#I’ve been thinking about the irl publication history for both characters and wondering if that’s playing in somehow

[milfglupshitto]

you extended the offer to let me rant about malevolent in your inbox and so i am taking you up on it.

i am absolutely SCREAMING over episode 40 part 2 i listened to it yesterday morning but i’m still not over it. i don’t even have words i’m just screaming. Screaming i tell you

i do have a question that’s been burning at me this whole time though. so i’ve been assuming that john and yellow are just pieces of the king, and the king in yellow still exists as his own entity as well separate from john and yellow. to put it in math terms, i was thinking of john and yellow not as halves, but as thirds, where john + yellow + the king in yellow = one whole complete being

but in episode 40.2 they were discussing john and yellow in terms of halves, so like, is it actually john + yellow = the king in yellow ?? cuz this changes my whole perspective on yellow as a whole then if he’s not a third but a half. Does this make sense. head in my fucking hands i’m having a crissis over this episode

hi yesss parts 40 are so. I think I tried to tell my roommate about it and just gave up because I couldn’t get coherent words together

it’s a good question and one that’s been bothering me for a while too tbh! kayne has been using language of halves since either part 20 or coda I think but it’s never been clear to me if that was literal or not, I was interpreting it the same as you before 40. so I don’t have a good answer here

[dictacontrion]

What tv show influenced you the most?

Hmm, you know anon, my first instinct was to say Buffy, but I think it’s actually Xena: Warrior Princess. 

I started watching Xena as a youngin’ and was so struck by a few things about the show. 

Here was this protagonist who was a woman who took up space, who never questioned the obviousness of walking into a room or sitting down at a table and standing tall, spreading out, taking up whatever room she needed to move comfortably through the world. 

Who had done terrible things and was given the room to change and grow, who was seen as important enough and worthy and valuable enough to be given room to have her own story, her own evolution. And not because she was good or obedient or desirable, but because she was strong and smart and willing to try. 

Who was motivated by changing, by learning, by becoming better - and who was NOT motivated by that because of a love interest, but because it was the right thing to do, and she had been shown mercy and kindness and justice, and aspired to mercy and justice and kindness. 

Who was motivated by her own internal compass, rather than by being liked. 

Who kicked some fucking ass. As a fighter, yes, but also as a strategist and a diplomat. 

And who was still allowed to be funny! And to have fun!

Who was totally at ease dealing with the actual pantheon of Greek deities and warlords. Who was threatened, who people tried to silence, and who did a lot of looking back at them like “Really? You think you can shut me up? You actually think you can accomplish that? Or offer me anything more important than my own voice?” 

Whose relationships with women were the most central parts of her life. Who was just not all that concerned with men. Who had friends and allies who were men, and treated them with respect and friendship and cared about them and was sometimes flirtatious or romantically involved with them, but who didn’t change herself even one little bit to make herself more palatable to them. 

Who had this relationship with another woman that seemed a whole lot like the queer relationships I was seeing IRL - their camaraderie, their intimacy, their ease with one another. Tbh, the relationship between Xena and Gabrielle never read as especially subtextual to me; they just seemed like a queer couple who we were mostly seeing in public spaces and who were as intimate as any other couple I saw on TV, talking drowsily to each other and spooning together. And I felt pretty certain that I was watching a queer storyline on TV and, even beyond that, a queer love story that was about real understanding and depth and adoration and support and passion and desire, that gave the characters room to grow as people, that freed them from the constraints of stereotypical womanhood and helped them become more themselves, that felt just really wonderful in a lot of ways. 

Who was, to my young eyes, allowed to build a life with - to love and to center her life around that love for - another woman, without giving anything up, without becoming less extraordinary or determined or valuable or good. Who was able to build a life with a woman who was her equal, who was also phenomenal, and to have that relationship make both of their lives so much better.

Who traveled the world and learned new things and and slipped up in big ways and kept trying and trying. Who did not ever think she would ever be perfect, but kept trying anyway. 

And! The same was true for Xena’s main love interest, who was a woman! 

And for her arch-nemesis, who was a woman. And they dressed and spoke and moved differently, and they wanted different things, but they all, all of them, were motivated by their own needs and beliefs and histories, they all grew and learned, they all took up space. And it was that capaciousness and complexity, that made them worthy of each other’s attention. That made them worthy of greatness. 

It was this show that didn’t center Christianity, that didn’t center heterosexuality, that didn’t center heteronormative femininity, that showed women who had strength and intelligence and wisdom and perspective and humor and loyalty and foibles and sexuality and sexual agency and friendship and beliefs and conviction and autonomy and agency. That didn’t reward women for forcing themselves to become quieter and smaller - that rewarded women for being braver and bolder and truer to themselves. 

And I think parts of that stuck, and holy fuck am I ever glad that they did. And it’s not that those are things that I learned from the show. Those are very much things I learned from the awesome real women in my real life, and I doubt Xena would’ve stuck in the same way, vs seeming like pure fantasy, if I wasn’t surrounded by women who had real full lives and who did awesome things just because they wanted to and who took up space and some of whom had queer relationships. But the show did help me learn that it wasn’t just the women I knew, and it did help me see that there was a much wider world out there that could appreciate and admire a woman who was all of these things, and it made it something that I could see just sitting at home, that I could take in in a different way. 

It was also the very first show I was a fannish fan of, all sitting on the dial-up looking up Xena/Gabrielle slash on the Pink Rabbit consortium and discovering all these smart stories, and that all these author people around the world saw and valued the same things I did. And also, fandom has generally worked out pretty well for me, as a thing I’m glad I’ve had in my life. 

I’ve tried watching the show again as an adult, and to my older, contemporary eyes, it has a lot of very cringe moments in its OTT kitschy campiness (not that I don’t love a bit of camp; I do, it’s just…very 90s in this certain way?), in its approach to cultural exchange/appropriation, in its whiteness even whilst telling stories set in the Mediterranean and Middle East and North Africa, in its centering of Eurocentric history. It’s an imperfect show. But the ways we consume fiction are complex, and it can simultaneously be a show that was imperfect and that did some really, really wonderful things, and that I’m grateful for. 

So anyway anon: Xena: Warrior Princess.

[dyketectivecomics]

{{ putting this comment here because i wasn't sure if i should embarrass the anon by doing it publically lD;; But: As somebody who actually has studied and practiced animal magic, I'm almost offended by how basal that suggestion is. (There is so! Much! Possible! Protection Trinkets! Meditation! Astral shapshifting! I mean, personally I would just twist that into a very anti-BBRae, like Raven being "fuck you no", but WHY would you WASTE an ANIMAL in a MAGIC AU and NOT make it MAGICAL?!

