is suffering from existential boredom. I think, in showing a failure in communication between these two, the episode fails to properly communicate what’s going on to the audience: Philippe is usually content just to do the same stuff over and over - watching movies, as it may be - but that doesn’t mean that he dislikes new things, only that he’s not the sort to actively seek them out. So the conflict is that Katia is doing the same stuff because she wants Philippe to be happy, while Philippe is fully expecting Katia to be pushing for new things - which she finally does here, when she suggests breaking Lizzie out of jail. Another aspect of this dynamic which I think is unclear is the fact that Philippe’s happy to do pretty much anything - including literal crime - but draws the line at taking off his sunglasses. Katia’s presumably been trying to get him to do so for months; her narrativist instincts are telling her that he must be hiding something. I figure he’s not - he just really likes his sunglasses.

Anyway, enough of that. “The Easy Way” is another fairly-forgettable plot-centric episode - but I like the way it handles the third and final appearance of Santa, who at first glance seems to have no reason to be at the office. The reveal that the whole thing’s been a distraction for the breakout is probably the closest the series comes to ever having a plot twist - I think it sits very well in the series as a whole, which (for technical reasons) never shows the big, important moments on-screen. I’m pretty proud of Santa’s monologue, which I wrote myself as a bookend to his opening quote, and the little glimpses of his history given within. I also like the moment towards the middle of the episode, where Detective Raymond - having been left to his own devices - wonders aloud “how can one man be so based”, right after threatening a teenager with torture and right before getting duped by a homeless man in a Santa suit.

Getting four characters into a single scene was a real challenge, let me tell ya, but I think “The Agenda (Part 1)” pulls it off decently enough. It offers some decent closure for the minor characters: Katia and Philippe get their adventure; Jessica’s mad hacks keep the cops off their backs. I think Lizzie’s “true power of love” realisation is a sincere one, but she won’t get her closure until a little later. Her expression upon seeing Chris again strikes me as similarly sincere. By this point, I’m banking on the audience having forgotten about Samir - so Lizzie’s actual goal here should come as something of a surprise.

In “The Agenda (Part 2)”, the penultimate episode, the series comes full circle. There isn’t really much to say about this one; the way Chris and Samir make up is pretty much the same as the way they fell out in the first place. Lizzie is just a facilitator here - she’s still planning to leave, but this time has decided that she doesn’t want to leave Chris entirely on his own.

Finally, in “The Agenda (Part III)”, we end up back at the bus stop, where Lizzie talks to Literally The Devil - who turns out to be a much better conversational partner than Chris ever was. This episode tries to strike a balance between jokes and introspection, but I don’t really think that it properly achieves either. Still, Lizzie’s shift to optimistic nihilism here feels like a good conclusion to her arc within the series.

It’s obvious that I was writing Are You Happy by the seat of my pants. While this lead to a pretty unpredictable plot, it lead to fairly poor economy of narrative. Although many of the characters get rudimentary arcs of their own, there isn’t a clear throughline which connects them all - I didn’t know what I wanted to say with this series, and so it ended up saying pretty much nothing.

On the other hand, this is just fifteen minutes of content - and I think it packs a lot of individually-quite-good snippets into that runtime. Usually, when I’m writing something, I hit a point where it starts to be a chore; that wasn’t really the case with Are You Happy, thanks to the fast turnaround provided by Plotagon and - perhaps more importantly - the fact that I didn’t need to worry about writing full descriptive prose.

Plotagon provided a huge amount of great background music - seeing as I didn’t go into detail in the last commentary, here’s a breakdown of which pieces I used:

“cruising rap battle” is something of a leitmotif for Chris, appearing during “I Hate You”, “The Agenda (Part 2)” and his scene in “Nobody to Talk To”

Lizzie, meanwhile, has “hideout”, which appears during “Why Nobody Likes You”, her scene in “Nobody to Talk To”, and the final scene in “The Agenda (Part 1)”

Santa naturally has “jingle bells” for all three of his appearances

I guess you could say that “happy music (care free)” from “What are we Learning Today?” is technically a Mr. Hernandez song, but I’d consider this to be more true of “sentimental” which plays throughout “The Faculty Bathroom”

Detective Raymond’s theme is “Detective Noir background”, which appears during the endings of “White-Hat Hacking” and “Nobody to Talk To”

Jessica gets two songs - “pirate ditty” and “suspenseful”, appearing in “White-Hat Hacking” and “The Easy Way” respectively

