#2022 media retrospective

[centrally-unplanned]

I feel like making a “Top 5 Media of the Year” post is like extremely redundant if you follow me, its going to be really obvious what is on there. Still, ranking things is fun and is good to reflect on them, in particular why they ‘stuck’ with me and what makes them last as opposed to fun-at-the-time so here goes:

Perfect Tides

Definitely the most well-crafted ‘narrative’ of the year for me. As a game its eh, but you essentially ignore that and its very easy to do so. I been ruminating a lot on temporality this year; the sort of stripping-away of the idea of one having a future that ones grows to as opposed to a sequential present. The idea of ‘growth’ being more of a story we write for ourselves. And additionally I have always had a passion for stories about contingency and specificity, the ways technology, locale and circumstances shape people in not-so-obvious ways. 

Perfect Tides is never settled on one thing but those two themes permeate every part of its narrative. Mara is obsessed with changing herself, getting out of the ‘rut’ of her life, but has almost no agency in that regard. She changes, massively so, but never due to her plans coming to fruition. There are these moments where she introspects, and she is smart so it seems right, but - while never confirmed to be so explicitly - are just wrong on reflection, in the battle between her identity & and her outside reality, reality proves stronger.

And the ways she tries to fight against her circumstances are so adorably 2000′s. Writing on fanfic webforums, ‘dating’ someone via IM (and it falling apart from it being transposed outside of that medium), living on an outskirt suburbia island to the metropole of the rest of your social circle, there is so much in there. In the end the bildungsroman story of a teen growing up is dime a dozen, these stories can’t survive on the universality. Perfect Tides marries the universality to a specificity that changes it enough to make it new.

Bocchi the Rock

I have said a lot about Bocchi and why it works so I won’t repeat myself on that front. Instead to situate its lasting impact on me I think I can instead focus on the kind of anime I have been watching. I have picked up a lot (by no means all) of the older ‘classics’ over the past 5 or so years, and I was absolutely soul-sniped by the 90′s ~mindfuck~ era of anime. I am always secretly hunting for more of that, but you really aren’t going to find any of that in modern shows; Sonny Boy is the closest I have seen and its a forced comparion for sure (still a great show, would recommend). The Evangelion era is so over not even an Evangelion remake could recapture it.

The modern era instead has other strengths that you need to see on its own terms - new themes, new styles, new approaches. Slice of life is one of them, K-On! was the first ‘great’ entry into the genre that utilizes the modern lexicon, and there have been more and more hits along that front over time. Anime - and the people who watch it - has a more comfortable relationship with its otaku identity, replacing existential dilemma with celebratory depiction. 90′s animation experimentalism was immense but also limited by the tools of the day; modern animation technology allows an easy integration of styles and techniques that was out or reach 20 years ago. 

Bocchi for me is the crest of a wave of modern trendlines in anime’s capabilities and thematics. It perfects so much of what slice of life does while shedding its tired tropes; ruthlessly depicts a real-if-exaggerated otaku struggle but through the modern comedic, happy lens; and puts animation-as-a-tool to work communicating those feelings in the most inventive ways posible. Hell, the design process itself is radically accessible! I follow the creative team on twitter who were live-posting production photos, scene reactions, everything you could imagine. The media mix was intense. It is, in a certain sense, the most modern anime I have seen. It crystalized its own ‘genre’ that I want to see more of.

Sing Yesterday For Me

This year was a big year for manga for me, a journey I am hoping to deepen going forward. Sing Yesterday For Me was on my list for a while due to the anime adaptation from 2020, which I...hated? But due to all the really polished balls it kept dropping, I could see the potential, moody characters struggling with love & life in period-piece 2000′s Tokyo, lots of my boxes checked there.

The manga drops many of these same balls (less for sure), this is not a ‘great’ work. Instead why it has stuck with me is that is a showcase in the strengths of aesthetics & realism. Kei Toume’s art is just so absolutely my jam; the way she draws eyes with enhanced roundness and detail; the way the hair is all messy textures and sharp lines; the fact that in the middle of this serious manga will be splash images of little fashion showcases or photobooth printouts or something. She does this in all of her works too, she has types - I have been reading two of her other manga, Rocky Princess and Karakida-ke no Koshogurashi, and her aesthetic archetypes absolutely show up again in both. 

I enjoyed Sing Yesterday for Me’s story but what I remember most are these individual panels that are just Art to me, and its something that manga does on its own terms that I have been growing to appreciate more and more as I read more and more (Chainsaw Man stands out in this regard as well). Its a reason to read manga specifically as its own genre. Maybe the story won’t be amazing, but it can be in service of those panels, a necessary component to making them shine, and its worth it for that.

Astrophyics - Hope Left Me+

Astroyphics is a synthwave/darkwave composer who got their start doing remixes, lots of anime & 80′s stuff, which all rocks and I highly recommend. This is the year they started branching out into their own original compositions in a way that I think succeeded - it was a rougher journey, some of their early works lack life, but the later stuff - Hope Left Me, Cute Tragedies - are some of my favourite of the genre in how they blend being ‘noisescape’ with having melodic elements or motiffs that still stand out.

And they are a media mix pioneer in how much work they put into video elements for the songs, album covers, and other things - Hope Left Me has a visual novel it is attached to! Which you can play as a standalone game (this worked ~fine) or partly experience as a visual album for listening to the music (which is amazing). I love that someone who started out making Serial Experiments Lain covers is working so well in the medium of “music as its permitted to be by the internet”. Its something I want more and more over time, music that exists beyond the notes and instead is in conversation with the rest of the media apparatus it is so inexorably embedded in, and Astrophysics owns that reality. They are 50% of the reason I am a Hatsune Miku stan nowadays (first t-shirt recently acquired!) - the other 50% of the reason being...

Hazel - Why Did We Like Elfen Lied? 

Hazel’s Why Did We Like Elfen Lied? lives rent-free in my mind. Its the perfect question for me, not about ‘anime as anime’ but ‘anime as societal product’, about how watchers viewed it, cared about it, repackaged it, communicated it, the works. “What does this piece of media being loved say about those who love it” is the root question over which every other media discussion I ever have rests, the Unified Field Theorem of media analysis. And Elfen Lied is the *perfect* target for this question - it fucking sucks! It is an awful show, and in Japan no one cared. But in 2004 everyone in the west loved it. It was a show begging for an explanation.

Hazel nails it, and she does so through her subjectivity. She was the patient zero for the Elfen Lied experience as an emo goth edgy teen girl for its release; the way she jumps back and forth between the anime’s actual content, the way what it offered was passed around anime & goth subcultures, and the wider concerns those communities had in 2000′s America, is completely realized due to its combination of analysis and autobiography. And Hazel excels as a filmmaker along this same lens - her editing style is a tower of niche references to iconography, media, and music from the era, she composes her own songs which she uses for key moments, its a “by kids for kids  by scene nerds for scene nerds” approach that epotimizes the strength of YouTube as a medium.

Hazel will not continue to be my favourite YouTuber - I will absolutely still be a fan, but she has her own questions she cares about that don’t align with mine, and the way she is evolving as a creator is not my own path. She has many other good videos and I highly recommend looking through all her works. But Why Did We Like Elfen Lied will last beyond that for me as an influence of the kind of thing I myself want to make (and probably never will, oh well!).

