#underground wastebasket

[infamous-if]

i cant believe i like sharing the bus with UW more than with SV. im ashamed to admit this, but UW wins because blake... BLAKE... makes me feel something 🤡 while SV members just makes me want to bite them (aggressively) everytime any of them shows up. however, i kind of get this feeling that the relationship with UW will only get worse with time while with SV there's a potential for it to get better. is that a wrong thing to assume?

i really like how surprised people are. SV ended up being a bit more boisterous and hostile than UW, and that surprised me too. Blake and Co have been in the game longer, so it makes sense that they know when to just cool it. They were really mad during the party, but they're not strangers to working with people they don't like. SV, on the other hand, are just as fresh and new to this as your band is, and Pope and Kieran act that way on behalf of Seven. It's always nice when my own characters surprise me while writing.

As for your second question...we will see!

[incorrectquotes-if]

(Dark humor)

Rowen: “One more week of being stuck in this fucking bus with UV and you’ll be finding a dead body!”

Blake: Yes, because one more week with [Band] and I will definitely k!ll myself.

Characters from @infamous-if

[foreverppl]

Moodboard for Amais Rena (he/they), lead singer of alt rock band Way Way Downers @infamous-if

Playlist

[knightcallie]

Temerity: Hairstyles Edition ✨

Bald Mer has no right lookin that good…

Also planning to do human versions for infamous-if… the horns gonna be my downfall 😭

[arlathen]

“certified florrie moment” actually definitely becomes a stupid meme among botb enjoyers. on both sides of popular opinion abt her + golden hour. a certified florrie moment is any moment that rules or where you knock it out of the park OR it’s any moment where someone is a piece of shit.

[heroofpenamstan]

MAREENA QASIM of EMERALD FIRE — this season's talk of the town !

[ ... and who can forget the lead singer of EMERALD FIRE , MAREENA ? allegations of infighting and exploitation have followed her for nearly three years , and now , she can add cheating to her extensive resume as well . nevertheless , it cannot be denied that her unique twist of adding slivers of her arabic mother tongue in her songwriting has made her a standout , and other contestants — apart from the very vocal UNDERGROUND WASTEBASKET — have sang her nothing but praises and compliments; even SEVEN LAWLESS of SOFT VIOLENCE , whose history with his former band will surely be unfolded as SEASON 4 progresses ! ]

INFAMOUS IF by @infamous-if !

[kirnet]

A lady of latex and leather, Stoja of ИOCTURNA INFEЯNO is already set to be the heartbreaker of this season of BOTB. The band used their standout track “Wasted Desires,” a deeply erotic and headbangable rock song as their audition, providing the perfect opportunity for Stoja flaunt her ability to switch from honeyed gospel notes to throaty screams on a dime. While much of the band’s actual talent is overshadowed by their current conflict with both Blake Winter of Underground Wastebasket and the bitter rivalry between ex-bandmate Seven Lawless, ИOCTURNA INFEЯNO is certainly a group to keep an eye on this season, whether it’s for their music or the drama.

[mnasthaii]

ISIS FOX, LEAD SINGER OF DUSK [ @infamous-if ]

well, dear readers, we have an unexpected favourite out of misfit alley’s battle of the bands: dusk, a folk-rock band with a beautiful (although a little shy) lead singer with a haunting voice. soft and angelic, the band is nothing like the expected front runner, underground wastebasket. unexpected, but marking a return to classic rock bands like fleetwood mac. if you want gentle grooves and good vibes, this is the band for you !

band playlist here !

[xoteajays]

introducing …… DEVOUR

if there’s a party to be had, DEVOUR will be there! high school friends turned bandmates, the newest band joining the botb is headed by benji butcher. known for his high energy performances, it’s no surprise the audience goes crazy whenever they get on stage. however, new to fame and a newer face on the scene, there’s a rumour going around that DEVOUR rigged their most recent win against fan favourite underground wastebasket.

however when forced to choose, leader benji has decided on bussing with underground wastebasket instead of their ex-boyfriend-and-bandmate, seven lawless of soft violence. how deep is the cut between the ex-bandmates? and how many more clashes can we expect from DEVOUR and underground wastebasket’s forced proximity?  —   excerpt from the beat.

