#2022's eulogy

[rudyscuriocabinet]

[Music] Creed Taylor obituary (died 2022)

Thanks to both The Guardian and Jazz 88.3 KCCK-FM ‘s Facebook page for giving a history and eulogy of Creed Taylor, a man who changed jazz radically. He’s one worth knowing about. From the articles: The American jazz record producer Creed Taylor (May 13, 1929 – August 22, 2022) achieved a widely envied balance between artistic quality and commercial success. His award-winning artists included…

[sigmablog2077]

Welcome to Tumblr and Blogging

What is Tumblr? A brief introduction of Tumblr.

Tumblr is a social media microblogging site founded in 2007 by an American developer, David Karp. The site is notable for its customizability, allowing for a variety of content, including images, text, music, and short-form blog posts (Matthias, 2024). Once users follow an individual, their posts are displayed on their dashboard. On the site, fandoms (the community that surrounds a TV show, game, or book) have become main contributors (Hillman et al., 2014, p. 286).

Selfie & Selfie culture

According to Oxford English Dictionary (2023), selfie is defined as photograph that one has taken of oneself, with smartphone or webcam and shared via social media. The individuals who take selfies are most likely adolescent, and female (Reif et al., 2022). Selfie has become a genre of visual self-presentation with its own method of storytelling, representational techniques and poses (Reif et al., 2022).

Selfie culture has emerged as a natural result of the development of smartphones and social media. As technology advances, people are connected to the online space more than ever and sharing pictures of themselves online. The trend started off simply as an action of taking a photo of themselves and posting it online, but over time, it has become a method to show off and a race to have the best selfie among your friends.

Over time, selfies are no longer about the 'self,' but they are now about the engagement and the interaction you receive when posting them online. As a result, social media users will alter their body image, posting selfies more frequently to compensate for the fear of receiving less (positive) user feedback (Reif et al., 2022, p. 4).

Desire and Digital gaze

Authenticity bind is a term describing the pressure on women to share private information on social media in order to present authentic (Reif et al., 2022, p. 4). Social media often rewards certain aesthetic or provocative images with positive reactions. Over time, the desire for validation can encourage users to push boundaries and share increasingly explicit content. Tumblr, as a social platform, is tolerating NSFW (not safe for work) content and allowing it to exist in a sense of a community (Ashley, 2019, p.359). Although I have to give credit to Tumblr for its transparency and inclusion for marginalized groups. It still raises the question of 'Where to draw the lines between art, self-expression, and self-objectification?'.

References

Ashley, V. (2019). Tumblr porn eulogy. Porn Studies, 1–4. https://doi.org/10.1080/23268743.2019.1631560

Hillman, S., Procyk, J., & Neustaedter, C. (2014). Tumblr fandoms, community & culture. Proceedings of the Companion Publication of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing - CSCW Companion ’14. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556420.2557634

Matthias, M. (2024, August 31). Tumblr social media microblogging site. Www.britannica.com. https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tumblr

Oxford English Dictionary. (2023). “Selfie, n��. Oxford University Press.. OED Online. https://doi.org/10.1093//OED//1054456437

Reif, A., Miller, I., & Taddicken, M. (2022). “Love the Skin You‘re In”: An Analysis of Women’s Self-Presentation and User Reactions to Selfies Using the Tumblr Hashtag #bodypositive. Mass Communication and Society, 26(6). https://doi.org/10.1080/15205436.2022.2138442

[nikator]

Readings, 2024

I didn’t read anything like enough this year, but a lot of what I did read was fantastic; several brilliant short works that have left a lasting imprint.

1. Joseph Conrad, The Heart of Darkness (Penguin Books, 2012/1899).

Deservedly famous, this novella communicates a passionate apathy that is hard to describe. Beautiful prose for ugly things, a refusal to ever make the narrative easy, striking characters that seem like all-too-serious caricatures, a slow threatening build-up, and an immensely powerful rejection of the entire colonial enterprise from a worldly author whose country had been swallowed by the great empires all give The Heart of Darkness an oppressive, malignant atmosphere in a masterful case of pathetic fallacy which makes the jungle seem the central character of the entire piece. Almost exactly a year after finishing it, the words “The horror! The horror!” flashed into my mind, and made my eyes wet; there is so much pain in this book, so much awe, so much madness.

2. Alexandros Papadiamantis, trans. Peter Levi, The Murderess (NYRB, 2010/1903).

Deceptively simple and crude in its style, The Murderess is a reflection on the evils of poverty, reproduction, and womanhood, and on Greece’s wounded, uncertain entry into modernity. In a strange sense a love song and eulogy to old Greece cowed under spiritual and material oppression for so many long centuries, Papadiamantis conveys a palpable combination of utter condemnation for what has passed and total hopelessness for what was coming.

3. Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd edn. (U. of Chicago Press, 1996/1962).

Kuhn’s structural theory of science, which analyses it as an un-demarcatable family of disciplines defined by a psychosociological unity, is well-written, easy to understand, philosophically rigorous and, in my view, probably more or less—there being a lot of wriggle room in that qualification—correct.

4. Imre Lakatos, The methodology of scientific research programmes, Volume 1: Philosophical Papers (CUP, 1980).

Lakatos’ logical theory of science, which analyses it as a demarcatable family of disciplines defined by a logic of discovery, is densely written, difficult to understand, philosophically rigorous and, in my view, vitiated by an overly ambitious goal of a universal, objective demarcation for science. As a theory of how modern science actually functions I think it has a lot of strength, and as a normative claim for how we should engage with and scrutinise our research it is attractive, but as a categorical and transhistorical definition of science intended to overcome Kuhn and other “relativists” it fails. The reactionary political motivation, this near-hysterical frothing at the mouth over the looming spectre of communism, is apparent though thankfully limited to a few highly-telling remarks.

5. Mariana Enriquez, trans. Megan McDowell, The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories (Granta, 2022/2009).

Like its predecessor, Things We Lost in the Fire, this collection of short stories is a delightfully visceral, erotic, gothic, magical wandering through a blurred combination of supernaturalism and realism in the underbelly of the Hispanosphere. Enriquez has an excellent sense of the erotic, a dark Dionysianism, a skill in dissolving boundaries between the pathological and the supernatural, a penchant for writing traumatised girls and young women, and an omnipresent but subtle social criticism that feels neither forced nor unwelcome.