Zira i heckin LOVE YA (quick rant abt the previous ask to clear up some things & then some Better Ideas, under the cut)

Just to preface what I THINK they were asking (bc I’ve seen them ask Blu for this same request abt her dad constantine au as well), is something more focused on BB’s “Beast” &/or ‘animal instincts’ taking over control of him for the purpose of a kind of romcom fic??? This is something i’ve had the displeasure of seeing a few times in my early TT fic reading days (usually stumbled upon accidentally and quickly nope’d out of). I find nothing funny about a boy making a girl uncomfortable while trying to pursue her romantically, which is exactly where BB/Rae ALWAYS goes under the guise of her acting “tsundere uwu” towards him. its just uncomfortable to read.

with THAT out of the way, let’s talk shapeshifting, magic, & BB and Raven’s platonic relationship in regards to this AU (i know you’ve mentioned it being just a Magic AU here, I had assumed due to key additions in the last ask, that it was in regards to my magic fam au, so thats where I’m going with this. Just for Clarity of Argument’s sake. Also keep in mind my Knowledge of magic irl & in the DCU are both admittedly limited, but I’m Learning haha)

I LOVE that idea of Astral Shapeshifting you mentioned! BB & Raven’s powers are very Distinct from each other, in that BB’s is usually a result of his entire genetic structure being placed out of sequence (Heavy Sci-Fi stuff) whereas Ravens are, well, Fantasy and Magic. They’re two opposing parts of the DCU that meet to provide some opposition, and are often presented as foils to each other. And I’d feel in my AU it would be no different.

But, there could be something wonderful to be found by trying to meet in the middle. BB’s powers require him to understand the physiology of the animal he wants to become, and to correctly visualize it, willing it into reality. Though he’s often shown to have a natural aptitude to learning about these animals and understanding how to transform into them, it would be amazing to see Raven helping him more with the visualization process, possibly helping him to Actualize more complex/bigger animals with greater speed. (He HAS been shown to turn into animals of considerable size and from all eras. And experimentation with Alien Animals is shown but not often explored, after all)

This is a Very Careful intersection of Magic & Science. One that meets strictly in the mind (a great unknown that we can only begin to guess about). Perhaps with time and meaningful conversation between the two, that doesnt devolve into baseless flirting as Garfield is prone to do, they could both help each other to understand their thoughts/emotions regarding their powers, and help each other grow in those areas.

Now going into that talisman/trinket thread: seeing as how Raven’s powers are so heavily influenced by emotion. It would be amazing to see her apply talismans and crystals used for meditation (or those commonly associated with certain chakras/animals/etc.) and teaching Garfield about those as a way to connect them. A kind of ‘cultural’ power exchange, if that makes any sense? Hell, I could see them getting into a big convo about how Vixen’s totem works and the intersection of magic & the animal kingdom there to help get them started. (It’s just funny to me now, how many times DC can have these different characters overlap through others in such a way… and only when bringing up certain ideas/aus do they come to mind for me???) 

Now on to their overall History with each other in this AU:

their overall ages as I have considered it would remain about the same as I consider in ‘canon’. With Gar being around the same &/or a year younger. He would have some time with the Titans a bit ahead of Raven, with him being the youngest member of the ‘original’ team, and Raven among others joining a few years after almost as part of ‘gen II’ in a way. Initial distrust between them would be hard won over a period of time, and Raven would come to consider the Titans as another family to supplement her foster parents & the sirens (who are all considered Aunts, no if ands or buts abt it). Because Friends Are Family too dammit!

However, the same as in canon, I don’t see Raven as the type of hero who wants to stay in the spotlight, or doing the Hero Thing long-term. She instead strikes me as the type of character who tries to have a Nice Quiet retirement from the Bigger/Showy situations but Inevitably gets wrapped up in Some Kind Of Drama (bc how else do we keep her Involved in all of this nonsense? lmao). And on the opposite end, I Definitely see Gar as the kind of character who remains with a cast/crew that he can work well with. Not that Gar couldn’t probably maintain the safety & well-being of a small city on his own! But mostly bc he IS such a sociable character. he’s at his best when he has others who play well off of him & his banter. Or even when they’re just there to, ahem, humor him.

Overall, I see them learning and growing from one another, becoming those friends who may not get along initially, but eventually find some common ground and check up on each other when the occasion arises. (This is At Best, though) When i find the time to flesh out more of Raven’s time with the Titans as well as expanding who her team with them would consist of (Bc there’s going to be a kind of? Interim mixing of Old And New Titans before Jason’s death, and then a more Permanent new team after), I’ll be happy to start exploring this dynamic and others when I have a better understanding of where I want other Titans characters to be at that point in time.

[cookinguptales]

Professor Marston and the Wonder Women

So I saw this film last night at a free preshowing and I’m really of two minds about it. Like on one hand, the movie itself was very well-made (save some real pacing issues) and it’s always great to see sex-positive, LGBT-positive, kink-positive films. That said, it played fast and loose with history in ways that really bothered me. See, I actually had to read a fair amount about this family for one of my classes in college, so I know more about them than your average moviegoer. And uh. There is some real revisionist history in this one.

Here’s the thing. We all know that biopics aren’t 100% accurate. But one of the things I hate most in biopics is when history is revised to make the protagonist look better. And I really, really feel like this film made William Moulton Marston (WMM going forward) out to be this kind, open-minded crusader against intolerance. In some ways, he did do things like that IRL. But he also fucked over his wife and his psychological theories are rooted in gender essentialist nonsense.

Here’s the rundown: the film is about WMM, co-inventor of the lie detector and creator of Wonder Woman, his wife, brilliant psychologist Elizabeth Marston, and their partner, Olive Byrne. The three of them IRL were part of a poly relationship and Marston was interested in BDSM (particularly bondage) as a form of sexual expression as well as therapy/life mantra. All this makes for a very interesting movie regardless of how you go about it. Unfortunately, the aim of the creator of this film was to write an epic romance about a perfect triad whose only real problems boiled down to societal intolerance and Elizabeth’s frequent cruelties.

The problem? IRL, WMM and Elizabeth didn’t have some enlightened conversation about Olive and decide they both loved her and wanted her as a third. IRL, WMM told his wife that he wanted to have a relationship with one of his grad students (yikes) and told her that if she didn’t like it, he’d divorce her. Elizabeth reportedly was completely distraught but eventually acquiesced because she didn’t want to lose her home and family.