( my 2nd mc for @infamous-if​ )

* i do not have the mental energy to write lyrics for two entirely different bands; so lyrics and song titles yoinked from various real bands (in this edit: p.alaye royale. p.ierce the veil, b.adflower).

[infamous-if]

Wait Amy pls, I gotta know the emoji ask but with underground wastebasket, please 🙏 (if that’s okay)

Your wish is my command <3

Blake: 😾 and 😼

Ansel: 😴 or 🤧

Jane: 🫶 or 🫥

[mistyeyedbi-archive]

Misozi "Miso" Lesa (she/they); lead singer of Loosened Inhibitions

This singer songwriter draws people in with their warm, husky vocals and playful rap delivery, telling a story with both and melding them with the band's indie and psychedelic sound. Loosened Inhibitions won the 10th and final spot in this year's Battle of the Bands with a passionate power ballad, "Sunrise". Rumour has it that this song is an ode to former bandmate and ex-lover Seven Lawless. Miso quietly dodges questions of their past and their current rivalry with Underground Wastebasket - as well as her apparent absence during the altercation. They may be keeping a low profile now, but Loosened Inhibitions has a lot of noise around them and is a band to keep your eye on.

[pspsps go play @infamous-if]

[phoenix-wulf]

The Beat, new issue today!

Blake got Mike Wazowki-ed lmao

I’m very ok and normal about Seven

M!Blake Winter and M!Seven Lawless belong to @infamous-if

[Text version below]

THE BEAT

UNDERGROUND WASTEBASKET SURPRISE ARRIVAL ROCKS SHOW

Get the behind the scenes scoop on the surprising 13th band of BOTB! Page 2

TENSIONS ARE RISING!

Words exchanged inside the photography set! And what are these looks Ashes is giving to Soft Violence’s Seven Lawless

CELEBRITY SIGHTING?

Griffin Reign, Victoria Valentine, and Ashes of Bad/Society spotted at Manhattan café?

Touring Band of Season 5

MISFIT ALLEY

[used template in Canva]

[mariacallous]

Kim Kardashian’s newest range of products, launched in late 2022—post SKIMS shapewear, post SKKN facewear—is a menacing set of raw concrete forms for storing bathroom products: a gray tissue box, Q-tip tin, wastebasket. Dry, brutal, and mysterious, the items look like you hired one of Gary Larson’s cavemen to decorate your vanity with found objects.

“Having the concrete material and monochromatic design are important for my mental wellness,” Kim said in a recent interview with Architectural Digest. Concrete … for wellness? I imagine her removing her shoes and socks and planting her feet on the gritty sidewalk, grounding herself on the concrete slab, gathering power from the sprawling gray. Kim abandoning her activated charcoal and turning to powdered concrete to treat her gut problems and ensure clearer skin. Jade egg? No, concrete egg. Wellness concrete!

Concrete does not, objectively, promote wellness. It is responsible for 8 percent of the world’s C02 emissions. Concrete dust ruins the lungs of those who inhale it regularly. Concrete cityscapes exacerbate flooding and degrade joggers’ joints. Thanks to a reliance on concrete for construction, the world is running out of certain types of sand. Other high-end brands have sold home products made of concrete, like Comme des Garçons’ concrete-clad perfume bottles, but these usually use the material for its brutal and rough-hewn qualities, not to promote wellness. Kim is an alchemist though. She has taken a material that is undeniably a product of industrial modernity, imbued with a century’s worth of architectural and ideological baggage, and reconfigured it as healthy, intimate, and integral to self-care.