6. Julian Barnes, Elizabeth Finch (Penguin Books, 2022).

This book has a strange feel to it, unsure in its unstable existence between pseudo-academia and diaristics. There are plenty of genuinely good ideas put into Finch’s mouth, but they’re not very well communicated and give an unfair impression of philosophy. In general this comes across as the non-philosopher’s idea of the philosopher and of philosophical life, but nonetheless still an idea of it, so worth something. Neither fun nor particularly interesting nor particularly well-written, but not actively bad. I can’t help feeling I would rather have read Finch’s philosophy directly, in a non-fiction work by an actual philosopher, as well as the essayistic biography of Julian the Apostate by an actual historian. I actually think Emperor Julian bears only a very superficial similarity to Finch and so doesn’t work that well as a supposed intellectual companion, which again conveys a sense of ignorance about both subjects to me.

7. Albert Camus, trans. Justin O’Brien, The Fall, in The Plague, The Fall, Exile and the Kingdom, and Selected Essays (Everyman’s Library, 2004/1956).

The Fall has a strange narrative style that’s unlike Camus’ other fictions; I’m not sure it’s entirely successful. Jean-Baptiste Clamence is likewise an uncertain narrator, philosophically speaking, because I’m unsure how Camus intends us to view him; his life before the titular fall seems more intelligent, more free, more correct than his life after the fall, though I don’t think either were meant to act as exemplars. Sartre said this is perhaps Camus’ least understood book, which seems right for me, as I don’t think I do.

8. Albert Camus, trans. Joseph Laredo, The Outsider (Penguin Books, 2000/1942).

With great resemblance to Kafka, and a deep sense of fatalism given gorgeous pathetic fallacy by Camus' familiar and evocative invocation of the shifting sands, blurring air, and sloshing sea of the Mediterranean that is his most significant character, The Outsider is a sublime and critical declaration of the absurd. With Meursault we come dangerously close, far closer than in any other of Camus’ characters that I’ve read, to a free spirit, to an absurd man, to one who is living right. Meursault’s fundamentally correct, loving, beautiful mode of life is flawed only by the ignorance with which he saw it and then by a few incidental errors, errors which are errors because they are ugly and for no other reason; and I don’t mean the murder, which is wholly unimportant, but his complicity with Raymond, which vitiates and stains Meursault’s love for women by engaging in a boring, unintelligent, pathetic misogyny that makes all sensuous joy cringe. I read Meursault’s final explosion at the chaplain as a revelation of an already believed truth: it is correct, utterly and totally correct, a stinging refusal to grasp this world with anything other than love and so a righteous indignation at the slavish mind and its state apparatus; it is marked only by a few peculiarities of word and emphasis that reflect Meursault’s random historical accident of birth and life. In this only they differ from myself. Other than his strange reference to truth which does nothing and confuses the thing with a subtle and intractable distraction, if there is any error at all it is that Meursault does not quite come to love the guillotine, to long for its sharp blade, its release, its liberation. Stood before the block, our final words should be: “I thank the inventor of the guillotine, whose name I cannot remember but once read, and the Revolution which put it to use. I am not afraid to die. Nothing more.” When I finished reading, sitting outside, I looked up and saw a cloudless sky.

9. Richard Whatmore, The End of Enlightenment: Empire, Commerce, Crisis (Allen Lane, 2023).

An intellectual history of the late Enlightenment, told through nine of its leading proponents. Whatmore lacks a voice of his own, and the consequence is that the book comes across as a massively bloated text continually quoting primary literature. The thesis of the book—that in the eyes of its major theorists the Enlightenment was seen to have failed and died by the end of the seventeenth century—could be stated and comfortably if not exhaustively demonstrated in fifty pages, leaving ample space for a considered discussion of the merits of the views of those contemporaries with that of the later theorists who view the modern world as the continual outgrowth of the Enlightenment, or of the status of the Enlightenment itself, or of the problematic of republic and commonwealth in the eighteenth century, or of the French Revolution, or perhaps above all the consensus all the thinkers discussed seemed to have that enlightenment was killed by the rise of international capitalism, or any of the countless other very interesting and significant questions raised by the history of ideas presented here. Instead, Whatmore spends three hundred mostly boring pages mechanistically reporting people’s views to no actual purpose; he does nothing with this wealth of sources, as The End of Enlightenment has no argument of any kind to make beyond the mere fact that these people existed and thought what they did.

10. J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians (Vintage Books, 2004/1980).

Beautiful, with a sublime appreciation for the physicality of our existence, from our bodies to the seasons to the elements, and a perfectly handled narrative and criticism. Coetzee’s style, his tone, his intelligence, is wonderful.

11. Yukio Mishima, trans. John Nathan, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea (Vintage Books, 2019/1963).

A mournful, intimate book that feels far larger than it is. The opening chapter is spellbinding. Mishima’s writing is exquisitely intricate, careful, perfect. The whole thing moves effortlessly, like flowing silk, like the gracious sea. A masterpiece.

12. Kazuo Ishiguro, Klara and the Sun (Faber & Faber, 2022/2021).

A gentle, sweet book, with a protagonist whose unique innocence—unique because it is innocence, which is only ever ignorance, coexisting with and through sharp intelligence and knowledge—defines the narrative. The sadness is strange, hard to describe, intimate, delicate, interwoven with things which on paper are far less sad than you are made to feel about them. As an exploration of what it means to love, Klara and the Sun is excellent but not incomparable; as an exploration of its protagonist and what it means to feel, and the pitfalls and potentials of a society where emotion is more rationally structured and utilised than it is in our own (albeit only slightly), it is deceptively spellbinding. Above all, Klara is a wonderful character wonderfully executed, a rare example of a character I would like to have as my friend.

13. Graham Greene, The Quiet American (Vintage Books, 2019/1955).

The use of war as a metaphor for love and love as a metaphor for war is cliché, but done superbly well here. The three central characters—the love triangle—are perfect foils for each other. Pyle, the antagonist such as he is one, is a deeply disgusting person who you viscerally want to grab by the shoulders and shake with fury for his obsequious politeness, his choking misogyny, his racism, his imperialist attitude, his incredible arrogance, his stupidity. Fowler, the protagonist, is a well-worn archetype and convincing once you get used to Greene’s style; his deep emotional life and love-at-a-bearable-distance for Vietnam and humanity is moving at the best points. Phuong is a very well done character in that she is overshadowed by the men who vie for her but highly suggestive of depth, that she has a life of her own as full as theirs’ which is simply beyond their sight, that her motives, while easy to imagine, are her own and guarded. Greene’s depiction of the various factions in Vietnam is unpolished, unsentimental, always humanising. The multilingual dialogue is enjoyable. The whole novel has a delightful lack of moral instruction and closure.

