#myrtalith

[idiopathicsmile]

myrtalith

replied to your

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listen, i will apologize for many things in my...

What is the best way to check out these tracks?

Homestuck has a bandcamp account where you can listen to all the music for free! There are many many albums, so I’d say a good place to start is Volume 5, which has some classics (ex. Savior of the Waking World, Skaian Skirmish, Descend)  

(And if you’re not feeling the occasional joke track, feel free to skip it. That ironic cover of “How Do I Live Without You” makes sense in context, to the extent that any of the Homestuck lore makes sense in context.)

ETA: if you’re looking for more specific track recs, I bet that other listeners would be happy to chime in and answer this post with their faves?

[theatrekage]

Tag Game

Thanks, @theatrebelle217

5 things you would find in my bag:

-Pens/pencils

-Receipts I mean to log but never will

-Chapstick I’ll forget about

-At least one knife

-Some kind of list I won’t look at

5 things you’ll find in my room:

-Foxes

-A growing stack of movies I’m too lazy to put back

-Clothes I don’t wear but can’t get rid of—just in case

-Assorted cat toys

-So many pillows

5 things I’m currently into:

-Amtgard (LARP)

-The Runaways

-Dragon Age: Inquisition (again)

-Drawing

-Painting

5 things on my to-do list:

-Pay bills

-Finish washing dishes

-Refresh the cat litter

-Contact garber about commission

-Be better

I tag @myrtalith

[theatrekage]

@myrtalith

[theatrekage]

@myrtalith

[videntefernandez]

A while back I saw a comic where Carlos got away from a Strex agent (Diego maybe?) because people kill guns, but I can't seem to find it now. Was that one of yours?

It was this one

[theatrekage]

@myrtalith

Buffy meta that’s been sitting in my drafts since I did my rewatch last winter:

I hate the way that posting multiple times about the same media makes me sound fandomy, but I guess that’s what happens when you rewatch a show. You get stuck thinking about it for a while. Which is to say: thinking about Buffy. Went back, rewatched the second season, the season of the epically doomed relationship with Angel. People go on about Angel versus Spike, but the difference in the kind of love-ish story that each of them represent is actually pretty interesting to me. I always found it a shame how het up people got about the relationships on Buffy, when one of the most satisfying things about the show (to me) was the way it depicted and used romantic relationships without ever actually being about them. Buffy was never a romance. It was always a story about Buffy growing up and growing into herself, by herself. “She alone will stand against the vampires.” The chosen one, the only child (and then the single parent). The last image of the credits is always Buffy posed alone. And the last image of each season is generally of Buffy and her friends, rather than Buffy and her lovers.

Which is to say, the point of a romantic Buffy storyline is always, primarily, what it means for her and her development. For that larger metaphor of personal maturation, rather than some question of “what are the best traits to reproduce with.” (My frustration with Buffy and Riley in season four was always that it didn’t quite hit the “she is LARPing normality” thing hard enough. Though I liked the season five deterioration of their relationship.).

I see the theme of season two as something like “the tragedy of purity.” Not “loss of innocence” so much as the knowledge that pure things both exist and cannot be protected. Pure love, pure happiness, pure good, pure evil. In When She Was Bad, the opening, you have Buffy coping with the loss of pure heroism. The fact that her heroism both killed and didn’t kill her, that she neither fully won nor fully lost. What purity really is is a kind of control, or the luxury of not needing to have it, and so we have Buffy confronting the fact that she doesn’t have control over things that she expected to. She had no choice about whether she lived or died. In Lie To Me, Buffy has to stop a terminally ill friend who wants to become a vampire. So she loses her luxury of easy ethics. And then when Angel loses his soul she loses the luxury of an easy story. (“What did you do for your birthday?” “I got older”).

I really like that storyline because Buffy losing her virginity isn’t treated as a corruption. It’s an inversion of that. It’s the world that’s corrupt, and Buffy’s humanity that is pure. If anyone is an Eve in Surprise it’s Angel, who chooses to have knowledge of happiness (quite literally: “pure happiness”) even though it is forbidden to him. The tragedy of purity is not the loss of purity. It’s the fundamental ephemerality of it.

