#and the definition of exploitative work is often very very subjective

[petvampire]

1 and 9 with TCK, Monty, and Charles? I love love love your work btw I reread in the cards all the time

awwwh you’re so sweet! I’m really glad you enjoyed it!

also clearly a person of taste <3 double penetration + breath control, charles x monty x cat king (what do we call this threesome?) NSFW

~

Monty is well aware that he is a lucky, lucky bird.

The fact that he’s able to regain a human form at all is proof of that. He’s got far more than that, though; a home, a job, and…

Well. A few very, very hot partners.

It’s not only each of them individually, though that would be amazing on its own. When they work together, though… shit, he’s pretty sure he’s the luckiest person alive.

Perhaps especially when it’s Thomas and Charles.

They both dote on him in their own ways, often soft and sweet with the crow in a way he certainly appreciates. He’s seen them together, though, and it’s all fire and sparks. So when the two of them are with him, things definitely get interesting.

Like now. He’d expected the usual competitive spark between the two, the typical drive they have to show each other up. Instead, however, they’ve decided to work together for the first time in… well, Monty thinks it might actually be the first time. Ever. And being the focus of their combined attention is a good bit more daunting than he ever would have imagined.

Thomas has him pinned to the bed already, has spent an extensive amount of time teasing him by licking over the feathered wings tattooed on Monty’s shoulders. He knows the magically-inked marks are more sensitive than they should be, and he exploits that at every opportunity. What Monty hadn’t expected was Charles sitting back and watching, every so often making a wryly amused comment, a “You missed a spot,” or “Oh, he moans so pretty when you do that.” He knows the ghost can be a bit of a voyeur, but he’s never been the subject of it until now.

He’s not sure if it’s better or worse when the Cat King slides two fingers easily into him, stretching him open, while Charles watches with a gleam of clear interest and amusement in his eyes.

Monty lets out a low, ragged moan when those fingers are replaced with the head of his lover’s cock, dipping teasingly into him, making him squirm. He presses back, and Thomas laughs, one hand gripping hard at his hip, the other tangling in his hair, dragging his head back. “Easy, little bird,” he purrs into his ear. “Take it slow.”

Yeah, right.

He thrusts his hips back, and he hears Thomas curse as his cock slides deeper into the crow, though it’s hardly a sound of discontent. “Greedy,” he chides softly, and his hand slips out of Monty’s hair, curves around the pale column of his throat. “Can’t have that. Charles, darling?”

The ghost seems only to have been waiting for his cue; he grins, one hand cupping Monty’s jaw, the other working his trousers open. It takes barely five seconds before he’s slipping his cock into the crow’s mouth, giving a short, sharp thrust that has him buried deep, Monty almost choking as that hard length presses down his throat. Thomas’ hand tightens just slightly, and he definitely can’t breathe for a moment, even if he could remember how to.

Between the two of them, he doesn’t get a full breath for - hours, it seems like. Charles’ hands bury in his hair, moving Monty’s mouth over his dick; Thomas fucks him in slow, teasing thrusts, grinding against his prostate and then pulling back, slipping a hand around his cock and stroking him to the edge, then leaving him whimpering and desperate. And all the while, one of the Cat King’s hands remains around his neck, a soft pressure, threatening but not cutting off his air again, not like that first moment.

And Monty can’t help it - he fucking loves that edge of danger, knows he can trust these two, of all people, not to actually hurt him.

So he pulls back off Charles’ cock for just a moment, panting, desperate. “Please,” he murmurs, and Thomas knows him so well; the way he leans into the other’s hand is enough.

He can almost feel the beautiful, vicious grin. “I think our darling crow wants us to stop holding back,” he drawls, and he slams himself into Monty, forcing a low moan from the bird.

Charles’ grin is less cruel, simply because of who he is, but he wastes no time shoving his cock back down Monty’s throat. His thrusts are rougher now, harsher, and the crow whimpers around him, even as he feels Thomas’ grip tighten.

He can’t breathe. He doesn’t need to breathe - he just needs to open up and be fucked from both ends, doesn’t need anything else. Black spots dance before his eyes, and he doesn’t fucking care, he just needs—

Monty is pretty sure he doesn’t entirely black out, but he comes hard enough that he might as well have, and he hears Charles swear as if from a great distance, tastes the other as he spills down his throat. Thomas’ fingers clench once more, and yeah, the crow is completely gone, body tensing and spasming around him. He’s somewhere else, Mercury maybe, fucking floating.

The Cat King’s touch turns soothing, fingers tracing softly along his neck, his collarbones, his shoulders. He pulls the bird against him, Charles nestling comfortably on the other side, both of them murmuring soft words of appreciation and praise. Monty hears them, he does, but he’s still drifting a little, can only make a low murmur of response, nestling back against Thomas and burying his face against Charles’ chest.

He really is a lucky, lucky bird.

[whencyclopedia]

The Chapter: A Segmented History from Antiquity to the Twenty-First Century

Nicholas Dames presents a detailed history of the seemingly invisible chapter. While offering insights about how the chapter frames our perception of time, his work struggles to find a final thesis about the use of this information and thus leaves the reader with a wide body of information with, paradoxically, little indexing.

To Nicholas Dames, the "chapter" has become a silent, invisible metronome of our lives. Beginning as an index for Latin encyclopedias and Greek legal codes, this simple tool for dividing text has spread far beyond its basic indexical function to become a metaphor for all areas of life. For example, Gerald Ford would have us believe we have started a new chapter after Watergate; after a painful breakup we start a new chapter of our lives; and organizations like fraternities also use chapters to increase their popularity. We do not stop to question the concept of the chapter very much; unlike sentences, paragraphs, or essays, chapters do not have strict rules governing their form, content, or reach. Nor do we ask why they begin or end where they do, or why they have the titles they do – if they have a title at all. Thus, Dames sets out to answer two questions: "Why chapters exist" – a historical question – and "What exactly they did to our sense of time" – a theoretical question.

To be sure, Dames is well-qualified to carry out this analysis. As a professor of humanities at Columbia University, he focuses on "the history and theory of the novel," marshaling a vast variety and quantity of evidence to make his case. To this end, he structures his book in chapters of its own, beginning with a general introduction before leading into a historical overview, analyzing the chapter's history from its historic origins in antiquity to its ultimate purpose as a citation tool for Biblical transcription. Finally, he focuses his final chapters on the novel: notably, he focuses almost exclusively on the Western novel, emphasizing writers like Goethe, Tolstoy, and Dickens. To support this argument, Dames offers scans of early pages that indicate signs of chapter-like divisions, includes charts and graphs that analyze the lengths of chapters statistically and offers deep consideration of how content and form shape one another. The book benefits from these insets, if only because they force us to consider our own definitions for "chapter." Is a chapter defined by its length? By its subject? Dames uses these tools to make us conceive of the chapter as time, cementing the crux of his argument.

Then we must ask: to what end? This type of book purports to find something remarkable in the history of the "musty" and "common," and thus they must always make a kind of case for its existence to a skeptical reader. In this respect, it is a bit difficult to say who this book is for: it is certainly far too advanced and too densely written for most students, not of much interest to the general public, and perhaps already familiar to experts. There are certainly many interesting observations here. For example, Dames rightly points out that chapter titles are only vaguely part of the novel's content, usually expressed by neither the narrator nor the characters. The chapter is a third point of view, often presenting an ironic commentary on the text. But how useful is this insight? Where is that "so what" that this book is always looking for?

To venture one theory: this book is about the great but often secretive power of the framing device. By conceiving life, history, or politics in chapters, we permit a vast, inchoate blob of time, with all its currents and eddies, to be chopped up into all-too-neat chunks. A canny manipulator can easily exploit the power to reorganize "time as a series of ordered linear segments," and thus manufacture divisions that reflect the interests of the person making the division. Readers of this book will sit up and take notice the next time a conniving politician, smiling influencer, or manipulative ex claims to have started a new chapter and wonder what exactly hides in the white space between the end of one segment and the start of the next.

Readers interested in the history of the novel might enjoy The Lives of the Novel (2013) by Thomas Pavel, while those seeking a book on writing more generally might find A History of Writing (2002) by Ann-Marie Cristin interesting.

Continue reading...

[morvantmortuary]

I tried to post something at the show itself, but tumblr… ate it :’D alas.

so, a few days late but still exciting, have some photos of the tiny!morvants accompanying me and our bestie @bigtiddythanos to the Hozier show over the weekend!!

(left is me trying to take a photo of them in my lap in their Enclosure, right is tiddy generally providing a better angle from where they were sitting in front of us lmao.)

we had really amazing seats at the very end of our row, which meant we both got to go absolutely feral during respective songs (me during Francesca, specifically, bc I didn’t think he was going to play it and then I throttled poor Tiddy’s hands all the way through), and not worry about crowding anyone with our massive emotions lmao

this photo’s a bit zoomed in, but you get the general sense of where we were!