Katia and Philippe technically get “zombie theme” and “news intro” in “Ever Get Tired of Movies?”, but that’s just the stuff that plays from the TV - it’s not until “The Agenda (Part 1)” that they get “anticipating”, which I consider to be theirs

Fitting neatly with the vague stabs at liminality present in “The Agenda (Part III)”, Literally The Devil gets “muzak”: elevator music

Other bits of music include “lounge” in the actual elevator in “I Hate You” and “french bistro” for the cafe in “The Meaning of Life”

Upon booting up Plotagon, I was greeted with the disconcerting news that it’s being discontinued on desktop at the end of next month - ostensibly so the developers can focus on mobile platforms, although I can’t help but notice that this announcement was shortly followed by a flash sale on their “Plotagon Studio” subscription service for desktop: just $49.99 monthly, or $499.99 annually! Yeah, uhh, I’m good. This is pretty disappointing, but not entirely surprising - I’ve always kinda felt like the software was about to disappear in a poof of smoke, and now it kinda has.

However, I was also greeted with some good news: apparently, it turns out that I’d previously revisited the program all the way back on the 21st of September last year, to start work on a sequel to Are You Happy. Although I knew that I’d made vague plans to do so, I’d completely forgotten that I’d actually gone ahead and produced any new material! The sequel will likely share a portion of its cast with the original series, but based on what I’ve currently got it’ll probably end up dealing with pretty different themes.

With any luck, the application will continue to work offline past that date - but just in case it doesn’t, I’m going to try and accelerate production on the sequel. Don’t get your hopes up. If I can’t finish it, or I’m not happy with it, I’ll still try and put it out - but it’ll be more as a “bonus feature” than as a fully-fledged instalment in the continuity. More importantly, as is the case with everything made in Plotagon, I can’t promise it’ll be good - I can only promise that I’ll have fun making it.

[thedisorg]

This weekend there was a Folk Punk fest in my city, so here’s my review of BRIS-FOPO

BrisFOPO Part I:

1. James Brook: Environmentalist punk music. Did both acoustic and electric. I think he likes Billy Bragg, by the sounds of things. https://jamesbrook.bandcamp.com/ 2. Quinton Trembath: I loved this guy since I looked him up about a week ago to check out the bands. Quinton plays an acoustic guitar, and he's accompanied by Hannah Morell on the fiddle. Very folky. Did not disappoint live, he had good chat in between. Plays mostly really lovely songs. https://quintontrembath.bandcamp.com/album/tuns-of-fun 3. The Dangerous Folk. Local. Celtic-influenced Punk From what I could gather talking to one of them after the show they're a pretty new band, still working out their sound and they'd been playing as a six-piece but were short staffed having just sacked two members, leaving a more punk lineup. Worth keeping an eye on. Included an Electric Mandolin, so that's a good start in my book. Had good stage presence. https://thedangerousfolk.bandcamp.com/releases 4. The Dead Maggies: 'You can't go apeshit to a completely acoustic band.' - someone who hasn't seen The Dead Maggies. 'Tasmanian Convict Punk' telling old stories with energetic folk songs. Loved it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AzOmfHiZA-4http://www.thedeadmaggies.com 5. Fox & Firkin: Celtic punk. Another electric mandolin, this time as lead, interchanged with electric banjo. Honestly just sounded like a Australian band doing Dropkick Murphys songs, except for the one that was basically Drunken Lullabies (Flogging Molly) with different words. Still, I like those bands so I didn't mind so much. By this point I was pretty exhausted. https://foxnfirkin.bandcamp.com/

