#i enjoy having a wide range of interests 👍

[the-pea-and-the-sun]

sry in advance to everyone who started following me bcz of my death note posting when in a month from now i inevitably start fervently posting abt looney tunes again or some shit

[bagheerita]

I am a SO ready to talk Godzilla movies. I’ve only seen a handful of them compared to like the dozens I know exist-the more recent ones where they were trying to do Avengers but the big Monsties-but god I love them.

Admittedly Kong is seared into my brain because it came out at the Height of my Tom Hiddleston obsession-I even own it in dvd like I was that deep-so that’s the one I remember the best. And it’s the one I like the most because of the wide range of monsters we get to see. Big Buffalo guy? The skull lizards? Fuck yeah love my monsters wish more movies were monster movies lol.

Anyways, the others are more spattering in recollection. But I wanna ask, which of these movies is your fave, why, and what do you think of the empty core earth/godzilla goes into the center of the earth to recharge like Superman does to the sun? I remember finding that very. Odd? But ripe for interest bc in Kong they set up that whole. Under-earth world the skull things came from.

I've also only seen a handful of the movies... exactly 6 Godzilla/Monster-verse related movies (that I can recall anyway): the original Gojira and the original King Kong. And then Godzilla 2014, Kong Skull Island, Godzilla King of the Monsters (watched last night), and Godzilla vs Kong (watched today!).

I've only seen each of them once, and Kong Skull Island is the only one I saw in the theater (Tom Hiddleston obsession what....😅😅💚❤). Watching Godzilla KotM's last night was the first time I'd actually seen several of the monsters I already knew of through cultural osmosis, like Rodan and Ghidorah, which was very cool.

My favorite is hard to say. (I mean, to say the best movie would be easy: it would be Gojira, because I think it's awesome and perfect and very much a product of its time that said what it needed to say. But I feel like it's an entirely separate genre than the other movies I've seen.) I enjoyed Skull Island and I remember it being slightly better story-wise than the Godzilla movies, IE it made me care more about the human characters and they had better development and reasons for what they were doing.

Since it's the one I just watched I might say KotM is my favorite, just because I loved all the monster battles, and because there are apparently no locked doors in this world (Millie Bobbie Brown can just walk into Fenway Park, and also her family home that's been abandoned for months/years, without any keys or any problems). And also because of Charles Dance, who is a fantastic villain even though he looked like he was phoning it in and even though he didn't get eaten by a dragon (It was all I wanted... what was promised. lol). GvK was fun, but not quite enough to overcome the silliness of the premise. (like, come on, giant monkey versus radioactive dinosaur. who do you think wins? I did like that the movie turned it into a team up against Mechagodzilla/the ghost of Ghidorah.)

The first mentions of the Hollow Earth Theory kind of took me by surprise, so it took me awhile to get over the silliness of it especially the gravity inversion lmao. (Just last month or so I finished watching Sanctuary, which has its own Hollow Earth theory lol) But I did really love the concept of Godzilla's temple where he would go to recharge in KotM. (Too bad they blew it up 😭 Or did they?? Maybe Godzilla's temple where he hangs out can withstand nuclear blasts? 🤔) I love the idea that he would go to this place of ancient worship to rest and regain his strength, sleeping among the memories of when he was perhaps more literally a god. The whole "recharging from the center of the earth bc there's radiation" is whatever. The origins of Godzilla have changed so much to get him to fit into this new idea of him and his place within the world and what he represents, so... sure. The Earth is a hollow, Godzilla recharging battery. 👍

