#literally samples this song btw

[batmobilestires]

Disco Deewane by Nazia Hassan is very Discowing coded

[rocketbirdie]

badass mercenary by day, forklift certified by night

[solardaartistperson]

THERE'S A FRIKIN VOCALOID SONG THAT'S STUCK IN MY HEAD RN AND I HAVE THE URGE TO MAKE A VID WITH IT RHFHEHGFJEHDJWHFJSFJDJ

[idekwtf-is-happening]

Absolutely adored the Barbie Movie with my whole heart, but I hate that with all the good messages in it they still had a rape apologist on the sound track

[peekofhistory]

hello! I saw your post about the layers of hanfu, the one with the pants that tie around the waist. I really want to try to make them, but I can't seem to find a pattern. Is there a term for that article of clothing that I can use to search? Or better yet, do you have any pattern recommendations?

I was recently introduced to hanfu through a c-drama, and I'm really curious about it, so I'm glad I found your blog!

AHHH!! My first inbox message!! I'm so happy 😃😃

The name for that style of pants is (unfortunately) just "pants" (裤/ku in Chinese, which literally translates to pants).

I searched around for patterns and pieced one together (luckily it doesn't seem too complicated :D). You'll have to play around with the measurements so they fit you best, these were based on a video of someone who made this for a client (I'll link the video as a source but it's all in Chinese).

Here's some screenshots of videos demo-ing it (also linked in sources). The most important take-away I got is to make sure the width of the pant legs is enough to wrap ALL the way around your body and overlap in the back so your butt doesn't show xD

The earliest artefacts for this style of pants is the Han Dynasty (202 BC-9 AD, 25–220 AD), but it was also discovered in tombs of the Song Dynasty (960-1279 AD), which had more samples and were better preserved (I heard in one Song tomb they found 24 pairs of pants, 15 of which were this style O.O). So all of these were made using the Song Dynasty version, but they look basically the same and were also worn as under garments.

Sources: Sewing patterns https://www.sohu.com/a/406159256_620719

Sewing full process (with measurements) 慕少蓉 https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1sg4y1v7jZ/

Demonstration: Xiaohongshu 曾嚼子 Video

Xiaohongshu 宾义儿 Video

If you're interested in hand-making Hanfu (BIG kudos to you, btw, that is AMAZING!) I recommend this book （it's all in Chinese but it does provide patterns for many Hanfu styles): 中国古代服饰结构图集 (Patterns of historical Chinese clothing)

You can also use Xiaohongshu (Little red book), it's both a website and an app that a LOOOT of Chinese people use for everything: https://www.xiaohongshu.com/

If you searching "[dynasty or clothing name] 结构图" (结构图 means patterns) you'll usually get a lot of results.

[alllgator-blood]

hymns of the unholy drops tomorrow, I'm gonna make a track tier list but here's my initial thoughts before it comes out:

This feels worthy of a "read more" just because there's no pictures to look at and it's four paragraphs. TL;DR the album is very cheesy but I'm literally so excited I'm gonna stay up all night so I can listen to the new album the second it drops. The overly critical part of my brain is telling me I shouldn't derive enjoyment from this album unironically but I'm not gonna obey, I am cringe and free and I'm gonna crank this shit with no shame cause it's the game I like...IN MUSIC FORm

[gif meant to represent me randomly busting it down leshy style when I'm home alone, and singing "THE END AWAITS AS THE OLD FAITH TAKES THE LAST OF MY KIIIIINDDDD" over and over]

The lamb's song was kickass and if I heard it in the wild without knowing there was a metal album for this game, I'd spontaneously combust from sheer excitement. It's instantly recognizable and that's kinda all I wanted from it tbh! I've mentioned before that I'm way more of a djent/shoegaze/sludge fan when it comes to metal rather than the genre these songs have been, but I'm literally so excited the bishops are getting some kind of inclusion in a project that I'm gonna crank this album even if it reminds me of the shadow the hedgehog game soundtrack. Tbh this one is so solid that if they JUST announced this one and didn't make the others, I'd still think it'd stand alone quite well for what it is! Edit: I said I'm cringe and free, why did I spend half this section dunking on the genre.....

Leshy's song..........was totally lame but in an epic way, like the first time I listened to it I thought it was fine! But when I actually read the lyrics I had tears streaming down my face from laughter. I screamed out loud when the guy basically says "btw my name is leshy :)", the lyrics are actually so fucking bad. But c'mon it's LESHY he's the littlest brother, if anyone got a corny ass song it should really be him. The shredding solo at the end is fucking hilarious and if he was in charge of his own song, he 10000% would request that specific ending. Musically, this one sounds the least like the source material so far but it's got that arpeggio from his + amdusias' theme and that's arguably the most iconic part. Also, "DAYLIGHT WILL COME UNDONE AS WE ECLIPSE THE SUN" is insane and is the best part besides describing his blindness as "ETERNAL NIGHTFALL"