Like just that piece of information throws the entire thesis of the film under suspicion. It also makes the film’s treatment of Elizabeth seem dramatically unfair. Elizabeth is shown to be cruel to Olive for no reason, due only to her “neurosis”, and often makes problems for the triad because she can’t accept her husband’s love for Olive, she can’t accept Olive’s love for her, she can’t accept WMM & Olive’s interest in BDSM, and can’t accept the societal reprobation for their poly relationship. Like the film is just one big line of Elizabeth throwing hissy fits and then her needing to apologize and admit she ruined everything because of her own issues. Considering IRL, this relationship was literally forced upon her, this treatment just seems so unfair.

Now, it is true that there’s no hard historical evidence that Elizabeth and Olive were in a romantic relationship, but there’s enough historical implication that I’m not upset the filmmaker chose to include this. The two of them certainly became close later on. Elizabeth named her child after Olive and the two of them lived together for 40 years after WMM died. And frankly, that’s an incredibly interesting story all on its own. How did they become so close when their relationship began so badly? I sort of wish the movie had actually been about that.

WMM himself is shown to be kind, intelligent, open-minded, thoughtful, experimental, and a crusader against comics censorship. Which uh. Is not the impression I got of him reading his writings and biography, but okay. I do feel like the movie implied that he was up against the giants of the Comics Code Authority and the massive push against “filth” in comics, which came into being well after his death, which is clearly historically inaccurate. He did face censorship in his time, but many of the big issues with Wonder Woman became an issue after his death.

His ideology is also presented without criticism in the film, which is…a choice. Essentially speaking, he believed that men were inherently violent and women were inherently gentle, which meant women had to induce/seduce men into being submissive to them, which would lead to world peace. That is obviously pretty…flawed. I won’t go into the reasons why but uh. Yeah. Honestly speaking, it was progressive for its time! But to show that like it’s life’s real truth in a movie in 2017 is another story entirely.

I wish the movie had been badly-made in other ways, because then I would feel less ambivalent. Because if you completely ignore history, it’s a beautiful, romantic film about an early polyamorous family trying to make things work in a world that certainly didn’t want them to. (Though, another historical aside… None of the sources I read talked about some big breakup blow up between all three of them? It’s possible that the sources I’ve read just glossed over the period, but I worry that this was another scene manufactured for drama that put the responsibility for pain on Elizabeth’s head.)

The cinematography was lush and beautiful, you really get fired up about being against censorship, it introduces alternative families, you get invested in the characters and relationships, the dialogue was really well-written, the acting was great, and it’s one of the first times in a long time that I’ve actually seen a sex scene between two women actually directed by a woman — and, imo, it shows. Like I have a lot of good things to say about the film. But! That pesky history!

Long and short of it, I feel like the creators wanted to make a film that was pro-polyamory, pro-kink, and anti-censorship — and that’s commendable. But they wanted so badly to make it a cut and dry good vs. evil scenario that they warped history to make it look like it was a perfect triad vs. the world. And it was a lot more complicated than that. I think several things they introduced contrary to historical record made the women seem pretty cruel, which I feel is both unfair and disingenuous, especially for a film that purports to be so feminist. It ignores WMM’s flaws: his mistreatment of his wife, his public distancing of himself from Sanger’s philosophies even as he financially benefited from their influence, etc. It oversells his sense of justice and undersells his selfishness.

Because of all that, I find myself really divided on how to rate a film like that. I suspect it’ll be relatively popular in some circles, especially ones that only have passing knowledge of the real-life family. Again, it was very lovely in some ways. But I really do think this already fascinating piece of history was done a disservice, and some of the amazing women in it were as well.

[kidsviral-blog]

How I Grew Up On The Internet

New Post has been published on https://kidsviral.info/how-i-grew-up-on-the-internet/

How I Grew Up On The Internet

The internet is IRL. It always has been.

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I started navigating the internet — really, the earliest versions of social media — early in my life, and before most people even really knew what the internet was. I was 11 when I first logged on in 1993 — I’m 32 now — and I’ve spent the ensuing years invested in online communities at least as much as I’m invested in offline ones. I never understood there to be a clear line between the two. Before I ever even had a cell phone, I used the social web to document and reflect on my offline life. I’ve met wonderful people online, connected in much deeper ways to the friends I had, and I’ve used dozens of networks and platforms to figure myself out. The internet hasn’t been a way to escape, it’s been a creative outlet, a friend, a documentarian, and a tool that has made my real life better, cooler, weirder, and more fun. For me, the internet isn’t some distinct virtual universe, it’s just one part of the real world.

This is the history of my first 20 years online. It’s a happy story.

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When I was 9, my parents chose to homeschool my older brother, Mitch, and me out of frustration with public school. I had just finished third grade and he, fifth. We were both doing fine academically, but my mom felt like our personalities were changing. My brother often came home from school depressed, and we started to complain about things like reading that we had loved before. Mom and Dad hated the focus on standardized testing, and felt that our teachers didn’t appreciate the creative curiosity they treasured.

A couple years into the great homeschooling experiment, we moved temporarily from Austin, Texas, a hippie college town with a growing secular homeschooling community, to Arlington, Virginia. I missed home and I had trouble making new friends in the Christian homeschool group there.

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My brother Mitch on our Macintosh computer in the mid-’80s.

That was when Mitch told me about BBSes (Bulletin Board Systems) and saved me from my boredom and social isolation. BBSes were local networks where we could read and write on message boards, chat live, and play games. We were lucky enough to have the magic formula: a PC, a 2400-baud modem, and a second phone line. My dad had always been fascinated by gadgets — he’d bought us our (and the!) first Macintosh in 1984, when I was just two years old. The iconic modem sound that began any trip to my favorite BBSes still makes me feel urgently stoked. That sound means I’m about to arrive at the best party ever, and I still get to wear my pajamas.

I tried a few BBSes, but I quickly became devoted to one in particular called “International House of Kumquats.” IHOK was run by a chill teenager who went by the handle Surrealistic Pickle. I felt at home there. Everyone was young and smart and cool and they immediately became my friends. (Since the BBS was on a local phone number, I knew we all lived in the D.C. area.) I never really thought much about the fact that we had “met online” — the concept was too new to feel dorky or taboo yet.

The average age of people on the board was probably about 16, while I was only 12. “Star Shadow,” my earnest choice of an alias, was a dead giveaway that I was the youngest person on the board. Still, I fit in fine. The kids on IHOK shared my enthusiasm for the band They Might Be Giants and we discussed them constantly, dissecting lyrics and debating best songs. We also talked about our lives and anxieties, we made up recurring inside jokes, we quoted our favorite movies and TV shows, and recommended books. We developed real friendships.

Within a few months, Surrealistic Pickle made me a co-sysop (system operator), the official duties of which were slight enough that I don’t actually remember what they were, but I still listed it on all of my teenage resumes. It was the first time that anyone had put semiprofessional faith in me, and it was done purely because of the value of my contributions, without a thought given to my being a girl, a weird homeschooler, or an actual child.