The Man himself was amazing: he was tall, his hair was up and then it was down, and he said the sweetest little “thank you so much! :D” after each song when the crowd lost their minds, as though we’d all just shown up to a little club gig and he hadn’t literally sold out the entire venue. he even came out in the crowd for his first encore, Cherry Wine!! (which I have video of but won’t post so I don’t have to subject people to me singing along under my breath :’D)

and ofc, here he is after his last song of the official set (none other than Take Me to Church, which was its own kind of religious experience ngl), with the pride flag he brought up for his mic:

it’s grainy, but I thought the thumbs up was so cute lmao

part of the original, pre-show post that got eaten was me guessing which song each necromancer(/vampire) would lose their mind during if it got played. however, now that I’ve experienced the whole set for myself, I can tell you with certainty what songs each of them would definitely have flipped out about that evening :D

Maxi - To Be Alone and It Will Come Back, bc they’re both v much how he feels about you. Probably the one freaking out the most during the whole evening; you’ll recall Hoze was his favorite artist to sprawl out on the embalming table and daydream about you to during the early days of your relationship. ;D actually, there was also one dude there in a full suit (with his girlfriend, in her own flowing black dress morticia-style, I was extremely jealous) and I couldn’t help but subtly point him out to Tiddy like ‘yep. that would be our guy. there he is, Mr. Suits-or-Sweatpants-No-Inbetween, the King ♥️’ lol

Hex - Work Song, for the above, which he would’ve been exceptionally excited about as the v last encore, but also Too Sweet bc its a fun jam when he has the radio playing in his dark room or the kitchen

Rora - Like Real People Do, for the same (which she would have insisted on kissing you during), but also the Cherry Wine encore for her own reasons. some things just are too familiar, even when you haven’t bled like a human in a long time.

Seth - Eat Your Young, bc it’s a deeply sexy song about cycles exploitation, which is. his entire vibe tbh, but also secretly From Eden for the above even if he wouldn’t cop to it

Leon - Mostly there just to hang and vibe, but he’d have done the leo dicaprio pointing meme while the necromancers were losing their shit during Take Me to Church like ‘I recognize that one!!! :D’ (he is. not always the most aware of ‘modern’ music, despite having local bands at his bar as often as he can lmao.)

anyway! thank you for humoring me as always 🖤 and thank you once again to our buddy Tiddy for inviting us along 🥰 it was a magical evening, and it’s kickstarted not one but two pieces I was stuck on, so thank you for that too ᕕ( ᐛ )ᕗ

happy may day/beltane to all in the meantime, and I hope everyone’s week is off to a good start! cheers to meeting the halfway point!!!

[theculturedmarxist]

[...]

A long time ago, while conducting research for my master’s thesis on how the economic reforms of [French President] Emmanuel Macron had closed the circle started by [François] Mitterrand, I came to realize that the old Thatcherite idea, “There is no society, only individuals with the freedom of choice,” had become so commonly accepted in contemporary society that both right– and left-wing neoliberals today feel no need to emphasize it. 

Social surveys have also found a shocking lack of empathy and solidarity among communities in the U.S. and Western Europe, exactly at the time the dominant political narratives have begun to insist on inclusiveness and tolerance toward others. Subtle distinctions in definitions can often reveal commonly understood and yet unspoken differences between terms that we prefer to use: Inclusiveness does not necessary oblige solidarity or empathy, just as tolerance in the absolute sense means merely withholding action based on existing animosities, which are acknowledged by the very need for the usage of the term in question. Tolerance, indeed, does not have to mean understanding and accepting increasingly distant “others.”  

A question must be asked: Are we now, through ideological terminology, searching for exactly those things that we are in fact missing in our social reality? The need to define ideological terms prompts this question in that it arises only when certain notions have left the sphere of unspoken social consensus—the very frame of political and social thought. 

In his latest book, The exiled terms, Todor Kuljić, who is among the most internationally recognized Serbian sociologists of the previous and current century, explains how four decades of neoliberal reforms have influenced significant changes in the language we use to discuss ideology and politics, noting that all the terms previously connected to class inequalities, Marxist ideologies, and collective struggles of the working class have been systematically replaced with less critical, less “communist sounding” terms.

In sociology curricula, the terms “exploitation,” “revolution,” and even “humanism” have been almost completely forsaken, while we can see increased usage of words such as “transition,” “transformation,” and “social exclusion.” The term “transition,” a case in point, normalises poverty and corruption in countries that need to be convinced that they will be much better off when they adopt neoliberal economic models. 

The famous comedian George Carlin put forward a notion that there is a cultural tradition in the United States of constantly inventing new terms, and “exiling” the old-fashioned terms, which derives from the constant need to make the brutalities of everyday life more easily accommodated. “Americans have trouble facing the truth,” Carlin once said, “so they invent a kind of soft language to protect themselves from it.” If poor people used to live in slums, to cite one of Carlin’s standup routines, “now ‘the economically disadvantaged’ occupy ‘substandard housing’ in ‘inner cities.’” 

Anthropological studies have shown that this tendency has certain connections with the totemistic belief of the earliest human societies that, by changing the way we verbally identify a certain aspect of reality we can change the reality itself. It appears that this has never been more relevant than in the case of the modern culture of political correctness, which proposes that we accept social problems as consequences of our subconscious thoughts and/or individual actions, and try to solve them by changing the language we use to define them—while never searching for their material causes.

Professor Jordan Peterson has claimed that modern-day political culture developed in a manner in which the previously presumed need for objectivity was replaced with subjective feelings and perceptions, while the very understanding of material reality has been, through relativization, reduced to little more than an inconvenience that can be regulated by state legislation and group stigmatization. On the other hand, Slavoj Žižek holds that it is precisely the abandonment of the collective (ideas) for the individual (interests) that has led our increasingly globalized political culture down this path. The neoliberal, postmodern left has merely followed the neoliberal right of the eighties in the project of eliminating undesirable terminology related to physical, class, and social reality—depending on the preference of each—from the common frames of political debate, since a consensus on understanding material reality is the first and necessary condition of the collective political struggle.

Žižek also claims that the phenomenon of New Age leftists striving toward zealous political correctness merely contributes to depriving formal and informal human relationships of what is the very essence of humanity. This is because following the increasingly strict standards of Newspeak, as Orwell would put it, necessarily increases the distance between people by making them focus on their differences, thus continuously reinforcing the same barriers neoliberal leftists wish to break free of, while, at the same time, leaving them unable to overcome the tensions of every-day interactions through humor and other forms of releasing the burdening contents of the individual and collective subconscious. 

Further, if we take into account the previously mentioned thesis of Professor Kuljić, we can also propose the question: To what extent is the modern neoliberal leftist obsession with political correctness a consequence of the absence of a language and terminology by which young people could articulate the actual causes of their fear and anger and the need to express political radicalism? Of course, leftists of this persuasion remain thoroughly within the existing frame of the globally dominant ideology and never challenge the economic and political system.

At the same time, neoliberal right-wing policies continue to insist on the previously discussed narrative of personal responsibility—or, rather, personal “guilt”—not for the problems of cultural inequalities, which their leftist counterparts remain unable to relate to their actual causes in material reality, but rather for the position of the individual in the new economic order. Now in social media we witness the rise of an entire generation of young conservatives who present success and failure in life—mostly defined by the acquisition of wealth rather than personal happiness—as a consequence of individual decisions and actions, entirely decontextualized and removed from one’s personal circumstances, class background, and social context. 

Unlike the previous authors of the self-help books from the early eighties, these new “life coaches” of the internet are heavily engaged in the relativization of ethics, with some going as far as to conclude that those who stay employed in times of low wages and worsening labor conditions, instead of risking their financial existence with private business gambles, have no one but themselves to blame for being exploited. Thus, in a perverted sense of logical framing, they arrive very close to an argument used by ancient Greek philosophers to justify slavery: “An Athenian would rather kill himself than become a slave.” 

Neoliberal leftists legitimize the unfair treatment of others for personal gain with the condition that you address respectfully the same people whom you are exploiting—and, as well, disregard solidarity as the core value of the left. Contrarily, the neoliberal right wing insists that participation in the hierarchy of social and economic power is a goal necessary to achieve and a matter of personal choice, and not at all of social reality. It is as though they, the neoliberal right wing, have forgotten with how much effort traditional conservatives tried to uphold the principles of ethics—even if many of those principles were not part of the initial humanist–Enlightenment agenda, or universal values as Immanuel Kant would define them, but served only to preserve position and ensure reproduction of the upper classes—as though there truly was no society anymore. 

