#quarterly review

[krjpalmer]

On a certain edge: Vinland Saga 2 and Pui Pui Molcar Driving School

One future from the past: Galaxy Cyclone Braiger

Varied catch-ups: Lycoris Recoil, Bocchi the Rock!, and Magical Revolution

In realer worlds: Skip and Loafer and Mix 2

Varieties of magic: The Ancient Magus’ Bride 2 and Soaring Sky Pretty Cure

Assorted pickups: Birdie Wing, The Witch From Mercury, and Suzume

[cctinsleybaxter]

fisherman trent rezn-oar i wanna gut you like a mackerel

[leonardcohenofficial]

what if i actually started using letterboxd for real

[charliespringverse]

i think it should be possible to scream without making any noise or disturbing anyone or inviting any questions . just sometimes . as a treat .

[cool-as-steel]

i think women should also get to perish in terrible submarine-related incidents. tragic submarine death should not be a men-only field.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Kate Beaton's "Ducks"

It’s been more than a decade since I began thrilling to Kate Beaton’s spectacular, hilarious snark-history webcomic “Hark! A Vagrant,” pioneering work that mixed deceptively simple lines, superb facial expressions, and devastating historical humor:

https://memex.craphound.com/2012/03/23/hark-a-vagrant-the-book/

Beaton developed Hark! into a more explicit political allegory, managing the near-impossible trick of being trenchant and topical while still being explosively funny. Her second Hark! collection, Step Aside, Pops, remains essential reading, if only for her brilliant “straw feminists”:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/09/15/step-aside-pops-a-new-hark-a-vagrant-collection-that-delights-and-dazzles/

Beaton is nothing if not versatile. In 2015, she published The Princess and the Pony, a picture book that I read to my own daughter — and which inspired me to write my own first picture book, Poesy the Monster-Slayer:

https://memex.craphound.com/2015/08/07/the-princess-and-the-pony-from-kate-hark-a-vagrant-beaton/

Beaton, then, has a long history of crossing genres in her graphic novels, so the fact that she published a memoir in graphic novel form is no surprise. But that memoir, Ducks: Two Years In the Oil Sands, still marks a departure for her, trading explosive laughs for subtle, keen observations about labor, climate and gender:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/ducks/

In 2005, Beaton was a newly minted art-school grad facing a crushing load of student debt, a debt she would never be able to manage in the crumbling, post-boom economy of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. Like so many Maritimers, she left the home that meant everything for her to travel to Alberta, where the tar sands oil boom promised unmatched riches for anyone willing to take them.

Beaton’s memoir describes the following four years, as she works her way into a series of oil industry jobs in isolated company towns where men outnumber women 50:1 and where whole communities marinate in a literally toxic brew of carcinogens, misogyny, economic desperation and environmental degradation.

The story that follows is — naturally — wrenching, but it is also subtle and ambivalent. Beaton finds camaraderie with — and empathy for — the people she works alongside, even amidst unimaginable, grinding workplace harassment that manifests in both obvious and glancing ways.

Early reviews of Ducks rightly praised it for this subtlety and ambivalence. This is a book that makes no easy characterizations, and while it has villains — a content warning, the book depicts multiple sexual assaults — it carefully apportions blame in the mix of individual failings and a brutal system.

This is as true for the environmental tale as it is for the labor story: the tar sands are the world’s filthiest oil, an energy source that is only viable when oil prices peak, because extracting and refining that oil is so energy-intensive. The slow, implacable, irreversible impact that burning Canadian oil has on our shared planet is diffuse and takes place over long timescales, making it hard to measure and attribute.

But the impact of the tar sands on the bodies and minds of the workers in the oil patch, on the First Nations whose land is stolen and despoiled in service to oil, and on the politics of Canada are far more immediate. Beaton paints all this in with the subtlest of brushstrokes, a thousand delicate cuts that leave the reader bleeding in sympathy by the time the tale is told.

Beaton’s memoir is a political and social triumph, a subtle knife that cuts at our carefully cultivated blind-spots about industry, labor, energy, gender, and the climate. But it’s also — and not incidentally — a narrative and artistic triumph.