When my mom first agreed to let me meet my friends in person, she dropped me off at the National Mall but then parked a few blocks away with a stack of books and an eye on our activities. Looking back, I’m amazed that the teenagers from the board didn’t tease me for my mom literally watching over us, and I’m equally grateful she was open to the idea at all. We couldn’t share photos on the BBS, so the first time I met my board mates IRL was the first time I saw them at all. That part seems weird now, but it didn’t feel strange at the time. We already knew each other’s sense of humor, feelings, opinions, and personalities — the rest was just wrapping paper.

A few months later, I went to my first ever show with my BBS buddies: NRBQ and They Might Be Giants (obviously) at Wolf Trap in Virginia. The Kumquat crew were splayed out on picnic blankets on the grassy hills. They were Manic Panic-ed, glasses-wearing, and trench-coated teenagers who probably didn’t fit in at high school. They were all, more than any other quality, ridiculously nice. I thought they were the coolest people in the world.

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Cool “Lion King” button + Slurpee T-shirt.

I was having an awkward adolescence. I liked talking to my parents way more than I liked anyone my own age. I wanted to have deep, intelligent conversations about my interests, which were Disney animated movies (I collected Lion King merchandise), horses, and cute boys. Not, for the most part, things that grown-ups actually wanted to talk to me about.

Luckily, Prodigy existed. Prodigy was a dialup service that predated widespread use of the World Wide Web. Like its competitor, America Online, Prodigy contained multitudes: shopping, news, weather, games, advice columns, and more. I was only interested in connecting with people, so I used the live chat, email, and discussion boards.

I joined a message board where other girls like me had invented an elaborate role playing game for made-up horses — we each “owned” dozens of fake horses, gave them names and attributes, and pitted them against each other in entirely arbitrary competitions that were just decided by whoever was running them. I kept my horse files in a giant binder full of descriptions like this:

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People who I tried to explain the game to didn’t understand it at all. It wasn’t until I was introduced to the concept of fantasy sports a decade later that I thought maybe this all wasn’t as strange as I feared.

I was even more involved with the Disney Fans Bulletin Board, which was populated mostly by grown men and women who retained their interest in all things Disney well past the age when most people grow out of it. I loved them. Many of my DFBB cohorts lived and worked in Orlando, just because it meant that they got to go to Disney World whenever they wanted. To me, they were living the ultimate adulthood dream.

I got so involved with the Disney board that I was eventually given a “job.” The job paid me in a free Prodigy subscription and one free t-shirt. My title was “Teens Liaison,” and I did just that: liaised with other teens. Although most of the community was much older , I developed raging crushes on the handful of boys my age. I can still remember, in fine detail, a photo one of them sent me of himself dressed up as Prince Eric for Halloween. I had several Prodigy flirtations before I had figured out the slightest thing about talking to boys I knew offline. We talked about our feelings, which was impossible with the teenage boys I knew in “real” life. I was myself with the dudes of Prodigy — open and honest and weird — and they liked me for it.

I eventually met my Prodigy friends in real life too. My parents planned a trip to Disney World, mostly for my obsessive benefit, and let me bring my best friend, another homeschooler named Kate. I dragged Kate and my mom to a meetup dinner with the DFBB group at a fancy Disney-themed restaurant. Almost all of the attendees were closer to my mom’s age than to mine, but we had fun anyway. I got a purple tie-dyed DFBB staff T-shirt that I wore proudly to the park the next day. Soon after our meeting, people started to leave Prodigy for the wider world of the web, and I followed.

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Editing my “Lady and the Tramp” fan site with a stack of Disney encyclopedias, 1995.

I made my first website in 1995, when I was 13, and it was dedicated to my favorite movie, Lady and the Tramp. It started with a short introduction: “I’m here to provide the major source of Lady information on the World Wide Web.” The page included an archive of tiny photos I’d been able to dig up or scan, random facts I’d strung together from my collection of Disney books, the title of the movie translated into several other languages, a character list, quotes, and the movie’s credits, transcribed from my own VHS copy.

I taught myself HTML to make the page, borrowing books from the library and reading tutorials online. Once I made the Lady and the Tramp page, I was hooked. I started expanding my website to include biographical information about me, terrible things I’d written, pictures of my friends, and more.

By 1999, the earliest date that the web archive has for my site, it was basically a magazine. It included:

A 14-part “about me” section

Thousands of words devoted to describing each of my friends. Example: “Lots of people will tell you that I’m obsessed with Dorothy and you might say that’s true — I just happen to think she’s one of tha most beautiful, funniest girlies in that whole wide world. :-)”

Pages devoted to my opinions on religion, animal rights, curfews, Bill Clinton, and legalizing marijuana

A list of reasons that you should go vegetarian

A description of my imaginary perfect boyfriend, Jimmy Tony

Dozens of poems I’d written

My “future encyclopedia entry,” including the career description “writer, artist, entrepreneur, animal handler, actress, philosopher”; the titles of several of my future books about Shakespeare and hip-hop; details of the company I would found someday; the many books I would write; and my partnership with my imaginary husband Jimmy

A daily journal cataloguing the mundane details of my life

Book reviews

Comics I made with Photoshop

“Summer’s Spiffy Sendable Celebs,” a collection of about 30 e-postcards I made of my favorite celebrities

Capsule reviews of every episode of Dawson’s Creek

Commentary on my favorite songs and a list of my favorite CDs

A “shrine” celebrating Ani DiFranco

A collection of my favorite jokes

Desktop photos of celebrities and animals that I’d edited and made available to my “public”

An elaborate, multisectioned fan page for the character Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, including artwork, personal essays, historical information, and more

A lengthy acknowledgments section that thanked AltaVista, my scanner, my entire extended family, friends, and all of my pets

Making websites was my primary mode of self-expression throughout my teens, and it was also a huge part of my mostly autodidactic education. Over the years, my family’s approach to our education had grown increasingly radical, buoyed by the writings of “unschooling” proponents such as John Holt and Grace Llewellyn. I chose what to focus on and how to spend my time based on my goals, with fairly minimal oversight from my parents. My website became an obsession, and I had all the time in the world to devote to it. Most of the other creative things I did — drawing pictures, writing bad poems, and composing essays — were in the service of making a cool-as-hell website.

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A version of my website layout, featuring a dog I found on the street and kept for two days.