Always ahead of the curve, Kim may have hit on something the rest of us are just coming around to. The idea that we might stop—stop producing plastic, stop building cement megastructures—seems out of the question. Decades of activism, policy work, and think tank-ery have done little to stem the tide of globalized capitalism and the torrents of plastic water bottles, polyester blend clothing, and Squishmallows that discharge from its perpetual motion machines. Blowing up a pipeline or fomenting revolution requires networks of solidarity and logistical capability that most people can’t imagine acquiring. Meanwhile, the microplastics are already in our blood.

What’s left is the alternative that Kim and her concrete line seem to offer: that we can learn how to metaphorically (or literally) digest the toxic brutality of the built environment and transform it into something else—or let it transform us. “I’m just putting little pieces of fibreglass into my cereal to get my body used to it,” tweets one nihilistic wiseass. We’re entering our metabolic era.

Nonhuman systems offer metaphors to help us comprehend and describe our own existence, and structures of behavior we might mimic to cope with intolerable conditions. Over the past decade, you may have noticed mushrooms and fungi embraced as the objects of this kind of attention. The fungal imaginary is powerful because it envisions a world where endless growth is possible, and might even be environmentally beneficial. We can build anything as long as we make it out of mushrooms. Houses, bridges, burgers, clamshell packages for said burgers. Fungi also offer a powerful, nonhuman other we can turn to for inspiration: Mushrooms can grow at the end of the world, form vast underground networks, and offer mystic insight.

More recently, though, metabolic metaphors and processes are emerging alongside, and sometimes overtaking, fungi’s place in the cultural ether. At the more practical end, digestive processes are cropping up as popular solutions to all kinds of crises: compost, vermiculture, bacteria to digest just about anything, biohacks for your gut microbiome. Elsewhere, the metaphor of metabolism is called on to describe the way people process emotions and build feedback loops, and the growth of cities.

Unlike the fungal model, the metabolic imaginary lets us envision a world in which we can get rid of anything. If the drive for endless growth has led to a world too full of bullshit and toxicity, perhaps we can chew it all up and digest it without harm, engineer bacteria to metabolize it, or transfigure it into something new and strange. There is no big other in metabolism, no consciousness to commune with or learn from. Where the fungal era has been about venerating unknowable nonhuman maybe-intelligence and believing that hope can be dredged from ruin, the metabolic era is about submission, subsumption by the great enzyme, the desire for transformative annihilation. Metabolism is an impulse that makes sense at the end of the usable world. If we’ve exhausted our current ways of being and the planet’s existing materials, we must embrace radical breakdown.

One version of creative, apocalyptic metabolism is on vivid display in David Cronenberg’s most recent film, Crimes of the Future. Set in a near future in which environmental degradation and unspecified climate events have led to generalized decay and deterioration, Crimes of the Future imagines what might happen to human digestion. In the film, a sector of the population is evolving to successfully digest and receive nourishment from plastic. At the beginning, we see a young boy crouched in a bathroom taking bites out of a plastic trash bin like he’s compelled by an insatiable craving. Later, we learn of a whole underground organization of plastic eaters who undergo surgery and other interventions in the hopes of spurring their bodies to better metabolize plastic and other pollutants.

In this world, it’s too late for a cleanup. Toxicity is endemic, and the plastic eaters consider the best path forward to be evolving human biology to flourish in the aftermath. The film captures something essential about our zeitgeist in its oscillation between anxiety about how to metabolize everything toxic we’ve created and desire to experience the bodily and social transformation that might accompany this perverse new digestion.