In other words, Beaton’s not just telling an important story, she’s also telling a fantastically engrossing story — a page-turner, filled with human drama, delicious tension, likable and complex characters, all the elements of a first-rate tale.

Likewise, Beaton’s art is perfectly on point. Hark!’s secret weapon was always Beaton’s gift for drawing deceptively simple human faces whose facial expressions were indescribably, superbly perfect, conveying irreducible mixtures of emotion and sentiment. If anything, Ducks does this even better. I think you could remix this book so that it’s just a series of facial expressions and you’d still convey all the major emotional beats of the story.

Graphic memoirs have emerged as a potent and important genre in this century. And women have led that genre, starting with books like Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006):

https://cbldf.org/banned-challenged-comics/case-study-fun-home/

But also the increasingly autobiographical work of Lynda Barry, culminating in her 2008 One! Hundred! Demons!:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/one-hundred-demons/

(which should really be read alongside her masterwork on creativity, 2019’s Making Comics):

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/11/05/lynda-barrys-making-comics-is-one-of-the-best-most-practical-books-ever-written-about-creativity/

In 2014, we got Cece Bell’s wonderful El Deafo:

https://memex.craphound.com/2014/11/25/el-deafo-moving-fresh-ya-comic-book-memoir-about-growing-up-deaf/

Which was part of the lineage that includes the work of Lucy Knisley, especially later volumes like 2020’s Stepping Stones:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/07/09/enhanced-rock-weathering/#knisley

Along with Jen Wang’s 2019 Stargazing:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/09/25/stargazing-jen-wangs-semi-autobiographical-graphic-novel-for-young-readers-is-a-complex-tale-of-identity-talent-and-loyalty/

2019 was actually a bumper-crop year for stupendous graphic memoirs by women, rounded out by Ebony Flowers’s Hot Comb:

https://drawnandquarterly.com/books/hot-comb/

And don’t forget 2017’s dazzling My Favorite Thing is Monsters, by Emil Ferris:

https://memex.craphound.com/2017/06/20/my-favorite-thing-is-monsters-a-haunting-diary-of-a-young-girl-as-a-dazzling-graphic-novel/

This rapidly expanding, enthralling canon is one of the most exciting literary trends of this century, and Ducks stands with the best of it.

[Image ID: The cover of the Drawn & Quarterly edition of Kate Beaton's 'Ducks.']

[thoughtportal]

The Price of Paperless

Table of Contents

Here Everything is Poison

By J. Malcolm Garcia, Photography by Darren McCollester

Fall 2010

Cold winds carry lead-filled dust from a nearby slagheap, a hundred million tonnes of toxic tailings, and scatter it on clothes hanging from laundry lines, on open buckets of drinking water, on the dirt children play in, and on the feral dogs running down alleys in this former French army barracks housing about 250 displaced Roma men, women, and children.

Editor’s Desk

The Price of the Paperless Revolution

By Ted Genoways

Reporting

Jharia Burning

By Allison Joyce, Photography by Allison Joyce

The Pit

By Nathaniel Miller

Father Copper

By Annie Murphy, Photography by Rodrigo Llano

Mother of God, Child of Zeus

By Jessica Benko, Photography by Bear Guerra

Digging Out

By Elliott D. Woods, Photography by Elliott D. Woods

The Solution: Bolivia’s Lithium Dreams

By Matthew Power, Photography by Fabio Cuttica

Tin Fever

By Delphine Schrank, Photography by Mark Craemer

Here Everything is Poison

By J. Malcolm Garcia, Photography by Darren McCollester

Essays

The Devil’s Tail: Reading From the Lives of Authors

By Robert Boyers

Fiction

Favorite Son

By Jennifer Haigh

The Digger

By Samanta Schweblin, Translated by Daniel Alarcon

Poetry

The Man

By Patrick Phillips

Work-Clothes Quilt

By Patrick Phillips

Tailing Dam of Baotou Steel

By Qin Xiaoyu

The Book of Lost Railroad Photographs

By Amy Beeder

Criticism

The Age of Inequality

By Oscar Villalon

The Activist Novelist

By Jacob Silverman

The Triumph of Capitalism

By Brian Sholis

Multimedia

The Underground Giant: Life in the Hard Rock Mines of Quebec and Ontario

By Louie Palu, Photography by Louie Palu

[mylittleredgirl]