Although my site wasn’t part of any specific social platform, there was an informal but intense network of teenage and young adult women doing the same thing I was, and we joined web rings, made link lists, and sent each other fan mail. I kept up with tons of other website makers, almost all of them women: from JenniCam to one gothy girl who I only remember as “Calliope.” I learned from them. I studied their source codes for HTML tips, copied their brooding photography styles, listened to bands they mentioned in passing, started taking moody selfies like theirs, and tried hard to impress them with endless tweaks and new features on my website. To some extent, I lived my life with my website in mind — do it for the dot-com! — but this was a good thing: It made me more creative, thoughtful, and adventurous.

Creating my own elaborate websites about myself was outrageously, hilariously narcissistic in hindsight. But building my own sites gave me the ability to tell people who I was in a way that I could control. It also allowed me to look at myself in a positive way, something that was missing when I looked in the mirror. I liked the me I was on the web. I still do.

I’ve always wondered about the assumption that our online personas are more fake than our physical ones. I often feel awkward and nervous in real-life situations; I almost always feel like I’m saying the wrong thing and am unable to articulate what I really think and feel. Online, I have plenty of time and unlimited space to consider what to say and how to express myself. It’s an advantage that makes me feel more like myself, not less so.

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On Dec. 7, 2000, the day I joined LiveJournal, I was 18 years old, living with my parents in Austin, jobless, ecstatically in love with my first boyfriend, and spending almost every waking second with as many of my friends as possible. My crew was comprised of other homeschooled teenagers with the same excess of free time that I had, resulting in us spending so much time together that we complained about missing each other when we were apart for two days. I documented every mundane moment of that life and the years that followed on my LiveJournal, eventually falling off but still occasionally updating until 2007.

My journal is still up, hundreds of thousands of words detailing the first seven years of my adult life, and it’s full of hilarious contradictions. I was clearly leading a blissful adventure, experiencing a new “first” practically every week — my first relationship, my first apartment, my first road trip with friends, my first full-time job — but I constantly write as if the weight of the world is on my shoulders: “Life has gotten so misplaced. I don’t even know what I’m doing, just that it can’t be like this forever.”

I was also so unaware of how dang corny I was being all the time. I would write about “candy magic” and my “yummy” days and being “so full of joy.” I think I’m a pretty earnest and even cheesy person now, but I’ve got nothing on my 18-year-old self waxing poetic about every single silly thing under the sun that day. Some parts of it make me wish I still had the ability to be so sincere, but other parts make me think I must have been the most annoying person on earth.

I shared more on my LiveJournal about my thoughts and emotions than I ever did in verbal conversations. I masked my feelings with humor and being loud in “real” life, but I was able to share my neuroses on my LJ. My best friends were reading my journal, and writing in their own too, so it wasn’t like it was a secret — when we weren’t busy hanging out and having fun in my room, we were talking and fighting and sharing our lives, all through words upon words upon words on our computer screens.

I’d write about politics or religion, about trying to understand people who disagreed with me, about the anxieties and delights of my first relationship, about the bands I was discovering and falling in love with. Most of all, I wrote about spending time with my friends, and about how much I loved them.

“I’ve just had one of the most fun-packed days of my life! This will be a long entry but it may actually be worth reading becuz there was so much weirdness today:

“Rachel and Dorothy and I stayed up ALL night last night, being goofy and bitchy and farting and just being completely delirious and silly. At 8:00 we went to Flips, and soon thereafter down to soccer.

I went to soccer and was loud and delirious and singing, and then we went to Schlotsky’s and had great conversation. Then Rachel left and I almost cried cuz she was so fun and I’m gunna miss her so much. But then I went to Flips and they were funny over there. And then I went to meet Isaac after work! And I was dressed so cool and in such a good mood, and we walked around.”

My friends’ journals have largely the same tone: documenting our lives in incredible, mundane, ecstatic detail. This is mostly a practice that seems to have been left behind on the present web, where at least most people are self-aware enough to know that others aren’t interested in an outline of their everyday lives. I guess this is a good thing — I’ve naturally grown up and become smarter and more self-aware since my LiveJournal days, and reading my writing from that era causes my entire body to seize up in embarrassment. I’m also so incredibly jealous. I look back at these entries and I read someone who was completely, 100% unafraid of being herself. I can’t think of anything more remarkable in a teenage girl, and I’m grateful that LiveJournal was a place where I could be me: purely, ridiculously, perfectly.

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I was still blogging when I first joined Flickr.com in August 2004. For five years when everything else was changing — I left jobs, moved four times, broke up and restarted relationships, got a cat, and met my best friend — Flickr was a stable and integral part of my life. Flickr was focused entirely on photographs, and those pictures were all there was to it. You were judged not by your cool list of interests or your clever status updates, but by the glimpse into your actual life that photos provide. The present analogue is Instagram.

Still, before I even had an iPhone, Flickr flipped the tables for me. Instead of the internet being a thing I did when I wasn’t ~living~, Flickr became a way to keep track of all the cool stuff I was doing with my time. And there was plenty to keep track of — the time when I started using it a lot was also when I started drinking, dating, and traveling, and met most of the friends who are still my crew today. My Flickr photos are packed with boys I had flings with or unrequited crushes on, parties, late night video game sessions at my ex-boyfriend’s house, my new best friend’s hands folded around a beer at our favorite bar, and lots and lots of elaborately artistic selfies taken with my DSLR’s timer function.

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Cute boys with cats uploaded to my Flickr, 2004-2005.

I looked at Flickr a lot. My friends who were on it uploaded all of their photos too, and it was a way to reflect and reinforce all of the things we were going through together. Looking back at my early uploads or my favorites list is as evocative as listening to an old favorite song. It’s easier to remember things that you regularly look at photos from, and as a result, the years after I joined Flickr are genuinely much clearer to me than all of the ones that came before.

When I browse Flickr now — it still exists, but active users have dwindled away since Yahoo started making changes after it acquired the service in 2005 — I’ll come across a photo of an ex-boyfriend hugging a cat or a good friend drinking coffee or a bunch of co-workers dancing in someone’s apartment, and I can hear and smell and feel everything in that frame. Flickr isn’t a window into my “internet life” of yore, it’s a window into my life-life. Maybe they are the same thing.

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Typical Myspace selfie.

Although it was preceded by Friendster, which was used by me and a handful of my friends, for me Myspace marks when the concept of “social networking” became mainstream. It was the first time that the energy and excitement I felt for the internet was shared by almost everyone else my age.

There were so many Myspace things that came and went with the platform. The entire concept of having a “top eight” friends will always haunt people of a very specific age and remain completely meaningless to everyone five years older or younger than us.

And the Myspace selfies! I used Myspace photos to exert a control over my appearance that I’ve never quite felt like I had in real life. I’d carefully apply makeup I never wore in public, borrow my roommate’s jewelry, and have an entire selfie session in the sunshine just to achieve the perfect new profile picture.

