#will I ever make that mirror gifset idea??? probably not but I got a couple of mirror moments here

[thelassoway]

Jason Sudeikis as Ted Lasso Seasons 1-3 » T-shirts

[scoundrels-in-love]

Exit Rant & Rave of Extraordinary You

Because I was watching with a friend and often had to go to sleep immediately after, I did not blog much commentary as I watched the series, but tonight I’m saying fuck sleep and writing some thoughts as I’ve just wrapped up the series.

Obviously stuffed with spoilers to the brim. (It’s long and I probably forgot something.)

Every character in the story believed that the changes they made had some superb effect one way or another the WAY they WANTED or BELIEVED they went/would go, without any proof. Dan Oh believed from get go she could save herself through changing her story. Without a single proof. Similarly, Kyung believed changing her story would kill her. Also without proof, other than his want to keep everything same as on stage. Meanwhile, to a reader it seemed obvious that while Saeguks are all about the tragedy, high school romcom is not likely to have a death of a character on whose romance there’s been quite the focus. Of course, that’s an outside POV. And desperation to live could spark such an idea in Dan Oh, I imagine. But it really got very frustrating around ep 24-26, how all of them kept blaming each other for ‘changing the story’ and dooming Dan Oh, even for things that happened in Trumpet Creeper when neither even REMEMBERED if any of the Stages got changed!!! This made the eps/that part drag for me and frustrate me and it deducted points from story, for me.

Similarly, as watcher/reader it was obvious Writer very much liked Kyung and some readers had been upset with the outcome, so Writer wanted to redeem him through a properly done romance where he Learned to be kinder/had happy ending, and the way to do it while telling a fresh story was to write Haru out and put them in background. More points in ‘Dan Oh ain’t gonna die’ goal. At one point I wondered if messing with the story really wouldn’t end up killing her because maybe grandma was meant to die and she wasn’t.

I still like @gizkasparadise​ theory his little brother was Writer’s self insert. The other option was he had mad crush on sulky Kyung.

This is how to do a Soulmate trope without mentioning soulmates right. While essentially nothing changed from Writer’s plan, Haru’s and Dan Oh’s feelings were so strong they basically drew him back into existence. His consciousness was tied to hers, it materialized in attempts to protect her and then into the world. Not to mention, all the lines they finally got to say as they had wanted to, the way they couldn’t forget each other. This is something that Dried Squid Fairy glossed over when they spoke of ‘mere extras that can be erased’ when they spoke of comic ending. That he already broke through it once just because he loved so much.

Also the cinematic parallels of him Remembering her and going into the next world versus her Remembering him as she goes into the next world. Whew.

Some more points are docked from the story for the way Do Hwa could NOT keep his mouth shut about anything and how much trouble he caused, but while that made sense for his character overall, the way Dried Squid Fairy told Kyung about erasing one’s self awareness was entirely plot-serving and made no sense.

DSF as narrative foil to Haru and Kyung as narrative foil to Do Hwa was gorgeously done.

Joo Da is Aro, in my head. While I can see it as Polyamorous thing, for me it’s more of an Aro being confused as what counts as ‘liking’ and ‘loving’ someone romantically, so intense care and friendship gets mistaken as one and therefor she just wants them all 3 to be together, happy, and can’t pick one, sticks with the one that needs her more as friend. She really seemed to struggle with word love and also never saw any kisses, on Stage or otherwise!

As a clear proof of being extensively spoiled for story doesn’t replace watching experience, I did not expect to have SO many feelings about DSF and his lady. I think I teared up over them before our main couple, oops, when he treated her to a meal. The YEARNING. Somehow, the way she played a soft matchmaker when Dan Oh forgot, the way they mirror each other... They were very powerful baseline for what the show was telling, putting it all in a sharp and cutting focus.