that corporate jargon fandom post ruined me because i really can't think of another way to say this. i am experiencing scope creep for real on those ask prompt ficlets. blowing all my milestones. rip to my user engagement touchpoints. i just wanted to diversify my fic offerings. this was not in the strategic plan

[jakeperalta]

work tomorrow

[mjohnso]

Quarterly Debut Review: Q1 2024

Quarterly Debut Reviews are a supplementary series to my biannual Periodic Rookie Group Reports, which are published quarterly. Each installment covers three rookie groups that debuted over the past three months. For the fifth installment, I covered ALL(H)OURS (January), YDS (February), and Heimish (March).

As always, a full list of rookie groups that have debuted thus far in 2024 is available here: 2024 Rookie Groups Debuts

January / ALL(H)OURS Debut: January 10, 2024 Debut Song: “GOTCHA”

Although I have been tracking rookie groups for over a decade, I am no soothsayer. I cannot predict with any accuracy the number of new groups that will debut in 2024 or if more groups will disband this year than last year. Nor can I tell if the recent reversal of a multi-year decline in the number of boy groups I covered in Periodic Rookie Groups Report No. 22 is permanent or a temporary deviation. At best, what the numbers tell me is. 2024 is not off to a bad start, especially regarding boy groups. The four boy groups that debuted this year in January mirrors the previous year's total. While this may not crack 2019’s record of nine boy groups in January, it is better than 2018's where boy groups' poor performance was foreshadowed by a single debut at the start of the year.

No matter how this year shakes out for boy groups, it cannot be said that boy groups did not try like ALL(H)OURS who was one of the four boy groups to debut. Their name externalizes their ambition signaling, according to Korea JoongAng Daily, their intention to “pour everything it has at all times.” Their debut song doubles down on this message with the chorus, punctuated by a deep bass sound, emphasizing their laser focus on their goal.

Of course, it takes more than focus and hard work for idols to achieve their dreams—or stardom —in the industry. Those are only parts of an equation with multiple variables, many of which idols have no control over, including their image, musical director, or whether a group gets to come back and try again or build on the momentum. But at least ALL(H)OURS are committed to doing what they can do and working with what they have control over.

February / YDS (YeoDongSaeng) Debut: February 21, 2024 Debut Song: “A Fluttering Love”

YDS’s debut single “A Fluttering Love” can claim more so-called ‘firsts’ than your average debut single. The song is the group’s first release under a proper label, as well as, their official debut and first single. Contrarily, it is also the first song in the industry's history to qualify as both a debut and a comeback single, a fact that the marketing has not hidden but highlighted. On a teaser image released to promote the song’s release, above the two members seated back-to-back on a white table, it reads “YDS 7TH DIGITAL SINGLE ALBUM.”

This discrepancy in qualification is a byproduct of YDS’ unorthodox career trajectory. The duo began their career uploading covers of k-pop songs to their YouTube channel, before pivoting to producing their original songs in 2022. They released six singles and built up a small following before according to their December 2023 Instagram post, signing with HO Entertainment. Then as established above, in February they released their seventh single that doubled as their major label debut. In other words, unlike most k-pop groups who debut after being assembled through the industry’s traditional top-down method, YDS debuted in reverse.

While there are tradeoffs for both YDS and HO Entertainment for bypassing this usual path, I see the appeal. For HO Entertainment, in particular, it is a cost-saving measure. A group with a pre-determined lineup eliminates the need to recruit and train future members of a group, a process so expensive that according to the Korea Creative Content Agency (KOCCA)’s 2023 Pop Culture & Arts Industry Survey, most agencies do not even maintain a pool of trainees. They also come with a pre-defined image and sound, which although certainly adjustable, HO Entertainment has left unchanged. Indeed “A Fluttering Love”, features their signature sweet acoustic sound and lyrics about a love confession. This is consistent with their previous releases, only this time it comes with a name attached to it and an accompanying promotional rollout, typical of your average group.