I really liked the development they did for Hollow Earth in GvK. I like that Kong's axe gets charged up by Godzilla's blasts. And I loved that when you see Kong's "throne," Godzilla is carved into the stones around the base of the throne. To me this suggests that rather than a rivalry, Kong and Godzilla have an ancient symbiosis: Godzilla is King Kong's guard dog... or perhaps "court wizard" in the sense of the archetypal magician, with the knowledge and power to comprehend a balance within nature that he then "advises" the "king" about. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I dunno but I think that would be really cool. I'd love to see more "monsterverse" movies with fewer human characters getting in the way (though I did really like Millie Bobbie Brown's posse wandering around and stumbling onto Mechagodzilla; that was a cool way to reveal that information to the audience). But more stories specifically about the interactions between these ancient creatures would be very interesting. In the special features for KotM they say that Mothra is the only female monster, which is kind of odd. I suppose Godzilla never really "dies" so he doesn't need to... reproduce in a standard-for-higher-Earth-life-forms way, but I'm pretty sure I remember Kong having parents in Skull Island, which I guess makes him (or his mom) an outlier if we're roping him into the monsterverse. Though the continuity for any of these stories is very loose (in KotM there are kaiju on every continent, but GvK is 3 years later and all of them... left? Everything's normal now. We're all fine here, now, thank you. How are you? And then Godzilla rolls up in Hong Kong and trashes it. There's one shot of a "kaiju bunker" or whatever, but no other preparations or any sort of contingencies for what to do if attacked by world-destroying monsters which last happened 3 years ago).

Anyway I hear there's another Godzilla movie coming out this year, and one called GodzillaXKong which I can only hope is the shipper movie we've all been waiting to see!! ;b

[randomvarious]

Today's compilation:

Krach Test 2001 Experimental / Dark Ambient / Noise / Harsh Noise / Rhythmic Noise / Industrial Techno / IDM / Abstract

Well…this was certainly a trip, folks; not a trip that I'd probably ever be interested in taking again, but a trip nonetheless. Here we have a 2001 triple-disc from a Berlin-based label called Ad Noiseam, who, true to their name, really seem to have a total preoccupation with the concept of noise as it applies to underground electronic music of many different stripes. Despite what Discogs may claim, this limited edition set—of which there are only 227 physical copies in existence—is far more than just a mix of industrial, ambient, and experimental stuff; there's techno, electro, IDM, drum n bass, drill n bass, and gabber too. And most of it, of course, is slathered in some level of noise.

Now, if you take a wide-angle view of all these songs, you can sort of see this release more or less traveling along a spectrum that starts on the fringes of atonal, amelodic, mostly rhythmless music that challenges our notions of what the definition of music even is, and by the middle of the final disc, progresses towards the other end of the spectrum, where rhythms are full-throttlingly overbearing and wholly unenjoyable to me in a substantially different way 😅. The only thing is that, by the final leg of that third disc, the comp runs totally afoul of this whole spectral idea, and like a snake eating its own tail, finds itself right back where it started.

So, needless to say, I did not like very much of this 3-and-a-half-hour-plus album, but as it continued to unfold towards the center, my ears started to perk up more and more, and when it got to that third disc, I was finally able to find a nice couple of palatable gems:

"Avatar (Version)" by Oakland, California's Dryft is probably one of the least noisy tunes on this comp, overall, and also one of its most conventional too. This is a sweet piece of atmospheric drum n bass with serene, spacefaring synth pads that underlie contrastingly crunchy and distorted kick-and-snare patterns. And when Dryft ladles in a thin layer of some of that warm, softly rumbling sub-bass, particularly, this one really becomes a well-crafted, full-blown bop 😌.

And then not too long after that, we get a song called "Flak," by another Californian who goes by the name of Railgun. This tune's like a piece of industrial techno with a sinister, Prodigy-inspired rock edge to it, and when Railgun drops in a dusty drum break to briefly complete his sharp-edged puzzle in both the middle and end, he really has a nice banger on his hands 👍.