Heket's song...........It has my favorite lyrics so far but the vocal work after the 40 second mark had to grow on me. I can't describe it but it sounds like that post grunge style and as a grunge fan, post grunge is my biggest opp in the music world. I was hoping they'd get a female singer for this but for heket specifically I can understand why they didn't. The actual lyrics in the song are fuckin badass, when it gets to the "MAKE YOUR PEACE, CREATURE" part I always turn it up to a deafening volume because it goes BALLISTIC. Genuinely my favorite part of any of these songs so far. I adore that her characterization in this song is layered and isn't just "I'm leshy, I'm made of plants or something and also I'm gonna kill you", it goes through her arc PERFECTLY imo!! Instrumentals in this one are better than the leshy song as well, I really like that they brought back the pitch bending/choppy sampling from the ost for this one

I'm on my hands and knees begging for the shamura song to be good, the leshy song had me worried but they came in clutch for heket. If they don't work in shamura's iconic lines from the game, I'm gonna cry inside I think- I'll forgive a lame kallamar song but ONLY if it's funny. Narinder's theme is gonna be hard to fuck up imo I have faith it'll be top tier

[venterry]

its genuinely so annoying the way the whole ai argument still revolves around the wrong shit for so many people

how hard is it to get that copyright law is NOT your friend. more regulations are not the solution literally just take a look at the entire music industry please

we're talking copyright strikes, dmca, This Video Is Not Available In Your Country, spotify taking down songs with a two second sample in them etc etc etc you think the poor little artists are the winners here?

now can you imagine that for IMAGES, for VISUAL ART ??? "sorry this piece you worked so hard on looks just too similar to this other one please take it down or better pay up!" and you can kiss memes, jokes and references goodbye while youre at it also did everyone just forget the whole nft thing

idk if you see some very big artists advocating for copyright law id suggest taking a moment to look into why they might be doing that. yeah some of them are just clueless and well intentioned and just jumped on the bandwagon, but many have other deals going on in the back

also saying youre fully anti ai makes you look like an idiot btw just because companies are being annoying and stupid about cutting costs via shit like chatgpt when ai is literally so vital in more serious fields like detecting cancer cells, processing data that would take people several years etc

id really love for the whole debate to go back to talking about the MASSIVE waste of resources and abuse of power the entire cheap ai trend has brought on

[genericpuff]

It's so hard to pick one but! But I am going to take the chance to talk about Greek music!

Entekhno and rebetiko are some of my favourite music genres, the later one especially has very interesting history if anyone is interested in looking it up! (it would be too long to analyse it here unfortunately, I would love to)

For it's significance I would recommend the album "Axion Esti" by Mikis Theodorakis, it's based on the poetry of Odysseus Elytis. Many of the songs were also very important to the resistance during the 1967-1972 dictatorship, so if you have ever been to a greek school during a national holiday you have definitely heard these songs a million times already.

The next song I would recommend is "Hamlet tis Selinis" (Hamlet of the moon), purely because I love it :)

From what I've noticed, if you enjoy rock music you are very likely to enjoy these genres, many artists that sing entekhno are also known for their greek rock songs! The subcultures really overlap, even though they are quite distinct in sound. Thank you for the opportunity, I am literally always looking to talk about greek music lol, so if this has interested anyone feel free to look into it! (or ask me about it)

omg thank you so much for these recommendations! There seems to be a live performance of "Axion Esti" that sounds gorgeous, I can't wait to listen to the whole thing!

Here's "Hamlet tis Selinis" btw if anyone wants a sample of the reccs!

Thanks so much for sharing!!! <3

[ask-phillip-graves]

This has literally nothing to do with your blog, but I am going insaane and idk who to ask bc i've asked my friends and they said they didnt know. So, RATATATA by BABYMETAL & Electrjc Callboy and Cannibal by KESHA, they both sound like almost exactly rhe same in the beginning no? Same with Jolene by Dolly Parton and The Water Is Fine by Chloe Ament, OR AM I JUST GOING CRAZY???

Also love ur blog btw, move seeikg you pop on in my notifications🩷

Artists sample eachothers songs all the time Sugar, that's why

[jet-bradley]

a list of artists (and groups of artists) who could do tron 3's ost, not because they sound like daft punk, but because tron 3 is probably going to completely ignore everything that made tron tron and they might as well do it with a banger soundtrack:

susumu hirasawa (especially in the style of p-model) (LISTEN TO THE SECOND SONG ON THAT ALBUM IMMEDIATELY)

mick gordon (because tbh i want tron 3 to be a tron 2.0 remaster/sequel FPS with him on the soundtrack. WHAT CAN I SAY? LOOK AT MY URL.)

most of the random edm artists making homestuck music in 2013. this includes toby fox but im gonna drop some of my favorite lesser-known tracks: crystalmethequins (dubstep with lots of industrial samples), heat (ambient industrial with a cello lead???), and fuchsia ruler (its just edm idk subgenres well enough to tell you)

telemist (literally almost everything they do, but here's some highlights)

3TEETH (cyberpunk metal. they did a collab with mick gordon and i couldn't tell where one started and the other ended, to give you an idea of their sound. two examples)

you can go down the chipspeech rabbit hole BAD in a post like this, but im going to limit myself to two recs from the chipspeech scene: attack humanoid 2015 and quantum leaper <- THESE ARE THE CLOSEST THIS LIST COMES TO FITTING IN WITH ANY EXISTING TRON SOUNDTRACK BTW

montopolis, because they toured live accompaning the silent l'inferno in tiny art house theaters, which feels more tron than... tron, somehow

THIS IS NOT AN EXHAUSTIVE LIST

[blubushie]

Me when nobody makes a jojo ref under a a music bands post (the band is literally earthshatteringly famous with a huge non jojo-related fanbase and im being completely unreasonable)

This is me when no one knows that Sniper TF2's theme is actually the theme from Magnum Force (1973, the second Dirty Harry movie)

Which is weird because the FIRST film was the one of him trying to bust a sniper!