[secretgamergirl]

People are super weird about letting fictional trans people get on with their lives.

There's a thing I've written about before where people will refuse to accept that fictional characters could possibly be trans no matter how incredibly blatant their creators are about it. You can put a big note on a character design sketch that just says "she is trans," you can have a character whose body shape suggests one gender and have every single character in the show make a point of correcting anyone misgendering that character accordingly, you can straight up have a character come out as trans, either having a serious talk about their identity with a parent while bathed in the trans flag color scheme with an actual trans flag on the wall behind them, or just straight up say "hey, I'm a man, gonna change my name to Victor, everyone cool with that?" and people will still find ways to bend over backwards and deny it.

But there's a small handful of characters out there people will accept as trans, generally, without a huge fight over it. Typically this happens with characters who are first introduced to people in a context where them being trans is treated like a mean-spirited joke, or is at least put so bluntly people can convince themselves it was. But then we have this weird thing that happens where that recognition is completely conditional on feeling like there's a mean-spirited joke they're in on.

Let's just dive in with the example that's going to be on most people's minds lately. Bridget from Guilty Gear.

I'm pretty sure if you had internet access from 2022 to 2023 you are Extremely Aware that this girl Bridget is trans, and that the scum of the earth threw a gigantic snot-nosed bawling fit of denial over this for at least half a year, trying to cope with all sorts of weird baffling denials where she wasn't trans in Japan and localizers made this up or there was some double-secret "true ending" to the game you could unlock somehow that walked this back or whatever, and the creator of the series as a whole, and this character, and really the only voice with any authority on the subject ended up writing like 4 big public statements directly addressing these bigoted weirdos about how no, she's trans, and she's always been trans. There's also some possibility that you were aware that Bridget is in a fighting game called Guilty Gear Strive, and maybe even that she's been a character in that series since 2002.

Here's the thing a lot of people don't seem to understand though. Since Strive has this whole story mode bit with her gaining the confidence to admit she's trans to everyone around her and they're all accepting and all that, if you just got here it would be pretty reasonable for you to assume that either she's a brand new character, or that in previous appearances, she was either "stealth" and everyone thought she was a cis girl, or this general look is new and she used to do the boymode thing. But, no. She's always presented this way, everyone's always known she was assigned male at birth. We went through two whole decades with Bridget being THE poster child for gross bigots going "hey, the little blond girl dressed like a nun is pretty cute right? HA! That's actually a boy! You're freakin' gay dude!" TVtropes had a page forever called "Dropped a Bridget on him" for describing all the media that as a "reveal" along those lines. The 4 letter T-slur was pretty much coined to describe this specific character.

So it's not that the recent rage from bigots is because they were into Bridget and thought they were into a cis girl, or that this character is "suddenly a girl." It's that we are now very explicitly saying "yeah, she's trans. Everyone knows she's trans and everyone is cool with it." There's no more "dark secret" to use as a gotcha.

Meanwhile, the incident that was really on my mind today was seeing someone's big retrospective piece about good ol' Poison, refreshingly opening with the actual story of how she was created, citing the same concept sketch from that post of mine I linked earlier, and not repeating the usual gross playground rumor, going on to mention an a fighting game appearance where backlash from trans-positive people caused Capcom to walk back some gross jokes in victory quotes about her "manly strength" or whatever... and then proceeded to speculate if cutting those transphobic jokes meant they have "retconned her into being cis." Like, what the hell is this logic? Is the idea of a character being trans and NOT being subject to gross ridicule seriously so hard for people to get their heads around that "they must have decided she was never trans at all" feels like a sensible explanation? That's... not how retcons work. If we've had years of hard confirmation that a character has had some particular trait, that's just a fact about that character, and you can go ahead and keep assuming it's true. A retcon would be like, if there was a new game and it had some cutscene where we see Poison dying her hair, revealing/confirming that it hasn't been naturally pink this whole time. There isn't a word for people just quietly deciding drastic changes have happened to characters, then never mentioning these anywhere. Because that's just not a thing that happens. It is completely absurd to just go around assuming characters stop being trans or gay or vegetarian or whatever the hell else if you haven't been reminded of the fact lately. That's like assuming your parents ceased to exist when they played peekaboo with you and hid their faces behind their hands. What the absolute hell? Oh and people do this with Birdo like all the damn time, too.

"Hey, don't you mean Birdetta?" I was going to make one of those rambling joke tags about this but, no, actual real discussion on this one. So just to clarify things here...

Here's the Japanese ad for "Super Mario USA," the Japanese release of the American "Super Mario Bros. 2" being presented in a way that makes it pretty clear we're going for as clear an example as we can give of mid-80s Japan's conception of a trans woman. Technically her first appearance was in Doki Doki Panic, a game created as part of this multimedia promotional thing for... a Japanese TV station's 1987 fall line-up. It was then reworked a bit into a Mario game because... it was really good, the actual Japanese sequel to SMB wasn't great, and Nintendo didn't want to have to deal with all the weird licensing issues tied into things. In the original manual for that, we have...

I'm a bit rusty, but in Japan, she's Catherine, and this brief description here says she's trans in a bigoted fashion, along with mentioning she tells people they can call her Cathy, you know, in a flirty sort of way. The general structure of this made its way into the original Super Mario Bros. 2 manual, at least in keeping the same general format of here's her name, here's some gross transphobia, here's her nickname, but... the whole thing's kind of a mess? Like, if you just saw the U.S. manual, and it said "Birdo- [Transphobic nonsense], ... rather be called 'Birdetta.'" It would be reasonable to interpret that as a dead name/chosen name sort of thing, but the original Japanese version has roughly the same formatting (and confirmation she's trans) but there's plainly no dead naming there, just an informal nickname... and the U.S. manual didn't even call her Birdo at all. It calls her "Ostro" and then it calls the actual ostrich enemies "Birdo."

And they're like that in-game in the credits too. Everyone caught the obvious error there about the wrong names getting used, and flipped those for future western mentions, but nobody ever caught that there was supposed to be a cutesy nickname going on, and future releases cut the whole transphobic description entirely. So, she's called Catherine in Japan, Cathy for short, and just kinda arbitrarily called Birdo instead in the west. But there's no dead name in any of this, just one of those Mash/Sabin Terra/Tina M. Bison/Vega/Balrog localization messes. And she always has been trans, everywhere, that's just a thing and has nothing to do with badly written manuals, and she's not going to somehow stop being trans just because the awful jokes have stopped.

Here's some fun extra trivia from wikipedia though! "Birdo/Catherine was prominently featured in the cut-scenes for the Japan-only, Satellaview pseudo-sequel of Super Mario USA (Japanese title for the Western version of Super Mario Bros. 2), known as BS Super Mario USA. In this version, three "Super Catherines" were voice-acted by Jun Donna (Pink, described as "slightly mischievous"), Rika (Red, "whose finances are always in the red"), and Akemi (Green, described as "cultured and affluent"). The voices were those of gay men or transgender women." That should really be "BS Super Mario USA" though. The Satellaview was weird.