Overall a top night

BrisFOPO Part II: 1. Andy Paine. A local and active member of the community. Protest songs on the Acoustic. Did a cover of 'Thou Shalt Not Steal' by Kev Carmody, always a positive there. Also author of the hit song 'Don't Kill People'. https://andypaine.wordpress.com/music/ 2. Laura Mardon. Sad songs, acoustic guitar. Very folky. https://lauramardon.bandcamp.com/ 3. Steve Reed. A guy in plaid pants who can't remember the name of his own songs plays the guitar fast and sings political songs badly. I loved him. https://easystevereed.bandcamp.com/releases 4. Jim Mongrel. He opened with an a-capella number called 'Sometimes Antisocial but Always Antifascist' which set the scene pretty well. An Anarchist artist who lived in Sydney and has fronted a few bands, now living in Northern NSW. Up for a good chat between songs. Inventive lyricism. Other hits include 'I Wanna Set Fire to Eddie McGuire'. https://www.facebook.com/JimMongrelMusic/ 5. Wilson & The Castaways. They had a guy who played the harmonica and someone else on a euphonium so that's a good start for a band. I don't really know how to describe them, but they were definitely fun. Also they completed the requirement for a Johnny Hobo cover at some point in any Folk Punk gig. show.https://wilsonandthecastaways.bandcamp.com 6. The Button Collective. From Lismore. A little bit different to the others these ones were a 4-piece (although sometimes they play as more) with fiddles, a guitar, a banjo and a double bass all standing around one mic and playing something very bluegrass, sea-shanty and bush band influenced. Very talented. Lots of facial hair. Excellent to listen to. I've tried to find an accurate representation of what that set was like because none of their other videos quite captured it but this short one is more like it. https://www.facebook.com/buttoncollective/videos/1343679122384048/ Great band. Loved it. 7. All Strings Attached. Sunshine Coast. In truth I probably could have really enjoyed them but by this point in the weekend I was absolutely exhausted and just wasn't in the mood for their big, loud, excited gypsy-punk sound and wanted to hear more of The Button Collective. https://www.facebook.com/allstringsattachedband/

[incarnate-death]

Slaughterhouse part 1

I don’t think I will ever understand Paul Celan’s agonized poetry. He kept looking for something in the poetry that poems cannot provide and so failed to capture the misery, loss, love, and deaths of millions of people killed in the Nazi Holocaust. Talk about pressure. He wrote in German for the Germans who killed his father and mother and left him scarred for life. Through the decades of nightmares, anti-semitism, accusations of plagiarism, and mental hospitals, he never stopped writing in German. Such maddening horror—the inevitability of escaping the trauma even while seeking to be relieved from would be enough to drive anyone to drown themselves in the Seine River, which he did in 1970. But he made it further than other writers! Walter Benjamin: suicide, 1940—he tried to reach America through Spain but Nazis contacted the Spanish government to return him home (the camps) and he killed himself with a couple handfuls of morphine tablets (boy am I jealous) before the police could arrive. Benjamin’s friend and colleague, Arthur Koestler was not so lucky. After Benjamin’s death he took the leftover pills and tried to suicide with them—it didn’t work. Everything turned out alright for Koestler anyway; he made it until 1983 before he did what he should have done decades ago: Koestler and his wife killed themselves with an overdose of barbiturates and alcohol, which is much more appealing than opiates in my opinion. (To tell the truth, I’ve never even read Koestler’s work. ) But the best way to go was told to me be my friend, a professor: lay in a cold snowy forest, one pack of Newport Menthol 100s (my addition), an iv drip of dmt (my addition) a fistful of barbiturates and another fist full of 2mg xanax bars, but they can’t be generic. 2mg xanax bars are a wonder of design. There should be a special exhibit for bars at the MoMA.

I bet the pharma company spent millions deciding the precise size and shape of the 2mg xanax bar; perhaps this is why I can buy brand name 2mg bars for 8 dollars a piece, but only  $4 four 4 half milligram pills. 4 pills for two milligrams?? We’d get full before we could eat enough to feel it, much less kill ourselves.

I sometimes fantasize about iving fatal doeses of DMT straight to certain egotistical and/or evil people’s veins when they’re not looking. Some people just need to join the dead. My partners father: he was a piece of shit ass and tried to drown Z when they were ten, then when they came home from college he told them he couldn’t stay cause of his transition.

Jean Amery’s shoulders were dislocated as the Nazis tied a rope around his hands behind his back and hung him up like and did lots of other dirty things. Amery admitted the truth about writing about the Holocoaust and torture: to convey the pain of his torture, he must torture. Amery refused to write about the camps or in German more than a decade after his release. He also brought up the problem implicit in our lives: what is dignity? Some people thing a human loses dignity when they can’t marry who they want, Amery writes. I think he knew it was futile to write in German for Germans about the Holocaust, but failure is irresistible so he ended up doing it anyway. Perhaps his resistance kept him alive longer than Celan, who wanted everything and never stopped writing for a moment until his death. Celan was almost even greedy with poetry. Amery didn’t kill himself until 1978—another overdose. But Primo Levi (also yet to read his writing) is the real marvel: it wasn’t until 1987 that he threw himself out of the third story of his apartment. I hope you don’t think worse of Primo Levi because he made some poor EMSA person scrape him off the pavement. I worked in emergency services and it would be an honor, perhaps even a joy or a privilege to clean up anyone in artistic relation to Celan and maybe even fuck with the leftovers a little bit while no one is looking. but most of all I am validated by the knowledge that because i did my job right, no one will step over him like the road kill we all are. As much as I’d like to be on the EMSA team that scraped these guys up, I’ll admit it was quite inconsiderate of him to make such a mess.