March / Heimish Debut: March 15, 2024 Debut Song: “Golden Hour”

So far, this year has gone according to Rainbow E&M’s plan. That plan, laid out across their 2023 year-end Instagram posts, indicated that they aimed to debut one group per month – a feat they have pulled off. Three months into 2024, they debuted at least one group under the Future Idol Asia banner every month: Flora in January, Bluebell in February, and now Heimish and Pearlys in March.

Practically speaking, these are all new groups in the sense that Future Idol Asia has never debuted a group under these names or with these lineups. Of the four groups that debuted, Flora and Heimish’s lineups are partly a patchwork of members from prior Future Idol Asia groups. In the case of Flora, of the group’s six members, four previously debuted under Redplum and Closer, respectively. As for Heimish, their group is comprised of one new member, two members of Blossom, and one member of Winsome. This is a byproduct of the nature of the project. As I have written before Future Idol Asia groups are not intended to be permanent homes for aspiring idols but a temporary waypoint on their journey. Ideally, a member who debuts as part of a Future Idol Asia group would catch the attention of an entertainment agency scout at a showcase who invites them for further auditioning before inviting them to join their agency. In reality, though not every member gets picked. For example, in the case of Closer, two of whose members re-debuted this year as part of Flora, only one of the ten members in the group was chosen for additional auditions with other agencies.

This poses a conundrum for the Future Idol Asia project, as they are left with groups with gaps in their lineup, although groups like Flora and Heimish point to their solution. Since last year they have been repackaging members from their previous groups into these new groups. That allows the project to pad its numbers, giving the illusion that the project has more recruits than it actually does, especially if recruitment does not meet expectations. More importantly, it also gives those not picked the first time another chance. With a new group, concept, song, choreography, and opportunity to perform at the showcase this time might be the charm.

[manwalksintobar]

North Winter  // Hayden Carruth

Coming of winter is a beech sapling rising silverly in a brown field in bramble in thicket the raspberry the rosemallow all gone to rust is a silver sapling to which in wind and the judaskisses of snow the starved brown leaves cling and cling.  

In spring the mountain was a fish with blond scales in summer the mountain was a crab with a green shell in fall the mountain was a leopard with a fiery coat in winter the mountain is a bird with lavender feathers and a still heart.  

Snow ice bitter wind the body of love.  

Where two boots labored yesterday across the snowdrifted pasture today each boothole is an offertory of bright seeds bittersweet yellowbirch hemlock pine thistle burning unconsumed.  

Stronger than destiny is pain and in the leaf the marvelous venature is stronger and in the year the last morsel of pancake of the forty-third breakfast is stronger.  

Caught in a brier of stars the lunar scrap blurred like paper fluttering in a gale carrying away a faintly remembered poem of a summer night.  

Twenty-two degrees below zero and only the blade of meadow like a snowpetal or foil of platinum defends the house from the glistening mountain and the unwinking moon.  

The morning ice on the window is opaque as beaten silver and the poet in his ninefootsquare hut stamps rhythmically breathing out plume after plume of warmth while the stove nibbles a few frozen sticks.  

In the snowy woods of morning the new deer tracks run cross and criss and circle among the snowappareled spruces and the gray maples telling of revels by night of joy and delight and happiness beyond any power of consciousness although the small green pellets mean a hard diet.  

The tamarack with needles lost and a thousand curled stiff twigs like dead birdsfeet takes the snow greedily and in snatches to cover its misshapen nakedness.  

Think not of chaste snow always nor of crystalline coldness think of spruce boughs like the swordblade breasts of negresses and of the bull mountain humped over the white soft valley and of stags raging down the rutting wind and of northern passion crackling like naked trumpets in the snow under the blazing aurora.  