[aprxn]

Cinnamoroll x Hatsune Miku 2.0 ✨✨

So... remember this trend from around July-August 2022? I, of course, participated in it, however, in retrospect, I started to dislike how I used my simplified art style for this and how much wasted potential this piece could've been, so I did myself a favor and redid it a year later! ✨✨✨

I know, I haven't been active on this website for hmm... 2 years? 🤔 Whoops! Look, I'm having a hard time handling multiple social media at a time (Translation in Fortnite language: I'm lazy).

You can find me on both Insta and Reddit!

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by sleepy duck 🦆🌻 (@naj_aprxn)

[beardedmrbean]

Mark Zuckerberg says he regrets that Meta bowed to Biden administration pressure to censor content, saying in a letter that the interference was "wrong" and he plans to push back if it happens again.

Meta's CEO aired his grievances in a letter Monday to the House Judiciary Committee in response to its investigation into content moderation on online platforms. Zuckerberg detailed how senior administration officials leaned on the company to censor certain posts about Covid-19, including humor and satire, and “expressed a lot of frustration” when the social media platform resisted.

“I believe the government pressure was wrong, and I regret that we were not more outspoken about it,” Zuckerberg wrote. “I feel strongly that we should not compromise our content standards due to pressure from any Administration in either direction — and we’re ready to push back if something like this happens again.”

Zuckerberg also expressed regret for essentially hiding content related to coverage by the New York Post about Hunter Biden ahead of the 2020 election that the FBI warned may have been rooted in a Russian disinformation operation.

“It’s since been made clear that the reporting was not Russian disinformation, and in retrospect, we shouldn’t have demoted the story,” he wrote.

Republicans on the committee, led by Ohio Rep. Jim Jordan, celebrated the letter in a long series of posts on X, calling it a “big win for free speech.”

The White House issued a statement defending the administration’s approach to Covid-19 information.

"When confronted with a deadly pandemic, this Administration encouraged responsible actions to protect public health and safety,” the statement said. “Our position has been clear and consistent: we believe tech companies and other private actors should take into account the effects their actions have on the American people, while making independent choices about the information they present."

The letter is the latest installment in a multi-year Washington argument about the role of social media companies in suppressing content friendly to conservatives.

Once Elon Musk bought Twitter (now X) in late 2022, turning the platform into a haven for "free speech" and reinstating numerous banned conservative posters, Zuckerberg became a particular target of Jordan.

Like many on the right, Jordan argued that the Biden administration unduly pressured social media platforms to take down content on topics from Covid-19 to Hunter Biden's laptop.

Jordan demanded extensive internal communications records from Meta and threatened a contempt-of-Congress hearing for the tech mogul before de-escalating at the last minute, saying Meta had provided the documents he requested.

Zuckerberg also said he would not repeat contributions he made in the last presidential election cycle to fund election infrastructure, saying that although they were intended to be nonpartisan, some people still interpreted the effort as benefiting one party or the other.

"My goal is to be neutral and not play a role one way or another — or to even appear to be playing a role," he said. "So I don't plan on making a similar contribution this cycle."

[chrisevansonly]

I'm Not Meant for This

Chris Evans x Girlfriend Reader

Summary: You weren’t meant for this life, the cameras, the gossip, the fan pages, it wasn’t you, letting yourself suffer wasn’t worth it anymore…was there anyway that would change?

Warnings: angst, minor arguing, crying, reader mentioning insecurities, happy ending<3

A/N: This was a request sent in by an anon! Thank you in advance for this, I’m a big lover of happy endings and I did tweak the request a little bit so I hope that’s okay!!I feel so unmotivated but I’m trying to update regardless lol

Word Count: 843

Spending a lot of time watching your life go by from outside your body looking down on yourself is a feeling so hard to describe, surrounding by celebrities of all calibres and standing, next to Chris you felt like you weren’t supposed to be here. You’d been feeling pretty low the past few months, Chris’s career doing really well, he just finished filming his last few movies for 2022 and 2023, and instead of talking about taking a break, he wanted to keep going. In retrospect, talking to Chris about your feelings should have been number one on the list of conversations you wanted to have, but maybe leaving and letting him down gently was better. Watching him talk freely in the sea of people, or handle the cameras like champ, all it did for you was made you feel out of place and disgusted by yourself. You knew this wasn’t his fault, you could only blame yourself for the position you were in, but you couldn’t take it anymore. 

-

The minute the two of you got home, you ditched your heels at the front door, leaving Chris standing there to go upstairs and into the bathroom. Looking at yourself in the mirror only made it worse, the bags and dark circles under your eyes despite the full coverage foundation and concealer covering it. Taking a wipe you cleaned your face off, letting out a quiet sigh, your eyes closing for a few seconds, and when you opened them, Chris was looking at you, an unreadable expression on his face 

“You’ve been really quiet all night…what’s going on?”

This was your chance, let him down easy, spend one last night with him and leave tomorrow, move far away, start over, leave Chris in the past

“I can’t do this anymore.”

“Do what baby?” 

You turned and motioned between the two of you 

“This, us, I can’t do it anymore, I’m not meant for this life Chris, I can’t fucking do this.”

You moved past him, ducking away into the closet to get out of the floor length black dress you had on, changing into a pair of cotton shorts and an oversized t-shirt

“Wait a minute, Y/N…we’re going to talk about this”

“I don’t want too anymore! I’m tired of constantly being attacked online, photographed without my consent, being the odd one out at every event, people I don’t even know nitpicking my appearance! I’m done!”

Chris ran a hand down his face 

“You know that’s not my fault, right?”

“Jesus Chris, that’s what you have to say?! I’m going to pack my stuff.”

His hand grasped yours tightly and he pulled you back to him softly, but firm enough for you to land against his chest, his arms holding you to him

“No. No. I can’t lose you, not now, not ever, we can figure a way to fix this problem.”

You shook your head, tears now falling down your cheeks

“No, we can’t, there’s n-”

“Yes, there is. Screw going back to work, i’ll take time off, as much as we need, I should have made that decision last year, but I didn’t and now I am. We can go away, stay at the cabin for a few months just me and you, restart your social media’s, hire more security, hell we can order our fucking groceries, that exists now!”

You laughed quietly into the flannel he had on, and Chris spoke again, beating you to it

“You are everything to me, you are my world, my light, and I wished you would have told me about this sooner so I could have helped you…I’m so sorry I didn’t notice how much this was hurting you, how much I was hurting you. You are the most beautiful girl in the world to me, and I swear to you I’ll fix this, we can make this work…”

Staying silent, eventually hugging him back tighter you closed your eyes before making a decision you hoped you wouldn’t regret

“Okay.”

Hearing your voice, Chris pulled back and brought his hands up to cup your face, swiping a few tears away before connecting his lips with yours, kissing you tenderly before pulling away and frowning when he noticed just how drained you looked 

“I love you so much angel, I’m going to make this right, and I’m going to work my hardest to keep you safe and happy, I promise I won’t let this happen again…”

A small part of you was worried you made the wrong decision but looking into Chris’s eyes and seeing just how much he love and appreciated you, was enough to help your heart prove you were doing the right thing. In the end you knew Chris would go to the ends of the earth for you, and he was willing to do that now, to protect you, and to give you the life he knows you deserve. The road would be long, but as long as you had Chris, he could make the journey a little more bearable. 

[harveyguilleniconodelamoda]

Harvey on Fashion for Plus Sizes: "Let's Make It Available to All of Us!"