Most notably, we made music for each other on Myspace. Getting musicians and their fanbases online must have been a strategic push for the company, but it felt completely organic. It felt like one day some band got on Myspace and made it big, and then the next day everyone on earth opened GarageBand for the first time.

Countless friends put music up on Myspace, so after joking that if I had a band I’d call it Premade Bears, I made a profile and I made some songs. For one of them, I borrowed my roommate’s 5-year-old son’s tiny miniature guitar and locked myself in the bathroom, strumming along to my imperfect country-ass voice singing about having a thing for a younger dude. For others, like “Stay Sweet; Don’t Ever Change,” I arranged some generic beats and played some keys on my laptop while sort of lackadaisically rapping about having a crush in the summertime.

There was no future for me in these weirdo amateur tunes, no shows to book or albums to release. Lily Allen made it big on Myspace, but most of us weren’t thinking about scale. I worked at a bookstore, doing events and making displays. I had designs to do something more with my life, but I wasn’t ever going to be a famous musician. Still, I made something I’d always wanted to, and I shared it with my friends. That was cool. Before Myspace, making music and getting people to listen to it seemed hard and complicated. During Myspace, it was the easiest thing in the world. Our old Myspace photos and cliquey top eights were a little silly, but making tunes for each other was a truly sweet, cool thing we got to do and I am grateful.

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When I joined Facebook in 2006, it felt at first like the other social networks — a secret club for me and a select few to share our lives together. I didn’t quite get the point — most of the action was still on Myspace for the first couple years, and the wonkiness of Myspace’s customizable color scheme felt way more me than the clean, boring blue and gray on Facebook. And then Facebook grew. And kept growing. And now it remains the only network mentioned here that’s frequented by my entire extended family.

As evidenced by the teens who’ve left Facebook for other less mom-supervised networks and apps over the last couple years, being on a social network with everyone you’ve ever known is sometimes less fun than the alternatives. I mean, it makes sense: The last thing I want to do in real life is gather every friend, former co-worker, family member, and ex-boyfriend in one giant room together.

That said, my own mom is by far the coolest part of my Facebook experience. My mom uses Facebook with the same delightful, contagious joy that I used early BBSes with. Every Friday, she posts nature photos from the ranch where she lives with the hashtag #FieldNotesFriday. Rumor of her excellence on Facebook has spread among my group of friends, and I occasionally get a text from another pal asking if it’s cool if they request her.

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A typical Facebook update from my mom.

Social networking is associated with youth — naturally, kids who grew up with the internet are more comfortable adapting to new social networks. But in the next couple decades, those same kids will be the parents crashing the party. If my mom is any indication, that could actually be pretty great.

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I joined Twitter just about as soon as I heard about it, in early 2008; by that time, I was joining pretty much any social network that came onto my radar. When I first joined, my tweets were approximations of Facebook statuses.

is going to start using twitter.

— summeranne (@Summer Anne Burton)

It took months before I started using the actual functionality of Twitter, like to find out I had missed events or, er, comment on the news:

checking twitter for the first time in a day & like a nightmare, last night: “secret okkervil river show RIGHT NOW @ the compound”… Sigh.

— summeranne (@Summer Anne Burton)

david foster wallace is dead. wtf.

— summeranne (@Summer Anne Burton)

I felt like I was talking to a wall, because no one I knew was on Twitter, so I gave up on it for a while. I got the sense that Twitter was never going to catch on, but when a few of my coolest real-life friends started accounts, I quickly returned:

people keep joining twitter. so i’ll try to start updating again. i need an omelette.

— summeranne (@Summer Anne Burton)

But I used the platform for desolate personal revelations and song lyrics cryptically referencing my complicated personal life:

We are the challengers of the unknown.

— summeranne (@Summer Anne Burton)

Whiskey, i love you with a depth of feeling that scares the shit out of you.

— summeranne (@Summer Anne Burton)

When I first started at BuzzFeed almost three years ago, I stopped using Twitter as a constant stream of my brain and started using it more professionally and strategically to share my articles, comment on other sites’ posts, and interact with writers and editors I worked with or admired.

It felt like Twitter was something I did for work and Facebook was something I did for my “real” friends. Living in New York City, I have now met many of the people whose faces light up my TweetDeck window every day, but my pals back home mostly remain holdouts.

Still, lately my Twitter experience has reverted 360 degrees back to the personal, flirty, ~relatable~ vibe of my early tweets, except people are actually listening. I like to tweet about songs I like, and having crushes, and being up too late at night. I like to post selfies, and look at the selfies of cute dudes and ladies I follow. I like Twitter on the nights and weekends as much as I like it during the day at work. I like to wonder about whether a fav is a flirty fav or just a fav. I try to make people smile, or laugh, or, at the very least, think I am charming. I follow people who I find nice, warm, and smart.

life goal: be more like this dog

— summeranne (@Summer Anne Burton)

I often describe Twitter these days as the cool room where I hang out with my internet friends all day. Most of my closest “IRL” friends back in Texas still don’t use it, so Twitter still feels in some ways like a throwback to the internet of yore. It’s insurance that my thoughts won’t just disappear inside my brain. It’s a place to test my own ideas and jokes and cute pictures before unleashing them on a wider audience. And it’s an amazing way to maintain mild crushes on the brains of a few hundred other people, a true dream come true for my giant, fickle heart.

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In January 2011, I had been using Tumblr for a couple years. I’d given up on maintaining my personal domain name and redirected it to my tumblog, where I posted photos, wrote about songs I liked, and shared links to things on the internet I was into. I had, around this same time, gotten super into drawing again. Art was something I’d been into consistently as a kid and a teenager, but I’d been focusing on writing, kissing boys, and working shitty retail jobs for most of my twenties. I started posting drawings on my blog in 2010 and found that my friends responded super positively to them. There’s so much reblogging and reposting and sharing on the social web that putting something truly new into the world again felt like I was doing something special.

I was also becoming completely obsessed with baseball, thanks to a fortuitous series of events. I’d started dating an obsessive sports fanatic named Brian and we visited the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown together for his birthday. I’d also recently switched from cheerleading to playing in my devoted local co-ed softball league. I’d just binge-watched all of the Ken Burns baseball documentary series. I joined a fantasy league. I had always liked baseball — it was the only sport I remember my dad being really into when I was a kid, and my grandmother was a devoted Astros fan — but this time, I got serious about it. I devoured books about baseball statistics and history, got an MLB season pass for my phone and computer so I could watch all the games I wanted, learned how to keep score, and started reading baseball websites and following baseball writers online.

