#and my inherent nostalgia

[jeremiahthefroge]

yeah ok so I caved. Lit up another bowl, opened a new folder on my Obsidian vault, and I'm gonna rewatch the minecraft diaries and I'm going to take detailed notes on everything plot related I can, separated episode by episode, make observations, and then create a little personal wikipedia of my interpretations of the characters as they appear on the show.

I just did episode one to do what is essentially a "am I capable of watching this" test (I feared since it was 2016 youtube that I was into in the year 2016, a historically terrible year for me, that I would have some HEAVILY BIASED ideas on the quality of this show, and that if I rewatched I would ruin it for myself) and I honestly didn't have too hard of a time with the youtube of it all. Cringe is and has been dead, and I'm looking at this like a fun little excercise in studying how this piece of media tells the story it tells.

Speaking of, I find it so interesting how the machinima of Zenix and Garroth kicks us off and we then have Aphmau speaking as like... a comentary youtuber. The machinima sets up a plot that isn't even hinted more at in the episode, too, but I can see the first 10 or whatever episodes having all been recorded in 1 batch all at once and then cut up. I don't recall how characterized Aphmau gets in this whole thing.

And also I find Aphmau doing the voices for Garroth and Zenix so unironically fun and endears me to the series. Idk why but it made me smile!

I'll probably liveblog more of this experience bc I'm incapable of keeping my mouth shut.

[macbethz]

Doctor who it’s me your regency era situationship I’m in cgi hell. You have to remember that you’re gay

[horizon-penblade]

ok but the totem/cubey friend in monument valley 3 growing into a boat vs the one in monument valley 1 getting lost under the waves... ough

[multi-fandom-lunatic]

y'all are such hypocrites bc WHY are you headcanoning james potters family as indian - stop dragging my culture into a transphobes work. if you really want indian characters, there's so many great indian authors you can read that star indian characters. dont force that fucking transphobes work into the mix.

[invader-sparkelhuzky]

Haii :3

I think ur art is kewl :3 (I wonder what you think of mine?)

Thanx, glad you like it! I think you have a fun way of stylization with very few bounaries, go nuts and dont limit yourself!

[gothteddiesdotcom]

I think that part of what like. kills me about the whole media literacy and critical thinking aspect of enjoying media these days is that people refuse to like. contextualize that

A. Bad media can still hold significant meaning to people

B. Media made for a demographic you aren’t apart of is not inherently bad media

C. Media made for and consumed by the opposite demographic is not inherently shallow or flawed nor is it above criticism for its media tropes either.

[charmcoindied]

i am like convinced that the nintendo (3)ds is as close as we'll get to a perfect games console. they didn't need to make any more after this one i think we've got it all figured out

[toothworxx]

you wake up, you look in the mirror, the face you see is not yours- your hair is the wrong color, your limbs feel all wrong- but you recognize yourself in those eyes- "this isnt real" everyone tells you- "thats not you" you look at the self in your mind and its oh so clear- thats you, youve been here, thats always been you "youre not acting yourself" but are you not another self than the one they last met? that wasnt you- thatll never be you- their voice sounds like "you" their face looks like "you" but that wasnt you- this body is wrong this body is wrong this body is wrong- your life is different- different world different friends different people different place and time and rules- you know who you were you know you know but its "wrong"- you try to change you try to be seen in a way where others will understand you but it always falls short- you fall back into old habits- the way you speak is so uniquely your own and not that of the others... the way you act speaks of a self youve long since tried to look past- the way you are- you will always be yourself- always always always no matter who believes you, you will always be you- and thats not "wrong", is it?

[ohzone]

listened to a track from an older rpg that reminded me of an ugly (said with affection) oc from my teenage years 🫶

[sylvainjosegaytier]

The wrong song came up on shuffle while I was trying to write about Dedue’s childhood right after coming to Faerghus and I had to stop working bc I was crying so hard I couldn’t see

[devilofthepit]

nyx screamo era!!!?!? what bands👀

OMGGG thank u for asking hehehe <333 it started bc @destroyingangela and i wanna play music together and he sent me songs he plays on bass so i could learn them on guitar and there was a bunch of selfish machines era pierce the veil which got me back into them and other stuff i listened to in my emo phase like fall out boy lol BUT then i started listening to stuff from that era that i wasn’t that into during my emo phase like the used, thursday, hawthorne heights, circa survive, saosin, and chiodos :3 idk if any of that counts as screamo or if it’s more post hardcore but i looooove it!! if u have any more recs send them my way <333 music just doesn’t sound this way anymore….

most of it was stolen from this playlist by an insta mutual:

[butterscotch-brigade]

every time quinton reviews makes a new video in the icarly/victorious saga i get inevitably tempted to listen to music from those shows/actors and yknow what im gonna say it. victoria justice WAS a good singer ik everybody likes to make fun of her bc ariana was the one that made it big + the whole "i think we ALL sing" incident but honestly? her music is still good too. like take a hint would NOT be take a hint without victoria justice