Harvey spoke to Charles Bright of GoldDerby last week on a webchat about What We Do In The Shadows ending, his voice acting career, and his incredible red carpet collaborations with Christian Siriano.

I want to do a full retrospective on this topic eventually, but that's somehow an even bigger undertaking than chronicling all of Guillermo's sweaters, so it may take a while. In the meantime, I've provided a write-up of the fashion portion of the chat below, along with some photos and additional fashion commentary from yours truly!

You can watch the full webchat here.

"Well you've got to remember that being a guy of size, not a lot of people or designers were willing to dress me," Harvey begins, in response to a question about his favorite red carpet look from the past two years. "And it's upsetting. It reminds me of Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman going 'I've got money to spend in here!'"

Harvey has spoken before about how prior to 2022, he dressed himself for red carpet events, and sometimes even had to provide his own costumes on set when the costume department didn't have anything that fit him. This is a problem many plus sized entertainers have encountered over the years, even as conversations about body positivity and fat acceptance have become more prominent in public discourse.

Siriano deserves a lot of credit for his track record of breaking barriers in fashion, for getting on board with Harvey's vision, and for bringing some incredible, iconic, history-making looks to life. But Harvey had been slaying on red carpets for years before their collaboration began, often in looks he put together himself without the aid of a designer or stylist. His love of fashion is not new, and his sense of style has always been on point!

Hollywood has been extremely reluctant to be inclusive in this way, with the media often reacting to even one or two high profile plus sized celebrities with concern trolling about whether they're "glorifying obesity" just by existing as successful and talented people in larger bodies in the public eye. But just as with so many other aspects of his career, Harvey has simply carved out doors for himself when none were opening.

"People don't take a risk because they're afraid, right?" Harvey explains. "But you could be the first! I've been fortunate. Talking to Christian Siriano, I was getting ready for the Academy Awards and I had this vision of like...'I really want to do something different, and I know that you don't really dress guys. I want to find a happy medium where it's masculine, and a little feminine, but it's me,' and it just wasn't something that they usually do."

"But we collaborated and we had this idea of like, what if it was the 1920s, but I'm going in a style that's retro, so it's the Gilded Age. So my hair is 1922 but I'm giving a nod to the Gilded Age because that would be vintage back in 1922. And so that's how I got that idea, and then we got the whole tuxedo flare and whatnot."

The now-iconic tuxedo gown Harvey wore to the 2023 Oscars.

"Working with Christian has been great. After that I think Vogue ran it, and it got all this attention, and people were like 'woah! a plus size guy looking good in fashion' and I was like 'yeah, we are out here and there's a lot of us! And I feel like there's just not designers who are designing for us or making it available to us.'"

Harvey's red carpet look for the Oscars, as well as his look for the Vanity Fair after party, appeared on multiple best dressed lists. He was even declared the best dressed person on the Oscars red carpet by MsMojo.

"After that Christian and I became friends," Harvey says. "I hosted the GLAAD awards and he dressed me for that, and I was honored with an award in California and he dressed me for that...and so we've been collaborating on different outfits."

Harvey and Christian Siriano have now collaborated on ten different outfits for half a dozen events since the start of 2023, including most recently the 2024 Critic's Choice Awards in January (where he once again made it only best dressed lists, such as this one from TVInsider) and the Garfield movie premiere in May.

"The Met Gala last year was, I think, the cherry on top, because it was a kind of nod to Chanel with a tweed in pink. But [the gala] was also honoring Karl Lagerfeld, and to be in my body, and being a POC, and wearing pink--so still honoring but not forgetting, and also representing myself--was a nice collaboration, and I think that gown was really beautiful and I loved it."

Harvey's Met Gala ensemble was easily one of the most impressive of the night, managing to be both flawlessly on theme while also being a creative interpretation that critiqued the subject of the theme.

Harvey finishes up his thoughts on his red carpet style by saying he wants to continue working with Siriano, as well as other designers who are willing to take a chance with him.

"The payoff is, you know, like you said: people look to people in film and television to be inspired, and be like 'why can't I? I can wear that! Where can I get that?' You know? And it's like you should be able to get that. Let's make it available to all of us."

Sounds great to me, Harvey! And it's true.

On a personal note, Harvey's incredible style and confidence has definitely been an inspiration. He's spoken a few times about how he's had people tell him how watching him has given them more confidence in themselves, and I count myself among that number. I am so excited to see what the rest of 2024 holds for him, on and off the red carpet!

[uwmspeccoll]

Spotlight: Faith Ringgold

92-year-old Faith Ringgold is arguably one of the most consequential African American artists of her generation, well-known for her paintings, mixed-media sculpture, performance work, and especially for her narrative quilts. A year ago, February 17, 2022, the New Museum in New York opened the retrospective exhibition “Faith Ringgold: American People,” the most comprehensive survey to date of the work of Faith Ringgold, whose groundbreaking art and political activism span more than sixty years.

These images are from the catalog of that exhibition, also titled Faith Ringgold: American People, edited by Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari and published in New York by Phaidon Press in 2022. The catalog features 11 essays by prominent writers and an interview with the artist, and covers work from all periods of Ringgold’s career, including her early civil rights-era figurative paintings, her graphic political protest posters, and her signature experimental story quilts.

Click or tap on the images for more detail.

The Flag is Bleeding #2: The American Collection #6, 1997. Acrylic on canvas with painted and pieced fabric. 76 x 79.5 in.

View more Black History Month posts.

[brigittttoo]

Writing Patterns (Tag Game)

Rules: list the first line of your last 10 (posted) fics and see if there's a pattern!

Thanks for the tag @goddammitjim ! I can't remember when I've last done something like this but hopefully I've created at least 10 new fics since then

"Ben silently watches Cody read." - Feast, my 2nd edwardian wlw codywan

"Cody’s hands are sweating inside his gloves." - Tending Towards Silence, a sombre cody retrospective

" . . . Thus [the Clone Soldier Facility Language] is arguably a pidgin, despite its novel morphology and phonology formulated under isolated conditions." - Abstand and Ausbau, an in-universe media fic for an unelaborated xmen au codywan

"[Typed blue header text: Writing Module.] [In pencil:] Today me and fives and rRex got to punch the big bags [Evidence 03.53.11] to see if we are strong now and I moved it 3 inchs!" - Tunneling, the sequel-ish to Abstand and Ausbau xmen au with a confusing piece of annotated in-universe media at the beginning that tripped me up while doing this tag game

"Ovens these days are such untrustworthy things." - Milk, Sugar, Cocoa, a The Old Guard codywan where they make brownies

"One day, a swan-maiden lands on an imprisoned isle." - Monday: Fairy Tale/Mythology, a wlw codywan au for @order63

"Excerpt from elle.com/culture/celebrities, Aug, 2022. The perfect phrase to describe Cody Fett and Obi-Wan Kenobi as a couple is ‘stage presence’." - Tuesday: Arts Professions, a wlw codywan au for Order 63 with stage actress obi-wan and glam rocker cody that also has in-universe media why do I do this to myself

"Cody understands why they call it a snowstorm, when your TV is full of white noise, an endless, blurry white and grey." - Wednesday: Alt Prompt Snowstorm, a wlw codywan au for Order 63, there's a video store

"They’ve been sharing the lodge for the past couple days, a perfect example of genial skiing sports relations." - Thursday: Sports, a wlw codywan au for Order 63, with wintersports

"In Florence, they share a suite that looks out over the high, sharp tower of the Santa Croce Basilica, but the view that truly arrests Ben is the one from the top staircase window." - Friday: Historical, a wlw codywan au for Order 63, and we're back where this list started with edwardian ladies!