That theme is my ringtone btw and was before I knew about Sniper TF2. I just really like the Dirty Harry movies. Clint Eastwood is great and those movies are fun and the opening theme is a banger. It's also really amusing to me that all the other mercs got their own themes but Sniper's was sampled out of a film. Which kinda sucks because if TF2 ever had a show or anything they'd probably have to pay royalties for every time that song was played... which means they'd probably just say fuck it and compose an entirely new theme for Sniper that nobody would recognise. Which sucks! Because that theme is iconic. And I love it, personally.

[bizlybebo]

oh my god im not your girlfriend but i NEED your normal album analysis omg (im normal about will wood btw)

HI OH MY GOD I TOOK SO LONG TO ANSWER THIS I AM. S ORRY

AUGHH this is definitely an excuse to ramble and i am TAKING it thank you so much for this

im fucking obsessed with the normal album. like sosoos much. it's such a subversive and creative and just. sort of album that you've never seen before, i think it seriously doesn't get the credit it deserves augh

first off here's a link to a 3-hour long analysis of the normal album that i haven't actually watched yet

here's where im cutting the post off before i start incoherently rambling about every song so that i don't curse people's dashes with having to Scroll for a million miles

THIS IS. A LONG ASS POST. LIKE 2.3K WORDS. SO IF YOU CLICK ON THIS BE WARNED LMAO.

i don't expect this to get more than like 2-3 notes this is literally just an open ramble about the normal album cause i got an excuse to.

Suburbia Overture / Greetings from Mary-Bell Township / Vampire Culture is SUCHH a good intro to the album. like. not even going into the lyricism it's fucking so insanely well-composed in a musical sense, I LOVE the samples and the immediate, like, doorbell sound at the very beginning because it just. introduces the ENTIRE album so well.

and the way it introduces will wood's motif of "Everybody's all up in my goddamn business" is SOSOO good.

The first half or so of the song is very illustrative of the typical, like, nuclear family, with these sounds inspired by a very upbeat, like... almost 60s-70s kind of music? It's a very creative song but it's tune and melody are also somewhat restrictive for a decent part of it, expressing perfectly what will wood's saying about this kind of lifestyle. If that makes sense?

and THEN the sudden switch into vampire culture is INSANE. im fucking AUGHGHGH over it.

It draws back on this stereotypical, happy lifestyle where something just seems a bit off and leans ENTIRELY into the uncanny-ness of it all. it's a sudden jump into random tempo switches, fucking just making all the noise he wants, and screaming "fuck your culture".

like the symbolism is so clear yet so subtle. I fucking love it.

and I am

OBSESSED. with this outro.

and THEN the little 'love me, normally' melody at the end is fucking INSANEEE augh. there was literally no better way to start this album off.

2econd 2ight 2eer (that was fun, goodbye) is EASILY one of my fucking favorites on this album. like. god.

IMMEDIATELY starting off with "take it with a pillar of salt, H.A.L.T., it's not my fault", illustrates the point of this song so well.

HALT is the acronym Hungry Angry Lonely Tired. It encourages you to "halt" and think before making an important decision and evaluate-- are you any of these four things?

And it's often been suggested by psychiatrists to a lot of people dealing with mental health issues.

The reason why I'm so obsessed with this lyric is because this entire song is basically accepting, "hey. i'm mentally ill. like i am. FUCKED in the head. this isn't something i can't escape, not really. i'm learning to be okay with this instead of searching my whole life for a cure. i'm never going to be able to assimilate fully into normal society."

and it's mixed with this very, like. Rudimentary view of how society views mentally ill people / those struggling with more severe psychological conditions. The chorus is literally "I'm just a psycho babe; come and go out my mind"

It's almost like this expression of mania, what with the upbeat tempo and the dark lyrics.

"I didn't lose it, I set it free" is another lyric in this song i just. augh. love. love love lvoe vloevleo this whole album. this is DEFINITELY the song i could say the MOST about. but i feel like i'd almost have to save that for another, more organized post.

Laplace's Angel / Hurt People? (Hurt People!)

AUGGGHHHHH.

god.

The title Laplace's Angel comes from the idea of Laplace's Demon, which concerns the whole idea of determinism, etc. It's essentially the idea that if a demon knew the position of everything, everywhere, the laws of physics would allow it to predict and understand the future.

it. doesn't make a lot of sense to me tbh.

BUT.

i understand determinism in a sense, and it's basically the idea that free will doesn't exist and that we and our actions are. products of the things that have already happened to us.