[steveyockey]

To be aware you might be trans but unwilling to do anything about it is to create endlessly bigger boxes within which to contain yourself. When you are a child, that box might encompass only yourself and your parents. By the time you are a gainfully employed adult, that box will contain multitudes, and the thought of disrupting it will grow ever more unthinkable. So you cease to think of yourself as a person on some level; you think not of what you want but what everybody expects from you. You do your best not to make waves, and you apologize, if only implicitly, for existing. You stop being real and start being a construct, and eventually, you decide the construct is just who you are, and you swaddle yourself up in it, and maybe you die there. There is still time until there isn’t.

This reading of TV Glow’s deliberately anticlimactic, noncathartic ending cuts against the transition narrative you typically see in movies and TV, in which a trans person self-accepts, transitions, and lives a happier life. Owen gets trapped in a space where he knows what he must do to live an authentic life but simply refuses to take those steps because, well, burying yourself alive is a terrifying thing to do. The transition narrative posits a trans existence as, effectively, a binary switch between “man” and “woman” that gets flipped one way or another, but to make our lives so binary is to miss how trans existences possess an inherent liminality.

Humans’ lives unfold in a constant state of becoming until death, but trans people are uniquely keyed in to what this means thanks to the simple fact of our identities. You can get lost in that liminality, too, forever trapped in a midnight realm of your own making, stuck between what you believe is true (I am a nice man with a good family and a good job, and I love my life) and what you know, deep in your most terrified heart of hearts, is real (I am a girl suffocating in a box).

And yet if you want to read the film as being about the dangerous allure of nostalgia, you’re not wrong. I Saw the TV Glow totally supports that interpretation, too! But in tempting you with that reading, the film creates a trap for cis viewers that will be all too familiar to trans viewers. Somewhere in the middle of Maddy’s story about The Pink Opaque being real, you will make a choice between “This kid has lost it!” and “No. Go with her, Owen,” and in asking you to make that choice, TV Glow is simulating the act of self-accepting a trans identity.

See, the grimmer read of the film’s ending truly is a nihilistic one. It leaves no hope, no potential for growth, no exit. Yet you must actively choose to read that ending as nihilistic. If you are cis and the end of I Saw the TV Glow left you with a gnawing sense of dissatisfaction, a weird but hard-to-pin-down feeling that something had broken, and a melancholy bordering on horror — congratulations, this movie gave you contact-high gender dysphoria.

In an infinite number of possible universes, there is at least one where I am still living “as a man,” embracing my fictionality, avoiding looking at how much more raw and real I feel when I “pretend” to be a woman. I think about that guy sometimes. I hope he’s okay.

Consider, then, my cis reader, that TV Glow is for both you and me, but it is maybe most of all for him. I hope he sees it. I hope he breaks down crying in the bathroom afterward. I hope he, after so many years locked inside himself, hears the promise of more life through the hiss of TV static.

Emily St. James, “I Saw the TV Glow’s Ending Is Full of Hope, If You Want It to Be,” Vulture. June 4, 2024.

[telltaletypist]

i have a theory that any franchise that lasts long enough eventually becomes incestuous and ends up eating its own tail, thematically. stories in these franchises can only ever comment on themselves

i think a lot about what alan moore said about his work on the killing joke, about how hollow it is in hindsight since the theme really just boils down to "batman and the joker are kinda similar when you think about it", which i suppose is a pretty novel observation, certainly changes the way i read batman comics, but what is there in that insight for me as a human being living in the real world that i can apply to my actual life? not a whole lot. all it can do is reward emotional investment in the brand of batman. if you don't really give a shit about batman there's nothing there for you.

the disney era of star wars is especially bad about this. by and large they're really just about our relationship to star wars. even the last jedi, which tries to be a little more critical about it, still can't break out of the thematic black hole the franchise has become. andor is possibly the only exception to this, and i steadfastly believe that was a total fluke. don't get it twisted, andor is good despite its connection to star wars, not because of it, and if it were just an original tv show about resisting space fascism, it would probably be better for it (if less popular). we're all lowkey dreading the second season bc we know that no star wars property can resist devolving into a nostalgia wank fest forever

there's nothing inherently wrong with hollow entertainment, but i do think there's something grotesque about pumping the gdp of a small nation into an entertainment product that doesn't aspire to be anything more than an advertisement for itself

[willosword]

i've watched about 2 hours of a dirge of cerberus playthrough so far and i'm not quite sure what i expected but i'm having a fun time

[helloanthy]

IM GONNA CRY

29.08.2023 ♥ yesterday's anthys¡

hi >:) 💜 👵 👭