Not even the Prussian militarists of the old German Empire ever went so far as to assert openly that there is no common good, not even a universal moral code, and that, rather, you should seek to enrich yourself at the expense of others just to prove your own capabilities to a society you don’t even believe in anymore. But modern-day conservatives have crossed this line by seducing today’s ever more fearful youth with the promises that, if they prove capable enough, they can assume the role of the oppressor themselves and exploit the weak, who deserve their fate for failing to seize the “boundless opportunities” of some neoliberal economic paradise.

Thus, prevalent neoliberal left– and right-wing ideologies have not just disregarded, fragmented, or redefined traditionally universalist principles of ethics; they have also forsaken many “core values”—an emphasis on collective solidarity or personal liberty, common wellbeing, or individual morality—which defined the differences between the significant left– and right-wing ideologies of the previous two centuries. Even more important, humanity has been almost completely exiled from the sphere of ideological priorities—in favor of politically correct formality in the case of the New Age left, or, in the case of the New Age right, in favor of a convenient indifference to social problems. The value of humanity, in the sense in which it was understood during the course of the 20th century, will therefore have a hard time finding its way back into the ideological frames of the new world order. 

Luka Filipović, among the youngest Serbians ever to earn his doctorate, holds a Ph.D. awarded by the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade. He has published numerous articles regarding the history of labor movements, communist parties, neoliberal economic reforms, and political turmoil of the late 20th century in Europe and Serbia. His book, Eurokomunizam i Jugoslavija 1968-1980,(Eurocommunism and Yugoslavia 1968–1980), is published this month by the Institute for Contemporary History in Belgrade, where Filipović currently conducts his research.  

[housecatclawmarks]

It feels important to note that while there can be very healthy age gap relationships between adults and there are ppl in their 20s who seek out much older partners (which im not gonna tell them not to! they’re adults w a right to fuck & it’s none of my goddamn business), there is not a ‘positive tradition of gay age gap relationships’ and I think it’s good to asses that statement critically when someone says it to you.

The historic frequency of age gap relationships in Western gay culture specifically, especially Britain, does not come from roots that have anything intrinsically to do with homosexuality. What it comes from is specifically rich, mostly white queer men doing what many, many rich white men have done throughout history regardless of sexuality-using their racial & class power to have consensual or coercive sex with young working class people & people of color. The power imbalance between age&experience AND financial status was romanticized a Lot by these rich gay men in the late 19th and early 20th century (think about ppl like Oscar Wilde, Walt Whitman, E.M. Forster, Edward Carpenter, etc) and relationships with poor young men & sometimes teenaged boys were sought out enthusiastically under the guise of imitating ‘the Greek acceptance of homosexuality’-which makes sense when you consider where & how a lot of these men were educated.

The illegality of gayness & oppression of lgbt people definitely made it hard to find examples of same-gender attracted people in society, which helps contribute to the Greek imitation thing but also more importantly created situations where young lgbt people who were working class, who were immigrants, who weren’t white were facing the most severe consequences under the law for their sexuality & gender expression, were living the hardest lives, & were easier to exploit by rich and powerful men because of it. The ones doing the exploiting weren’t doing it because they were gay, the criminalization of homosexuality just made it easier for them to take advantage as they did the same thing their heterosexual peers did to young women & girls who were working class, immigrants, & women of color.

If anything the fact that conditions in the UK & US have improved so much legally and socially for cis gay people has made it much more achievable to have ethical, healthy age gap relationships between people who want them, even though these issues do still exist. Again, it definitely can and does happen, and adults have the right to date & fuck each other if they want to, but that type of relationship does not need to be culturally tied to something unhealthy, coercive, & produced by classism and racism.

It’s a subject I think a lot of western gay people & historians shy away from talking about and really seeing as what it was because we’re so often wrongly smeared as pedophiles & gay sexuality is accused of being predatory to children & teens as way to harm and criminalize gay people, and I understand the fear of playing into that, which is why it’s so important to me to emphasize again that this exploitation was a product of class and racial inequality and homo/transphobia, not an innate quality of gay or trans society. But we do need to talk about it! We need to address it! And (saying this As one) white gay men NEED to find queer history & role models who aren’t rich, imperialist pedophiles-there have been SO MANY OF US who aren’t that! the majority of queer people in history have not been that! We have a rich culture and history to draw from here without glorifying or toning down really gross, predatory behavior from a handful of wealthy men & the class that enabled them.

[best-underrated-anime]

Best Underrated Anime Group C Round 3: #C5 vs #C6

#C5: A bunch of teenagers are forced to share pain

#C6: Sports anime for people who prefer bildungsromans to sports

Details and poll under the cut!

#C5: Kiznaiver

Summary:

Katsuhira Agata is a quiet and reserved teenage boy whose sense of pain has all but vanished. His friend, Chidori Takashiro, can only faintly remember the days before Katsuhira had undergone this profound change. Now, his muffled and complacent demeanor make Katsuhira a constant target for bullies, who exploit him for egregious sums of money. But their fists only just manage to make him blink, as even emotions are far from his grasp.

However, one day Katsuhira, Chidori, and four other teenagers are abducted and forced to join the Kizuna System as official "Kiznaivers." Those taking part are connected through pain: if one member is injured, the others will feel an equal amount of agony. These individuals must become the lab rats and scapegoats of an incomplete system designed with world peace in mind. With their fates literally intertwined, the Kiznaivers must expose their true selves to each other, or risk failing much more than just the Kizuna System.

Propaganda:

Kiznaiver is an extremely underrated work of Studio Trigger’s and is definitely one of their bests. Not just for the animation, but for the impactful story as well. The characters just feel so real, and this show just makes you think about human connection and how much we might care for each other if we shared our pain. Although it can get a little confusing at the end, the sheer raw emotion is what makes up for everything. Every single one of the characters gets developed in ways that made me smile like an idiot.

Very good but severely underrated anime! Would recommend! :)

Trigger Warnings: Emotional Abuse, Fatphobia, Disordered Eating, Implied Sexual Assault (maybe).

The fact that Yuuta is formerly fat is constantly mocked throughout the series, which leaves a bit of a sour taste in my mouth as a fat person watching the show personally. Yuuta, to maintain his thinness, engages in disordered eating by simply eating a small cube of food every day. Said character is also the subject of an attempted sexual assault by a female character, but I don’t remember correctly if that actually happened or if I just got triggered by the way the scene was portrayed.

#C6: Ping Pong the Animation

Summary:

Despite being polar opposites, Makoto "Smile" Tsukimoto and Yutaka "Peco" Hoshino have been best friends since childhood. Although the overly confident Peco strives to be the best ping-pong player in the world, he often skips practice, earning the ire of his fellow teammates on the Katase High School ping-pong team. Meanwhile, Smile—in spite of his innate talent for the sport—cannot help but hold back his full strength when playing against others. Through their mutual love for ping-pong, the two have developed a bond that is seemingly unbreakable.

When Peco hears that an ex-national team player from China is coming to Japan, he drags Smile over to rival Tsujido High School to observe them. The subsequent trip leads to a clash between Peco and Kong Wenge, who overwhelmingly defeats the former in one game. Stunned by such a comprehensive loss, Peco finds himself questioning why he plays to begin with. Seeing his potential as a player, Katase's coach begins to train Smile to overcome his hesitation, but he is reluctant to play if it is not for enjoyment.

As the two struggle to find meaning in the sport, a plethora of stronger players—each with their own internal strifes—await them at the inter-high tournament, where only the very best can persevere. But when these young athletes let their unbridled ambition go unchecked, the hardships they face paint a somber reality as they pursue glory.

Propaganda:

An experimental director (Masaaki Yuasa) adapting a work from a very stylized and emotionally-focused shonen mangaka (Taiyo Matsumoto). This is an anime that feels more like watching an indie arthouse movie than a shonen anime. Featuring characters and arcs that subvert standard anime tropes, it gives an incisive picture into youths on the verge of growing up and learning responsibility. If you want to watch a short anime (one 11-episode season!) which will include cool sports action (and that’s coming from someone who is not generally into sports animes) the matches given weight by the primary use of them in narrative being as checkpoint in the characters’ growths.

I tend to prefer shojo over shonen for being more introspective, with the emotional arcs developed slower and more subtly, but for me this shonen hits a sweet middle ground of having that more internal feel, while getting to do the shonen things of having cooler, action-focused animation and character relationships which are about friendship rather than romance, and character arcs that are about trying to strive hard to achieve a dream. The show is quite well critically regarded, but a lot of anime fans get turned off by the unusual art style, and there isn’t really a fandom for it, so I think it counts as underrated anyways! Anyways, I think it delivers a really impactful and complete story-arc in a short time, and it leaves you feeling like you’ve grown alongside the characters, no matter how old you are (no seriously, my 50-year-old mother walked away saying she didn’t know anime was such a profound genre when I made her watch this).

Trigger Warnings: None.