Patterns? I think my first lines have gotten shorter over the years maybe, and there's a lot of in-universe media excerpts cluttering up the place lol. I like finding characters mid-way through actions just as much as I like describing a setting, apparently!

I'm not sure who's been tagged, so I'll go with @cabezadeperro and @lttrsfrmlnrrgby and @elwenyere and @adiduck ? I'm sure I'm crossing over into lore's tagged people now so mwah goodnight <3

[chrisairgames]

A Year in Retrospect

The social media diaspora began a year ago, and I've been neglecting Tumblr. Trying to come back, slowly, so here's what I've been up to since November 2022.

Bio-Drones & Cryo-Clones

From November to February 1st, 2022, I worked on my Zine Month campaign, a Kickstarter for my first ttrpg zine, a Sleeper Crew Adventure for Mothership RPG called Bio-Drones & Cryo-Clones.

I was blown away by the immense show of support. The crowd-funding allowed me to pay for even more art, better and bigger maps, development and editing, and professional layout. I got to make the zine into the amazing package I'd dreamed up.

The zines were sent off to the fulfillment center last Friday! A ton of my ttrpg work time was spent on what's in these boxes, and it's pretty scary to see it go off into a truck. That does mean the zines will be available at retailers soon, though, which just feels nuts to me.

The Unseen City

I also wrote The Unseen City, the first 3pp setting and adventure for Cloud Empress, the ecological science fantasy RPG, the successful Mothership hack from Worlds by Watt.

I go into depth about how this 20pg zine turned evolved from the "Pamphlet Duet" I originally conceived in my most recent newsletter. A lot of struggles, gained some killer art from HodagRPG, and all for a game I'm really quite happy with. I do plan to return to writing more adventures for The Unseen City as well!

Mitosis, Escape from STAR Station

Last year, RV Games published my Mothership pamphlet series The Cerdo Cycle (that was my last Tumblr post!). Shortly after the campaign, Violet asked me to write a giant 8x16 inch pamphlet adventure for RV Games' upcoming in-universe Mothership board game, Mitosis.

I wrote Escape from STAR Station, a gonzo adventure about a Prison Break amidst two warring factions: Cyberviral Pirate Goons & STARS Staff Brainiacs. Both sides are infected by experiments with the Mitosis board game microorganisms. It's a crazy lil adventure with awesome art by Sigmacastell. You can pick up an abridged print-at-home version for free on my itch page, even.

5 Million Worlds RPG

For the One-Page Game Jam this past summer, I submitted a pocketzine Space Adventure hack of Mothership, called 5MW RPG: Avatar Basics.

In this little A4/US Letter space, I've designed two main pulls away from sci-fi horror to space adventure. The first are Push Tables. Similar to the end of act in a Star Trek episode, these tables push the conflict in new and unexpected directions.

The second is a switch from Stress into Limit. Limit is your PC's XP, used to improve Stats/Saves, build towards projects, etc. Notably, instead of a Panic Table, 5MW has two tables: a Break Down table (similar to Panic), and a Limit Break table (like in FF).

When characters are in the shit, and they have to roll a Limit Check, the players can decide whether to spend their XP and do some cool shit to overcome the circumstances, or accept the Break Down. Good ol' @christiansorrell even did a TikTok video discussing the game, if you wanna check that out.

I'm very excited to continue to pursue creating a player's handbook, 5MW RPG: Avatar Primer. If you download the game on itch, I'll keep y'all apprised of substantial updates. Next up is developing the chargen, and reconfiguring the pocketzine as an A6 booklet: 5MW RPG: Avatar Basics+.

Outer Rim Uprising

I was extremely honored to join 11 other designers to create pieces of the Outer Rim Uprising Megabundle, spearheaded by our intrepid leader, Iko of The Lost Bay Studio.

Several months of brainstorming and collaboration went into this 20+ piece bundle. I contributed two pieces for this bundle. The first is a 12pg adventure module Rusted to the Core. Androids aboard an aerostat station floating in a gas giant's clouds have gone on strike. Can the PCs resolve the issues before the Rust overtakes the station?

The second is the more "experimental" Bones on the Ground. Bones is a bifold adventure into an android museum-prison, paired with three diegetic fliers supporting the ARA, the Android Rights Association (or Android Rebel Alliance, depending on who you ask!). Pieces of the three flyers contain clues for PCs who join the ARA to better succeed when they begin their museum infiltration.

A Buncha Spaceship Deckplans

So I have ADHD, and experience bouts of summer mania. Spaceshiptember rolled around, and I thought, "Hey it'd be no problemo to write 30 deckplans and release them this month, while I'm also trying to print BioCryo, promote ORU, starting a newsletter, and finishing up The Unseen City." Totally sane decision, right?

Well, I got through half the month. And I sketched out a third week's worth of ships on paper too. One of those sketches caught Adam STATION's eye, even, and he asked me to join An Infinity of Ships to turn it into a micro-adventure!

As long as this quick-n-dirty zine remains unfinished, it'll be free on itch.io. Again, if you'd like, follow along and I'll send out dev updates when new pages are added!

the dying tides

Another Jam entry, this time for The Lost Bay Studio's system agnostic fantasy setting + coloring book, SKYREALMS.

I made the dying tides as a short, lightweight fantasy adventure to venture among wavebros and squidillies. The art is based on my 4 yo daughter's paintings. Since she loved coloring the SKYREALMS books so much, I figured it was a poetic homage to the kind and mysterious heart of this game.

An Interactive Terminal Network

Last but not least, I smashed my skull against Twine on and off for six months to create a unified Interactive Terminal Network for my Mothership adventure, Bio-Drones & Cryo Clones.

The terminal is absolutely free to play on itch.io. Though passwords that can be found in the zine lock off a few areas. That said, I'm sure many folk could dig out the passwords without the zine. I don't know how to do that stuff. The fact that I even MADE this thing is a miracle to me, hahaha.

Goal for 2023

Talk about this stuff as it's happening so I don't infodump on people like this, haha.

What I'm working on now:

Twisting Unseen

Untitled Liminal Horror adventure

Provisional sketches, for the artist/layout designer.

Also, if you made it this far, thanks.

-Chris Air

[silverquillsideas]

bestie you've watched beyond evil???? OMFG EEEE!! TELL ME YOUR FAVORITE SCENE PLEASE I AM GOING INSANE

Hellooo!!!

I watched beyond evil in 2022 fsjfsds....so the details are a bit fuzzy in my head, but off the top, I remember a couple of scenes that made me feel some sorta way 😭

(in no particular order)

1. The rain scene - where jw sees ds holding out an umbrella for a lost person, whole himself getting soaked. That scene changed me. The absolute wonder and revelation and admiration and love in jw's eyes??? I think that's the moment he fell in love 😭

2. The rain confession scene towards the end, yk which one, jw on his knees, begging ds to forgive him 😭 fucking hell that one restructured my internal organs.