[xtruss]

James Earl Jones’s Voice Was Something More

For the Actor, Speaking was Synonymous with Character.

— By Lauren Michele Jackson | September 13, 2024

James Earl Jones. Photograph By Andy Gotts/Camera Press/Redux

In A Culture Inclined to get its fill of drama from the screen over the stage, especially if the screen offerings are being furnished by the House of Mouse, one wants to trumpet that James Earl Jones, who died on Monday, at the age of ninety-three, was an actor greater than the reach of his instantly placeable voice. The corrective feels especially pressing as knee-jerk eulogies of Jones pour in from eighties and nineties kids, whose sticky-fingered nostalgia already dominates so much of our collective memory. Their first, formative encounter with Jones’s craft likely came courtesy of the acousmatic, in his vocal performances as Darth Vader (revived as recently as 2022, in A.I. form, in the Disney+ miniseries “Obi-Wan Kenobi”) and Mufasa (in both the 1994 and in several subsequent iterations of Disney’s “The Lion King”). These roles are celebrated along with other embodied Jones movie portrayals that are nonetheless distinguished by their sonority and bearing: the mesmerism of Terence Mann in “Field of Dreams,” the comic humorlessness of “Coming to America” ’s King Jaffe Joffer (first onscreen more than three decades ago, and then laid to rest in a recent sequel).

The worry is that our remembrance will whittle down Jones’s vast career—spanning sixty years and encompassing more than two hundred turns in the theatre, on film, and on television—to, as with Plutarch’s nightingale picked clean, vox et praeterea nihil: a voice and nothing more. In a study of that name, the philosopher Mladen Dolar admits that “the voice appears to be the most familiar thing.” At the same time, to experience any voice is to witness the strange physics of that which emanates beyond the body “yet remains corporeal,” biddable neither to words nor to flesh. This is a paradox best finessed by those, like Jones, who consider their true residence the theatre, where bodies must project by any means necessary. And what a voice! What facility with his instrument! Jones was unshy about its vital role in his work. No mere accident of the larynx, a voice was, as he understood it, tantamount to presence, the well-trained conduit to the emotional realities of dramatic performance.

As is an actor’s prerogative, Jones began his life story with an implausible memory. His 1993 memoir, “James Earl Jones: Voices and Silences,” written with Penelope Nivan, recalls “the warmth of the light” filling his grandmother’s home after his birth, on January 17, 1931, in Arkabutla Township, Mississippi. His people were Southern farmers, moody, contemplative, industrious, colored. He was raised by his maternal grandparents after his parents, Ruth and Robert Earl Jones, ill-suited to each other and to child rearing, left to pursue other lives—a desertion that Jones would, in a journal entry, relate to his experiences performing “Oedipus Rex.” The definitive tragedy of the play was not Oedipus’ patricide, Jones argued, “but that when he was a helpless infant, the father said, ‘Get rid of him,’ and the mother said, ‘Okay.’ ” Both parents would float in and out of his life. Robert was himself on the way to becoming an accomplished actor, and when Jones was twenty-one, the father introduced the son he hadn’t seen since infancy to a world awaiting him in New York’s cultural scene, especially to its theatre.

The memoir’s symmetrical subtitle, “Voices and Silences,” announces a motif he traces throughout his life and lifework. Jones was raised amid the “din” of country life, including family members prone to gossip and tall tales—“I grew up with the spoken word,” he writes. However, when the family moved North for a new start and better schools in Michigan, when Jones was five years old, he began stuttering and soon retreated into silence; he describes himself as “virtually mute” from the age of six. This crisis in language became existential: “I was robbing myself of any presence. I was denying myself identity.” Then, in high school, he found himself steered, by an English teacher, toward the great stewards of Anglophone poetics and prose: Shakespeare, Longfellow, Poe, Emerson. Afterward, Jones “could not get enough of speaking, debating, orating,” and, above all, “acting.” (Nor was it immaterial that, on the other side of puberty, he “could now speak in a deep, strong voice” that others “seemed to like.”) Jones likens his metamorphosis to that of Gwen Verdon, who was thrust into dance classes while struggling with rickets as a child. “The weak muscle can become the dominant muscle, either out of obsession with the weakness or genuine endeavor to correct,” he observes, adding, “the weak muscle can define a life and a profession.”

Jones enrolled at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor, in 1949, to pursue a career in medicine, and soon switched to studying drama, though at the time he considered this merely an enjoyable way station until his R.O.T.C. unit was called into Korea. He learned of the armistice in the green room during a summer season of community theatre. Instead of being deployed, he spent nearly two years with a cold-weather training unit in Colorado. Soon afterward, Jones moved to Greenwich Village to study at American Theatre Wing. There he met the acting coach Nora Dunfee, a former student of the linguist after whom “Pygmalion” ’s Professor Higgins was modelled, whose speech drills solidified for Jones the tie between diction and character. “Because of my muteness, I approached language in a different way from most actors,” Jones explains. As his training progressed, he “came to believe that what is valid about a character is not his intellect, but the sounds he makes.” That interpretation set Jones apart from students of the de-rigueur Method. Lee Strasberg would later tell Jones that he was among the rare actors better left “on their own paths.”

His professional opportunities, even as they accumulated, could scarcely keep up with his “rapacious” desire for roles. He rehearsed for a production of “Henry V” while in another play, Lionel Abel’s “The Pretender,” that was still running, then shortly afterward landed the major part of Deodatus Village alongside Cicely Tyson and Louis Gossett, Jr., in an Off Broadway, all-Black staging of “The Blacks.” It was a racially contentious production from which Jones took periodic breaks to do small television jobs and, naturally, more Shakespeare; he even turned down better-paid work, such as the Oscar-nominated drama “One Potato, Two Potato” (which co-starred his father), to work with Joe Papp, the founder of Shakespeare in the Park. In 1963, Papp offered Jones the role of Othello, a performance that the theatre critic Tom Prideaux, in Life, praised as “unjustly neglected” in favor of a showier Othello turn across the Pond, by Sir Laurence Olivier.

After Othello came another “elemental man,” as Jones called them, in “The Great White Hope.” The protagonist was based on the real-life heavyweight-champion boxer Jack Johnson, who winningly flouted the color line, in bed and in the ring. The play, by Howard Sackler, débuted on Broadway in 1968 and explored the disharmony of a man who needs words to undermine the racial symbolism of his body. The conflict in the story is cannily relevant to Jones’s own amative history and uneasy philosophy of race. He viewed Black men as America’s exemplary tragic heroes, à la Hamlet or Willy Loman, and yet was allergic to the ways in which race pride would compel others to speak on his behalf. Jones may have got “in Othello’s skin” and garnered a reputation as color struck—“I will concede that I have had a way of falling in love with my Desdemonas,” he admits in the memoir—but he was not one to give himself over to any representative image. Jones recalled a discussion with “Jimmy” Baldwin, who asked, “What do you see when you wake up in the morning? Do you see a black person or do you see a person?” Jones answered, “I see me.”

