#it really was one of the sort of early to mid early internet cultures that set the standards for digital etiquette

[legend-tripper]

ugh ok i know blizzard is a shit company but they just posted an opening for a warcraft lore writer and historian temp position and im a little 👀

[canmom]

comments on a guy who isn’t even online anymore

‘rant by a condescending British guy’ is a sort of stable fixed point in critical writing. this afternoon i lost a few hours reading this guy Stephen Bond, from the old days of the internet, following a link to his articulation of the difference between ‘camp’, ‘kitsch’ and ‘trash’. (which despite the presentation of a two-variable schema, can fairly easily be mapped to ‘good’, ‘mid’ and ‘crap’, since the deciding variable is mostly whether they fit his personal tastes, but of course you get nowhere in this sort of writing by hedging.)

mostly my impression of this guy is that it would be really exhausting to be him. it reminds me of moorcock’s disappointing essay “epic pooh”, or benjanun sriduangkaew’s old blog requireshate, in that just kind of prioritises the spectacle of demolishing some popular cultural artefact and heaping scorn on the sort of pathetic nerd who would find value in it. so even if I agree with the aesthetic opinion being advanced, the posture the rhetoric encourages is defensiveness and reluctance to express enthusiasm or appreciation towards anything, lest it betray some corruption of the deplorable middlebrow. and when the critic does dare to venture a positive opinion, it is all too tempting to turn it back. “lol, after all that crap he said, he’ll give a pass to Dragon Age: Origins of all things?”

his later writing from the early 2010s is a bit more substantial and interesting than his mid-2000s stuff; his account of breaking from the ‘skeptic’ movement is as solid as any from the people who ended up on that road, but mostly it’s exactly the opinions you’d expect of a 2010s ex-skeptic on the fringes of the nascent SJ subculture, carrying a lot of guilt about associating with the foul, cringe nerds and the accursed British. (he went to Oxford. so did the writers of Ferretbrain, which I used to read avidly, and I was reminded of a great deal reading this site. something in the water, perhaps.)

probably the most interesting article on the site is the one about the time he tried to go pro as a critic, because it is not just scorn but an actual specific experience, one that provokes some moments of self-reflection - but also because you see him throw out some mean comments at Yahtzee, hardly undeserved but amusing because both are minor variations on the same Type Of Guy.

[resolvedbrunette]

about me

director’s cut

Note: I don't know everything. I don't have an opinion on everything. Please don't expect me to.

information:

astrology: sun in capricorn, moon in aquarius, libra ascendant.

age: not a minor. not old enough to legally drink in the US. however, I do mention my age in some of my posts. please don’t ask otherwise unless you’re really that concerned. if you are a minor, please leave my blog. this ain’t a space for lil people.

location: the South. a border state

background: medical/health science field. nha-certified ekg technician (04/2022). certified in cpr/bls with the aha (01/2023). nha-certified clinical medical assistant (04/2023). planning to enter laboratory research field as soon as degree finished

brain soup: self-diagnosed adhd-c, supported by external observers. highly probable asd, not seeking professional diagnosis due to cost and other demographic factors. interrogate me if you wish.

ethnic background/race: black American, white American. raised speaking academic English and Ebonics (AAVE). primarily of English, Irish, Scottish, and German descent.

languages:

spanish (conversational)

english (native)

latin (professional)

french (conversational)

asl (intermediate)

russian (a few words. very familiar with Cyrillic and can transliterate with good accuracy)

politics: do not ask me what my political party is. I am registered as independent. that is all you need to know.

belief system: non-denominational Biblical Christian. mostly literal interpretation. I love learning about other people’s beliefs. Please tell me about yours!

hobbies/things i obsess over:

witch and nature-reverent culture, neopaganism

animals: passerine (perching) birds, corvids (ravens in particular), bears, wolves

music: especially: fleetwood. mac. I will live and die on this hill. also I apparently like Taylor Swift now

film study

writing

linguistics

handicrafts: sewing, quilting, knitting

geographical locations: montana, iceland, new zealand, the appalachian mountain range (my grandparents live in the blue ridge mountains), north.

farming/homesteading

storms

space anything

old things: england and english fashion in the eras of: 1400s, late 1700s, early-mid 1800s, old art.