3. The courtroom scene, in which jwds double cross the asshole father in front of all the media. And jw gets arrested by ds, but it's all as per agreement between the partners (husbands)

4. The scene where the girl (I forgot her name, chicken shop owner) throws eggs at jw lmfaoooo it was a heartbreaking scene at that point, I didn't laugh, but in retrospect, it was a lil bit funny

5. The scene at the end when jw arrests ds, and breaks down while holding his hands, even when he's making the arrest 😭 that first "juwon-ah" GODDAMMIT I GO FERAL EVERYTIME 😭

6. The scene at the very end, closing scene, them meeting after 6 long years, and smiling at each other across a bridge, bathed in morning sunlight. Breathtaking. Exquisite. They are so in love I cried 😭

Okay now. For the fanfic!!!

It's this one!!

[nancydrewwouldnever]

But panic over what? The time frame of his name visibility waning, due to Marvel being over for him? Surely not panic over money, given the Marvel residuals still coming in on those movies (he even bragged about it almost in that GQ interview). /

I don’t think money, I think more things not playing out as he thought they would, which possibly allowed some doubt to creep in? Lightyear wasn’t as well received as it was thought it was going to be, and Little Shop of Horrors was shelved due to Covid. We also don’t know what roles he might have missed out on or wasn’t able to do due to other commitments. He’s in a very stacked aged bracket for talent, it’s possible there were many factors/a combination of things not just any one thing.

You know, I think back now to those reposts he did on Twitter and IG of the good reviews/responses to both LY (especially that one) and TGM completely differently than I did back in 2022. Now, in retrospect, it looks so needy with how he was scrolling through social media looking for positive views on his films. Was he really feeling that fragile about the films, and people's responses to him in them? I now think "apparently" in a way I didn't back then. Now I go back even farther and wonder about how Defending Jacob getting overlooked might have effected him in 2020.

[bobaboard]

The BobaBoard 2022 Retrospective

~3 months late (it'll be worth it, I swear), the BobaBoard 2022 retrospective is finally here!

Since it's long (~30m reading time long), we'll be releasing summary threads in the following weeks. In the meantime, the juicy parts:

Our 2023 roadmap

Our 2022 supporters thank you page: the Wall of Blorbos

How to support us

Even more importantly, we're hiring for urgent short-term positions (to be blunt, April 1st is close):

(Paid) Pinch-hit Artists

(Paid) Intellectual Property and Contract Lawyers (we're in California)

(Paid) Short-term Social Media Manager

Please stay tuned for our summaries, and ask questions if you have them! And for the tl;dr of the support avenues, our project lead Ms Boba (@essential-randomness) now has actually sensible ways to support her and the project: a Patreon, a Ko-fi, and an experimental self-made support page.

[encyclopediacr]

Last month year at the wiki — 2022

Happy New Year! Today, as we all begin 2023, our editing community at Encyclopedia Exandria take the time to look back at the year we just left. Here is a special edition of our still-new monthly retrospectives: last year at the wiki.

2022 has been an exciting year for us as a fan community. The Legend of Vox Machina premiered, Tal'Dorei Campaign Setting Reborn, Call of the Netherdeep, and The Nine Eyes of Lucien were published, 4-Sided Dive began, ExU Kymal and Calamity aired, Vox Machina Origins: Series III and Tales of Exandria: The Bright Queen concluded, Mighty Nein Origins: Caleb, Yasha, and Fjord released.

It's been a busy time, especially for us at the Encyclopedia Exandria. The Critical Role wiki at Miraheze was opened to the public on June 9 as a fork from the original Fandom wiki.

In acknowledgement of the hard and exciting work our editors have accomplished over the past year, here is a selection of projects that our community is especially proud to have created or significantly improved (or is excited to have seen others work on) in 2022.

But first, to say: we are grateful for and excited about all work that was contributed to Encyclopedia Exandria, ranging from hefty content updates to spelling and typing error corrections. All of this together makes the wiki the resource that it is, and all contributions made over the past year by our editors—whether they be veteran, new, anonymous, or just passing by—is immensely valued.

Because many of our editors are veterans from Fandom and because this project is a fork, thus is based off the Fandom wiki as it existed in late May and inherited any contributions previously made there, the following projects include those editors of Encyclopedia Exandria completed while at the Fandom wiki. We are proud of that work as well, and they are included in keeping with the spirit of highlighting accomplishments and contributions to our wiki over the past year that our editors are proud of, regardless of where they first made these edits.

A family of articles covering the Tide of Retribution adventure from Explorer's Guide to Wildemount was added to the wiki. "Three Earrings" is a particular highlight.

With new access to the first two Chronicles of Exandria artbooks as a resource, we could make some significant updates. Most excitingly, "Ulugrah" was created, and "Melanie de Rolo" and "Grand Purveyor of the Grey Hunt" were greatly expanded.

Speaking of improvements in Campaign 1 coverage, "Vord" saw much-needed and long-overdue improvements, and the creation of "githyanki skull" covered an old gap of a very interesting item from the campaign. Other notable overhauls include "The Calamity" and "Star Razor".

Some more conceptual articles have also been reorganized and created. Perhaps not as exciting as other content updates, but it has been a boon for readability and information seeking. "Resurrection, "media chronology", and "magic" come to mind.

We revisited the historical decision not to properly cover the verboten Wendy's one-shot. "Feast of Legends" (formerly "Special 48") now treats the one-shot as any other.

We as a community are very proud of our coverage of Exandria Unlimited: Calamity. The topic is vast, and we love many aspects of it, but we are especially proud of "Astral Leywright", "Eyes of Avalir", "Tempus" and, of course, "Bolo Maximus".

All of our Talks Machina articles were renamed and given new episode codes to make them easier to identify and reference. For example, the article for the Talks Machina for 2x26: Found & Lost used to be simply "Talks Machina 74" with a code of "TMx74". It is now titled "Talks Machina 74: Found & Lost" and has a code of "TM2x26". That's not all for Talks Machina! These articles have long stood empty, but headway this year as seen all of them filled with at least the topics covered, and some Talks articles even now contain the cast's answers and discussion.

The family of articles for the Arms of the Betrayers were created early in the year, filling in a large gap in coverage for lore introduced in Explorer's Guide to Wildemount. The work was rewarded when "Mace of the Black Crown" became an important article for Calamity viewers.

Increased coverage of the smaller but unique elements of Exandria has been a joy to see. "Tree of the sun", "Trost", and "candlerock" are but a handful of the new articles on plants, animals, foods, and other small bits of the world.

We've also been very excited about work that is very hard to link to here, such as steadily removing rampant plagiarism, the development of clearer wiki policies, improvements to category structure, updates and re-structuring of infoboxes, separation of the "specials" episode category into one-shots and miscellaneous filmed content, and the creation of a script that near-instantly updates articles when the VOD is released on YouTube. These projects work mostly in the background and are harder to notice, but we feel they've improved the wiki just like any content update.

It's been a very busy 2022, and this is just a small selection of the amazing work our editing community has accomplished. We are proud of all the work that we've seen in the six months since Encyclopedia Exandria was created, and the work in the six months before that that we inherited.

We look forward to 2023 and to the exciting work that year will bring.