Other than that pair of tunes, though, this comp really just serves as a stark personal reminder that no matter how deep, eclectic, and wide-ranging that I think my own taste in music might be, there is plenty of stuff out there on the extremes, from the nightmare-fueled, experimental and dark ambient, to the brain-mashing gabber, that I just will not only probably ever enjoy myself, but also likely won't ever comprehend how it could possibly appeal to anyone else, either. But that's sort of the inherent beauty in the diversity of our collectively lived human experiences, isn't it? To each, their own, and all of that…um...noise…

Highlights:

Dryft - "Avatar (Version)" Railgun - "Flak"

[bonesbuckleup]

So I’m new to reading comics. I’m not someone who grew up with access to them, and no one in my immediate or extended family really were into them, and, to the best of my knowledge, most of my friends were in a similar boat. Basically, I’m an adult, and I’m new to comics, and I’m really enjoying exploring them.

I’m bringing this up because I found my way into DC comics via tumblr, which is arguably still the most centralized hub of fandom life, which means I entered through the recent issues. Because I’m me, I also immediately started making shitposts. Inevitably these shitposts have broken out of my dumb curated little enclosure to interact with bits of the fandom I’m generally unfamiliar with. Namely, gatekeepers.

Throwing this under a cut so it’s easily bypassable 👍

It has happened with literally all of my Batman posts that break ~500 notes. People show up in the tags to rant about how sick they are of people on tumblr getting characters wrong, or not understanding canon, or getting mad because of something getting ignored that happened in canon 20+ years ago. They start off by attacking immediately, and getting angry, and ranting about how new fans are so awful/annoying/stupid/etc.

I’ve been in fandom spaces for Far Too Long, so I’m used to dealing with input like this. But if 14/15/16 year old me was met with the kind of vitriol that shows up in my notifications sometimes? She would’ve disengaged with the material entirely and never interacted with the fandom again. She would’ve actively told people to stay out of those spaces because of how mean and unwelcoming many of the people were to her.

Listen: I do get it. It’s frustrating when someone misunderstands a thing you love. I really truly do understand. At the same time, though, we’re talking about characters who have been appearing for 20, 30, 50, 80 years. Characters who have had hard resets and retcons done 3+ times. Characters who have been written by tens or hundreds of different writers and drawn by just as wide a range of artists. It is next to impossible to pick one version of any of them that is The Definitive Version.

And to use myself as an example? Like I said, I’ve been reading these comics since March-ish. I work full time. I hang out with friends. I am querying an original book. I’m reading other books. I need to cook and clean and grocery shop and take walks and get writing done. Most weeks, I spend 1-2 hours reading comics, if that. I had to start somewhere, so I went with some Tim-centric runs (Lonely Place of Dying, the Contagion arc, Battle for the Cowl, Red Robin and related issues, and am now right around where Steph has the baby in his Robin run) and am now wading into Nightwing (1996). So the versions of the characters in my head are related to these moments in time, the early/mid nineties and 2009/2010ish eras. Those versions of the characters may also directly contradict your version, and that’s okay!

What’s not okay is how people immediately see a post and assume the worst instead of taking the opportunity to introduce a new fan to your version of these comics. Taking 2 seconds to be kind is the same amount of time it takes to rip someone’s head off. Like, instead of “jfc, I can’t believe this is framed as a joke when it’s canon, I’m so sick of this, try opening a comic,” try, “Hey guys! This is actually in canon! If you like this concept, check out these runs/issues for how it plays out.”

You all have a really great opportunity to expand your fandom in a dynamic and interesting way. It just makes me sad and a little frustrated to see people moaning about how comics aren’t appreciated enough, and then actively chasing away people who are new to them. No one is going to be able to absorb nearly a century’s worth of content overnight, and expecting them to stay out of fandom spaces until they have a sufficient knowledge base (whatever that means to you) literally defeats the point of fandom.

EDIT: also, just a quick note, for every interaction I’ve had with a gatekeeper in some way, I’ve had 3 interactions with wonderful and helpful people who have directed me to runs/issues that I may enjoy. This is definitely not an “all fans” complaint. There are just some very loud voices that sure are yelling a lot.

Anyway.

Those are my Monday thoughts.

Do with them what you will.