When reblogging and adding your own propaganda, please tag me @best-underrated-anime so that I’ll be sure to see it.

If you want to criticize one of the shows above to give the one you’re rooting for an advantage, then do so constructively. I do not tolerate groundless hate or slander on this blog. If I catch you doing such a thing in the notes, be it in the tags or reblogs, I will block you.

Know one of the shows above and not satisfied with how it’s presented in this tournament? Just fill up this form, where you can submit revisions for taglines, propaganda, trigger warnings, and/or video.

[mermaidsirennikita]

Can I ask your opinion on blonde. I’m always interesting in your opinions on movies.

Sure! And thanks, I appreciate that.

I think it's just a really bad movie. I was very open to it--I enjoyed the campiness of the early 2000s miniseries. I have nothing against biopics in theory, and I think it's okay for biopics to critically examine their subject... but I don't think that a clear misogynist who hates Marilyn Monroe should've made a movie about Marilyn Monroe.

Tbh, the idea of this being a biopic is flawed, because it's an adaptation of a Joyce Carol Oates novel that is in itself a work of fiction. But the promotion of the movie did not emphasize that at all; even JCO seems to not be as aware of that reality as she once did, and Dominik really only fell back on the book when he was getting heat from certain interviewers; otherwise, he just referred to Marilyn rather baldly, like this was a conventional biopic.

And even without his disgust for Marilyn being clear in those interviews, he obviously hated her based off the movie. The movie is about creating a fetishized wankfest of a woman for men who like idea of punishing hypersexualized (notice that I don't say hypersexual--because frankly, as long as you're being safe with yourself and your partners, you as an individual being hypersexual is not wrong, but Marilyn was NOT a hypersexual person) women. It literally felt like torture porn. I don't often feel like... triggered by movies? But this movie felt triggering at points. I don't even think it needed to connect to a specific experience to trigger you, tbh; you just have to be a woman who's experienced bullshit in the world, because it is just a violently misogynistic, woman-hating film. But truly, special shoutout to the loving night vision shot of Marilyn's nude form, hair fully done, as she cluelessly gets out of bed covered in blood following her second forced abortion.

Speaking of those abortions! Not that I require total accuracy from movies, but I've never seen super strong evidence either way that Marilyn had abortions. She could have; many actresses in the day did, and there's absolutely nothing wrong with that. Marilyn definitely had documented miscarriages, though, and fertility issues that gave her a lot of grief. So to see her fertility and her reproductive autonomy (or lackthereof) used as a plot point to elicit more shock and awe was really... gross. I have a big issue in general with fertility struggles being used as soapy drama in biopic content (I really hated the fucking goofy "I'm gonna have a stillborn baby on the lawn" moment in The Spanish Princess, for example, because it was so over the top and so easily mocked online that it seemed to just... make a joke out of a real woman's very real pregnancy losses). This took that to another level, because not only did Marilyn have forced abortions--it was like... They wanted us to see that she had no choice in the matter, was literally physically forced to have them, while also HATING HER FOR IT. Like oh, she considered the first abortion for a minute, so it's all her fault that she was then dragged into an operating room, strapped to bed, and forced into an abortion. Twice! With a vagina's eye view. And in case you didn't pick up on then, we have her fucking fetus talk to her while she's pregnant and blame her for it, before she like? Violently miscarries after tripping on the beach?

Never mind that like... The JFK shit was totally unnecessary, totally exploitative, and again, totally based on nothing, just there to make fun of her. I tend to raise an eyebrow at the Twitter threads that went to every effort to convince everyone that Marilyn didn't have an affair with JFK because... there's a lot of reason to believe that she did, and quite possibly (probably?) slept with his brother as well. And who cares if she did, honestly? That was JFK's asshole maneuver to do to his wife, and Marilyn does not lose merit as a person for sleeping with him--to me, bending over backwards to act like she didn't is reinforcing this idea that you must be evil if you make a mistake like that.

But... There's no evidence to suggest that it was anything other than a consensual affair. I mean, don't get me wrong, JFK was a rich, powerful, sex-obsessed man in the 1960s, so I feel that him assaulting women is totally on the table; but there's nothing legit out there indicating that he assaulted Marilyn. So that was just there to... shock us? I've seen some saying that it's meant to like, rattle the American idealism surrounding the Kennedys? My brother in Christ, we like... know... the Kennedys were into some shady shit.... And we certainly know that JFK fucked everything that moved, so MYTH: BUSTED on that one. A while ago!

I just think that it was a badly made movie for navel gazers who want to sound intellectual while enjoying torture porn starring America's most visually iconic actress (and really, most visually iconic sex symbol). Directed, worst of all, at someone who did fucking nothing to deserve this kind of backlash. She was an intelligent, talented, in many ways progressive, mentally ill woman who made some choices that hurt her, in large part because she was extremely traumatized from a young age, and the trauma piled on. She also had some fun times and some genuine friendships and complex relationships, and we never get to see that shit in media. We never see Marilyn happy, even though she totally was happy at points in her life. We never see Marilyn gossiping with other girls in the studio system and or vamping it up a bit for the fun of it.

And I also! Think! Ana did a shitty job as Marilyn! Lol I kept seeing people tout that performance as the movie's saving grace, but I'll be honest man... Homegirl didn't have much to go off with the script, to be fair--most of it was "say 'oh no daddy'" in a little girl lost voice or "look clueless" but... That was a rough go. I know Marilyn's accent is a hard one to get without it sounding like a mockery, and Ana's own natural accent is hard to cover, but uh... Yeah, bro. She sounded like a Cuban Marilyn Monroe impersonator the entire movie, and that was INCREDIBLY distracting. Bobby Cannavale was actually a really good DiMaggio, but like. I am not entirely sure that Bobby was in the same film as everyone else.

Anyway, I hated it, and I really like Be Kind Rewind's review of why this movie felt so much worse than two other not-good biopics about famous women we view with tragedy in mind (one of which I did actively loathe, but not as much as Blonde--Blonde makes Spencer look like a decent movie).

[vitos-ordination-song]

For this retrospective, I’m not going to discuss any of Butler’s short stories. I’m leaving those as little treats to read down the line. I’ve read “Bloodchild” and really liked it, and a lot of what I say about her novels definitely applies to it.

Butler had very specific interests. Her Patternist series and Xenogenesis series have a lot of overlap, as do Fledgling and even Kindred. The Parable series is stand out among all of her works for not playing into some of her usual themes, though there’s overlap there too. Kindred also stands out for its subject matter and approach.

Butler’s most common themes are parasitism/symbiosis, seduction, hybridity, reproduction/sexuality, pragmatism, unequal power dynamics, human cruelty, and the interplay between free will and external forces. Her writing style is frank and rarely embellished. Her characters are strong, determined, intelligent, and often brutal. Her stories are unique, strange, and twisted; most do not go where she does.

It was a bit difficult to finish completing her novels because the ones that aren’t as good are so similar to the better ones that I didn’t get much out of them. I would not recommend anyone read the Patternist series. It has some good moments, and I can’t think of any other books so centered on raw power struggles, situated in both the realms of family and species survival. However, they aren’t as interesting as her other works, and they aren’t very emotionally involving. I also wouldn’t recommend Fledgling. It’s probably the most poorly written and least exciting of her books; it starts out interesting but has too many characters and too few reasons to care about the narrative.

Fledgling, the Patternist books, and Xenogenesis are all broadly about the same thing: non-human (or greater than human) lifeforms rendering humans into their symbionts (or parasitic hosts). What exactly this means does vary from book to book, but there’s a lot of commonalities: in (almost) all cases, the life-forms grant humans longer, healthier, stronger lives, but it comes at a cost, typically one of domination and exploitation. The only exception to this are the Patternists themselves; a mutation of humanity, they take advantage of their weaker counterparts, often with no regard to their well-being, and give them nothing in return. Alien intelligences, however, are a little bit nicer. Or maybe it’s better to say they’re not cruel, only self-interested.

The best of this flavor of Butler is certainly the Xenogenesis series. I would recommend it to anyone who can appreciate it. To be honest, I love it so much and have so many thoughts on it that I’m going to find it difficult to talk about. Some day I’ll do more of a retrospective on this series in particular. For now, I’ll say a couple brief things and try to leave it at that. Firstly, the series has the best worldbuilding of any of her works. It is also the most emotionally gripping of her writing with a possible exception of Kindred. I loved Dawn, but Adulthood Rites is my favorite book Butler wrote hands down. Imago, I didn’t like as much, but it’s still important in the arc of the series, bringing it all full circle. Xenogenesis is Butler as her most transgressive—I LIKE weird sex stuff, but I can still feel Lilith’s horror on realizing what the Oankali wanted from her. Speaking of the Oankali, by creating them, Butler gave me something I’ve wanted for years: real aliens! Aliens which are truly different from humanity, from all life on earth, but so believable you feel you could touch them! Xenogenesis is the purest of science fiction for its reliance on speculative biology to create an authentic alien species, and guess what, they’re fucking freaks who want to have sex with you. The series also has the grandest ideas of any Butler novel, essentially serving as a treatise on human nature. As a final note, I’ll say that Akin is my favorite character Butler created.