So, in 2011, I started something that seemed totally natural: I decided to draw every member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame (there are currently 306) and put the drawings up on Tumblr. I thought maybe I could do it in a year. Four years later, I’m up to 258 drawings done. The project wasn’t designed to go viral; I just thought it would get me into the practice of drawing regularly, and that I’d get to learn more about baseball history in the process.

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One of the inaugural five Hall of Famers and one of my first drawings for the blog.

A few months in, an editor for ESPN: The Magazine called my cell phone. I was at my part-time waitressing job when he told me the magazine wanted to pay me to draw some pictures of players who won’t make it into the Hall despite impressive resumes (such as banned baseball player Pete Rose). It was the first time someone offered to pay me to do something freelance, and it blew my mind. After the magazine, I did an interview with ESPN online, Emma Carmichael asked if she could feature some of the drawings on Deadspin, and the project was written up in my hometown alt-weekly, the Austin Chronicle.

I started to become known, not just as an illustrator but also among baseball writers online. I applied for and, miraculously, got a regular paying freelance gig at Fangraphs, a baseball website for mega-nerds like the one I’d become. I didn’t write about stats in any traditional sense, though — I wrote about female pop stars as if they were players, researched the GOP presidential candidates’ relationships with America’s pastime, and crafted a T-shirt with the win probability graph of a crazy playoff game embroidered on it (the latter led my wonderful editor, Carson Cistulli, to email me with an apology for, well, all men).

Writing about baseball on Fangraphs opened up a world for me that I hadn’t fully realized existed, where people got paid to do what I’d been doing for fun my entire life: make stuff for the internet. I did some posts for The Hairpin and started drawing a comic for the newly kickstarted The Classical. I started applying for jobs at websites. And, 16 months after starting Every Hall of Famer, I got an email from a woman at BuzzFeed asking if I could chat with two editors about the part-time weekend editor position I’d applied for. By September of that year, I moved to New York for a full-time position at BuzzFeed.

Though I don’t typically write about baseball for the site, I’m sure I wouldn’t be here without Every Hall of Famer, which I’m hoping to finally finish sometime during the 2015 baseball season. I sometimes miss writing about baseball, but I figure I was never meant to be a specialist.

My latest position at BuzzFeed, Editorial Director of BFF, entails running a new team that makes original content for emerging social web platforms. It’s better than I ever imagined a job could be. It’s also the job I’ve been in training for without knowing it since I first dialed into a BBS at age 12. It reinforces my dad’s decision to introduce technology to me and my brother when we were so young, and it validates my mom’s loose, organic view of education and willingness to let me self-direct in front of a computer screen. I’m grateful for this life, online and off.

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One of my first posts on Vine, starring Bobby Sneakers.

I’ve focused here on the social networks that have had the biggest impact on my life, but there was also the ego-stroking delight of Friendster testimonials, the thrill of experimenting with online dating — or, more accurately, online flirting — on Consumating.com, my brief foray into anonymous message boards on Zug.com, and countless music message boards and email lists. These days, I use Instagram, Vine, and Facebook daily, in addition to Twitter and Tumblr.

“Social networking” is what I think about all day at my job, but it’s also how I stay connected to my friends back home, make new friends, develop crushes, document my life, and entertain myself. So about this tension between the internet and real life: Maybe while they’re melting together, they can bring out the best in one another.

There are plenty of people who seem to have an easy time being cruel on the web who would crumble if they were face to face with the victims of their abuse. It would be nice if those bullies and trolls could take whatever it is that keeps most of them from being horrible every day in the streets, and bring it with them to online forums.

On the flip side, I often yearn for the texture of my internet life in my “real” life. Sometimes when I’m at a bar or a party these days, I try to summon internet-me so that I can be more open, generous, flirtatious, confident, and tender. A better listener and a nicer person.

Most days I spend a lot of time watching people — some of them friends and some of them strangers — post on Instagram and Facebook and Twitter and Vine and Tumblr and TinyLetter and Medium. They are so often honest and vulnerable and breaking my heart, or funny, or creative, or incisive. I heart their selfies, I share their writing, I fav their tweets, and I read about their experiences. I tell them I love and appreciate them in tiny, easy ways, and they do the same for me.

Those moments usually feel like the realest part of my day.

Read more: http://www.buzzfeed.com/summeranne/social-networking-a-love-story

[apprenticemages]

Hinamatsuri once again hits one out of the park…  I take a look at this week’s carrots…  and I try my hand at poetry!  All this and more after the jump! The shows that I am watching are in bold, shows my wife and I are watching together are in bold italics.  Question marks denote shows not watched yet (during the premiere weeks), and strikethrough marks dropped shows.

3D Kanojo / Real Girl Ep 8

What a mess…  Turns out that Iroha isn’t as cool as she thought with Tsutsui being anywhere near Ayado.  Even just holding her hand while he’s treating a burn sets her off.  And of course, from her point of view, it’s all Tsutsui’s fault…  There’s been hints all along, but I think this ep cements my thoughts that she’s got a streak of self centeredness.  She keeps expecting him to change – and while he’s trying hard to work things out, he honestly is socially inept.  And she just doesn’t get that, she isn’t even trying.

I did enjoy watching Takanashi stomp Ishino’s advances into the mud.  She has become something of a friend to Tsutsui & Co., but she’s also shamelessly using them for her own ends.  She deserved that.

Anyhow, cliffhanger time…  Iroha ran off into the woods after seeing Tsutsui trying to help Ayado, and now she appears to lost.

Comic Girls Ep 7

Poor Kaos-chan.  One step forward, one step back…  she just can’t catch a break.  Every time she makes progress, she discovers another flaw in herself.

Why did it take me so long to figure she’s a HUGE idol otaku?  I mean we’ve all seen her figure collection any number of times.  And if you look over the left, though you make have to look at full size, that grouping of three looks to me to be a Love Live homage.

Best Girl Tsubasa rocks her glasses…  And speaking of her, both she and Ruki outed themselves as otaku this episode.  That leaves only Koyume (and I guess Fura-senpai) not outed.  I guess I should have expected that.

Crossing Time Ep 7

This week…  a girl composes haiku while waiting at the crossing.  I spent most of the episode cringing for two reasons…  First, what she was composing was much closer to senryu than haiku.  Second because they were just so awful.  Though it’s hard to tell how much was the intention of the production staff, and how much was an artifact of translation.  That is, was it translated literally or poetically?  I suspect the former.

Though I did appreciate her frustration with not being able to produce a finished poem in one go.  It took  me a long time to appreciate just how much work goes into even a simple haiku.  Actually, I think any Creator can appreciate that.

If you’re wondering what she was going on about when she was talking about a seasonal word – that’s called a kigo, and is vitally important in classic haiku.