That's the best way I can explain it.

And I think that all of this, tied together with how the song is discussing important topics of morality, etc. is just. So cool and artistic and. God.

It references this guttural, primal sort of fear and this sort of "predictability" of the human psyche with the lyric that throws the entire song into it's first chorus-- said lyric being:

"Run your diagnostic tests, it's posited; nobody dies agnostic, though we still dial 9-1-1."

AND THEEENNNN. the chorus itself. augh.

You could go on all day about the main voice, "Could you take a look at me?" but i'm more in love with the backing chorus--

"It's the norm for animals, it's the norm for chemicals -- It's the norm for particles, eye for eye, for tooth"

and you can see a lot of references to other philosophies such as "an eye for an eye".

AND THEN the bridge being "wash your hands of where you been until you flood the second floor - neatly fold your skeletons but still can't shut the closet door"

essentially just being this greater commentary on morals as a whole, and how, in a sense, morality is just. subjective. Like I don't think I have the skill to illustrate just how insightful this song is on the topic of morality. god.

I / Me / Myself !

so obviously i / me / myself is a remaster of sorts of i / me / myself by Will Wood and the Tapeworms (versus just solo Will Wood)

BUT I LVOE THIS SONG. SO MUCH.

Will Wood wrote this song, essentially, about wishing he could express his femininity properly, right? how he felt like people refused to accept his identity as cisgender and heterosexual because he was a crossdresser, and very proud of it?

i fucking love that. he just puts absolutely everyone on blast for that. he's a cis dude who's also fucking with gender and fashion and art and he's letting people understand that.

but here's where i get personal because i ADORE the song as a lesbian who doesn't consider himself cisgender in the slightest.

I've spent my whole life wishing I could "be a girl" despite being born and raised female-- I simply just didn't fit into the mold of traditional femininity and, growing up in a religious background, that just made it even more difficult to fit in.

So I LOVE the lyric "i wish i were a girl".

AND THE BRIDGE IM JUST OBSESSED WITH TOO

"Eating your prosthetic, meet your anesthetic criteria, pathetic seeing you become acetic -- Say my name like a slur, but I've been called worse; I've heard it all before, no this isn't a first -- Let me be the void you fill with taxidermy fingerprints, taxonomize our differences -- I am quantum physics, my witness brings me to existence"

I think I just. need to leave that there. Cause it says more than I ever could. rahgaghag

and then closing out with the repeated line "all identities are equally invalid; don't you think that there's a chance that you could live without it?" is such cool like. food for thought yk?

idk i love the view Will Wood gave here, honestly. Especially knowing that he's very accepting of the lgbt+ community.

...well, better than the alternative

HOLY SHIT I AM. AUGH. UNWELL OVER THIS SONG.

see, the way I view it, is this attempt to just. Play into a normal, quiet life, despite EVERYTHING mentioned previously in the album. It's about trying to shove beside everything else for a normal existence.

It ties into suburbia overture, i / me / myself, and 2econd 2ight 2eer soso well. it's the perfect "halfway point of the entire album".

another lyric that i just HAVE to throw in here "This isn't my first kiss, it's better to be lost than loved, now isn't it?"

i'm mainly just. obsessed with that because of how aromantic it sounds. even though i know that's not how it was intended.

but i LOVE. THIS SONG. AUGH i love them all obviously but this one has such a special place in my heart.

It's asking somebody to "play along with" you (referring to the normal life thing) and THEN the whole "I just wanna do what's right by you"

it's just. tying together all the previous songs and like. expressing, essentially. "I'm fucked up. Are you willing to put up with me?"

or maybe im just yapping about absolutely nothing on this one idk

--

I don't know much more about the second half of this album, but I feel like diving into the lyrics of Outliars and Hyppocrates : a fun fact about apples is something i definitely need to do soon. i love this song's musical composition and.

"Don't wanna be human, anyways -- who pilots all these crude machines" ?? BANGER FUCKING LYRIC.

It's essentially just-- "the things that make you special are the things that make you strange"

meaning. get weirder with it. get fucking weirder with your art.

BlackBoxWarrior - OKULTRA is probably my favorite song on this album in terms of, musical composition and noise. I've pored over these lyrics soosososo many times and a lot of it goes over my head but over time I've started to understand a LOT of it and i just. augh.

also this song has such strong animatic vibes?? this is the one that makes me think SO much about my current writing project and i adore it for that.

I wish i was like. able to coherently express my thoughts on the lyrics of this song but they're just so complicated and. wow. it's. I think Will Wood totally outdid himself with this one because this is the most. Perfectly tied-together song on this entire album.

HOLY SHITTT

MARSHA, THANKK YOU FOR THE DIALETICS, BUT I NEED YOU TO LEAVE

OKAY I LIED I CAN TALK ABOUT THIS ONE ALL FUCKING DAY.

GOD.

I'M AUTISTIC. IN THE DIAGNOSIS PROCESS. AND LET ME TELL YOU I AM FUCKING OBSESED WITH THIS ONE SO MUCH.