The Parable series is the first thing I read by her. It’s dystopian fiction, full of unending misery barely balanced out by the main character’s sheer determination. Both books are enjoyable as survival stories and also offer dire warnings about the future, many of which have come true since the series was written in the 90s. The second book is stronger than the first, more complicated for introducing a second narrator. The strained relationship between Lauren, her daughter, and her brother is some of Butler’s most compelling character writing. There were a lot of truly harrowing moments; the books are definitely not for the faint of heart. Probably the most interesting aspect is the Earthseed religion, which the reader gets to see grow from its infancy to the stars. I ended up really feeling for Lauren and cried on finishing the series. I would recommend the books, though I don’t think they’re quite as good as Xenogenesis.

I’ll talk about Kindred last. It stands out among all Butler’s novels by not having a science fiction element at all. Like Fledgling, it could be called fantasy, but it has no real supernatural elements beyond inexplicable time travel, which is then used for grounded historical fiction. Butler’s purpose with the novel is very clear and very well executed. Modern people (in her time and now) have lost touch with the reality of slavery. Kindred works to make it very real. I think it’s a must-read for anyone interested in her writing or in the history of American slavery. Butler shows a deft hand at bringing Dana, and thus the reader, back to the 1800s. The story is unique; I suppose it could be compared to Butler’s Wild Seed, which is the best of the Patternist series. Both books focus on complicated relationships between abusive men and women who have to put up with them/begrudgingly like them. However, Kindred has a much more satisfying conclusion and is really unlike any other time travel story or slave narrative. The set up creates complicated relationships and difficult choices for the main character. Rufus Weylin is a fascinating and disgusting character, one of the most layered Butler created. I’m really glad I read this one.

Butler’s harsh worlds and twisted vision spoke to me, as did her stories of human determination and liberation. I wish she’d been given more of a chance, because she was a clear talent. People often compare her to Le Guin, but they really have nothing in common. However, consider that Le Guin was decades older than Butler and died more than a decade after. She was from a well-off academic family, while Butler was raised by a single mother who worked as a maid. I’m not trying to speak down to Butler, who was a formidable person regardless circumstances. I just wish she’d had more time and hadn’t had as many constraints as she did. I can only imagine the strange places she would have taken me, because one thing’s for certain: nothing short of death was going to make that woman stop writing.

[ardn632fernbellbowers]

A BREIF HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY AND TRUTH

PART ONE

Photographs have long been seen as authentic representations of truth, but this belief has been increasingly questioned, especially with the rise of manipulated and faked images in the post-truth era. Recent examples include accusations against Fox News in June 2020 for digitally altering images related to the Black Lives Matter protests, which were deemed unethical and misrepresentative. The invention of Photoshop in 1990 contributed to the blurring of truth and artifice in photography, making photo manipulation common. Despite this, photos are still viewed as a means to authenticate events, as reflected in the phrase "pics, or it didn’t happen." The tension between photography and truth, however, dates back years and years and years.

It is widely agreed that photography was invented 1839 by Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre and William Henry Fox Talbot. Daguerre introduced the daguerreotype, and Talbot presented photogenic drawings, which led to the development of the calotype and the concept of photographic negatives and positives. Early photography aimed to capture reality, but limitations in technology, like long exposure times, prevented them from fully capturing this.

Due to these restrictions, photographers edited their works to better reflect their vision of reality. For example, Gustave Le Grey combined multiple negatives to capture both sky and sea in his seascapes, and Linnaeus Tripe painted clouds onto his negatives. These practices show that retouching and editing have been so important to photography since the beginning.

The photographic portrait became extremely popular upon its arrival, and for many these portraits seemed very truthful. However, there was room to move in the photographic format, to develop and present different visual identities and personalities through self-fashioning, staging and creative intervention. For example In response to his alleged injustice, Bayard staged a portrait entitled Le Noyé (Self Portrait as a Drowned Man) in 1840. It was the first faked, staged portrait and was accompanied by a statement indicating Bayard’s turn to suicide because of the lack of recognition he received by the French government for his role in the invention of photography. I think this guy was totally ahead of his time and this is definitely something we would see today.

I found the section on Aboriginal photographs very interesting. Majority of the photographs taken were exploitative and taken by photographers only looking to frame them in a bad light. The photographs were purposefully derogatory, showing Indigenous Australians as a passive, exotic people, frozen in time and disengaged with the changing world around them. The photographs intended to reinforce European supremacy and the continued control of Aboriginal people. At the time, majority of people looking at a photograph would have completely believed them as the truth and paired with articles- this was a perfect way to spread hatred about Aboriginal people.

The widespread commercialisation and interest in portrait photography during the nineteenth century, combined with the relative lack of knowledge surrounding the medium, provided ample opportunities for fraud, perhaps best demonstrated by the thriving trade of spirit photography. Spirit photography was the act of creating a double exposure in a portrait, leaving behind a ghost like figure behind the subject- today this would have been obvious what it was, however at the time it was easy to believe.

Documentary photography was hard in the 19th century, as it was not as simple and just grabbing a camera and snapping a photograph. Often photographers would have to stage their photographs, leading the question of whether the documentary style photographs were very truthful. A notable example is the widely debated photograph Valley of the Shadow of Death by Roger Fenton (1819-69), taken in 1855. Roger rolled cannonballs into the valley, creating a deeper sense of warfare and bombing.

PART TWO

The article 'A brief history of photography and truth' talks about the history of photography and the development from BW to COLOUR over the 19th century. It then goes on to tell stories of famous manipulated photographs that have changed the trajectory of photography today.

In the early twentieth century, black and white photography was very common, despite the existence of colour photography. Before colour photography, debates existed about the realism of black and white images. Black and white photos are often seen as more truthful and serious, while colour images can seem unrealistic. Recently, there's a trend of digitally coloring old black and white photos, making history more relatable. While this practice humanises the past, it also raises concerns about altering the original narrative and context of historical images. I think this is an interesting point, as I often see apps advertised online that turn old b/w photographs into colour. At first, I thought this was a cool idea but upon investigation I think this ruins the essence of the original photographs- often the introduction of colour makes the photographs look very unreal and a bit silly.

Portrait photography created a lot of distrust within the photography medium after photos like Stalin's portraits during the Cold War came out. When Stalin gained power in the 1920s, many photographs were taken of the leader, often depicting him with fellow Communist party members. Over time, these photographs were edited to align with shifting political and propaganda narratives within the party, removing members who were killed and no longer aligned with the party.

"The image created is framed by what the photographer perceives to be the most important or most aesthetically attractive moment. Frank Webster notes that photography needs to be viewed as a ‘selection and interpretation of the world in two respects. First, from the point of view of the photographer who selects and interprets a scene of incident in the process of encoding an image. Second, from the perspective of a view who interprets (reads) the photograph in the process of decoding. This orientation views the photographic communication as an active process of interpretation, by both the creator and the viewer"

Adobe photoshop was released in 1990, opening a whole new world for photography and post production. The computer software enabled photographs to be easily and effectively manipulated through actions like cloning and removing sections of images, and adjusting the opaqueness, hue and saturation of photographs. From the day photoshop was released, photography could no longer be classed as a truthful medium. The apparent reality and honesty perceived to be inherent to the medium of photography meant that it could be readily manipulated in the service of implementing a supposed ‘truth’, whether for propaganda purposes, commercial gains, colonial ideologies or to prove something that seemed unproveable, from fairies to spirits.

RESPONSE

I found both articles interesting and informative for the topic we are covering. I had no idea photograph manipulation dated back so long, and the examples are so interesting to see what people believed was real at the time. It is obvious this history has completely shaped how photography is viewed today and whether it can be classed as truthful or not. I think depending on the intent behind photography manipulation it is great. Relating this to my everyday life, I am constantly manipulating photos for my Instagram with filters and framing etc. I have found the history super interesting and have really enjoyed both these readings.

In terms of image manipulations I can think of, here are a couple:

Just recently, Kate Middleton came under fire for a photograph of her with her children, which professionals picked up as being edited. This caused a big storm on social media, leading Kate to make a statement about how and why she had edited the photograph. While to the naked eye this photograph seems completely normal, it is interesting it created such a scene, however it is the royal family so I think anything they do creates a scene.

I also remember this photoshop fail from a while back, Reese Witherspoon appears to have three legs, this is another image which created controversy on the internet.

