#but decent in terms of older stuff i've listened to that's new to ME

[4trackcassette]

anyway cliffnotes on my top 2023 albums late or whatever

lucky for you - bully. saw em live. lead singer was so hot she blew my mind. rock best genre to see live mayhaps. top song: "all i do"

10,000 gecs - 100 gecs. listened to this a couple times driving this particular stretch of i-15 into i-90. half-decent podcast episode on the album. top track: "frog on the floor"

everything is alive - slowdive. unexpectedly one of my favorite albums of the year. top track: "prayer remembered"

bonus singles

"autopoiética" - mon laferte. the feel of this song is just. impeccable. i wasn't super into the rest of the album but here's a nice interview with the artist.

"holidays in the sun" - mykki blanco. this is a tight little EP overall but this is my favorite track. i misheard the lyrics to this song when i first heard it as "home is the synth."

"goodness gracious" - baby gravy. bad taste whatever but also i love the lines "goodness gracious/Tito's got me beyond fucked up/it's ostentatious." endlessly funny to me.

"sepsis" - blondshell. i could recommend this whole album if i hadn't fucked up and waited too long to get my tickets to SEE HER and then the show was sold out. so many good one-liners here but i especially like "he wears a front-facing cap/the sex is almost always bad". thanks @normalgirlism for getting me hooked here.

"vampire empire" - big thief. whatever. i'm not immune.

"afraid of heights" - boygenius. lucy4eva.

"make my day" - coi leray (ft david guetta). yeah this is a interpolation of pump up the jam or whatever but i'm kind of obsessed with it i can't help it.

"i am the river" - lael neale. this entire album was recorded on cassette which imo really worked for this song and not for the rest of the work. this song is really one of my favorites of the year though.

"mbeda wella" - baaba maal (ft paco lenol). a great album by a master but i particularly liked this track.

"quarry" - wednesday. rat rock or whatever but this shit always does it for me. catchy in just the perfect dirtbag way.

"i dormenti i" - brian eno. randomly listened to this while running the other day and it wasn't an altogether awful experience. this has become my most recent migraine-music when i can handle music.

i also listened to every episode of all songs considered's new music friday this year, though i'm not sure that's an accomplishment. my dad says that show is only for old people who want to feel like they're cool. it's about the right level of keeping up with new releases for me and i don't usually go terribly far beyond it. that being said if u have any 2023 must-listens, send them my way!!

[sevlinop]

THINGS THAT I WOULD LIKE TO KNOW ABOUT MY FELLOW WRITERS

Thank you for the tag @angelosearch! I'll go ahead and tag whoever would like to play, as I tagged a lot of folks recently hahaha.

Last book I read: I reread "The Hobbit" recently after rewatching the Peter Jackson trilogy. And if audiobooks count, I listened to this book called "Caffeine" by Michael Pollan. Which has led to me cutting back how much coffee I drink lol.

Greatest literary inspirations: Probably Ursula K. Le Guin and William Blake. There are others, but those are the main two that come to mind!

Things in my current fandom I want to read but I don't want to write: I'm glad to see there are more Apothecary Diaries fics being written, but now that the anime's ended I'm craving more, lol. In terms of Final Fantasy VIII, I would love to see more Ellone centered fics even thought there are already a decent amount (Chaos Theory and some older fics by Siobhane on FFN being the main ones). Such an interesting character!

Things in my current fandoms I want to write but I think nobody would be interested in them but me: I know most fandoms are driven by ships and FF8 is definitely the same. Which is totally fine, I love ships too! Still, I like lots of lore and word building so that's probably what I'll continue to write for the most part. Still, my goal is to get good at writing Squinoa so I can lure them in, and then have them stay for my long lore chapters. >:)

You can recognize my writing by: How I prefer writing inner monologues over dialogue most of the time!

My most controversial take (current fandom): I don't really get why people are so into the Laguna sequences in FF8. I mean, they're fun and all, but I've never gotten why a lot of folks say they'd prefer a Laguna centered game instead. People really do be out here hating on Squall lol.

Top three favorite tropes: Honestly, I don't really have any specific ones. Maybe AU's where it's a similar story to the original but stuff has changed somehow? Unbalanced by Vrazdova (FF6) and Chaos Theory are two examples of this!

What’s your current writing mood (10 – super motivated and churning out words like crazy, 0 – in a complete rut): Probably a 6 or a 7! Definitely there, and I do write regularly, but it's not my main focus atm. Still, it seems like every week or two I'll have a day where all I want to do is write!