“The Great White Hope” presented its own special opportunity for Jones to deliver a performance whose muscularity exceeded his physical form. The author and activist Toni Cade Bambara wrote at the time that Jones “diverts us from some of the flabby features of the text,” and added, “There is always some telepathic, unnameable, supra-human something or other that is brooding, defiant, cunning, gentle, primordial—there is an ambience as well as a person that strikes us.” The role won Jones his first Tony, by which time there were already plans to adapt the play for the screen, but Jones was unhappy with the resulting movie, directed by Martin Ritt and released in 1970, feeling that it “eliminated every poetic aspect that the stage play had conjured,” reducing mythic characters “to mere social entities.” Did fault lie with the director, or the screenplay, or in the limitations of adaptation itself? “The lesson may simply be that it is almost impossible to transmute one form into another—a novel into a film, a stage drama into a motion picture. Maybe!”

Maybe! But actors make the worst critics and, thankfully, we needn’t always take their word for it. Generations separated by space and time from the theatrical version of “Great White Hope” will never know what they’re missing when they put on the film, if they can find it. Whatever absence is counteracted by presence—Jones as Jack, entirely too comfortable in his skin, his voice augmenting a lean frame that is, anyway, often excluded by frequent closeups. Here, his mouth is made mythic. Early in the film, ahead of a consequential match, a crowd of fans, young and old, gather around Jack, having prayed for a win “for us.” There is no money on the line but a more amorphous bet—the fate of a race. “My, my,” Jack responds. His baritone sounds destined for the pulpit, but his lecture on pride comes as a surprise: “Country boy, if you ain’t there already, all the boxing and all the nigger-praying in the world ain’t gonna get you there.” His timbre is as much a betrayal as his taste for the carnal press of white and caramel skin. There will be no Negro spirituals on this day. ♦

[hostess-of-horror]

Rest in Peace 2022 ⚰️

My lovely little monsters, we are gathered here tonight to honor the last day and bring eternal peace to 2022.

This year, regardless of whether it was good or bad, is another year that we survived. And the most important thing we must take away from this is that we survived together.

With this eulogy, 2022 will be put to rest along with all the other past years. It shall be another memory to live by or to forget. Let us bury 2022 in the ground to make way for the year of 2023. May 2022 rot in its grave, and may this new year pave the way for a brighter future.

@minnesotamedic186 @zao-starstruck @randomrabbidramblings @bramble-scramble @deezeyrabbidy @salamifuposey @tiramegtoons @darkmedolie @medys-space @twilit-critter @theboarsbride @sleepy-heads-blog @e-m-rip @elitadream @yoarmy @cinnamonsakura666 @trashdork @snailstrailz @subukunojess @lemonbaloni @lulu-baked-beans @hotpinkboots

[vilsoo]

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semi-inspired by Universal Studios/Halloween Horror Nights, indulge in sex and horror galore at our premiere kinktober event, HORRORLAND! hell is empty; all the devils are here waiting to play. would you be willing to venture our haunted houses and scare zones, face our exhilarating attractions, and uncover the scandalous, deadly mysteries of horrorland?

‎ OPENED OCTOBER 2022 🕸

fandoms: jujutsu kaisen, attack on titan, five nights at freddy’s

⚠︎ beware that event may be too intense for parkland guests and is NOT recommended for minors. horrorland will explore darker and extreme contents that may be triggering. ⚠︎

‎ VIEW PARKLANDS (KINKTOBER MASTERLIST) ↓

SLAUGHTERVILLE FRIDAYS 🪓 horrorland's number one favorite parkland! prepare for hordes of horror with some of our classic slashers! a character will be headcanoned as a gruesome villian/slasher from classic horror movie franchises.

OCTOBER 7TH: ❝ BRITISH PSYCHO ❞ ➥ starring WILLIAM AFTON (fnaf) as PATRICK BATEMAN

“did you know i’m utterly insane?”

⚠︎ TW: secretary x boss, fear play, age gap (reader is 29, william is 47) slight misogyny, dubcon, coercion, emotional manipulation, sadism, mentions of murder, throat fucking, disturbing sketches/pictures.

OCTOBER 14TH: ❝ SLASHER SLUT ❞ ➥ starring REINER BRAUN (aot) as JASON VOORHEES

“no one will find you here...”

⚠︎ TW: kidnapping, dubcon, semi public sex, strappado position, rope bondage, pantygag, manhandling, creampie, dumbification, mind break, throat fucking, mask kink, impact play.

OCTOBER 28TH: ❝ WANNA PLAY PSYCHO KILLER? ❞ ➥ starring EREN JAEGER (aot) as GHOSTFACE

“hang up on me again, i’ll gut you like a fish.”

⚠︎ TW: home invasion, chase scene, dubcon, yandere, slight stalking, phone sex, jealousy, implied infidelity, blackmailing, slight knife play, and some plot twists.

S&H CITY SATURDAYS🍷a mysterious city bound to corruption, sin, and immorality known as the devil’s playground. these dark streets beholds the prurient reigns of terror that which may also arouse parkland guests…

OCTOBER 8TH: ❝ LUST IN THE GRAVEYARD ❞ ➥ starring NANAMI KENTO (jjk)

“i couldn’t stop staring at you all through the eulogy…”

⚠︎ cw: established relationship, bondage with silk tie, voyeurism (spirits), sadism, masochism, knifeplay, cunnilingus, public sex, mating press, breeding, dark obsession, gothic romance, mentions of killing.

OCTOBER 15TH: ❝ 7 MINUTES IN HELL ❞ ➥ starring GETO SUGURU (jjk)

“my poor, innocent little lamb...”

⚠︎ TW: noncon → dubcon, sacrilege, blasphemy, rough demonic sex, stalking, breeding, impregnating, religious guilt, betrayal, impersonation, confessional booth sex, degradation, sadism

OCTOBER 22ND: ❝ FLIRT WITH DEATH ❞ ➥ starring GOJO SATORU (jjk)

“you should know better than to glorify your idols…”

⚠︎ TW: groupie, noncon, intoxication, betrayal, psychotic gojo, fame glorification, ritual, drugging, degradation, teared clothing, brutal murder, gore.