Essentially, under our current system, any inability to perfectly execute a grueling 9-5, 5 days a week, on top of the mental labor of schooling and debt etc. is considered a disability. "Actual" diagnosed people are just the canaries in the coal mines, we're struggling soso much daily and it's just.

It's expanding upon this idea of microlabels and how Will Wood feels about them, and i honestly do think that, even though it's not the intent of this song, it can open up a conversation about how autism is not a "silly" thing. yk how the jokes have essentially become "I have (normal personality trait), is this... 'the tism'?" or the obsession with the fucking. god. "Neurospicy" thing.

^and how this improper culture/misunderstanding of neurodivergency and the need to make it more sanitized/palatable feeds into consumerism. but i can. go on a rant about that some other day.

But basically, with the lyric that "Dr., what's my prognosis if the study shows that: disease is in the eye of the beholder?" it expresses this sort of disdain, almost, with greater society's view on psychiatric abnormalities. if that. makes sense.

and then it's this constant repetition of "Back in my day ; ; ; we just drank ourselves to death. And we fucking liked it". It's also jabbing at this idea of how, in previous generations, you were generally just told to suck it up or you were left behind/ostracized entirely. It's about older generations not understanding the surge of mental health issues as of late. Closing with "We just bled out in the bed".

I love this song. So much. But I feel like this is all I'm gonna say about it because honestly this sort of discourse. Tires me out so much.

AAA OKAY

MY FUCKING LOVE MY DEARIE MY SHINING STAR I LOVE THIS NEXT SONG MORE THAN I LOVE ANYTHING ELSE ON THIS FUCKING PLANET

Love, me Normally

GAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH

THIS IS THE ONE. THIS IS THETHE THE THE THEHT EH *THE* ONE.

THIS IS THE SONG THAT I UNDERSTAND THE MOST. THIS SONG IS LITERALLY ME. ME ME EM EM ME EAUGGHGH

HOLY SHIT.

I feel like so much has already been said on this song. I want to highlight, specifically, the bridge.

This is. my favorite piece of lyricism Will Wood has EVER put out and i fucking mean that.

---

"Now this is the part of the song where I like to talk to my audience

I like to tell 'em there's something I want from you hep cats tonight

I want you to look to your left, look to your right

Your 12 o'clock, three o'clock, six o'clock, nine o'clock, rock around the clock tonight

And I want you to find those points of no return, those singularities

Those burning rings of fire in the beautiful pupils of the beautiful eyes of the beautiful

Boy, girl, neither, both, or in-between that you brought with you tonight

And I want you to tell 'em how you really feel

I want you to tell 'em that you love the way they so seamlessly, like-a-dream-fully

So beautifully, oh so dutifully

Jam that square peg in the round hole in their heart

I want you to tell 'em that you love the way

That they don't stick out like sore middle fingers

That they crawl their way up the side of the bell curve

Stick their flag in the peak, and slide their way back down

I want you to tell them that you love the way that they're not maladaptive

Not malcontent, not malignant or maleficent, but rather that you love them

Exactly the way that everybody else is!"

---

now is it. unnecessary. to paste it all in here? certainly. but i just. love this so much.

the constant motif of mentioning the bell curve is amazing, too. I love this album because of it's essential... just. Being so outside of the normal bounds of society that all you can do is sit back and observe it all like "huh".

this is another ramble that i'd have to save for another post because this is the one that i understand the most.

I personally like to view this one through the lens of aromanticism. cause i can.

Now I'm not gonna go too much into detail on Memento Mori: the most important thing in the world cause BOY is it existential.

but i do think it's a beautiful way of tying this entire album together.

this entire album is almost like a note to humanity in general, this whole "you may not listen to me ever again, but give me these 45 minutes of your life to change your outlook on all of it".

Despite this album being subjective and subversive? Deviating so strongly from the norm that the average person, hell, even most avid fans, could never begin to relate to most of it?

It has this sort of... span of the human existence, in a sense. It understands it on such a small level, and it speaks bast the barriers that we usually don't try to cross. It just says shit that nobody else has said before.

I <3 this album. So insanely much.

I think that it's honestly one of the better pieces of music period that have been put out in these last few years. nothing else is as lyrically, linguistically, or musically different. aughgg

thank you for the ask if you read to the end youre fucking insane.

[youremyheaven]

https://www.tumblr.com/youremyheaven/753636400982786048/whys-this-song-sooo-catchyyy-sreeleela-is-a?source=share

Yes!! It is. The music director ( thaman) literally sampled a Telugu meme of an old man cursing and used it inthe song. " Kurchini marthabetti de***githe " is what that old guy says , in the song they beeped out the last word . Thaman gave him 10k to this old man for using his voice & meme .

Sreeleela is a phenomenal performer . Her debut was in tollywood and she had a movie release every month in 2023 . How does she balance her studies btw she's a mbbs student and acting.

My fav performance of her is 'pulsar bike' song , she got popular with this song actually .

https://youtu.be/c9fXiv1UELo?si=jAdegfoeDPgl-uzx

Omg tysm for telling me!!! This is sooo interesting

I looked up the meme,, I don't understand anything but the grandpa seems funny as hell 😭😂 marthabetti means chair??? I saw a comment say that the grandpa was talking about attacking someone with a chair??? 😭 idk if they were kidding but what's the context??? like within the song?? ik they used chairs as props in the chorus but???