The song of the gray ninepointed buck contains much contains many contains all a whole north for example the sweet sharp whistling of the redpolls caught overhead in the branches of the yellow birch like leaves left over from autumn and at night the remote chiming of stars caught in the tines of his quiet exaltation.  

The snowy owl moved across the snowsmooth meadow to the dark balsam without sound without wingbeat more quiet than a fish more effortless than the gliding seed as if it were a white thought of love moving moving over the pasture to home.  

Five jays discuss good and evil in a white birch like five blue fingers playing a guitar.  

Eons gone by the sea hissed among these promontories in ageless stress and despair now stilled but memorialized in the frozen whirl and floodtide of the snow.  

Like a frozen lake the sky on the bitterest night cracks in rays a black elm rising a spray of limbs revealing the longdrowned lurid moon.  

Cold hunger tripped her but her years held her downfallen in this snow hollow this small death valley where small beaks and talons will slowly chip her frozen being though in the snow desert she will not bleach and her eyes will stay soft and beautiful a long long time in the winter light and she will modestly wear her genteel tatters of old flesh and fur.  

The frozen brook sprawls in sunlight a tree of glass uprooted.  

Snow buntings whirling on a snowy field cutglass reflections on a ceiling.  

The dog flies with his ears across the snow carrying a deer’s legbone in his jaws the bone flops threejointedly and the little hoof dances delicately in the snow.  

The window the icicle the gleaming moon when the lamplight fails.  

The night is an immense cauldron four farms of boiling snow under a gale from the pole and the highway where headlights cringe seethes with a furious froth and melts away.  

This wind this screaming parrot this springing wolf this down fall this ab solute extinc tion this deton ating godhead this wind this.  

Blizzard trampling past has left the birches bent as in humiliation the soft scotch pines laid down as in subjection the beeches snapped at the top as in a reign of terror the balsams scarred but upright as in the dignity of suffering and all the woods in sorrow as if the world meant something.  

Pale dawnlight spooks the mist and the valley glimmers and higher behind the mountain whitely rises another peak in remote majesty a presence silent and unknown and gone by noon.  

In cold the snow leaps and dances lightly over the earth but in thaw the sullen fingers of snow heavily cling to each stalk and to every stone.  

Tracks of the snowshoe rabbit across the snow are a ridiculous ominous alphabet of skulls.  

The brook has holes in its cover this morning where the black water flows rippling menacing through the snow which mounds in untouched purity except where threaded prints of the mink delicately deathly stop to drink.  

Snow comes bits of light flake from the sky day breaks whirling in early night.  

Beginning with the palest and most delicate lavender deepening downward murex purpure arras of old brocade kingly loveliest hues imaginable snow blending the bare hardwood maples beeches birches forests called green in summer now this unbelievable intricacy shaded purple gray hanging wavering trembling over the valley this is the mountain.  

Heavy gloves or better mittens the north silencing savoring and saving that lewdword finger.  

After the thaw after illusion the cold comes again returning changed in aspect a great body of death and inertia a corpse flung down a whale perhaps gray and still and immense crushing everything day becomes hard and silent night stiffens heaving to support the weight while the woods groan and the soft snow turns metallic barren and brittle the house creaks under the burden in mindless suffering and its nails burst out with a sound of cracking bones moon sets in afternoon jays huddle say nothing and endure.  

Sky like fishblood deprecative lurid thin evening blush on the mountain and here the foreground very near a sheen of vitrescent snowcrust and reflected light thin lurid deprecative fishblood.  

Gunmetal snow icecolored sky granitic meadow sullen noon stunted yellowed loplimbed pine flayed birch elm tattered with empty nests poverty hunger bitten fingers retracting in splayed gloves dead sun gray hair poverty poverty.  

Wet fire it turns out is better than no fire.  

Sky yellow sky wet sky reeky sky lax some god’s old diaper.  