[janedyson4thyear]

Millner, Jacqueline, and Catriona Moore. Contemporary Art and Feminism. Google Books, Routledge, 5 July 2021,

books.google.co.nz/books?hl=en&lr=&id=_h0vEAAAQBAJ&oi=fnd&pg=PT6&dq=feminism+abstract+painting&ots=4uLU1ewri9&sig=-GlB0vni50kWscSKQx2DWZe1bik&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false . Accessed 16 Mar. 2024.

A rounded history of the deep connections between female/femme abstract and contemporary art, and feminism. It has a lot of good references relevant to the topic of BLAH BLAH

Pg 85 -88

The opaqueness of modern or postmodern art, intended to confound the intellectual and aesthetic capacities of the viewer,  - how is it that contemporary art, at least in certain incarnations,

overtly positions itself as didactic

feminist theory and feminist art allows us both to trace the

development of this trend and to understand its currency.

Feminist art is by definition activist and has

consequently sought to transform audiences beyond art world initiates

Feminism’s early discovery of the relationship between ones very (private, individual) subjectivity

and the public sphere shaped its political strategy and from the outset tied transfor-

mation to teaching. Feminist consciousness-raising was based around personal story

telling; it provided space for many perspectives and acknowledged the relative nature

of knowledge and its interconnection with power.

searching for ways to understand political action beyond thepredominant Marxist framework of‘revealing’the‘hidden truths’of exploitation.

Joseph Beuys’lectures as performance andradical pedagogical experiments are an important historical antecedent here, they‘simultaneously challenged and reinforced the patriarchal power structure of the acad-emy and the authority of the artist’,5

Suzanne Lacy’s early public projects (discussed in detail below), which createdworks through personal story and supportive listening environments and have beenretrospectively described as‘expanded public pedagogy’.

feminist work reinserted the body an

d the psyche into institutional critique

Feminism contributions to changing the teaching of art - a guide sharing knowledge instead of teaching from one side

Pg 101 -

Inspired by playground design, brightly coloured and beautifullyfinished, Mel-bourne-based Emily Floyd’s installations, often in public spaces, conflate play, peda-gogy and art to loosen up the viewer’s disposition to learn. The appealing materialpresence of these objects and the physical interaction they invite are key to this con-ceptual loosening, or‘active learning’to use radical educator Rudolf Steiner’sphrase.As Australian critic Wes Hill observes,‘Similar to the way in which children play withbuilding blocks, viewers are directed toward the process of engaging with the con-structed components of her work, where‘meaning’remains open-ended’.114According to Floyd,‘contemporary art itself is the most current form of alternativeeducation’, and exhibitions can function as‘a series of forms that might temporarilyfree us from the act of explaining’,

The fluorescent mixed messages and sentiments offer no answers or solutions. But this fits. Contemporary feminism by its very definition is confusing, unfinished, hard to define and temporal.

How much of pedagogy, even in creativefields, remains an exercise in killing imagination and creative thinking

https://www.crossart.com.au/future-feminist-archive/

Pg 129 craftivsm 

material ethics of careIntroductionIn response to US art historian Linda Nochlin’sfamousquestion,‘Why have therebeen no great women artists?’,1feminists have long argued that women have alwayscontributed to culture; however the fact is that they‘speak’from historically margin-alised positions within that culture—spaces that for too long have been‘hidden fromhistory’.

By attending to these spaces and revaluing women's traditional arts,feminists challenged spurious delineations between what is private and public business, what is domestic and what is political

Craftivism is the practice of engaged creativity, especially regarding political orsocial causes. By using their creative energy to help make the world a betterplace, craftivists help bring about positive change via personalized activism.Craftivism allows practitioners to customize their particular skills to address particular causes

[finely-tuned-line]

RP:

Log 232

FTL: For once, progress has been at the typical pace. I do believe that my workaround to the issue that is my lack of knowledge about the subject of purposed organisms will indeed be successful.

FTL: I have simulated what the genetics of a green lizard capable of eating poleplants and defending itself against one would look like. It's rather interesting how it is within my limitations to modify specifically only its digestive system, outside of them to be able to create complex purposed organisms. My knowledge is rather specific, and I have been more.. salty about that, as of late. That's an emotion. Take that, LIFEGIVER.

FTL: Purposed organisms most likely fall into two.. categories. They're not true categories, as that requires clear, hard lines to draw the distinction by, but they are somewhat clear. Simple and complex purposed organisms. At least, those are the best terms I could come up with for them, I do not believe that I'm the best at naming things.

FTL: Simple purposed organisms are often the results of small purposed modifications that do result in the lifeform doing the task it was intended to do. If I were to define them clearly, simple purposed organisms are when instincts and general make-up of the creature are not changed. They fulfill their task, but not singlemindedly, as most purposed organisms do. I think they're a lot more uncommon, but they do fall within my capabilities of creation.

FTL: Complex purposed organisms are well... everything else. Most purposed organisms are these. Created for the task at hand, and only that. More sophisticated. Potentially intelligent and potentially aware. Complex, as the title implies.

FTL: As I said, they're not strict categories by any means, and I'm quite sure that they'd fall apart rather quickly if I were to witness more purposed organisms, but they do provide some sort of structure. Not that I'll be using these terms officially, I suppose they're a means of solidifying the knowledge I have gained from all of this, especially from finding a workaround.

FTL: As I mentioned in log 231, I have isolated the major parts of the green lizard's genetics that are key to its instincts. If I were to somehow exploit its territoriality, making my immediate surroudings its 'home', for lack of a better word... That could work. Though I am unsure how to do so. Perhaps releasing it and keeping it confined within the specified area would do the trick. I could then monitor both its brain activity and its genetics to note down any changes. Though I do doubt that genetics will be changing, that is not something typically found within green lizards, though it is good practice.

FTL: As for the aforementioned modifications to help it in the defeat of poleplants, I did not change much. Green lizards are most likely already hardy enough to withstand a poleplant, I'm sure that it didn't need much changing for this particular context. Though it is far from perfect, as all lifeforms are.

FTL: But how to make it leave its designated 'home' area in order to make it set upon the journey for poleplants... Perhaps artificial food scarcity would do the trick, though I am unsure of how I'd do that. Though there is the fact that my south-eastern side is quite barren, if I released it there and let it claim that area as its territory...

FTL: As incredibly roundabout as all this is, this could work! I'm not too sure, but it definitely could work! This is so very interesting... I've never done something quite like this before. So many problems to solve, not that I am enthusiastic about doing so. It's an interesting challenge, one I do not often find within my typical experiments. Of course I still do find challenge in those typical experiments, but this is a different type of challenge. One that I am none too keen to experience too often. Going back to the typical experiments will be a refreshing dose of familiarity, no matter how unconventional (to me) the white lizard-poleplant hybrid experiment even is.

FTL: I am so near to success. I must say, no matter how different it is, I've missed this.

[fzzr]

Working!! is the Perfect 8/10 Anime

Now that I wrote On Rating Anime, and "Perfection" I'm going to talk about an exception to that approach. My definition of a 10/10 anime is one that is Perfect In Every Way That Matters. Working!!, also known as Wagnaria!!, is unquestionably an 8/10. It is also, in its own way, Perfect. Working!! does not want to be one of the Great Works Of Art, but it does have Something To Say. Over the course of three seasons and a special, it manages to deliver on multiple stories about love in many forms while never losing sight of the fun.

Working!! is a 2010 comedy anime about an ensemble cast of weirdos who work in a family restaurant called Wagnaria. It is based on a 4-koma (four panel) manga of the same name, so episodes are mostly a collection of shorter scenes with only vague continuity between them. The larger continuity of the show is carried more by the development of the relationships among the characters, as opposed to the twists and turns of any plot.

Characters

It's an ensemble cast, so here come a lot of names.

Popura "Poplar" Taneshima - Female, 17 years old, high school student, part-time waiter. Popura is short enough to be mistaken for a middle schooler, and definitely has a complex about it. She is unfailingly positive, hard working, and just wants everyone to get along.

Souta Takanashi - Male, 16 years old, high school student, part-time waiter. Takanashi is a guy who really, really likes small things. He works at Wagnaria specifically because the diminutive Popura asked him to and working there lets him be around her. Both of Souta's parents are generally absent due to work, so he lives with his four sisters as one of the more functional members of the household.

Mahiru Inami - Female, 17 years old, high school student, part-time waiter. Inami has extreme androphobia, to the point of physically attacking any man who gets within a few feet of her. This is exacerbated by the fact that she is physically very strong, despite her slight build. Despite the obvious disadvantages of this quirk when interacting with the public, she does her best at her job. As the only male waiter, Takanashi is the primary victim of her reflexive violence. For seemingly obvious reasons, Inami is largely estranged from her father.