Damn he should've been paid more than 10k tho if his meme inspired a whole ass song :/

Sreeleela seems like such a Martian woman, she's such a high energy performer,, more than anything, it's her energy and power that makes her look so good while performing. It seems very Martian to me.

She only had 4 releases in 2023 👀 that math don't be mathing

But yes, that's still a lot of movies to do IN A YEAR 😭😭😭

Damn she's doing medicine??? I looked her up and apparently her mom's a famous doctor and treats many film stars?? Wow

Also Sreeleela adopted 2 kids??? when she was 21??? What 😳🤯😮?? Has she ever talked about them?? I can't find more info on it 😔

I watched the pulsar bike song and damn her energy is just 💯🥵🔥 but the song itself is kinda meh (sorry 😔) but I loooveeee Telugu dance numbers,,, all Telugu actors can dance really well. They go sooo hard. Same with Tamil dance numbers actually. They dance like they'll break all their bones , it makes you want to get up and join them 😍🥳

[piglii]

btw I have not finished Umineko (I’m literally on the last leg of Episode 8, shortly after an important jump happens) but I’m so gushing with things to say about that I feel like I need to type this all out now (will start with impressions that are non-spoilery and go into impressions that are big spoilers. there will be a dividing line which I earnestly recommend you do not cross if you have any interest reading it yourself.)

anyways

Non-Spoiler Section

Absolutely 10/10 for me. Can feel like a climb at times but that feeling increasingly goes away as you get used to the pacing. Any fumbles Umineko has for me personally are so small in the grander scope of what it’s doing that it doesn’t even feel worth acknowledging them. Literally a story that is going to affect my view on life. I really fell for the charm of Ryukishi’s goofy ass old sprites too after a while, it’s really compelling to me that Ryukishi was able to make such a good, earnest story while having kind of limited drawing ability. I’m dead ass serious, it’s really inspirational. The quality of the writing and voice acting especially is so good that after a short while you kind of don’t even process that the sprites look kind of silly-goofy at all. I highly recommend playing with the original sprites and voice acting if you can.

And the music! holy shit I can’t imagine getting through this story without the music! The fucking 1800′s pipe organ songs one minute, intense trance the next, distorted choir singing, a mellow beat that’s sampling that fucking ambulance siren! Probably my top faves are Infant Queen Bee, Golden Nocturne, far, Rain, Daydream’s End, Fall, Miragecoordinator, Melting Away, Dead Angle, Hope and probably like 15 more I’m forgetting. Absolute banger of a soundtrack. Virtually no misses and the ones that hit, HIT. I think I have spent nearly as much time listening to the soundtrack in between sessions as I have just playing the game itself.

I won’t go into detail about what the central messages of Umineko are because they could ostensibly be spoilers but they are pretty fucking hard to miss. If you have two eyeballs and a brain you will probably figure them out as you go because Ryukishi is NOT subtle about what he wants to say. He will smash you with a hammer making sure you get it. But it’s less of a giant metal warhammer and more of a little wooden mallet that he’s just hitting on your knee every 20 minutes to make sure you’re awake and following along.

The writing honestly can be very... it straddles the line between very straightforward descriptions and waxing very poetic about a particular topic. I won’t even say it’s particularly the best prose ever or anything - I think Ryukishi’s biggest talent is simply in how he’s able to convey the characters by always having a really solid understanding of how they react to things. Maybe his worst flaw is that sometimes he includes a scene or concept where I’m like  “oh Ryukishi just thought this would be super fucking cool” but I can’t even hate because most of the time it is super fucking cool actually. Umineko is so dripping with earnest cheesiness in a lot of its delivery and character interactions that I can’t help but like it most of the time. Granted I am biased because I do enjoy stuff that is earnestly cheesy like 90% of the time. The goofy ass anime interactions characters sometimes have are used just sparingly enough and contrasted with the serious scenes that I found pretty much all of it enjoyable for what it was. 

Be warned it is 150+ hours (faster if you are just reading but seriously those voice actors are top tier, big recommend) but it really needs... at least most of that time. I struggle to find a single exact point that I would shorten any part of Umineko because so much of it really is required to understand what the story’s going for but at the same time sometimes Ryukishi does love to sit you down and talk about the process of liquidating gold into cash money for 30 minutes. A lot of the worst of that is in the first episode to be honest so if you can get past that you’re probably golden. It’s got a hell of a hook by the end of episode 1. Go in as blind as possible and enjoy yourself.

 And now, for the spoilers.

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Spoiler Section

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Don’t Go Beyond This Point If You Haven’t Read It, Seriously Holy Fuck!!!

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Seriously, The Author Wants You To Go In Blind!

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Alright.

All the losers are gone let’s partay.

Heads up I’m a little blasted so this might be a bit scrambled and all around the place so sorry, just writing stuff as I think about it.