The day the brook went out was still midwinter locked in zodiacal fastness yet rain fell and fell in fact so much the snow turned green and the water in the brook covered the ice like urine until at one crack the whole damned thing let go ice and muddy water trees stones bits of lumber snow like a racketing express through a local stop and then subsided leaving the banks dark and dirty raw and torn with new patterns of rocks looking unfamiliar what a purgation it was wild and beautiful the result wasn’t bad either all told for now the brook is rising again after the long icebound repression singing a midwinter rebel song.  

Lover of balsam and lover of white pine o crossbill crossbill cracking unseen with of all things scissors seeds seeds a fidget for ears enpomped in the meadow’s silence silence a crackling thorn aflame in the meadow’s cold cold.  

i n  f o      e 39.   Snow’s downstrokes climb softly up the  c          r.

Lichen and liverwort laurel and brome lightened and gravamen of old stones a cellar hole far in foliate woods the dry cistern where sweet water stood the stepstone to nothing that summer entwined softly and now drowned in the snow.  

Astigmatism breaks the crescent moon into two images set asymmetrically so that they cross in the upper third like two scimitars flung down at rest in the Sahara.  

In freshfallen snow marks of pad and paw and even partridge claw go delicately and distinct straight as a string of beads but marks of a heeled boot waver shufflle wamble ruckle the snow define a most unsteady line then spell it out once so death knowledge being heady it hath not the beasts’ beauty goeth tricksy and ploddy and usually too damn wordy but drunken or topsyturvy gladhanding tea’d or groovy it arriveth it arriveth o you pretty lady.  

Lichen is a hardy plant hardy hardy taking sustenance from the granite ledge nouriture from the dead elm bole icy plant hoar plant living kin to rime the north plant flower of death poverty and resolution.  

On Lincoln’s birthday the forest bound in fifty degrees of frost stirs tentatively with a creaking here and there in the new strength of the noticeably higher sun.  

Four greens the aspen trunk the lichen on the aspen trunk the shadow of the aspen across the snow the vanished leaves of the aspen fluttering all over the sky.  

Under the hill a winter twilight darkens to evening colorlessly without sunset and yet the birches rising leaping across the way cry pink cry lavender cry saffron the instant the darkness freezes them.  

When conditions of frost and moisture are just right the air is filled with thousands and thousands of points of light like the fireflies come back only tinier and much more brilliant as if the fireflies had ghosts to haunt the February night.  

Small things are hardest to believe a redpoll snatches the drops from an icicle.  

In late winter cold nights and warm days bring the untimely harvests bright pails and smoke in the sugarbush and the snow called cornsnow on the mountain whining under the skis like chickfeed plunging in the chute  

One day music begins everywhere in the woods unexpectedly water water dripping from fir boughs spilling from ledges singing unexpectedly as when a woman sleeping speaks a strange word or a name so winterfolk the chickadees give over harshness for a sort of carol and the poet appears emerges brushing the mist from his shoulders amused and yawning tasting the snowwater crumbling a bit of tanbark in his teeth water water the pools and freshets wakening earth glistening releasing the ways of the words of earth long frozen.  