HALLOWEEN WEEKEND🩸feed your fear as the thirst for blood, flesh, and lust terrorize the handsome men in town! such vastly evil sensuality of our iconic maneaters and femme fatales like jennifer check, vampirella, and elaine parks!

OCTOBER 29TH: ❝ MY GIRLFRIEND IS A SUCCUBUS! ❞ ➥ starring MICHAEL AFTON (fnaf)

“hell is a teenage girl.”

⚠︎ cw: established relationship, malewife himbo bf/girlboss demon gf dynamic, revenge, graphic murder scenes, bloody sex, edging, handjob, tentacle bondage, msub michael, mommy kink, face sitting, 69.

OCTOBER 30TH: ❝ SEASON OF THE WITCH ❞ ➥ starring JEAN KIRSTEIN (aot)

“men are like children.”

⚠︎ cw: witch disguised as sex therapist, love and sex spells, bewitched jean, witchcraft, seduction, mdom → msub, hallucinogenic herbs, hopeless romantic, incantations, eventual smut, hypnotism, murder scene.

OCTOBER 31ST: ❝ LUST AT FIRST BITE ❞ ➥ starring TOJI FUSHIGURO (jjk)

“darling, i’m already in your veins.”

⚠︎ cw: vampire hunter toji fushiguro, enemies to lovers, bloodplay, predator/prey dynamic, dubcon → consensual, msub → mdom, sloppy foreplay, rough → soft sex, killing threats, neck biting, marking, hypnosis.

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[absolutebl]

I'm in quarantine rn and my credit card isn't here yet so I can't get gaga/viki. What are your favorite bls on YouTube that came out like this year or near the end of last year. Or in general a favorites by platform would be interesting too if you don't have one already 👀

Gotcha covered. Not sure on your particular taste so I popped the mini reviews in too. 

Best 2022 BLs Available to watch for Free (with ads)

Gonna do just 2022 because I have that post in progress, and I can just pull from it. And also SO MANY happening this year. Gonna suggest completed series ONLY, so as of mid May 2022.  

Semantic Error - (Korea Feb Viki*) 10/10

Main Tropes: opposites attract, enemies to lovers, bully romance, sunshine/tsundere, teasing & pranks

This is my favorite BL of 2022. Korea hits it entirely out of both Parks (pun on the actors’ last names intended) by doing a university set BL with everything we might expect done exactly right, their signature quality executed perfectly, and added bonus good story, great pacing, yaoi style filming, and fantastic chemistry. You cannot ask for more from a BL, let alone a KBL. Full review here.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED 

* (I believe it is now free with adds to many countries, some of my other favorites might also be free on Viki but I don’t check which ones are free, because i have a sub. In general, I suggest Korean BL on Viki and watching whatever you can.)

Bad Buddy - (Thailand, Nov-Jan on YouTube) 9/10

Main Tropes: secret lovers, Romeo & Romeo, sunshine/tsundere, enemies-to-friends-to-lovers, GL side plot

GMMTV’s flagship BL started 2022 on a BANG (okay no actual banging but you know what I mean), starring heavy hitters Ohm & Nanon in a pitch perfect university Romeo & Juliet masterpiece that will give you domesticity meets pain whiplash throughout and jet lag at the end. Great production values, killer acting, and some conscious effort to correct for half a decade of Thai BL’s anti-queer mistakes. GMMTV, we forgive you. More. Live blog of this one is here. Full review here.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Not Me - (Thailand Jan-March YouTube) 9/10  

Main Tropes: enemies to lovers, secret identity, identical twins, goodboy/bad boy

GMMTV gave us a dark disestablishment narrative (in a time of civil unrest) with established queer award-winning director Anucha and starring OffGun. THIS IS AN AMAZING THING to get to experience in the BL world - nerve racking but remarkable. But was it ACTUALLY BL? Not Me had a lot of BL elements, but in the end that’s not what the show was about, or even what it was genuinely trying to be. Still an amazing piece of Thai cinema certainly worth your time. Don’t worry, it all ends happily. Full review here. OffGun Eulogy here.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

Cutie Pie (Thailand Feb-May on YouTube) 8/10

Main Tropes: arranged marriage, age gap, secret identity, cohabitation, rich kid problems, he’s in engineering

Very high production and a lot of visual references to live action yaoi gave this show a whiff of Japan but ultimately it stayed firmly in Thailand’s BL camp veering from absurd to appealing to annoying and then back to absurd again. If you can roll with the arranged marriage conceit and very lifestyle D/s relationships, the chemistry is spot on even if the plot is naff and sappy and driven by miscommunication. Watch this one for the pretty, give it a pass on depth. Full review here.

RECOMMENDED

Mr Cinderella (Vietnam Jan YouTube) - 8/10

Main Tropes: forced proximity, cohabitation, childhood sweethearts, opposites attract, good boy/bad boy, domesticity

Higher than normal production values plus experienced BL actors plus two charismatic smoldering leads with good kissing and comfortable body language make this Vietnam’s objectively best BL to date. Plus we got a fabulously (and quintessentially Vietnamese) domestic ending. Full review here.

RECOMMENDED

Love Stage (Thailand, Feb-March YouTube) 8/10

Main Tropes: childhood crush, sunshine/tsundere, unrequited love, secret identity

This BL surprised me with its charm. The acting was good, the leads were appealing, support cast on point, and the production values high. It followed the original manga story arc relatively closely: boy falls in love with girl as a child, grows up to discover girl is actually a very pretty boy. Although there are some quintessentially Thai changes that mellowed, softened, and extended the romance arc. One of the things I’ve always appreciated about this story is that the climax is about coming out as a celebrity couple as well as gay. I like the examination of the nature of celebrity versus privacy, and the contrasting kinds of closets. And I love that they depicted two couples with two different versions of this choice. A solid and enjoyable show. Full review here.

RECOMMENDED

Enchanté (Thailand, Jan-March YouTube) 7/10

Main Tropes: childhood sweethearts, sunshine/tsundere, secret admirer with a touch of Cyrano de Bergerac and dose of Boys Over Flowers.

Theo returns from France and starts a written flirtation inside a library book (!) at his new uni with the mysterious Enchante. When he and his best friend Akk hunt for Enchante’s real identity, 4 senior boys step forward - all intersted in dating Theo, all with ulterior motives. Can’t fault the chemistry or the classic old school Thai uni BL and Akk (Force) was particularly sympathetic. But the twist over Enchantie’s identity felt disingenuous, manipulative, and unnecessary and the whole narrative was flawed as a result, Theo became unlikeable and irredeemable. GMMTV seems to specialize in squandering great chemistry on shoddy scripts. Honestly it probubly should get an 8/10 by my rating system but I was so disappointed I’m gave it a 7/10 and did not bother to write a full review. Live blog ep-by-ep recap here.