there is however much to admire about Celan’s stamina. He wrote from the 1940s until his death. It’s unthinkable to me. Theodor Adorno explained the dilemma of Celan and his contemporaries: it is impossible to write in the same language and produce cultural capital in the German context without recreating the Nazi horror and therefore barbaric.

The more total society becomes, the greater the reification of the mind and the more paradoxical its effort to escape reification on its own. Even the most extreme consciousness of doom threatens to degenerate into idle chatter. Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self-satisfied contemplation. (Prisms, 34)

The Nazis didn’t disappear. They are still neighbors. But Adorno later retracted the statement; the poetry isn’t barbaric, but it requires the same bourgeois coldness to the suffering of others that characterized Nazism. In a sense, they all wanted that coldness, even Adorno. He is brutally honest in

his retraction of his previous critique of poetry: “perennial suffering has as much right to expression as a tortured man has to scream; hence it may have been wrong to say that after Auschwitz you could no longer write poems. But it is not wrong to raise the less cultural question whether after Auschwitz you can go on living--especially whether one who escaped by accident, one who by rights should have been killed, may go on living. His mere survival calls for the coldness, the basic principle of bourgeois subjectivity, without which there could have been no Auschwitz; this is the drastic guilt of him who was spared. By way of atonement he will be plagued by dreams such as that he is no longer living at all, that he was sent to the ovens in 1944 and his whole existence since has been imaginary, an emanation of the insane wish of a man killed twenty years earlier.

In other words, if they had any sense they would have killed themselves long before they had the time to write much less publish. Yes, Celan, Levi, Amery, and Koestler must have been truly evil not to suicide before pen became print. Instead, they spent countless hours sharpening their line breaks, enjambments, and images, reading literature, philosophers and mystics and magicians and historians so they would have the power to peel the skin off their readers’ bodies and make them watch it while the poet douses the husk of their readers’ flesh with kerosene and sets it on fire. It’s obvious that this is what they would have liked to do, but in the end, meh. Their writing was brilliant, yes, but flashes not sunlit hours, no spontaneous human combustion at the site of a poem. I wish they were magicians, not just poets; maybe then they could recite incantations and really show me what torture is like. I can handle being knicked for sure, but not if reading their writing requires me to adopt the cold bourgeois mentality of your average US secretary of state, which is pretty fucking cold. No, I’d rather be dead.  V soon now, I will kill myself with a bullet to the brain in the two bedroom apartment I share with my partner.

     I’m not the scholar on the above authors. My partner is. I simply became obsessed with their research, particularly regarding Celan and began investigating it in a different academic field. Z’s research has convinced me that suicidedeath is the only way for people like me. I’m not comparing myself to being a Jew in 1942. I just see partial homologies that help me understand the world and my relation to it.

     Once, when Z was escorting in Chicago to earn extra cash for grad school, someone stole hundreds of dollars and enough bars to make us both forget a month. I was at home doing drugs and had no solution but would listen as best I could. Z’s friend, D, is also an escort.  Some of her money was stolen as well and she called her boyfriend who got the numbers of the dudes who tried to rape our significant others, then stole from them, and threatened to come to their house and personally beat them. I’ve never been scared of D’s boyfriend because even though he’s big and got a deep voice, he’s mostly slumped. But damn he must have scared them, because they gave the money, but the drugs were gone. Some of my partner’s friends from highschool took care of him and his friends for us a couple weeks later; they are allmiddle class whiteboys and they lied about their addresses, saying they lived in the ghetto. We all threw a little money up and no one knows what happened or who beat them. Z called me after it first happened and said how angry they were they were trying to think of something to punch that wouldn’t break any knuckles. I said stopsign and they went straight out of a 5 star hotel in Chicago and started smashing the side of the nearest street sign over and over with their brass knuckles. If you don’t touch the bar in the middle, it just snaps back. he got arrested for disorderly conduct, but the cops didn’t find the cocaine stuffed up his vagina. They didn’t find out about the prostitution or anarchist organization we work for. I paid bail and we moved on. It tends to goes like that.