Aterword: What the Poet Had Written

. . . and sun the blear sun straggled forever on the horizon an unvarying scrutiny around around as they limped and stumbled holding each other against the wind over the ice that crumbled under them in the tremors of unseen currents and the compass plunging and rearing the sun the livid sun smeared in the wind watching watching never relenting till exhaustion inundated them yet they slept with their eyes open clinging together just as they walked often with their eyes shut hand in hand and fell at last tripped on their destination their sextant snagged their compass wild with incomprehension and they looked over the sides of the world    The sun the bloated sun ever on the horizon ballooning and they shuddered and turned to each other and then dropped down their plumbline under them and payed out its knots hand over hand to the end to fifteen hundred fathoms and felt the plummet still swinging in the void. . . . . . nothing they were nothing afloat on nothing frozen by the winds of nothing under the meaningless glare of nothing’s eye there where the compass points down there where the needle turns in. . . . . . why had they come so far what had led them drawn them into the remoteness and the hostility of north what did north mean and why why was one of them black and the other white these were the points in doubt    There in confrontation they gave over the last dissemblings and the last nostalgias nothing against nothing yet more than that the infinitesimal nothing against the nothing of all the nothing of the real and in this giddiness they became at last the objectivists    They drew back not in fear for fear had consumed itself but as the painter retreats from his canvas and so they saved themselves now seeing how this was their only virtue the withdrawing mind that steadies before reality and they turned slowly together through the whole arc of absurdity with outstretched hands bestowing cold benediction on the north and then sank down    Another confrontation stoned them as they peered into each other’s eyes . . . . . . and saw nothing nothing    Oh in the low gutteral inner voice they exclaimed the misery the destitution of nothing. . . . . . and saw nothing except yes this is the object nothing except the other’s returning gaze which each knew also saw nothing And in this likeness this scrap of likeness that contained their likelihood they arose once more calmly the tall twin centers of compassion in the wide field of cold and horror    And the sun the huge sun circled around them. . . . . . they came back trudging in love and hardship while the sun took a month to set cowering lidless on the extremity of the ice floe where they crouched    Aurora flickered and mounted pale brightening caparisons of yellow and green falling fluttering swaying in such majestic movements that that elemental silence pealed with trumpets and they truly listened with their eyes    Did they then see with their ears the changing simplicities of wind and snow the purity of whiteness whispering everywhere in dunes and fastnesses and cascades Reality gladdened them and all the more when the astonished walrus fell off his seat backwards whopping the sea and they smote their knees and wallowed in the snow. . . . . . north is a horror from which a horror grows a purity and fervor to which in opposition an equal purity and fervor supervene north is the latitude of the near remote lying beyond hope and beyond despair lying in destination where the compass points down the needle turns in where the last breath of meaning is borne away on the cold wind north is the meaninglessness of beauty uncaused in the complete object auroral flickerings on the eternal snows the eye swimming in the mind’s deluge the blue mountain floating on emptiness the shadow of the white bear gliding underfoot north is the vacancy that flowers in a glance wakening compassion and mercy and lovingkindness the beautiful dew of the sea rosmarine the call dying in silence so distant so small and meeting itself in its own silence forever north is north is the aurora north is deliverance emancipation . . . . . . north is nothing . . .  

(found at the Virginia Quarterly Review, issue 40: summer, 1964)

[krjpalmer]

Plugging along: Machine Robo Revenge of Cronos

Streaming dark and light: Dead Dead Demon's DeDeDeDe Destruction and Narenare Cheer For You!

Streaming old and new: Major 2nd and Sengoku Youko

Back to long ago: Anne of Green Gables

A new adaptation: Urusei Yatsura

The concluding movement: Sound! Euphonium

The unexpected number: Girls Band Cry

[tumblasha]

vacation review: taiwan

overall rating: ★★★★/5

cities visited (chronologically): taipei, taichung, kaohsiung, taitung

the good parts

i got to see Moomf (micosu oomf)

i got over the "i can't visit a country if i don't know the language" feeling

nature everywhere

night markets were so fun!

at least half of the population wears a mask at all times (even outside of taipei where the air quality is nicer!)

every train station + tourist spot had a stamp area so now i have a lil booklet filled with taiwanese stamps :,)

food! especially boba and soups :DD -so much liquid.

traveling on the back of a scooter is so mind-numbing, i love being a passenger princess

the bad parts

taipei's air pollution is a lil sad but def not the worst

getting over the jetlag and post-vacation sadness T_T

they killed that duck that i saw in that one tumblr post

overall summary

i think that taiwan is an excellent place for people of all places to visit! especially if you know english, everyone is really nice to english-speakers and makes an effort to gesture-speak or google translate through every conversation

this may be insensitive, but i think that the "made in taipei" brand (country pride of having many ~cultural influences) really works for tourism. previously, i saw friends and co-workers take their japan trip and do all the kawaii things (sanrio store, snoopy cafe, studio ghibli museum, etc), and got sad. taichung really embraces manga, anime, and other kawaii-adjacent things, and it satisfied my desire to go to japan. i've been having a hard time with co-existing with appreciating the good side of japan (mostly art and media) and learning abt the bad sides (colonial history), so it was nice being able to get a positive experience with low "double-think"