“Congratulations on graduating from this world” was one of the, if not most, powerful line in the series for me, somehow. The bittersweet taste of it. ‘You endured through the pain and the longing. You learned. You grew. You are leaving it all behind. And maybe there will be no more you, or me, ever. Congratulations. You did well.’ Oh god. I just can’t deal. (I need this on gifset)

Kyung is Fuckyung as my friend deemed him. That’s all. While I did feel sympathy for him at various times and was like “Dan Oh, if only you gave him chance to speak/didn’t literally run off to Haru quite in most brusque/fuck you way”.... He still Fucked up, he was still messed up and chose some really messed up things even full aware of making those choices and consequences. His ‘redemption’ was short and without proper momentum and idk. I hope he can be happier and more whole in next volume.

Speaking of which, I am so upset most of their belongings and memories like photos and such disappear. And that we can never know who will live through iterations, how many lifetimes Haru and Dan Oh will have. The thought Sae Mi might’ve gotten through to uni life and DSF and Do Hwa might not have... Fucks me up, in a bad way.

Also what’s the deal with ERASING a world? I’d never erase my own worlds. And I like to think that after story is finished, if you think about it and things like fanfiction keep it not being ‘shut down’ like this.

Also it’s a SOFT COVER BOOK, it’d not shut so loudly, lol.

I really loved the softness of our couple. Like, YESSS. Perfect. Overall, this did so many of things I love right and even when it went into territories I wasn’t fond of, it was still quite good. I can say, yeah, this goes in top favorite drama list. It’s hard to say good bye to it and watching it with my friend was a huge highlight of my April.

[superchartisland]

Super Mario All Stars (Nintendo, SNES, 1993)

Any overall roadmap for this project (and my brother’s related predecessor) is very lightly sketched, but this is a useful point to reflect on it. We grew up playing Dizzy games; part of what we’re doing is trying to reclaim video game history as we and many other Brits lived it, to demonstrate how the American-led received wisdom is a rewriting of the record. All of my research suggests that we were in the majority there -- in the UK the NES didn’t get a look in, and we’re not going to properly encounter the Game Boy until it’s a decade old.

Even this first Nintendo direct encounter is somewhat of a guess. Super Mario All Stars was a documented best-seller for the SNES, but in an absence of evidence I don’t know for sure that it was big enough to be an overall UK #1. I remember hearing about it a lot at the time, and by then the SNES had had a chance to build an audience, but remember that this blog covers games which were a #1 but not necessarily always the #1. Yet at the same time as I refute the story that Nintendo swept in to replace a dying industry -- neither happened like that in the UK -- we’re pretty keen on many things Nintendo. I have a NES Classic Mini, SNES Classic Mini and a Famicom Classic Mini sitting under my TV: loving recreations of consoles which I never owned.

In the internet era, this kind of adoption of history is probably more common. When I wrote the first version of this post I had recently watched the period piece music video for Satellite Young’s “Don’t Graduate, Senpai!” and was overwhelmed with contented nostalgic feelings, left with the power of a glimpse into a familiar and loved past. All that despite the fact I’ve hardly ever listened to the Japanese genre that it takes after, City Pop, or watched shoujo anime, and never when I was growing up. The person who it is precision targeting isn’t me. But it needn't be. There can be a feeling that is just as real, but second hand, a gravity exerted on adjacent culture that was invisible until something made me look over and notice its force.

There are lots of ways that the influences on the song and video reached me. My partner did grow up with a lot of Japanese pop culture in Hong Kong, and talking with her about that and having watched a couple of episodes of Creamy Mami means having a feel for her fond memories. I have years of happily browsing tumblr gifsets of Sailor Moon, absorbing love for it and its place in culture. I can still get good use from a “but you didn’t do anything!” meme even if I’ve never actually watched the show. I’ve listened to 80s referencing music elsewhere, and modern Japanese music taking cues from City Pop, and that has added up to giving the sounds of the song a similar personal gravity.