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS

Secret Crush on You (Thailand Feb-May YouTube) 7/10

Main Tropes: stalking, obsession, hottest guy on campus, multiple couples, queer affirming

Previously known as Stalker the series, and you can TELL. Co-produced by and featuring (but NOT staring) Saint and directed by Cheewin (sigh) with all fresh faces it was pure pulp and... I hated the plot. In fact I was ALL OVER THE PLACE with this show. SCOY drove me nuts and made me bush but had flashes of unparalleled genius. It had a ton of things I really did not like (e.g. the humor was crass and awkward, and the whole stalker thing was extremely CRINGE). It also had things that really worked: (e.g. representation of multiple different kinds of queerness, about which it very Taiwanese - in that there was no doubt that the characters really did want to bone). It was the opposite of sanitized gay. Honestly, if you can make it through the first half, and survive the never ending cringe-factor that IS this show, the second half is entirely unique - content we’ve never seen before in BL. Full review here. 

RECOMMENDED WITH RESERVATIONS, but not the usual ones.

Rainbow Prince (The Philippines Jan-Feb-March YouTube) - 6/10

Main Tropes: disney princess, opposites attract, sunshine/tsundere

This long form MUSICAL BL is fucking LEGEND. Also it’s profoundly not good. The acting is absolutely terrible but that’s not the point, the point is that it’s a cheesy af fairy story. Possibly the gayest BL to ever BL and certainly the most camp and very Disney. Watch it of that’s your thing, otherwise hard pass. (Full review here.)

RECOMMENDED ONLY IF YOU ALSO LIKE DISNEY SHIT

I hope these help and let me know if you tray and like any of them!

[explosionshark]

my favorite records of 2022 (in alphabetical order)

BACKXWASH - HIS HAPPINESS SHALL COME FIRST EVEN THOUGH WE ARE SUFFERING 

Black Anvil - Regenesis

Blackbraid - I 

Counterparts - A Eulogy for Those Still Here

Fit for an Autopsy - Oh What the Future Holds

Fleshwater - We’re Not Here to be Loved

Hath - All That was Promised

Ithaca - They Fear Us

Joyce Manor - 40oz to Fresno

Kilo Kish - AMERICAN GURL 

Morbikon - Ov Mournful Twilight

Prince Daddy & the Hyena - S/T

Rew - Quiet All the Time 

Ripped to Shreds - Jubian 

Spielbergs - Vestli 

Soft Kill - Canary Yellow 

Sonja - Loud Arriver 

Soul Glo - Diaspora Problems

Sweet Pill - Where the Heart Is 

Tallah - The Generation of Danger  

Upchuck - Sense Yourself 

Venom Prison - Erebos 

Vomit Forth - Seething Malevolence 

WAAX - At Least I’m Free

The Zells - Ant Farm

hon ment to Inclination, Amanda Shires, Tribal Gaze, Maul, Honey Harper, Wormrot, and White Ward for putting out truly nasty tunes this year too

would love to see a one of these from @holdsteady, @angrypedestrian, @shewhosleepsalotincemetaries, @pivitor, @seumascowan, @gothprentiss + whoever else is putting a list together!

ED: I used this website + screenshotted for the collage!

[kawaiiinla]

Rest in Peace P-22

A Eulogy for P-22, A Mountain Lion Who Changed the World

• Beth Pratt

• Dec 17, 2022

‘It’s My Hope that Future Mountain Lions Will Be Able to Walk in the Steps of P-22 Without Risking Their Lives on California’s Highways, Streets’

“I write this eulogy while looking across one of the ten-lane freeways P-22 somehow miraculously crossed in 2012, gazing at a view of his new home, Griffith Park. Burbank Peak and the other hills that mark the terminus of the Santa Monica Mountains emerge from this urban island like sentinels making a last stand against the second largest city in the country. The traffic noise never ceases. Helicopters fly overhead. The lights of the city give the sky no peace.

“Yet a mountain lion lived here, right here in Los Angeles.

“I can’t finish this sentence without crying because of the past tense. It’s hard to imagine I will be writing about P-22 in the past tense now.

"Biologists and veterinarians with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife announced today they have made the difficult decision to end P-22’s suffering and help him transition peacefully to the next place. I hope his future is filled with endless forests without a car or road in sight and where deer are plentiful, and I hope he finally finds the mate that his island existence denied him his entire life.

“I am so grateful I was given the opportunity to say goodbye to P-22. Although I have advocated for his protection for a decade, we had never met before. I sat near him, looking into his eyes for a few minutes, and told him he was a good boy. I told him how much I loved him. How much the world loved him. And I told him I was so sorry that we did not make the world a safer place for him. I apologized that despite all I and others who cared for him did, we failed him.

“I don’t have any illusion that my presence or words comforted him. And I left with a great sadness I will carry for the rest of my days.

“Before I said goodbye, I sat in a conference room with team members from the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and the team of doctors at the San Diego Zoo Safari Park. The showed me a video of P-22’s CT scan, images of the results, and my despair grew as they outlined the list of serious health issues they had uncovered from all their testing: stage two kidney failure, a weight of 90 pounds (he normally weighs about 125), head and eye trauma, a hernia causing abdominal organs to fill his chest cavity, an extensive case of demodex gatoi (a parasitic skin infection likely transmitted from domestic cats), heart disease, and more. The most severe injuries resulted from him being hit by a car last week, and I thought of how terrible it was that this cat, who had managed to evade cars for a decade, in his weakened and desperate condition could not avoid the vehicle strike that sealed his fate.

“As the agency folks and veterinarians relayed these sobering facts to me, tissue boxes were passed around the table and there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. This team cares just as much for this cat as we all do. They did everything they could for P-22 and deserve our gratitude.

“Although I wished so desperately he could be returned to the wild, or live out his days in a sanctuary, the decision to euthanize our beloved P-22 is the right one. With these health issues, there could be no peaceful retirement, only some managed care existence where we prolonged his suffering — not for his benefit, but for ours.

“Those of us who have pets know how it feels when we receive news from the veterinarian that we don’t want to hear. As a lifelong dog and cat owner, I have been in this dreadful position too many times. The decision to let them go is never easy, but we as humans have the ability, the responsibility, and the selflessness to show mercy to end the suffering for these beloved family members, a compassionate choice we scarcely have for ourselves.