Share a fandom frustration: Nothing new here, but the FF7 ship wars are genuinely insane. I'll leave it at that! XD

[fishmech]

tbh i despise that vox article on the helicopter thing because the overall framing and argument it makes just really sucks.

like yeah twitter is an argument factory and all but that pattern of internet discourse is so fucking old it goes back to the early days of usenet, about 40 years ago. and the original author did deliberately choose a provocative story subject and even more provocative title for it. this was always going to lead to a big fucking arguments online and honestly twitter doesn't have much to do with it at all!

and i sincerely doubt that the author would have been able to handle the nominally less 'intense' reaction to their provocation that would have happened if published with a similarly provocative title and subject in 2010 or 2000 instead of 2020.

because its not really like maybe waiting a few extra days or at most weeks for the word to spread and people to get angry and suspicious would actually matter, and that's what we'd be having over the story. the level of it might even be somewhat increased in increasingly older eras because the relevant communities that would be talking about it would be smaller and relatively more tightknit, which would put an additional level of intimacy into the people saying "who the fuck is this person". and there would likely have been an even more untrusting reaction from the trans community because yknow there was already a lot more open transphobia in comparison.

and like i think its very weird the way the article tries to position things as like "well the first few days after it was published not much had been written about it except by the direct readership and the surviving tweets seem positive from then". that's not special? like most speculative fiction outlets these days, there isn't exactly a huge direct readerbase for clarkesworld - they get about 50,000 monthly users. in modern terms that's pretty decent for an outlet to manage and it's still a low amount of people, particularly as many of the readership isn't actually reading the new stories as they're published.

but its like yeah, the most dedicated and prompt readers of the outlet are most likely to have a higher level of trust in what's being put out, that's why they're in that group in the first place. and it only makes sense that as hearing about the story radiates out from that generally most trusting group, people might raise more questions about the general weirdness of premise and choices in bios.

i'm a fairly avid reader of and listener to short fiction. i've heard and read so many snippet bios that i don't really care about which tend to have similar generic statements about the author - this author lives in x region, likes y and z hobbies, thinks cats are cute etc etc - that honestly it was kind of weird that the bio snippet associated with this particular article didn't have those sorts of things that really sound like they're telling you more about an author than they really do. because that is a notable choice to drop it. for those who aren't familiar with those, here's one of the author bios attached to a recent clarkesworld story:

incidentally i did enjoy the story this bio is associated with! but as you can see, it's the sort of thing that just gives you a vibe about the author who chooses to go into very little detail about their life, and it happens to link to a rather barebones writing business-focused site. she's not a first time published author with this story, but you'll see a lot of similar vague, frankly privacy-protecting, bios associated with a lot of first time published authors.

but the helicopter story decided to go full force with provocation and not doing, well, basic satisfy the reader's curiosity bio stuff associated. so yeah of course it looked suspicious. personally i also felt, when i read it when it was new, that is wasn't even a particularly good handling of the concept they were trying to get at and that i've frankly read/heard better stories about military forces where people's genders or other parts of their mental identification were replaced with identification with combat roles or equipment (and don't ask me for the names of those, it's genuinely hard for me to keep track of all the stuff i've read! pretty sure at least one of them was on escape pod in the mid-2010s tho).

so take modern twitter out of the cycle entirely and we still would have had a story that would have kicked off a firestorm of controversy and dislike through other forms of web community as word of it diffused out from the core readership. like i guess some people just have feigned or real amnesia about the world before they decided twitter was the real world, but internet controversies are again not new, nor is having it over provocative fiction in particular. it's not like lack of twitter usage would mean, say, that you wouldn't be able to search for people talking about the story on google or whatever to see negative reactions, or to experience it in large communities. or to take it back to the 80s and 90s, to see it in large irc channels and usenet discussions or on newsletters. or to peel all the way back to a full analog era (where frankly the concept of this provocation would barely work considering its nature, but fuck it lets pretend an alternate 1970s where people were widely accepting of trans people) it would be showing in letters to the editor, at fan cons, and in fanzines, as was the style of the time!

[viksalos]

Daffodil, mahonia, aloe Vera, ivy.

Aw ty i forgot i queued that!! ok uhhhh daffodil ⇢ do you have siblings? if yes, in what ways do you think you’re similar to or different from them?