And all of that has been made easier by the world getting smaller, by the internet giving providing an easy route to interests you share with people elsewhere in the world and from there to interests they share that you don’t. Look at it negatively, and it means a winning narrative can travel faster and become more comprehensive than ever, reaching into places where it doesn’t belong. But at the same time, it gives us a Japanese band and some Swedish animators uniting in their shared nostalgia, and it reaching out to me through next door culture which I’ve taken in via friends from all round the world, and me having feelings shared with those friends. That’s an amazing thing.

In common with most people I knew, we didn’t have the internet when Super Mario All Stars came out, and the world was still huge. Nintendo had other tools to work with, though. Their games were successful enough to reach out and have an outsized cultural impact beyond the limits of people actually playing them. 

When I started primary school, before football stickers, there was a craze for Nintendo sticker books, and friends and I collected images of all of their games. People tried to negotiate enhanced swaps for stickers of Game Boy screenshots by maintaining that they were gold stickers, even more valuable than the special silver ones. I knew more about the characters and background for Mario through Saturday morning cartoons, and I remember watching American TV programmes where people competed through playing Super Mario Bros. levels. I assume it made it to the UK’s own Gamesmaster at some point too. And of course, many of the European games we were playing took their own influence from Nintendo. I may have been unaware of Metroid until years later, but hours spent playing Turrican still gave my first impressions of it that nostalgic gravity.

Mario was Nintendo’s most successful reach out to the wider culture, and that wider culture drove people back to Mario’s original form. That could work better for Nintendo if Mario games were easier to access, and so we get Super Mario All Stars. What to do when moving on from the NES to the SNES? Reissue, repackage, re-evaluate the games! Super Mario Bros., Super Mario Bros. 2, and Super Mario Bros. 3, now brought together in one place. With an extra track, no less, in the form of Japan’s very different Super Mario Bros. 2, new to the rest of the world and hence called The Lost Levels. From 2019 the very idea of levels being lost feels faintly absurd – someone will dig it out in a mod, or you can just log onto your alternate Japanese online console account, surely? I guess a handful of British people probably did own imported Famicoms even in 1993, but everyone else got their cross-fertilisation of culture mediated by Nintendo’s eccentric international release schedule. 

Super Mario All Stars presents each game in its entirety, complete with newly upgraded graphics. Yet, in some way, the games seem to shrink in the transition. The act of selecting a game to play from a menu, turning them into pinned specimens labelled by year, emphasises the overall history and starts you off with a reminder that each world is only a part of a newly defined whole. Maybe that's why there is no Super Mario All Stars on the SNES Classic Mini, an assessment that the bird-inside-a-bird effect of featuring a retro collection on a retro collection would be that bit too spookily recursive. 

And that idea of recursion is where the realisation struck me as I played Super Mario All Stars. It wasn't the first version of Mario I played, (it was the first Super Mario Bros. 3 that I ever played, though, the briefest of enchanting glimpses). But it feels absolutely right as my version of these games, even for Super Mario Bros. 2 where I'm pretty sure I'd never played this version before. The very sense of diminished scale, the way that All Stars exists as a Mario game aware that not only each individual game, but the games as a whole, are but a small part of the Mario out there in the world, feels totally fitting. The feeling runs through everything. The upscaled renditions of the music which expand on it but nonetheless can't escape how iconic the basic originals were. The decision to put Super Mario Bros.’ underwater waltz on the title screen with the new confidence that duh, it rules. The little portraits of what to expect that have been added to the start of each level, not spoilers but cute reminders. This is a Mario for the late to the party, an artefact of the games' immense second hand cultural gravity, reflected back into the games themselves. It's a sign of so much to come.

In reflection of it being the first time these games have come up on my route through history, here are miniature entries for each of the four games on Super Mario All Stars, pinned to one place:

Super Mario Bros.