I really adore the way that Beatrice is in literally every layer of this story. Like the concept of the masses being in such a rush to figure out what the truth of the Rokkenjima Massacre is that they end up literally trampling over the deeply embedded and sad story of Beatrice really gets to me. Like, the people who are looking at the Massacre from the angle that she even “exists” at all literally only see Beatrice as a piece in their own constructed games, an explanation that’s just one step to figuring out what was really important. But of course, Beatrice IS the heart of the story. The whole family is arranged around her like a web and she’s right at the center. She’s in every possible layer of this story that she can be, she’s the connecting fabric of everything important.

Also I really adored Battler and Ange as characters. It’s rare that a main character feels so relatable but I ended up really enjoying his personality by around episode 2 or 3. He’s just so stupid but also earnest and flustered. Try to give him a slight pass on episode 1 because he is supposed to be kind of dumb and immature on purpose... even if it probably could’ve been toned down maybe just a bit. He gets better, I promise.

(btw literally been here. so relatable.)

anyways moving on. Ange. absolutely enjoyed the hell out of her story in episode 4 and was so glad to see that she’s basically the conclusion to the whole Ushiromiya family story in the final episode as well. also, her being the focus of this really inspirational message of what it means to move forward with your life was really well done. it’s insane to me that people are still out there trying to “figure out” the mystery when Umineko tells you as bluntly as it possibly can that it doesn’t really matter - finding out what “really” happened can’t bring closure no matter what and holding and walking this tenuous tightrope between belief and non-belief is a better way to live. her goodbye with the family and battler was about where it got me pretty good I could not fucking hold back crying at that.

and speaking of the family at large, I really like pretty much all of them! even the stinkers are fun to make fun of. also, Eva in particular is the milf of all time for me, personally. in fact thinking on it the only character I can really think that still rubs me badly (even though it is of course entirely intentional that the reader feels this way) is Rosa. good fucking lord the moments of episode 4 with Maria and Rosa’s relationship being explored (or rather, the complete lack of it except for the spouts of child abuse) really hit me. that... is probably the most I’ve ever been emotionally effected by a piece of media in a long ass time, it was a rough chapter to get through. that said ryukishi’s understanding of domestic abuse is fucking incredible, does not surprise me that he was a social worker before working on VNs. beyond even just that dynamic he clearly has an understanding of the kind of broken adults that come out of highly abusive households. the final game of episode 8 with ange getting to see this world that could theoretically have been real had kinzo chosen love in the future versus love in the past was so sincerely sweet to me. sorry I am a sucker for sappy shit, it got me.

anyways let’s talk about the illusions. loved them all too. feels obvious to say but Beatrice is one of the characters of all time. also really liked Ronove, his and battler’s occasional moments of being bros out of nowhere were really enjoyable to me. also sorry gamers Virgilia is another milf of all time. loved her tender and sweet personality. but as for beatrice and co as a whole - I do enjoy what Ryukishi has to say about fiction. Indulging too much of your life in fiction is ultimately harmful but it can be a valuable crutch to people who are dealing with life or even just people who could stand to learn and grow more. it’s also such a loving letter to mystery as a genre, you can really tell Ryukishi was going hog for mystery at the time. and it does work as a completely conventional mystery too - figuring out stuff as you go and putting the pieces slowly together is a huge blast! I loved the scenes where he’s clearly celebrating that with the readers who tried their best to understand the story.

I managed to avoid most spoilers - the ones I saw beforehand were really minor and didn’t really help me in putting the mystery together - that said, I really only figured out that Shannon and Kanon were being performed by the same person not terribly long before the game revealed it pretty directly - I think only a few hours ahead of time. that said, I really did give it my all, I’m just not super good at mysteries. I did pick up on some hints early on, like being able to figure out some of the early closed rooms but I didn’t have enough context to join them all together and realize the Truth before the game spelled it out for me. and tbh, that’s fine! I loved how the game congratulated people who simply try to figure it out for themselves, regardless of if they’re successful.

btw it also took me so fucking long to read because I was reading it side by side with a friend (who had read the manga but not the VN) and we basically set it up to auto play (with japanese voice acting + the original sprites of course.) we’d play intermittently roughly every few months in leaps and progress little by little. I can’t fucking believe I wasn’t spoiled on any of the major elements playing like that, it’s a fucking miracle. we started reading it on and off like that nearly two years ago now but honestly it was worth.

god I have so many thing I could spend rambling on about this manga but it genuinely is up there with, like, War and Peace and Crime and Punishment and I’m not even joking. there’s some of what I would call “Goofy Anime Bullshit” that happens (and it’s especially coated in that layer of stuff you only really got in the late aughts anime communities) but even that I found pretty enjoyably silly after a short period of time and just ended up rolling with it. if you know someone who can see past that layer of Goofy Anime Bullshit and enjoys reading 150+ hour long visual novels, this is the thing for them.

and speaking of the length boy fucking howdy. it’s worth it. the amount of time dedicated to fleshing out every character and making me understand what kind of person they are underneath everything else really makes me appreciate everybody in this fucked up family unit. it’s not something you could replicate in a movie or any reasonably lengthy manga. the magic of getting to know the whole family, flaws and all, really sells you on what a tragedy it is regardless of what happened. there are so many early scenes where I was like, “okay what’s the point of this” that I look back in hindsight and I’m either like "oh that was actually super fucking important and I just didn’t realize it” or “oh this was giving me time to become familiar with this character.” fuck man, I even liked Hideyoshi and he almost didn’t do shit!