[thestarlightforge]

Fiona’s Art Journal:

Table of Contents

Hello, everyone! Welcome to my blog!

As outlined here, my New Year’s Resolution for 2024 was to do something for my art every day. Whether writing, drawing, watching/studying, exploring or reading—I’d do something to sharpen my artistic focus daily.

As the year has gone by, I’ve documented some of the process on Tumblr. The tag “#Fiona’s Art Journal” has both reflections and artistic works, and “#Poetry” has an index of poems. This post is an index, and I’ll update it with hyperlinks to journals, art posts, and other favs.

NB: Aside from theatre and art posts, much of this blog is fandom posting about whatever (usually queer) media has most recently captured my interest. You can track various Strange New Worlds, Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Supergirl and House of the Dragon rotations (to name a few), along with other shows/movies on my list. I will probably spend the rest of 2024 crying about Agatha All Along (as WandaVision is an all-time favorite media & I’ve waited 2 years, since the night before I graduated undergrad, for Jac Schaeffer to fix this mess). I appreciate your understanding during this time, lol.

Journals — 2024

PETITION and Info to shut down the Pinyon Plain Uranium Mine and protect the people and lands of the Navajo Nation, Havasupai, Hopi, and Ute Mountain Ute — 8/28/24

DC Metro Accessibility Petition

“Squishy But Firm: Sexcapades of a Crip Girl” at the Kennedy Center Local Theatre Festival 🏳️‍🌈♿️🏳️‍⚧️ — 8/24/24

2024 🏳️‍🌈 Media Retrospective ❤️ — 9/20/24

National Be Nice To Bugs Day! We love a native species! 🥰 — 7/14/24

Setting Intentions: “Through the Sunken Lands” — 1/31/24

Introduction — 12/31/23

Go Listen to Sandra Yellowhorse — 11/20/22

AO3 Entries

A Rhaenicent & Rhaesaria entry written shortly after HOTD 2x07

An early chapter of my ongoing Snowbaird fic with @imjustmarcy

Artistic Works — 2024

For Popo (like “Pawpaw”) Wilson: A Real (Union Strong) Redneck ❤️ — 9/25/24

“Clerics Have Necromancy” — 8/28/24

“Winter Blooms” — 8/18/24

“For Gus and Claudia” — 6/22/24

“QUEERING NEVERLAND IS LIVE—MY PAPER MADE THE COVER!” — 6/6/24

“Gentle Animals” Short Story — 5/1/24

“From Your Internet Big Brother” Essay — 4/8/24

Isolation/Recovery Discussion — 4/4/24

“Playing Fetch” Short Story — 3/31/24

“Building Momentum” Prose Poetry — 3/24/24

“Following the River” Short Story — 3/22/24

“Is There A World” Poem — 3/15/24

“A Practical Career” Short Story — 3/10/24

“The arospecs are onto something” Prose Poetry — 3/9/24

“Through the Sunken Lands” Pins Setup Addition — 3/9/24

“I wrote you a play” Prose Poetry — 3/9/24

On the Models of Disability Discussion — 3/5/24

“Threads” Prose Poetry — 3/3/24

“Interdependence is a love poem” Prose Poetry — 2/24/24

“A Shift” Short Story — 2/20/24

“To Falling in Love” Prose Poetry — 2/6/24

“Push-up Contest” Short Story — 2/6/24

“Autistic Katniss saves the world” THG Meta/Discussion — 2/2/24

“Purpose” Essay — 2/1/24

“Oracle Forever” Short Story — 1/29/24

“Stardust” Poem — 1/23/24

“Point of View” Short Story — 1/21/24

Patriarchy Hurts Everyone Discussion (edit: erroneously flagged/removed by Tumblr staff, appeal not allowed) — 1/21/24

“A Winter Morning” Short Story — 1/16/24

“Ymir with the Freckles” Short Story — 1/11/24

On Propaganda & the Cancellation of Queer Media (OFMD) Discussion — 1/10/24

“Glimmer” Short Story — 1/5/24

“What the Antihero, Your Villain, Has Left” Essay — 12/31/23

Some Favorite Art, Analyses/Metas & Journals (2023 + Previous)

“Lost Girl” at the National Theatre in Higher Ed Conference Journal — Aug. 6, 2023

First Day of “Through the Sunken Lands” at the Kennedy Center Journal — Dec. 11, 2023

Intimacy Choreography in “Hacks” Analysis — Jul. 15, 2023

“Swallowtail” Poem — Sept. 18, 2023

“Hope is the only thing stronger than fear” TBOSAS Meta — Nov. 19, 2023

“Wake Up” Gay Poem — Aug. 23, 2023

“Myths” Poem— Nov. 12, 2023

“Thanks, Tennessee” Gay Poem — Nov. 23, 2022

On Strength: Katniss and Lucy Gray TBOSAS Meta/Journal — Dec. 10, 2023

“Trust is more important even than love” TBOSAS Meta — Nov. 24, 2023

“The Valley Song” THG Meta — Nov. 18, 2023

Their first meeting in Twelve TBOSAS Meta — Dec. 24, 2023

Hurt/Comfort Thoughts TBOSAS Meta/Journal — Dec. 17, 2023

Do Better with Queer Rep — Aug. 19, 2023

“Ellee” Short Story — Aug. 15, 2023

I crack myself up

i'm so normal about them :)) — Sept. 26, 2024

“Oh, ableism. Great. THAT’S not gonna go over well with the woke mob.” — Aug. 19, 2024

rhaenicent nation how we feelin 😌 — July 21, 2024

it gets better, apparently :)) — July 22, 2024

representation matters (GoT/HotD) — July 21, 2024

rhaenyra my love, never ever change 😂 — July 21, 2024

SO MADGE X KATNISS LOL — June 9, 2024

Writing while queer — Jan. 2, 2024

Snowbaird “Aca-scuse me?” — Nov. 20, 2023

It’s almost like Suzanne meant to do that — Nov. 7, 2023

Not Coryo being more normal than Gale or Peeta — Dec. 13, 2023

Peeta “my beautiful princess with a disorder” 😆 — Dec. 7, 2023

SnowJanusBaird ≠ Everlark/Everthorne, lmao — Dec. 31, 2023

ValCarol giggles — Nov. 11, 2023

[jmdbjk]

2022: it’s a wrap.

2022. It’s been real. Too real. Not exactly how I thought it would unfold. But it’s the end of December and now we know. 

THEY knew 2022 was THE year. Time was working against them because of Jin’s age. But shit happened in the world, in their country. Or I should say, shit DIDN’T happen that they perhaps expected or hoped.

There was no brand new BTS comeback album, but a compilation which was wonderful, rich and retrospective. Each of the members reflected on their “proof” and why they chose the songs they did for the album. 

They teased PROOF at the end of the last PTD concert in Las Vegas in April. They knew long before that how 2022 was gonna play out.

Even though they hinted at the end of 2021 that there might be a world tour, there was no new comeback album and no new world tour for it, but as it happened, they gave us a single, amazing one-off concert that was free to the entire world. Immediately it was fraught with controversy, negativity and disorganization. But they pulled it off spectacularly in grand BTS style. Bangtan Bangtanned. 