It’s all about the movement. Specifically, the jump, the balletic means of progression which sits at the tempting boundary of predictability and control. It is not the only game jump, it was not the first game jump, but it is somehow still the Jump. When you press the jump button the moment stretches in time, a repeated joy that resounds slightly differently from Jump to Jump. Sometimes the Jump is relaxed, sometimes the Jump is tense, sometimes the Jump is a celebration of achievement. Gravity and momentum make their claim on you, and you must not reject them or bow to them, but turn towards them, take their hands, and dance. Only when you are the lead in the dance can it proceed in its full majesty. All of the subtle design, killer music and cleverly revealed secrets play their part too, of course. The richness of the world, day and night, water and dungeon, clouds and green groundclouds, isn’t to be underestimated. The dance wouldn’t be as kaleidoscopically beautiful without all of that. Fireworks might not always be necessary, but they are still fireworks. And yet it is the dance of the Jump that gives meaning to it all.

The Lost Levels

It’s common in games for many a character or object to be accompanied by its inverse, its mirror, its shadow. Maybe it’s a product of how games are made, were made, of the commonality of repetition and the short distance from repetition to repetition with a twist. Super Mario Bros. 2 (“The Lost Levels”) introduces one such shadow as almost its first move with the poison mushroom, power-up turned to power-down. It takes that to a whole new level with the negative warp zones: welcome to warp zone, now a trick on you. The whole game, in fact, is a cruel mirror held up to Super Mario Bros., a reflection that looks right but doesn’t wave back. Much of its cruelty comes from luring players into familiar actions and then turning them back against them. This game is a dance too, but it’s one where the floor is trying to throw you off, where the steps and flow that you have learned are not only impossible to use but will quicken your downfall. But for some people who already know the dance back to front, perhaps trying to freestyle your way through some spiky math-rock is an enjoyable next step.

Super Mario Bros. 2

It’s common in games for many a character or object to be accompanied by its inverse, its mirror, its shadow. Maybe it’s a product of how games are made, were made, of the commonality of repetition and the short distance from repetition to repetition with a twist. Super Mario Bros. 2 (“Super Mario Bros. USA”) is the Waluigi of early Mario games, a mirror of a mirror. It doesn’t focus on the shadows of objects and characters, though, but whole shadow worlds. Pick up a magical potion and you can open a door anywhere, take a subtle knife to the fabric of the universe, walk through the doorway and find yourself literally in shadow. Even outside of that mechanic, there are doors everywhere, and each one could go anywhere. This is the world of the subconsciousness, where possibilities extend to such things as a playable princess and gliding across the world on a gravity-resistant egg. Super Mario Bros. 2 is barely even a Mario game, and handles more awkwardly than one. Yet among all of its doors, it opens one to one of the series’s futures, platforming which is first and foremost a series of puzzles and doors to unlock.

Super Mario Bros. 3

This is the game where Mario learns to fly, tail flapping, on unseen wires in front of platforms casting shadows on a sky painted on sheets. The game is a show, and it’s some production. It has a cast of thousands and is the introduction point for almost as many iconic series images as the original. Its brilliance as sequel and as theatre is in taking the solid and dependable gameplay and mechanics of the original and using those as building blocks, the platforms of its stageset, then rearranging them. Each world rejigs and relights them and makes them interact with new props and characters for a set of dramatically different scenes. Water levels go from brief distractions to an entire world; the desert and an idyllic grassland emerge; World 7 turns off all of the lights to interact with the bare mechanics of pipes. The transitions between levels feel like curtains down and a chance to move things round. And then occasionally it breaks all the underlying rules and throws you into giant world or climbs up through the clouds, and there is nothing to do but laugh in delight. This is the game where Mario learns to fly. 

SNES chart, Edge 004, January 1994

[many-gay-magpies]

verivery and skz!

ooh okay--

first bias:

verivery: gyehyeon

skz: hyunjin

current bias(es):

verivery: ...gyehyeon (altho also dongheon and hoyoung now maybe? and yongseung? idk i like a lot of them)

skz: minho, jisung (maybe others but my bias list in skz is a lot less comprehensive than it used to be LMAO)

album/era ranking:

verivery:

ROUND 2: WHOLE | bcs it had both underdog and heart attack, and trigger slapped, so !