I have 1 sister! I think we're alike in a lot of ways, and amusingly we seem to become more alike as we get older. I think we're both fairly intelligent, driven women, we're both kinda sensitive (which can be both a good and bad thing obvs; I mean this in the sense that we both experience very high highs and very low lows), and we have some more superficial qualities that have seemed to converge over time: she came out as bi before I did, we both were larger as kids/young adults and later lost a bunch of weight, we have partners that are similar in a lot of ways (including that we both have contentious relationships with our mothers-in-law, lmao.) I think when we were younger we tried to be intentionally different a lot more but as we got older we had more room to grow on our own and realized it didn't matter as much. Like I was kinda typecast as the kid that's good at STEM and visual arts, and she as the kid that's good at the humanities and performing arts. In reality we both have a lot more crossover in terms of areas of skill.

mahonia ⇢ what place, thing, activity inspires you most and how do you express yourself when it does?

Rn I'd have to say that's listening to music! For pandemic/grad school/chronic illness reasons I don't leave the house a ton anymore and don't really have the time or energy for a lot of the hobbies/activities I used to be able to do, so over the past few years I've gotten into music a lot more because I can throw it on in the background while I'm working or if I'm not feeling well and can't concentrate on anything else. As for what I do to express myself... idk, over on Twitter I talk about music a lot more, and sometimes (very rarely) I'll draw or paint, but I'll usually just pick music to listen while drawing that's thematically relevant to a piece I was already planning on working on rather than making something that's directly inspired by the music. Probably the thing I do that most directly expresses myself is making my battle jackets/metal vests/DIY jackets/whatever-you-call-thems with patches of logos of my favorite bands--they take FOREVER to make but I've finally started on my second (or third depending on how you count one I made for a friend), and I'm really excited about a very silly idea I have for it lol.

aloe vera ⇢ what’s something (mundane) you really want to experience in life?

For whatever reason the first thing that came to mind is that I want to go clubbing in Berlin. Lmao. I live in pennsylvania. 😂 I think it's just that I've been on a techno kick for the past couple weeks (and Beyonce's new house album isn't helping in the best way), plus the nightlife in Berlin sounds unreal. I think in reality I'd just settle for being able to go clubbing in my city more often, but obvs the aforementioned pandemic/grad school/chronic illness stuff has made that pretty difficult, plus all my friends here hate dancing lol.

ivy ⇢ what are your ‘tells’ for your emotions and moods? how can someone tell you’re happy, annoyed, upset or tired?

I like to think I'm pretty straightforward with my emotions? If I'm happy I won't be able to shut up about whatever I'm excited about, if I'm upset I'm probably crying, if I'm tired I start to become terrible at word recollection/forming sentences and I start to slouch when my posture is usually decent otherwise, or more likely I'll just fall asleep lol. The one emotion I do tend to hide is annoyance; I find that most times when I'm annoyed with someone I can usually just ignore it. Unless someone is actively harassing me or otherwise making my life worse, I find that most things I think are annoying are ultimately pretty harmless and aren't worth snapping at someone over.

(get-to-know-me ask game!)

[kyunsies]

Hi mädch!!! I'm sending this after you said goodnight haha, but I'm glad you got to sleep early today :) you deserve a good night's rest!!!

I will definitely send you pictures of our plants soon so be on the look out for that 👀👀

About being a musician, I do have a degree in music and I studied for four and a half difficult terrible years to get it 🥲 but it was good, truthfully. It was difficult simply because college is hard. Listening to musical elements in mx or Mozart or soundtracks or t swift or literally any song isn't any harder or easier than another. Just different! Different layerings, sections, sounds, timbres, etc. It's very satisfying to be able to pick out sounds and point them out to my sister and maybe explain them a little bit! And I'll check out those shinee react video suggestions, I already know don't call me, so it'll be fun to watch that one!