The Festa dinner in June truly revealed their turmoil. It was a hard year for them and they worked and fought so hard to make it as good as possible for us. It was so heartbreaking to see them struggling to tell us they were committed to staying together but they needed to step away from the group in order to work on themselves as artists and to find out who they were as people. 

We started getting their solo work in the form of Jack in the Box and Indigo and The Astronaut. The individual artistic growth is already amazing. We already see Joon resolving some of the internal conflicts he was facing this past summer. The more we see him during interviews the more he is smiling and looks happy. It’s a big relief.

We will never know how truly heartbroken and frustrated they were this year. They may never reveal the reasons why they hinted at a world tour that never happened. And all the other bullshit they went through, especially Jimin and his privacy breach and how that may have influenced changes. I am so sorry and sad they felt they had to make the decisions they did but Jimin said they did EVERYTHING the best they could, ALWAYS keeping ARMY in their minds and hearts.

Their military service has been announced and is now underway. It has been a very emotional month for us and the members, seeing Jin off to begin his enlistment obligation.

Yes, we all hoped beyond hope there would be a military exemption. But they really set it up so we could process it little by little so that by October, when they made the announcement, we were ready to accept it even though we were still hoping they had an out somewhere.

As the announcement says: “...it is a promise, there’s much more yet to come in the years ahead from BTS.”

Emotional rollercoaster for everyone is the best description of 2022.

We saw some changes as far as social media presence on their parts. As far as the guys are concerned, Twitter has mostly been abandoned for Instagram and Weverse. The Weverse platform had a total makeover this year. 

Jimin, who used to be the king of Twitter selcas a few years ago, dropped off the face of the social media universe for a while and is now posting on Weverse more than he visits his Instagram account. Jungkook continued his very erratic usage, wiping his entire Instagram at one point, “just because,” and starting over. He posted on Weverse for Jimin’s birthday, his first post there since July 2019 on that platform.

Hobi and Namjoon are our social media kings on Instagram now. Followed by Tae, Jin and Yoongi. Useless debate still rages TODAY on how significant their social media usage is, who they post pictures of, who they comment or like, what does it mean, if anything?

Now we look forward to 2023. 

A New Years custom in South Korea is to watch the sunrise on New Year’s day. Throngs of people go out in public places waiting for the sunrise. 

It is an optimistic way of greeting the new set of twelve months. A fresh new year, a new sun, a new day. We need all the optimism we can gather. Take a deep breath. This is a kumbaya moment! (lol).

2023 will bring new thrills for us as we look forward to new solo music and appearances and content. New documentaries, new Run BTS! So many rumors flying about tv dramas and collaborations. There is a lot in store for them and us in 2023.

However, it will all be severely tempered with each new heartbreak watching each one of them finally take that big step and enter the military for their service (assuming they all go in 2023).

We will probably see less and less interactions on social media, of course especially after they all enter the military. We should expect nothing for birthdays, anniversaries, holidays or when milestones are reached or awards achieved. We will have to get used to their silence on social. 

All we can do is support them the best way we can. And stick together and try not to create too much negativity among us. When it gets overwhelming, just step away for a while, there’s nothing wrong with that. Take time, think about why you love Jin, Yoongi, Hobi, Namjoon, Jimin, Jungkook and Taehyung.

We already know we get to start off with a brand new episode of Run BTS!

ANYWAY! Happy new year to you all and I hope everyone gets to start it on their best note. So bring it on 2023! FIGHTING!

[generation1point5]

Year of Reviews

I slept through my entry into 2023, and awoke to a new year while in a far distant country while spending my last days in 2022 on vacation. And in its own way, that near-seamless entrance now stands in stark contrast to where I find myself this year. The melancholy, however, has remained; a steady undercurrent that I see has been there since the beginning.

I still remember that trip as vividly as the day I had left; the sleepless plane ride, the cloudy, rainy morning on the highway passing through the mountains and the houses nestled into tall trees as I entered Taipei. I remember the food and the sights, the long and much-needed break where many new experiences brought up old memories, old haunts. In retrospect those sentiments were prescient, and perhaps in ways that ended up becoming self-fulfilling. Much of my life this year was spent as if I had the chance to do things all over again, and understanding what that sentiment truly is, and what it feels like. Like many things in life, it is bittersweet.

This year I have written more than I have in a long time; part of it is a compulsion and response to having recently switched to a high-powered, full-time job that has forced me to question my choice between a stable income and my artistic pursuits, which has since only been brought even further to the forefront. The other part has been the sheer amount of media that I have consumed that has inspired me, and from that, the new friends I've become acquainted with as a result. To think that it all started with a trip to Taiwan, and revisiting Nekojishi. It feels like a story all its own.

There's much I've come to learn and to appreciate about the culture of my heritage and my own place in it. It is so distinctly Chinese-American, but the prefix is made no lesser for it. Having experienced both the mainland and Taiwan's own branch of Chinese history, and having lived all my own, I understand the formation of my own racial identity as a very diffuse thing; a product of circumstances and material conditions as it is historical animus. I finally have an answer to the difficulty in translating my name. China as a setting and as a center for game development has experienced a resurgence in, something that I have enjoyed both as a matter of representation and also inspiration.

Revisiting the visual novel that had first made me curious about the island country of distant relation had also kick-started a wild direction to my life I wouldn't have anticipated otherwise, and now I look back on the beginning of the year almost as an oddity of a prior era. It is reminiscent of my first forays into online social circles. It has come to similar conclusions, also, and I am left with a better impression of how little I have truly changed from my years before. History did not quite repeat itself, but it has indeed rhymed. But that sentiment seems to be true globally as much as it has personally.

Sometimes, it feels like we’re only going in circles.

But things are not like before. I think about how much my life has changed from mere whims that had taken me to amazing fiction, to amazing people, and what both had inspired me to create. My best writing of this year was a memento of sorts, made in response to and kicked off by Echo. In that time, I have spent much of this year in a new community, meeting new people, and understanding my own place in a world that I have always been adjacent to but never truly a part of. But that has been a common pattern that has pervaded my life for a long time now, and that is not an unfamiliar sentiment that I have long since internalized and come to accept.

More than anything, I am appreciative of the journey, a journey of discovery as much as a reminder, a dark mirror from which I glimpse the parts of myself not easily perceived in the light. I have grown immensely for having put myself out there, as little as I have. I can imagine where I will go, and what I will see when I look back on this year many years into the future. I see shards like starlight, a constellation over a vast expanse, a picture and a tale long in the making. It is not a fire, so much as it is a glow; it's not too much, but just enough to give me hope in spite of many things this year.

Being 30, I had expected much in my life circumstances to settle, but it has continued to prove an unexpected, at times sobering adventure of smiles and pain. There are few things that I have kept for myself over the years, but what (and more importantly, who) has remained I have treasured beyond all measure that I could hope to convey.

For those new and old who have stuck with me thus far, thank you. I hope to create things worth the effort spent making them for many more years, and will always, always value the support offered to a solitary soul in a sea of talented, good-hearted people. The world is made bright and its beauty preserved because of the small and the insignificant; the signs of life and humanity in a world that seems to forget both beneath the weight of its own animus.

I go into the new year as I have like many new years' prior; without expectation, with hope, and a will to keep going. What I little I have kept for myself over these years, I intend to treasure to the very end.