Her final poem…  I think there’s something good in there, but after fiddling with it for a couple of days I haven’t been able to find it with certainty.  What I ended up with was this:

Snow drifting A crossing gate bars love

It drops the sense of love than cannot be restrained…  But maybe brings in a sense of impatient waiting?  Or maybe not.  And yes, I know the syllable count is off, it’s a work in progress.  If anyone cares to take a swing in the comments, feel free!  I’d love to see what folks come up with.  (More information about haiku from a previous posting.)

Hinamatsuri Ep 7

Hina’s segment was laugh out loud funny…  I’m impressed as hell that they can keep returning the same schtick and still make it so engaging.  Nitta and Utako’s segment was…  I don’t know quite how to put it.  Happy and sad, but not bittersweet?  Nitta has certainly transitioned from player to seriously looking to build a family, but doesn’t quite grasp that it’s not quite that easy.

And someone on Twitter pointed out…  The end title card has changed.  On the left, the original – with Utako behind the bar.  On the right, she’s absent after this week’s events.  What’s going on here? will she still be in OP next week?

But once again…  Anzu steal the show.  Not a tearjerker like last week’s ep, but no less powerful.  OK, OK, when she was bathing the onion ninjas weren’t attacking in force but there were a few scouts sneaking around.

I’ve seen a name plaque on a kid’s door in plenty of anime…  But it was a real kick in the feels for Anzu’s to be the one from the shed she lived in at the homeless camp.

Worth reading:  Matt & Irina’s joint review of episodes 6 & 7.  Be sure and stick with it all the way to the end.

My Hero Academia 3 /  Boku no Hero Academia 3 Ep 7 (Ep 45)

It turns out that the League Of Villains has adopted a new strategy.  They’re not out to kill heroes (or at least that’s not now the whole of their strategy), they’re out to destroy them.  And by handing the pro Heroes a decisive defeat and kidnapping a student, they’ve succeeded beyond their wildest dreams.  The public is questioning and criticizing UA.  The teachers are UA are questioning and criticizing themselves.  Of course, discrediting heroes is an ancient trope in the comic book world, but I find myself curious to see MHA‘s take on it.

The split between the students is interesting…  It was pretty predictable that Lida would take the “let’s follow the rules” position, but the others appear to be wavering.  Deku of course won’t waver long – he’s never let the rules stand in the way of doing what is right.

And it’s very cool to see Yaoyorozu’s powers be used in interesting new ways.

Worth reading: Luminous Mongoose over at Anime Junk takes a look at the ‘edgy’ characters in MHA, and what makes them so:  Revelry in the Dark – The Refined Edginess of My Hero Academia.

Rokuhoudou Yotsuiro Biyori Ep 6

As I said last week, I was about ready to give up…  But this week gave us a ton of history and backstory on Rokuhoudou, Kyousi, and Tokitaka.  We knew Sui had a business background, but I found it interesting that Tokitaka has been (still is?) an artisan (a potter) rather than a salaryman.  I don’t find it all surprising that he became Rokuhoudou’s cook, almost all of the talented artisans I know IRL are also very good cooks.  All the talented Makers I know love nothing better than the see stuff meant to be used actually being used…*  The fusion of seeing someone enjoy the food you cooked on plates you made?  That just has to be powerful as all hell.

A few years back our local SCA culinary group was the pastry/bread team for a feast and we all had to bring our own rolling pins.  Of the twelve pins, eleven of them had come from the hand of the same woodturner.  He was at the feast, and when I told him about this he had to come to kitchen and see…  and was grinning like an idiot the whole time.  Pleased as punch to see his stuff getting used.

Sword Art Online Alternative: Gun Gale Online Ep 6

OK, we knew Pito was messed up…  But who could imagine that messed up?  Though M-san (who we know have a name for – Asougi Goushi ) himself isn’t exactly a shining example of mental health.

Either way, now we know at least the basic plot for the remainder of the season.

Tada-kun wa Koi wo Shinai / Tada Never Falls in Love Ep 7 Tada-kun has reverted to its usual way of doing business…  All about the loves and emotions of everyone who isn’t the show’s main couple.  This week, a quadruple dose of unrequited love.  And while Nyanko Big can’t vocalize his feelings, there’s no damm reason why none of the three humans can’t do so.

Yata at For Great Justice dropped Tada this week, and I’m starting to get mighty tempted myself.  I listed it as a keeper mid-season because last week’s ep seemed to show they were going to start making progress, but this week blew it.

However, this is cool:

https://twitter.com/Surwill/status/999725355333226496

Uma Musume: Pretty Derby Ep 9

This week’s carrots…  Being bet during a game of Blind Man’s Bluff.  And am I the only one who thinks that “This Week’s Carrots” would be a cool name for a band?

Anyhow, this week – another training camp ep.  (They’re really pounding the tropes in here, aren’t they?)  And finally Trainer-san gets off his dead ass and acts like a trainer with a clue.  Seeing that Spe-chan‘s consideration for Silence is holding them both back, he finally confronts them.  And they both realize that the other is not only their dearest friend, but their closest rival.  Both of them run their little horse girl asses off – and handily beat the others, even with their head start.

It’s kinda annoying sometimes…  Uma Musume seems to really badly want to be a proper sports anime, but doesn’t (or won’t) put in the work to sustain the tone.

Also, just now…  Arby’s (who has a history of anime references on Twitter) tweets about Uma Musume…

https://twitter.com/Arbys/status/999681432166350848

Wotakoi: Love is Hard for Otaku Ep 6

Honestly, this week’s ep seems to have been mostly forgettable…  When it came time to write this review,  I pretty much couldn’t remember anything other than the gift scene at the end.   Looking around the rest of the web, it becomes clear that I couldn’t remember because pretty much nothing happened.

I should be clear though…  In this kind of semi-anthology/slice-of-life romance series, that’s not actually a glaring flaw.  It’s pretty much par for the course in that genre.

I do sympathise with Nafuji though.  I’m the oldest of five, and there’s seven years between me and my original youngest brother and sixteen years between me and my actual youngest brother.  (Which sounds funny…  But the explanation is simple, my parents had an unexpected late life (by the standards of the day) child.)  I was in fourth or fifth grade when I grasped the truth about Santa – but my parents made it Very Clear that I was to keep my lips zipped for the sake of my younger siblings.

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And that’s this week!  Remember, between the holiday weekend (which we traditionally spend geocaching) and preps for and recovering from the Kitsap Medieval Faire, there will be no weekly posts on the 30th and the 6th.  I may or may not get some editorial content out, that just depends on time and energy.

So, what did you think of this week?  Care to take a swing at poetry?  Drop a comment and let’s chat!

  Spring 2018 – Week 7 Hinamatsuri once again hits one out of the park...  I take a look at this week's carrots...