So in order for the Angelus and sending-Angel-to-hell storyline to have its full thematic weight, it actually is genuinely important that—according to the narrative—Buffy and Angel have a “true love” sort of relationship. Regardless of how I or anyone else feels about whether the two of them are interesting or romantic. It has to be something pure and real, so it can be something that is lost. It’s precisely the kind of romance, the kind of metaphor, that makes sense at this stage of a story about growing up.

The Buffy and Spike storyline on the other hand, is about intimacy in the absence of purity, post-purity. Their relationship is interesting because it isn’t really a romance, even by the end of the seventh season. It’s more about the intersection of human feeling with self-transformation. Love as motivation, sex as revelation, relationships as catalysis. The Buffy and Spike relationship is about loss of innocence, is about corruption, or at least the fear thereof. But losing innocence about oneself, rather than the world. Buffy first learning her true capability for cruelty* and self-debasement in season six, and then (in season seven) her true capability for forgiveness. Forgiveness not in the sense of absolution, or taking back a bad boyfriend, but in the sense of giving people who have done bad things opportunities to also do good. With Spike, but also with Faith, Anya, Andrew, Willow and—most crucially—herself. Spike in turn learns more fully the extent of both his humanity and his monstrousness. His ability to care, to violate, and to morally strive.

*(Not that Spike, being an unrepentant mass murderer and all, doesn’t basically deserve what he gets. More that it’s clearly bad for Buffy—“It’s killing me” she says—to use him to feel or to punish herself, because she sees him as a moral non-entity. In her words, “a thing”. Beating him bloody in Dead Things is visibly disturbing to her.)

Their dynamic, in other words, is about losing your illusions about yourself, and carrying on afterwards. It’s the kind of story that makes sense at that more mature, late-season stage of a story about growing up. You can’t forgive or accommodate your humanity until you discover it. So the same way the Angel relationship had to be something pure, the Spike relationship had to something somewhat sordid—so it could be something that was forgiven (incorporated, transformed).  It’s fitting that Spike’s description of his love by the end of the show is framed by “I’ve seen the best and the worst of you. And I understand with perfect clarity exactly what you are.” The two relationships basically form a complete arc: from pure romantic love as something wonderful but fragile (you’ll lose your soul) to more human, ambiguous feeling as something difficult but worthwhile (you’ll gain a soul). Buffy and Spike’s “connection” by the end of the show is not really treated as a romantic culmination—they don’t end up together after all. It’s more like they seem to represent another triumph of self-mastery, in the vein of Willow channeling white magic or Buffy sharing her power.

[meggannn]

myrtalith replied to your chat: my mother: so what did you do in vienna? did you...

This is practically a quote from the stage play “True West”. Look it up.

i've never heard of it? if you're accusing me of stealing a joke or something i don't really know what to say to this other than my post really was a conversation that happened last night at our dinner table. you can ask my sister if you like.

[intergalacticcas]

Who is it your favorite animated character based on cuteness? My recent choice is Catbug from Bravest Warriors.

Holy butts that’s hard to decide. Probably The Professor from Nichijou!

[katthedemonslayer]

@myrtalith the audio is really only at its absolute worst for the first like 10 eps or so (i think?? its been a while), it just doesnt get to campaign 2 quality until (in my opinion) about 30 eps in, which i think is roughly when they get an actual set and better equipment. its not horrible, just not great

I skipped campaign 1 due to the time commitment and am currently 12 episodes away from being caught up with campaign 2. How is the technical quality of the early episodes? Cause I’m interested in the story, but have gotten pretty spoiled by the production values of the current content.

rip sorry i fell asleep

i really only listened to the first campaign in podcast form so im not sure when the technical aspects get better. i do know the audio gets better at roughly 30 episodes in at least lol and i thiiiiiink that's roughly when they get their set? again, im not sure

the only episodes i actively watched were up through about episode 24 and then the last 3 of the campaign

[katthedemonslayer]

Hey, we have the same birthday. Happy birthday to us!

yay! happy birthday us!

[videntefernandez]

Has anyone else suggested the idea that maybe Dana is The Faceless Old Woman Who Secretly Lives in Your Home? Dana's new found powers and the way Cecil interacted with her is very reminiscent of TFOWWSLiYH, especially since she can apparently travel through time now.

Woah what