This scenario is only a half step away from our current reality. Efforts are well underway to metabolize the plastic that suffuses our environment. Scientists have found multiple strains of microbes and bacteria that have evolved to digest plastic. Comamonas testosteroni can metabolize complex waste from plants and plastics. Ideonella sakaiensis enzymatically breaks down polyethylene terephthalate (PET). With each new study of microbial plastic-phagy comes a spate of hopeful, if hyperbolic, news articles: “a potential breakthrough for recycling,” “This discovery … could help solve one of the world’s most pressing environmental problems.” People love the idea that we can digest our way out of this mess. The jury is still out on whether it’s possible to operationalize plastic-eating bacteria at scale. There is some movement on this front. Carbios, a well-funded French company developing enzymes that break down plastic, recently announced funding and investment for the world’s first PET “biorecycling” plant, for instance. But many scientists are skeptical about the idea that microbial digestion is a viable solution to the problem of oceanic or terrestrial pollution. For now, plastic digestion at scale remains a pipe dream.

The metabolic turn isn’t just about learning to digest toxicity. It also plays out in fantasies—both desirous and anxious—about being digested. In times of stress, it’s a relief to imagine being crushed and consumed by some other metabolic system. “Why Does Everyone Want Their Crush to Run Them Over?” asked The Cut a few years ago. Being pulverized by your crush is a dream of being relieved of your own agency, destroyed and reconfigured, freed from the pain of consciousness so that you can be reshaped for someone else’s uses. A version of this obliterating impulse is made more explicit in vore, the erotic desire to be swallowed or devoured whole (or, conversely, to swallow or devour another), which is often expressed in role-play or illustrations. In vore, the process of digestion is imagined as a relationship between devoured and devourer—a desire for the kind of intense intimacy only possible when one is literally consumed by another.

Only a short jump from vore is the transhumanist fantasy of having your brain uploaded into the cloud, outrunning death by being absorbed into another system and transformed into bits and bytes. Ray Kurzweil famously advocated for brain uploads to achieve technological immortality, estimating in The Singularity Is Near that “the end of the 2030s is a conservative projection for successful uploading.” Russian entrepreneur Dmitry Itskov’s now mostly defunct 2045 Initiative aimed “to create technologies enabling the transfer of an individual’s personality to a more advanced non-biological carrier, and extending life, including to the point of immortality.” The desire to be consumed and immortalized by technology reveals a belief that your consciousness is uniquely important and your own creation is uniquely powerful. It’s no surprise technologists like Kurzweil lust to be dissolved by their own machines.

Similarly, some of the recent hype around generative AI reveals a conflicting set of responses to metabolic machinery. Large language models and image generators are enormous digestive systems that ingest and transform the raw materials of cultural output and behavioral data on behalf of voracious corporate interests. They suck down the sprawling detritus of human effort and swallow it into the great black box stomach of the AI system, which converts it into something uncanny and instant and profitable. As with transhumanism, some may find this extremely exciting, the emergent opportunity to create the world’s biggest digestive tract, and hence the world’s biggest (and most profitable) collective intelligence. For others, the idea that their labor and creativity is nothing but grist for the generative mill owned and controlled by unaccountable companies is a cause for great anxiety. It’s harder to be optimistic about the future of technological digestion if you’re forced to be an unwilling participant in a voracious process of corporate metabolism.

Kim’s wellness concrete and Crimes of the Future highlight the ambivalence of digestive politics. If the environment is inescapably suffused with pollutants emitted by the biggest and worst companies on earth, then learning to digest this toxicity is a sensible coping mechanism. Of course, there are creative and aesthetic possibilities within the process of toxic digestion—minimalist home goods in Kim’s case, strange new forms of sex and performance art in Cronenberg’s film. We can eke pleasure and art from all kinds of wretched situations—and we should. As Boots Riley put it in a recent interview, “Culture is what we do to make our survival normal.” Still, these visions of metabolism leave us stuck absorbing the excretions of a system that hates us. We have sprawling digestive capabilities. What might it look like to embrace our role as part of a massive and massively weird ecological and metabolic system, and to experiment with the creative and expressive potential of digestion?