ROUND 3: WHOLE | undercover and O are my two favorite promoted tracks of theirs and they both come off this album, plus the styling and concept this era fucked massively, so. yeah <3

ROUND 1: HALL | only two tracks, but the tracks were get away and numbness, which both slapped. also the concept and mv were absolutely iconic

FACE ME + FACE YOU | lumping these together because theyre pretty even for me-- FACE ME has lay back, photo, and MOMENT, then FACE YOU has thunder.

FACE US | the bsides were great and a couple of my favorite VRVR tracks are on that album (my face and get outta my way), but GBTB being the title kinda detracted from it for me HDJFFJHF

VERI-CHILL

VERI-US + VERI-ABLE | i know there are a lot of kpop fans out there who really go for the more bright, cheery songs, but as much as i respect them they are not me-- i still like all the songs tho, not to be mistaken! Alright! and Get Ready are forever bops

skz: (im not doing literally every single era because that would be, just. SO much.)

clé: LEVANTER | levanter is one of, if not my MOST favorite skz title track of all time-- the mv, the song, just the EVERYTHING. the album also has sunshine, booster, and STOP, so yeah its my favorite <33

I AM WHO | my pace as the tt, and then question, insomnia, m.i.a., voices, WHO?, awkward silence... i have listed literally every song on the album so that probably gives you an idea of how much i value it.

Clé 1: MIROH | me: era that got me into stray kids say aye! miroh: AYE!! KSGDJDGH but yeah it. the Queen of all time <33 im pretty sure i had some of the rap sections in maze of memories, if not the entire song, memorized for like a straight year, despite not being able to nor wanting to rap myself. chronosaurus, 19, boxer, victory song my beloveds... clé 1 my beloved <3

GO LIFE/IN LIFE | pairing these two together because one is a repackage and they BOTH have some of my favorite ever skz songs on them. even though these eras saw the start of my decline from stay-dom with god's menu, im still absolutely in love with a lot of the songs that came from them, like easy, any, wow, my universe, another day, phobia, gone days, and ta!

NOEASY | once again kind of a miss on the title track with my personal tasted, but the BSIDES. god the bsides. we got silent cry, gone away, mixtape: OH (even though that was kind of its own era before with a single/ prerelease if i remember right?), cheese, domino, fucking red lights... kpop groups why must you always make my least favorite song of an album the title track.

I am NOT | not one of my favorite tts even if it was debut, but its a nostalgia era for me, and mirror, awaken, rock, grow up, and 3rd eye are ABSOLUTELY my beloveds.

Clé 2: Yellow Wood | not one of my most exciting eras, but i loved all the mixtapes and four of them were on this album, so !!

how i got into them:

verivery: i saw a gyehyeon gifset on my fyp, then went into his tag to find more gifsets to reblog (both because he pretty and i wanted to support creators), then next thing i know im binging every single one of their title tracks in order and drowning myself in their lore. it happened entirely without me expecting it

skz: saw the chronosaurus mv under a b*s mv i was watching back in 2019, liked it, then went and watched a bunch of their other stuff, liked that, and they very rapidly ascended to ult position LMAO

which member would be my best friend:

verivery: honestly theyre all very friend-shaped to me but probably dongheon, yongseung, or minchan? dongheon is a dork, minchan is precisely my kind of funny/weird, and yongseung is just chill and i think he'd be cool to hang out with!

skz: jisung <3 also felix, felix would be an absolutely rad best friend.

something i associate with them:

verivery: fuck idrk how to interpret this question. their lore? clone themes? vaguely homoerotic tension? the color silver? i could go on a whole rant on what my synesthesia associates with each of the individual members but that would be far too much to squeeze into this ask game, and also i think i may have already done that. i can say i associate minchan with coffee a little bit because that's what his voice sounds like to me?

skz: the color orange, for some reason. other than that i kinda got nothing HDJFBF