“I look at Griffith Park through the window again and feel the loss so deeply. Whenever I hiked to the Hollywood sign, or strolled down a street in Beachwood Canyon to pick up a sandwich at The Oaks, or walked to my car after a concert at the Greek Theater, the wondrous knowledge that I could encounter P-22 always propelled me into a joyous kind of awe. And I am not alone — his legion of stans hoped for a sight of Hollywood’s most beloved celebrity, the Brad Pitt of the cougar world, on their walks or on their Ring cams, and when he made an appearance, the videos usually went viral. In perhaps the most Hollywood of P-22’s moments, human celebrity Alan Ruck, star of Succession, once reported seeing P-22 from his deck, and shouting at him like a devoted fan would.

“We will all be grappling with the loss of P-22 for some time, trying to make sense of a Los Angeles without this magnificent wild creature. I loved P-22 and hold a deep respect for his intrepid spirit, charm, and just plain chutzpah. We may never see another mountain lion stroll down Sunset Boulevard or surprise customers outside the Los Feliz Trader Joe’s. But perhaps that doesn’t matter — what matters is P-22 showed us it’s possible.

“He changed us.  He changed the way we look at LA. And his influencer status extended around the world, as he inspired millions of people to see wildlife as their neighbors. He made us more human, made us connect more to that wild place in ourselves. We are part of nature and he reminded us of that. Even in the city that gave us Carmeggedon, where we thought wildness had been banished a long time ago, P-22 reminded us it’s still here.

“His legacy to us, and to his kind will never fade. He ensured a future for the entire population of mountain lions in the Santa Monica Mountains by inspiring us to build the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing, which broke ground this spring.

“P-22 never fully got to be a mountain lion. His whole life, he suffered the consequences of trying to survive in unconnected space, right to the end when being hit by a car led to his tragic end. He showed people around the world that we need to ensure our roads, highways, and communities are better and safer when people and wildlife can freely travel to find food, shelter, and families. The Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing would not have been possible without P-22, but the most fitting memorial to P-22 will be how we carry his story forward in the work ahead. One crossing is not enough — we must build more, and we must continue to invest in proactive efforts to protect and conserve wildlife and the habitats they depend on — even in urban areas.

“P-22’s journey to and life in Griffith Park was a miracle. It’s my hope that future mountain lions will be able to walk in the steps of P-22 without risking their lives on California’s highways and streets. We owe it to P-22 to build more crossings and connect the habitats where we live now.

“Thank you for the gift of knowing you, P-22. I’ll miss you forever. But I will never stop working to honor your legacy, and although we failed you, we can at least partly atone by making the world safer for your kind.”

[groovesnjams]

gRººv333S,,,n,,,J▲M§ ▬|s|!|O|!| ❤︎|!|t|!|y|▬{{mmxxii}}  

..................number19 ....................of50

“Enter the Day” by Patrick Wolf

DV:

The most fascinating thing about "Enter the Day" isn't how it fits into Patrick Wolf's previous oeveure - I'd place it somewhere between the hard-earned, comfortable lushness of Lupercalia and the back-to-basics approach of Sundark and Riverlight - but how much it doesn't fit into the musical landscape of 2022. It's immaculate, carefully produced, feeling both sparse and lush at once. The track is constructed from the piano, psaltery, rustic percussion, and space - reverb and silence are characters here too. The inhale and exhale that Wolf takes before the first note lasts less than a second, but it's a stunning one. It centers the entire song on him, as a performer but also as a person. It's a sort of intimacy and directness that we've heard other bands spend an entire album failing to recreate: no less artificial than anything else put to tape and released, but the kind of lie that tells a truth. "Enter the Day" is as vulnerable as any eulogy could hope to be, and as openhearted.

MG:

Listen, I love batshit electronic music as much as the next person. I love when music sounds hard, rotten, awful. But I also feel like it’s a tiny miracle to have a song like “Enter the Day” at a time when hard feels like the default setting. Patrick Wolf is a master of patience, spaciousness, and craft. His work isn’t necessarily straightforwardly beautiful -- he takes pains to wrench certain words from his mouth, almost sounding like an attempt at singing like Gandalf. But even these slightly strange choices feel precious and serve to highlight the spectacular whole. Similarly, the hum of the psaltery is pure tension against the lush, twinkling piano, like seeing electric wires against the night sky. “Enter the Day” is evocation at its best, calling to our higher selves and beseeching our imaginations to lead the way.

[azpartygirlz]

Tuesday, February 15th, 2022

SHAME

at Club Congress (tix/info)

Since starting out as school boys, this five-piece band has become notorious for stealing every stage with the outrageous, jaw-dropping performances that have become the shame signature. Their riotous two-year journey has included gate-crashing a Glastonbury stage, supporting The Fat White Family, Warpaint and Slaves, performances in Europe, Austin Texas, a nomination for best new artists at the prestigious Anchor awards, headlining their own UK tour and releasing the double A-side single, Gold Hole/The Lick and follow-up, Tasteless.

Formed in the playgrounds of South London, Steen met guitarist Sean Coyle-Smith at primary school. They got together with guitarists Josh Finerty and Eddie Green at secondary school. Charlie Forbes –the drummer – was at nursery school with Green. Bonded by their precocious taste in music (one of their first gigs was supporting their hero Mark E Smith of The Fall) during their A level years they were hanging out at Stockwell’ s Queen’ s Head – unofficial home to The Fat White Family.

“We were sucked into this alternative world which just crystallised everything we thought about” says Steen. “There were drag queens and jobseekers; people who’ d been in bands, like Alabama3, The Ruts, and the bassist from Stiff Little Fingers – this older generation of people and they saw a kindred spirit in this little group of schoolkid runts.”Along with the Queen’ s head crew, The Fat Whites inspired and mentored them. “In a sea of mundanity the Fat Whites were exciting and dangerous,” says Steen. “It was like watching chaos explode in front of you.”As their foothold in the South London scene grew, shame instigated the daredevil club night, Chimney Shitters and creating a politically outspoken, DIY ethos reflecting a punk spirit in today’ s world.

“We are not puppets. Everything we do, we do ourselves,” says former Camberwell student, Steen. “From our songs to our clothes to the artwork for the singles, T-shirts, and fanzines. It’ s all us. We are about creating a movement - it’ s all our blood, sweat and tears.”shame’ s music is controversial, challenging, political and often unprintable. Visa Vulture (written two years ago) is a vicious indictment of Theresa May wrapped up in a happy love song. ‘ Gold Hole’  is a satire of rock narcissism, while ‘ Tasteless’  is about “Living in a world where nobody dares to say anything or do anything different.”.