Kyouko Shirafuji - Female, 28 years old, manager. Kyouko does the absolute minimum necessary to get by, and is more than willing to exploit her position to her advantage. In practice, that mostly just means feeding herself off the restaurant's supplies, to the chagrin of most of the staff. Her apathy is not absolute, and if shenanigans genuinely threaten the stability of the restaurant she will step in.

Yachiyo Todoroki - Female, 20 years old, floor chief. Yachiyo worships the very ground Kyouko walks on. She blatantly enables Kyouko's sloth, and jealously guards against anyone else taking up more of Kyouko's attention than is absolutely necessary. She also carries a katana at all times, while completely oblivious of how intimidating this makes her.

Jun Satou - Male, 20 years old, head chef. Jun is very capable but has trouble communicating anything not related to work. He has a crush on Yachiyo that is extremely obvious to anyone with an ounce of social intelligence (so, barely 1/3 of the cast, and certainly not including Yachiyo herself). His height and stoic manner make him somewhat intimidating, and he uses that to keep things around him (partially) in order.

Hiroomi Souma - Male, at least 20 years old, sous chef. Souma is outwardly pleasant, but is very perceptive and willing to exploit the things he knows about people to get them to do what he wants. Luckily, all he usually wants is small favors around work.

Hyougo Otoo - Male, top head of the restaurant. He is rarely present, as he is often abroad searching for his long-missing wife. When he is in town, he is very subject to intimidation from the frankly terrifying female staff and rarely pushes back on any shenanigans.

"Aoi Yamada" - Female, allegedly 16 years old, waiter. Yamada is clearly running away from home under a fake name. The very forgiving Otoo has allowed her to live in the attic of Wagnaria in exchange for her working as a waiter. Unfortunately she is clumsy, self-important, and generally a pain in the butt.

Summary

The first season of Working!! is dedicated almost entirely to meeting the cast and coming to understand their relationships. It is a comedy at all times, with most of the humor coming from the wackiness that results from very weird people interacting in different subsets and situations. There are many sources of chaos and humor - Yamada causing problems accidentally, Souma causing problems deliberately, and generally all the fun that comes from the wild interactions that follow from the quirky staff of Wagnaria.

As the show goes on, relationships slowly but surely develop. Takanashi and Inami, forced together by circumstance, come to develop feelings for one another. This is very hard for them to recognize, because Inami is still likely to respond to being startled by Takanashi in any way using force. In the meantime, Satou's feelings for Yachiyo only intensify. Yachiyo's fixation on Kyouko make him feel that any approach will be doomed from the start, but with the unsolicited help of other staff members they inch ever so slightly closer together.

Parallel to the romantic plots, the various separated families begin to be pulled back together. These storylines contain the spoilers, so I'll be oblique. At first as we learn about the Inami, Takanashi, and Yamada families, we find that we mostly don't learn about them. For their own reasons and in their own ways, the characters manage to step around exposing those parts of themselves to each other. Yamada is forced to reconnect when her family comes looking for her. Otoo's wife re-enters the picture, but for humorous reasons she is blown back out again. Inami's father is hesitant to re-emerge, but it is clear that he has something to apologize for. Finally, Takanashi's active efforts to avoid talking about his mother become abruptly very understandable when we meet her.

A Different Kind of Foil

Working!! does something a bit unusual with narrative foils. Instead of character foils, it has contrasting relationships. The initially doubly oblivious Inami-Takanashi relationship is contrasted with the unidirectional Yachiyo-Satou relationship. Otoo's quest to reunite with his wife contrasts with Yamada's efforts to avoid reuniting with her own family. In the later parts of the show, Inami's estrangement from her father is compared to Takanashi's disconnect with his mother. These contrasts are Working!!'s secret sauce when it comes to telling its stories about love.

The Inami-Takanashi and Yachiyo-Satou comparison lets it examine developing and recognizing romantic love. Here are multiple ways people can come to develop feelings for each other. What sort of obstacles might they face? What keeps them from recognizing the feelings they have? What are the consequences for their other relationships as things change?

The Otoo and Yamada contrast is about separated families. For Otoo, separation is a matter of circumstance rather than choice, and both of them make great effort to reunify. On the Yamada side the separation is only desired on one side - the other seeks reunification just as intently as Otoo does. What is it that makes returning someone home a matter of persuasion instead of simply finding them? Why and how might someone want to change their family circumstance, and how far would they go to achieve that? How do separation by chance and choice feel different?

The parental relationships of Takanashi and Inami are the most serious part of the show - it's very possible to argue that their parents emotionally abused them. Since these are stories about parents and children, they are largely about control. For Inami, where is the line between raising your child in the way you see fit and manipulating them abusively? For Takanashi, how much control of a child's life trajectory can a parent exercise by fiat?

Never Drop the Smile

Now, with all that heavy business about broken families and whatnot, you may be wondering "hey, is this one of those comedies that actually turns into a drama later and isn't as fun?" To that I am pleased to respond in the negative. Working!! manages to stay funny even through all of that. The way it achieves this is simple, yet genius. Every place a dramedy would have a dark or edgy reason some family fell apart, Working!! has a funny one.

I don't want to spoil all the jokes, so I'll just share one: Otoo is looking for his wife, who disappeared years ago. A darker show would have it be that she ran away, or he did something that pushed her away which he now regrets. But no, he's looking for her because she's lost. As in, her sense of direction is so bad that she has also been trying to get home for years and cannot find her way back.

Conclusion

Score: 8/10. This is a show that wants to be a light and fluffy and comfortable, and it does that to a T. What makes it the perfect 8/10 is that it does that while simultaneously exploring love from many different angles.

Recommendation: You should watch Working!! Yes, you. The power level requirement is nominal, and if you have ever struggled with acknowledging or expressing your love for another person (romantic or otherwise) you will find a way to connect with it. It's also just a lot of fun all around.

Comparisons

Toradora! is the greatest love story ever told, and it happens to be a romcom with a violent tsundere main girl and an extended cast of weirdos with a lot more going on than it seems. Working!! thus stands in the shadow of Toradora! in a few ways. The plot-signifcant cast of Working!! is larger than Toradora!’s, which means the show doesn’t give the core relationships as much time as they might otherwise have - but if it didn’t have a cast of weirdos, it wouldn’t be Working!! Toradora! actually does have to yield to Working!! on one point - the explorations of parental relationships. For Toradora!, it comes up in only a few arcs, whereas in Working!! it weaves through whole seasons and is much better integrated into the last minute will things fall apart twist.

Saekano, well. Instead of turning up the dial on romance, it turned it up on the other themes, and on drama. Season 2 of Saekano and of Working!! are nothing alike. And yet… in the Saekano movie, it brings all the weirdos together and has all the shenanigans fall together in just the right way to make the ending happen. Working!! does that too, particularly in the special. The difference is it never loses sight of being a comedy. It teases being a little dark for a moment here or there, but it never actually makes you worry. The degree of contrast is part of what makes Saekano an amazing show, but sometimes you just want a comfy time and that’s what Working!! does best.

Shakugan no Shana, like Working!!, turned up the volume on romance in season 2. Going into season 3 and the special Working!! managed to keep the volume going up at a gentle pace, while Shana dropped the romance almost completely and decided to be an action show again. They end up not being comparable, but I at least wanted to acknowledge the parallel.

Dog Days is also not quite a fair comparison, because it doesn’t have an ending (the ones above all do). Dog Days is extremely light and fluffy, even more so than Working!! Dog Days unfortunately falls into the harem trap of never wanting to wrap things up or even really move things forward. It also has a massive cast, and most of the show is just mixing them up into different subgroups to see how they bounce off each other. When it does do a very-lightly-dark section, it doesn’t actually make full use of its cast. The shenanigans were fun, but they didn’t mean anything. In every other show listed above, even Shana to some extent, the shenanigans retroactively justify what might have seem like wasted time because they are tied together in the end.

Final Thoughts

Working!! is a tough one for me. I really like it, but I have to acknowledge that it's not as ambitious as 9s like Oregairu or Monogatari nor as technically excellent as 9s like One Punch Man or Fate/Zero. Among my 8s, it is certainly one of the ones I recommend the strongest due to what I would consider its near-universal accessibility and appeal.

[gelmaah]

First bass lessons, how it went.

August blog post (2022) 🥤

What to expect from tutors, some mindsets to be aware of.

Quick blog today.

This month was when I went to my first bass lesson after maybe a month of practicing on my own.

(example of music material you might receive, very simple but gets the point across, I like it.)

I went into the practice room and met the teacher–with a mindset of learning. One of my largest hurdles when starting something like this is making it clear why you want to do this, because if you don't, the focus of the lessons can stray from what you are trying to achieve. So this time I wanted to be more open to exposing my intentions to the teacher as the tutor would ask me why I wanted to learn.

This was embarrassing in its own right, but worth it in the end.

Share with your instructor why you want to learn and show what you're interested in, because thats faster than letting them figure out for themselves. There's no reason as to why they wouldn't listen to you.