I think it's really interesting that I've heard mx refer to All About Luv as a "US album" rather than an "English album". It might not mean anything, but more countries than just the US speak English, y'know? So it feels.. intentional? Anyway I will spare you from the extensive (and I mean super extensive) length of thoughts I'm having about their English songs vs Korean and just say a little bit skdjsh

From a musical stand point, Secrets (English song on a Korean album) is objectively just as or more simple than Middle of the Night (English song on the English album) or Sorry I'm Not Sorry (Korean song on a Korean album). Middle of the Night has lovely vocal harmonies and is very active rhythmically and has a lot of different textures. Secrets is just three chords, with a simple melody (a wonderful lovely simple melody), and a decent amount of clear layers with an acoustic feel with drums/guitar/bass/synths/sax/backing vocal ad libs, all of which are pretty active voices. Whereas Sorry I'm Not Sorry is so smooth and has such a chill vibe, with significantly less layers than Secrets (though just as clear) - it's just guitar and vocals at the beginning, and then some very simple drums and bass layer in, and a little bit of keys too (with some sweeet vocal harmonies in the second half that will melt my heart every time!!), but it's all very gentle. And then BEASTMODE (to stay on Fatal Love) has a much heavier feel (ALSO with some sweet harmonies in the opening "ohs" which are so so strong, and won't melt hearts in the same way the harmonies in Sorry I'm Not Sorry do), as well as stylistically different sections with a lot of different musical elements! Sorry I'm Not Sorry is just like.. one style the whole time, which they do beautifully!!! So like, there's already so much variety within albums, and within their entire discography! It makes being a monbebe so... rewarding and satisfying. Like, it feels like there's something here for everyone.

If you got through all that you deserve an award, it's a lot hsksjslsk I could go on and on and on about music, but I'll stop here for now haha. I'm considering doing a series of posts on my blog where I talk about music, but I'm a little nervous to go through with it 😅😅 my sister thinks it'd be awesome, but I'm not super confident to put myself out there like that hehe... we'll see...

Anyway long message!!!!!!!!!! I feel like I haven't told you lately, but talking to you is so so so nice 💖💖 I don't feel any pressure to say things or not say things, I can just.. chat freely! I feel so warm and loved when I read your replies 🥰🥰🥰 thank you for being such a wonderful sweet lovely amazing nice friendly superstar of a person 💖💖💖💖 dkbtho

HI PLS APOLOGIZE I TOOK SO LONG TO ANSWER THIS LKFDSJ but i'm finally getting to it, thank u for being patent with me <3 i've been getting good sleep ever since finishing those exams and getting back a good grade on that massive assignment yesterday so THANK U for checking in :)

about your education !!!! it just seems so hard ;____; like obviously when u are in a specific field for so long, the terminology makes sense bc you use it all the time (like how now one really knows what i'm talking about when i use medical terms lol) so i guess just from and outside perspective it looks hard !!! plus we were taught how to learn the basics of music reading in high school bc i was in choir for 1 semester and i was sooooo bad at it, it never really clicked for me ;_____; but i really look up to you for dedicating your livelihood for something you love !!! you seem to be very knowledgeable <3

and i know what you mean about them referring to all of their english stuff to 'US' stuff and i can understand how frustrating that might be bc there are many countries that speak english as well, not just the US ,,,,,,,,, to me it might just be bc their whole "english team" is from the US and everyone who works on their stuff is from the US, also i think the record label is from the US ? so maybe they're just so used to referring it that way bc those are the ppl they work with ya know? but i totally understand how isolating that must feel for a lot of other ppl, i can't really talk that much on it since i'm from the US myself lol but i totally get it and i think it's very valid if it irks some ppl !!!!

and ldskfjslkdjf i loved reading all of this <3 and i really agree with everything you say !!! and i'm glad u are able to pick apart the different styles for each song, for example i also think secrets is one of the more "simpler" songs on the album (not as simple as BEBE) but like, it works for me bc the sax has a nice improv at the end, and the song is pretty synth-y(?) which are elements that i like to a song lol ; you should really dig into mx's older discography tho!!!!! and although i love love love mx's new music (i think fatal love is one of their best albums) there is something that can be said about the timelessness of mx's older discography too <3 i know i've said this to you before, but one of my fav mx songs of all time is blue moon (composed by joo hehe) and like, ,,,,,,,,, i just still cannot believe that was on a DEBUT album ?????? the way it's layered and just the lofi vibes sound so sophisticated and honestly ahead of its time, and i'm not sure how much you've dove into mx already, but i would love to hear your thoughts on their previous music too <3 !!!!!!!

also you should def make that series on ur blog!!!!! i think it'll be nice for u to reflect on but also be a resource for ppl too <3 i think it's a great idea !!!!!! also , thank u so much for taking the time out of YOUR busy day to talk to me <3 it's been so lovely just chatting and im SUPER glad u feel comfortable enough to come here and spend some time with me bc it really means a lot <3 thank you !!!! and i hope u have had a great day today okay?? take care <3