But to be ‘ shamed’  you have to see them live. Their appearance at The Great Escape last May so knocked out the editor of French magazine ‘ Les Inrockuptibles’  that he penned a two-page eulogy prompting a wave of shamemania –a performance at Pitchfork Paris and on Le Grand Journal TV show in the slot usually reserved for the likes of Taylor Swift or Kanye West. A sign of how fast they are steaming their way to the top is this. Last year they gate-crashed Glastonbury (“It was insane, says guitarist Coyle Smith. “We got the directions wrong and ended up walking miles round the perimeter with our instruments before we found the right hole in the fence”) this year they have been invited to play by Billy Bragg on the Leftfield stage.

With a UK headline tour under their belt, 40-odd festivals this summer, their first album is being produced by Local Hero, aka Dan Foat and Nathan Boddy best known for techno music and work with James Blake. “As soon as we met them, it clicked,” says Steen. “They had ideas that a stereotypical person producing a guitar band might not necessarily think of. And we never want to be predictable. We always want to do something unexpected.”

“The London post-punk band’s second album is bigger, louder, and more textured as frontman Charlie Steen anxiously details the strange gap between youth and adulthood.“ - Pitchfork

[deepartnature]

Camera Lucida – Roland Barthes (1980)

“Camera Lucida (French: La chambre claire) is a short book published in 1980 by the French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes. It is simultaneously an inquiry into the nature and essence of photography and a eulogy to Barthes’ late mother. The book investigates the effects of photography on the spectator (as distinct from the photographer, and also from the object photographed, which Barthes calls the ‘spectrum’). In a deeply personal discussion of the lasting emotional effect of certain photographs, Barthes considers photography as asymbolic, irreducible to the codes of language or culture, acting on the body as much as on the mind. ...”

Wikipedia

Roland Barthes: excerpts from ‘Camera Lucida’, 1980

Roland Barthes and Camera Lucida: Photography and Modernism

amazom

2010 March: Roland Barthes, 2014 March: Semiotext(e), 2014 November: What Is Schizo-Culture? A Classic Conversation with William S. Burroughs, 2016 December: Can We Criticize Foucault?, 2017 June: The CIA Reads French Theory: On the Intellectual Labor of Dismantling the Cultural Left, 2017 November: A Lover's Discourse: Fragments (1977), 2022 June: Mythologies (1957)

[macflorendo]

This is my Eulogy.

This is my Eulogy.

First. I would like to thank Life and God for giving me the opportunity to live and experience a taste of this world.

TO MY FAMILY. Thank you for raising me well. I am not me without any single of you. I may not express as much as needed but I want you to know that I LOVE YOU. See you soon!

I may not be the best son, not the best brother. I don’t wish to be one but I would like to believe that we are destined to be the way we are. Well, that’s where I learn from my lessons from anyway - all my mistakes.

TO THE ENVIRONMENT. I am so proud to have joined Cuernos de Negros Mountaineers Club, Inc. of Silliman University for teaching me how to love the environment. Because of that, I was able to travel to 5 countries (USA, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand) for FREE to attend different environmental programs and its alumni engagements.

Aside from being able to see different parts of the world. I am fortunate to learn that there is a problem that we need to do something about. Our children’s lives are at stake.

MUSIC, MAGIC, & MOVING PICTURES. MY PASSIONS. I cannot thank you enough. We have been through the happiest and most difficult times of my life. When there’s no one else to talk to and hang out with, you were there.

You even got me jobs!

-

SOUTH KOREA. You are my second home country. You made realize that I am part of the world, a global citizen. There is the potential of anyone to make a difference even to another individual in the world. Thank you Silliman University and Hannam University for this opportunity!

I am happy I am able to learn Korean so I could understand you. Now, I am giving back by learning your language too. South Korea is beautiful. I know most of you are tired of the pressure in your country. But please, never forget your passions and purpose. There’s more to the world than getting a “good” job and lots of money.

-

March 2020. There’s an ongoing virus called COVID-19 infecting people around the world. Who knows what will happen next? We will not be always safe. I live in a dorm, I live with other people. They may be carrying the disease. I hope not. I have one roommate who still goes to work at this time. I hope he won’t bring the disease in the dorm. There’s currently 187 infected patients in the Philippines and recovery rate has not moved at all.

July 2020.  COVID cases are not easing down here in the Philippines. I heard stories of the government just making money out of this situation...

-

I am happy that I have experienced many jobs. I realize that I can do so much more, at the same time, I know I will have options when any career I would choose won’t work.

-

MEANING OF MEANING

Meaning starts with ME. Everything you do should start and would meaning something to you.

MEAN has three meanings.

1. what do you mean to say

2. you are so mean

3. what does it mean

MEANING is present tense. Is it something that you currently do. It should be something that you are doing now.

-

A MESSAGE TO MY YOUNGER SELF/TO MY CHILDREN/ TO YOUNG PEOPLE:

1. Exercise more. Play more.

2. Get long hair and donate.

3. Grow a beard! (DONE)

4. Talk to more people.

5. Go to more places. Be more adventurous.

-

A MESSAGE TO MY FUTURE SELF:

1. Hope you are still doing what you love; performing really good magic, doing something for the environment, helping people, sharing what you know.

2. Stay fit.

3. Be financially secure.

4. Always learn.

5. Network more. Meet more people.

6. Don’t work for a boring company with boring people.

-

TRAVELS

Countries I traveled to..

2013 - South Korea - Seoul, Daejeon, Busan, Chuncheon, Okcheon, Jeonju

2015 -  USA - Hawaii, Colorado, Washington DC

2015 - Singapore

2015 - Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur

2016 - Thailand, Bangkok

2016 - Cambodia, Siem Reap

2017 - South Korea - Seoul, Daejeon, Pohang, Busan

2020 - Japan - Osaka, Nagoya

2022 - France - Paris

PHILIPPINES

1. Zamboanga

2. Dumaguete

3. Manila

4. Cebu

5. Davao

6. Iloilo

7. Palawan - Puerto Princesa

8. Baguio

9. Tagaytay

10. Bohol

11. Siquijor

12. La Union

13. Zambales

14. Dapitan

15. Bacolod

16. Boracay

To be continued…

Edited 5/9/2019

Edited 10/2/2019

Edited 3/18/2020

Edited 3/29/2020

Edited 7/23/2020

Edited 9/6/2021

Edited 1/1/2022

Edited 4/14/2022

Edited 7/11/2022