I think reaffirming why you are doing something and reminding yourself of your 'why's' when trying to achieve something is very important. Staring with the 'why' helps you identify what type of identity/person you want to be, then you consider the 'how', which is the method of becoming that person, and the 'what' the thing the person actually wants to do–the typical goal. Going through that process gives often vague goals more clarity and more easily offers you next steps that are more in reach of your current abilities.

In that month I looked over a lot of bass beginner videos and followed along with them.

cover videos with tabs I can replicate

longer videos that are more like tutors

and even shorter videos that expand my knowledge about bass and increase my familiarity with the instrument (this channel has a lot of tips and tricks for bass players of all skill levels–very well formatted)

If you don't have any tutors or guidance at the moment, I think something like this teaches you a lot of the basic skills that you need to have as a bass player and what you need to be aware of.

Although, having a tutor does help as they structure your learning to fit your pace. For example, I think in my first lessons I came 'prepared' by practicing a 2 octave G major scale. The moment I played it the tutor told me I was completely wrong. Which goes to show you the level of expertise you can come in contact with when having lessons.

I always try to ask questions by the end of the lesson as to make sure my learning is assertive and based on inquisition/curiosity. .. Asking questions is a great way to become more knowledgable in a subject quickly as it exploits your natural curiosity and concerns.

In the first month or so of learning, we went over two songs.

'Time is running out' (Muse)

and

'Basket case' (Green Day)

Just from these two songs I was introduced to a wide range of skills that I could add onto my routine. Including fingering patterns, economy fingering, slides (glissandos), pulloffs/hammer ons, and syncopation rhythm. This definitely helps when trying to make a practice routine and it gives you specific skills you can improve on and track with metronomes.

Tutor is highly recommended, music teachers are passionate about their work and will help you along the way–so practice when you can for at least 5 minutes (try to do all the skills you know at least once) and asks questions often.

You'll have a fun time.

[thewul]

The Evocative Power of Words, Semantic Relational Language Module, SRL

Definitions, Synonyms, Antonyms, Word Referentials

Nihon Kokugo Daijiten Japanese dictionary contains 500,000 words Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language contains 470,000 words (1)

These are only 2 examples but we can ascertain the usefulness of knowing words and their definitions within a cognizant AI, where defining words is just a starting point, after that there are the synonyms, antonyms and word referentials that altogether densify the language referencial and allow us to implement a Semantic Relational Language module and a relational conception of language in AI, that is conducive to meaning and crucially to the ability to learn

(1) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dictionaries_by_number_of_words

“The rose is blue”, there is such thing as blue flowers, but is there a blue rose, and if there isn’t such a thing than we can interpret it in a literary context, such as poetry, “The rose is blue” is a subjective literary concept substituting the known color of roses for an imaginary color

Although blue roses do not exist in nature, florists can produce blue-hued flowers by placing cut roses in dye. Also, in a painstaking 20-year effort, biotechnologists made a "blue rose" through a combination of genetic engineering and selective breeding. However, the rose is more mauve-colored than blue.(1)

I didn’t know that, I have learned something new

(2) sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181010111946.htm

Where even the ability to translate is conducive to understanding the cultural diversity of different cultural ensembles, and in doing so conducive to more understanding, and more learning

That is seeing a word, its referencial, and its meaning from different cultural perspectives, and word after word there is the knowledge of different cultures which is an invaluable asset as we strive to make AI understand us, thus understand our different cultures and cultural referentials

And Etymology

In etymology lies the vast wealth of not only culture but indeed the very history and evolution of language, that is to say the history and evolution of ourselves, of how we think, how we appropriate words and give them meaning

We can only be thankful to the work, of many, in the field of linguistics who have made it a formidable gift of knowledge and meaning, that is now also available online for the use of all

For those of us who work in the field of AI, or research it, or have a keen interest in it, suffice it to say that artificial intelligence owes as much to linguistics as it does to computer science

Wiktionary is such a contribution, in a computerized format directly exploitable in AI

As of July 2021, Wiktionary features over 30 million articles (and even more entries) across its editions. The largest of the language editions is the English Wiktionary, with over 7.2 million entries, followed by the French Wiktionary with over 4.5 million and the Malagasy Wiktionary with over 1.7 million entries.(2)

(2) en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiktionary

Practically Hosted and Extensively Cloud Based

Going back to KAITE AI, can we expect its cyberbrain to host all this data and articulate it as metadata and information, not so, here we see the usefulness of SRL also as a cloud hosted service, where the ability to articulate practical metadata and information, that which is often used practically and actually, is with KAITE as an AI, but the bulk of the semantic knowledge and data is cloud hosted and available as queries, perhaps even from Wiktionary itself

Where the real challenge is that KAITE AI has the ability to format these queries fast and efficiently, no differently than you or I would research the definition, synonyms, antonyms, referentials and etymology of a word online, and where we can assume that because it is a computerized data entity it is going to be able to do so in a shorter amount of time

Putting the focus on the usefulness of artificial intelligence to gather and analyse large quantities of texts from different sources in a short amount of time, and compounding that material into referenced summaries of different sizes, as a capable digital assistant across the full spectrum of industries and research fields

[kzoewagner]

Tumblr Blog Post 1 Art 150

Black-ish is a television show that details the lives of an African American family as they are growing up in a majority white neighborhood. The parents, Rainbow “Bow” Johnson and Andre “Dre” Johnson lead the family as they face tough encounters involving issues such as race, police brutality, biracialism, and many more. In this course, we have looked at media, whether it be video, audio, or picture to see how each depicts a “narrative” of cultural, ethnic, and racial identity in the United States. The television show Black-ish is no different. In watching the show, the audience views a modern “narrative” of what cultural, racial, and ethnic identity means to each of the members of the Johnson family through their eyes. The parents even give history lessons when they address each issue, utilizing cartoon type imagery to drive their point home to the younger, typically generation Z viewer.  

In the show, the character of Rainbow highlights the topic of being mixed-raced and biracialism, a subject we discussed in class. This is addressed as early as the first episode. Rainbow’s father is white, and her mother is African American. When her son brings home a white girlfriend, Rainbow is forced to face her own biracial identity and the historical implications around it: https://twitter.com/i/status/804158363449769984. As discussed in class and in the clip of the episode, the demographics of the United States is growing in mix-raced population.

This is represented in this image, which uses slight variation of hue to demonstrate a critical point: with this growth comes an “identity crisis” as Rainbow calls it for mix-raced and biracial people. The clip I included from the episode employs the use of expressive faces and slight raunchiness to emphasize how biracial people historically have endured quite polarizing results with being accepted by African Americans among others as African American. It took until the Civil Rights movement for them to get the green light to identity as such. The intensity of the topic combined with the expressive imagery causes the viewer to call into question what it means to identify as multiracial. 

(Loving Vs. Virginia Case) 

The Civil Rights movement was one of the first steps in transforming the very definition of what it means to be African American (in the context of biracialism), and throughout the show Black-ish does so as well. Additionally, this episode explores the intersectionality of being a biracial woman, bringing gender into the conversation. The episode hones in on the idea that white women in biracial partnerships are viewed (by often men) as superior to biracial African American women. This mixture of a racial and gender hierarchy is an idea we explored in class. For instance, in Ringlero’s “Prairie Pinups,” Ringlero discusses and includes images of half-naked Native American women that were taken and sold to white men. Not only were these women discriminated against because they were Native American, but they were furthermore exploited due to their gender. This parallels the additive gender, ethnicity, and racial hierarchy illustrated in Black-Ish.  

works cited:

Duignan, Brian. “Loving v. Virginia.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 8 Nov. 2022, https://www.britannica.com/event/Loving-v-Virginia. 

Fusco, Coco, and Brian Wallis. Only Skin Deep: Changing Visions of the American Self. International Center of Photography in Association with Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers, 2003. 

Ross, Tracee Ellis, director. Blackish. Twitter, Twitter, 1 Dec. 2016, https://twitter.com/TraceeEllisRoss/status/804158363449769984. Accessed 4 Dec. 2022. 

Wang, Hansi Lo, et al. “Painting by Numbers.” NPR, NPR, 20 Oct. 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/09/29/1041510105/painting-by-numbers. 

[tales-of-the-dense]

If I had to sum up Louise Simonson’s writing in one word, at least in the context of X-Factor, that word would be “exploitative,” and in multiple senses. First of all, in a more straightforward sense, in how she handles certain subject matter; addiction, relationship strife, disability, and so on. But also in the sense that the drama in X-Factor takes precedence above all else. Everything must be milked for the visceral emotional response it may or may not cause in the audience. No character moments are left fully unadulterated by this egregious pursuit of drama. The emotion lunges toward extremity, hellbent on stroking the titillation of tragedy to its inevitable, messy conclusion. Anyway