on post-vacation sadness

idk why but this was the first time that i came back from a vacation and i was Sad. like, maybe it's bc i got my period mid-trip and it was some weird post-period hormonal thing?? but i doubt it

looking back, i think that i have never truly been Alone until this trip? when i solo traveled in sp+pt, i was able to talk to the people in the hostel and go out with them. i wasn't able to talk to anybody bc a majority of the tourists spoke either mandarin or japanese, and idk either of those languages. i think that i was alone with my thoughts for too long -> leading to being on my phone too much -> leading to random bursts of crying (?) that lasted through a week after coming back to the US. it was bad enough that i took off all my jewelry and almost cut my hair X|

also any instagram posts that mentions taiwan / east asia kinda ruins my whole day. i wanna go backkkkkk

lessons learned

it's okay to be lost emotionally and physically! being alone is a constant battle of self-love and The Void

i need more international friends bc visiting them in their free time + their country of residence in their work time is so fun

i need to take more pictures of myself! i think somewhere in this trip i convinced myself to download dating apps again and i have no good pics. i also can't post a "taiwan photodump" on insta :(

tl;dr: go to taiwan! but go with friends!!

[anonymusbosch]

here's a tech tidbit for the day. in large part, the US's current lack of green energy isn't because the tech doesn't exist or that the tech isn't cheap/competitive with fossil fuels - it's because of bureaucratic tangles and permitting delays. Right now it can take new power projects five full years just to get approved to connect to the power grid. (On average, it's taking 3.7 years).

As of the end of 2021, there was over a terawatt of green energy storage waiting to get approval to connect to the grid. That's more than all the energy currently generated in the US. For the most part, these aren't completed projects waiting to connect - they're projects that are ready to build waiting for approval before they break ground, or are partially built and getting their application in so that they're not waiting between construction and transmission. Many requests in the queue will never get built (some because they can't afford to wait in line for five years, or lose land rights, or have their interconnect denied, or require costly restudies after design changes, or for unrelated reasons) but even if the historical rate of 25% of them were to succeed, that's still hundreds of gigawatts of power and enough to more-than-replace all the coal plants in the US.

That's not the only obstacle to construction (see also: transmission capacity, load balancing, environmental studies, permitting, and a host of other factors). To be clear: waving a magic wand and lifting this particular barrier wouldn't mean green energy right away forever. But this problem is a decent representative of the type of obstacle green energy faces. Generation and transmission of energy are - largely - cheap and efficient. Getting systems approved and integrated across a morass of local, state, and federal governments, utility companies, and ISOs? Slow and hard.

[randomcomicbookreading]

Underwater #3 (1995)

Underwater is one of the few unfinished Chester Brown's works, hence it has never been compiled in graphic novel format. The only phisical evidence for its existence is the original comic book series where it was periodically published by chapters.

Neither plot nor author's aims are easy to understand starting with chapter three. Underwater is deliberately surrealist, its dialogue is written in a bizarrely distorted version of English, and a single chapter is too few pages long to draw any kind of conclusion.

In fact, the Underwarter episode is so short because it only fills half of the book. The second half belongs to another legendary unfinished work by Brown, nothing less than the Christian Gospels comic adaptation!. Particularly, these 13 pages adapt the "fedding the multitude" miracle according Gospel of Matthew.

It's known that Brown's graphic translation of Jesus' life has a very special feature among others in any medium: The mood and look of Jesus changes depending on the particular gospel writer he is adapting. Clearly, the chosen depiction for Matthew's part is quite uncommon: semi-bald, older than usual, serious (almost angry) face... I am tremendously curious about the other alternative versions and the autor's reasons to choose those characterizations. I'll look for more chapters of Underwater and Yummy Fur on the Internet, hoping that Chester Brown take the decision to finish any of those works in order to see it reprinted .

Purchased at Gosh! (Soho, London) for  £3.50

[digital-skeletons]

a wizard staff meeting