btw I got the culprits in bernkastel’s game figured out in one try (with the help of my friend bouncing ideas off of eachother)

feels good, feels organic, thank you, etc

anyways... I think that about wraps it up for me... honestly just a stellar game. It feels like one of those things where I’m going to catch myself thinking about the themes and what it was trying to say, just like Disco Elysium or a lot of Wildbow’s works or EEAAO. It almost makes me wish this story was in a more conventional book form because I think you could tell the core of what’s there but at the same time I don’t think it’d be worth losing all the other aspects that make it so memorable. It’s going to have probably 1/100th the readers it could have just for being a long VN rather than a long book series but I’d honestly rather have it this way. It’s such a weirdly specific gem of that era of internet-anime culture that I think the time has already passed that anything quite like it could come out. What a special little piece of media.  If I have more to say after finishing out the ending proper I‘ll probably just edit my impressions on to this post and reblog again at a later date.

EDIT: It is now two days later and I have finished everything, including the last “????” segment. My thoughts on the ending - I liked it. It’s very sweet and depending on how you want to interpret certain facets of what you see, it can be read several different ways. Of course the way the narrative is set up, it very much wants you to pick the most optimistic interpretation but I like that there’s always room to explore just a bit. The point of whether Beatrice as a witch is real or not is entirely beside the point almost - there was a woman named Beatrice who brought happiness to her family (at least, in one world) as well as she could given her fucked up circumstances. That’s honestly all there really is to say on it. I can very much vibe with that message.

I was also earnestly expecting the last scene of Umineko to be even more bittersweet than it ended up being - I was really waiting for the very last scene to be Ange literally throwing away the key to Eva’s diary into the ocean. That is kind of what happens in a way, and the scenes in which they do explore Ange opening the diary and reading it are left deliberately obscure (as they should be) but I was really expecting it to be even more poignant than that. I was thinking Ange would literally never see the diary in any part of the story the reader saw at any point. It would’ve been very Titanic-esque in a way - Ange throwing away the only way for her to even possibly know what happened on Rokkenjima. The story does effectively do this, kind of, anyways, it’s just a lot more roundabout.

But yeah. Supremely sweet story. I will probably be thinking about it for much of my life.

[optiwashere]

Archspire touring this year? Alongside Aborted? There's few shows where I've immediately bought tickets quite like that lmao.

Also, Friday's new releases were kinda sick ngl.

I love the "completely random discovery" part of new music. Sometimes you find a band that just flew under your radar for no reason.

Doomy, folky band called Isenordal released a new album and it's just fucking incredible? Melancholic, dark, emotionally raw. Melodic and depressing. Almost funeral doom in its pacing but with bursts of melodic black metal AKA fuckin' made specifically For Me. Definitely found new writing music with this one. The clean bridge in "A Moment Approaches Eternity?" Literally all of "Await Me, Ultima Thule?" The ethereal title track? Every track is incredible, 11+ minute songs have never felt so brief. Also, the 2CD physical copy comes with a narrative essay about the concept of the album??? How can a band be so for me and yet I've only heard of them now?

Skeletal Remains is the best death metal a girl could ask for 💜 Ending the album on a Hate Eternal cover 💜💜💜 It feels good to hear death metal so clearly inspired by F/G-era Morbid Angel without the absolutely tragic snare sound of the G album. Incredible follow-up to their 2020 album (that also rules btw)

Fun grimy death-doom from the fantastically named Slimelord. This time with an album title referencing a fungal disease found in frogs (???) and the album starts off with a highly reverberated, atmospheric sample of layered geese and gull sounds (?????)

On another note, the new Midnight is fine, nice and punky. I feel like he's been spinning his wheels for the last few albums though. Live shows still fuck either way, so I'm probably gonna see them live when they swing around here next time lol.

I have to wait to get the new Spit On Your Grave because I can only buy it from their label in Mexico. Zero presence around this album at all, and it's very odd. Maybe it's getting a wider release with the independent release on the 30th, IDK.

Also, new Ulcerate this year? Which means possibly Ulcerate tour this year? What pact did I unwittingly sign to deserve this?

[chewwytwee]

Okay not to harp on the AI thing, this’ll be my last post about it rn.

But remember in the 90s when musicians thought that MIDI meant performing musicians would all lose their jobs and become obsolete? Well yeah that kind of happened (similarly to self checkout) but in the aftermath of ‘every musician losing their job’, plenty of musicians still had jobs using their skills along with new technology. People weren’t hiring musicians for music, they could just put in a CD if they really wanted to, people hired musicians for their expertise in the field of music.

Some studio exec has no fucking clue how to use a DAW or write a song or record samples or build chords or literally any other basic musical task, and THATS what makes musicians valuable. Digital artists aren’t valuable because they can make JPEGs they’re valuable because they have skills in the field of design and digital art, which AI still doesn’t have btw.