Nothing is more natural or strange than metabolism. It happens on many scales, around us and within us, via processes that involve human bodies and microbes and other flora and fauna. I move through the world, digesting it as I go—material entering the mouth hole at one end, exiting the anus at the other—and in between my body does the work of processing, sorting, excreting. I am also here to be digested—built cell by cell inside another’s body and extruded into the world, only to exit back into the earth via a final hole (the grave, the furnace, the mouth of the bear) where I provide fodder for the next stomach. What a trip, what a pleasure.

Digesting with and on behalf of the earth’s ur-metabolic system means wanting more than to function as the unhappy stomach that processes capitalism’s excesses. Embracing digestion as a tool and a metaphor can help us to not only accommodate the horrors of the existing system, but to dissolve it and break it down until it no longer exists in its current form. Some ideas for earth-first digestion are already familiar, thanks to proponents of the circular economy: recapturing waste streams from one process to become inputs for another, designing to ensure reusability. However, ideally digestion wouldn’t just be mobilized to enable human industry and profit. I’m also interested in more creative and psychedelic experiences of metabolism, like collaboration with enzymes, embrace of rot, and joyful submission to the knowledge that humans are just one digestive node of the material world, rather than its apex.

Metabolism can be framed through the lens of mutual aid. While the mainstream medical industry is now catching up, biohackers and anarchist IBS sufferers alike have been experimenting with DIY fecal transplants for years, trading advice and healthy poop samples in the interests of helping each other digest better. It can also be seen as a kind of collective destruction, where communities decide a system or an infrastructure that causes them harm should no longer exist and work together to metabolize it, dissolve it, and perhaps transform its constituent matter into something entirely new. Outside of human-centered processes, composting and rot provide inspiration for rich and generative multispecies metabolism, like worms and microbes working with chemical heat and leafy greens to produce rich and unrecognizable loam. If we’re brave enough, we can even look forward to our own bodies being digested. It’s hard to know what that experience will be like, but let’s try to imagine. Space travel is uncertain, and the singularity is a mirage, so why not stay here, nestled into the cool damp ground. There is much to learn from becoming compost for the original stomach.

[seraphim0]

How I would go about winning BOTB (as an Infamous IF player <333 btw go play it)

Step 1 — “romance” Blake. That's bound to piss off a lot of characters LMAO, which is kinda the point. Convince Blake that posing as the villain couple of the season would be beneficial for them too (e.g. saying it'd annoy Griffin and get Seven out of the spotlight).

Step 2 — Get the public's attention with this drama — not only enemies to lovers but also it's the “love triangle” with Seven that would keep them wanting to know what happens next.

Step 3 — Get rid of Seven >:))))))

Step 4 — Beat every other band with the power of love audience votes and popularity (and also by writing sick ass songs) until there's just UW and MC's band.

Step 5 — Beat Underground Wastebasket.

Ta da!

[florvinhara]

marina weiss of kiss you later

(1/3 of my @infamous-if mcs)

Pop band Kiss You Later has made themselves the ones to watch with a controversial triumph that landed them the tenth slot in this year's BOTB. Charismatic frontwoman Marina Weiss brings an enticing sensuality to the stage that lures listeners in as much as the group's band's fun, catchy lyrics and glittery instrumentals.

Among allegations of cheating from crowd favorites Underground Wastebasket and a rumoured rivalry with ex-bandmate Seven Lawless, Kiss You Later has certainly caught the nation's eye. Whether their music can set them apart as much as the dramatic circumstances surrounding their sudden notoriety remains to be seen...

[syfynjavall]

Twisted Vineyard, the tenth and final band on this year’s BOTB tour, has already made a splash in the competition, with a tangled past with Soft Violence’s Seven Lawless and fresh tension with Underground Wastebasket, who had been favourites to win. Georgia-born singer Shea Laveau seems quite literally above it all - their towering vocals are matched only by their stature, dominating the stage and ensuring that whatever else happens this tour, they’ll be one to watch.

go play @infamous-if !