art: i have an art tag

architecture

other cultures (religions especially)

ted lasso: this show is everything to me

football: gridiron and normal

tag list:

personal: wide range of stuff about my life, from short form brain occurrences to long winded posts

reblog

brain chaos: asd related content

brain chaos.2: adhd related content

a journal of sorts: generally mid length to longer posts about me + life + emotions

poetry

successes: common Vega Ws

cultcha: things related to Black/African American culture

diary of a not so mad scientist: my science tag

nature: about nature

hobbitposting: I am a hobbit soul in a human body and this is how it is expressed

musique: music tag

the oc varga: au where an author surrogate werewolf falls in love with a female knight (probably in a universe similar to skyrim)

nature ascendant: closely related to hobbitposting but instead of a hobbit i am the moss. the trees, the wind in their branches

fashun: clothing and other wearables

original: original content that is created by me and might be published eventually

khenma: the tag for my conlang (2 years in the making so far - 12/2023)

cinema: film related content

college: anything related to college

article: online articles

ask game/asks: ask tags

bookmark: keepsake tags

meme: memes

rebagled: reblog but goofy

writing

products: things I've made

emotion tags:

a little vent: short form vents

anger. just anger: vents about prolonged/repeated issues that anger me to my bones

happy vent: no one will listen in real life so I am happying into the ether of the internet

rant: rant posts... more so long winded than venty

vent

[onewomancitadel]

I think what people really mean by Twitter being 2015!Tumblr is that the age demographic of Tumblr has changed (based on polls, I think the age group with the biggest user size is early-mid twenties), a lot of shitstirrers left for Twitter in the Purge of 2018, a lot of guys who used Tumblr for p*rn also left in 2018 (seriously, when I interacted with a guy at uni once who wanted in my pants I mentioned Tumblr because I am socially inept and he was like, oh the website for p*rn? *smirk* and I was like no I use it for my Reylos... he was wearing a Star Wars t-shirt, it's a long story) and obviously in general anybody else who used it for that reason also left, but you know exactly what sort of demographic I'm talking about - far be it from me to unturn that stone, I understand it's a mixed issue - and then overall you've got the fact that Tumblr is slightly better than it was, but it's not perfect.

I do think platform culture influences the way people interact with each other, and there are definitely ways you can fit somebody's interaction patterns into a typology - but the style of detraction you might see in Reddit comments is exactly the stuff you see on Twitter and it is the thing you encounter on Tumblr. Because Tumblr allows you to run your own personal blog, though, you have much more control over your interaction style. If Reddit is a free debate space, Tumblr is curated by comparison.

But it's also just a human nature thing lol. There are plenty of teenagers who have growing up to do on here (I was one of them) and you see a lot more on platforms popular with teenagers (Tik Tok, Twitter, Instagram) which changes the site culture. But I also think that teenagers need their own space to be edgy and get the angst out of the way. It's just much harder to do that when the platforms they're on also encourage putting your face, name, where you live etc. on it.

I find it a fascinating question because I don't think the Internet is wholly iredeemable and clearly we get some joy out of it - the things which concern me about the Internet have parts to do with social media and some not. I want to know what it is that makes Tumblr a pleasant site to use for hobbyist purposes. I can write longform posts, and consider topics which interest me, and curate my experience - by in large the the site has a slightly more mature userbase...

I also had on my mind recently how hard it is to write posts where you have people coming to you with the worst interpretation of what you've said. I think I am starting to accept again that I can't control that and people will read into what I'm saying because that's what they're looking for. That's something which still happens on Tumblr. It's a product of the Internet medium where it's very hard to clarify something you've said the way you could mid-conversation, and the fact that generally people are quite defensive. It feels like a combative space at times.

The real point I'm sort of trying to make is that like, part of what makes Tumblr a good platform is a consequence of its medium - it's a microblogging website - and part of it is a consequence of the userbase evolving. But I also think that loyal userbase is a consequence of what it offers in contrast to what others don't. Equally, issues with Tumblr aren't necessarily specific to platform, and I'd go so far as to venture that to be true of other social media websites. It's just very apparent that there are very bad decisions being made with them killing all user goodwill and reason to use them, but the myopic eye of short-term gains does not care for long-term growth and stability. It's a pretty sobering realisation to know that most of those guys up there think you're as dumb as a rock and will just take what you get. It's not some big conspiracy. They just think their site users are dumb. It's a pretty haunting and narrow view of humanity lol. There is no honour in it and yeah, it is actually nonsensical even from the view of a capitalist philosophy, because why would you willingly kill something with great brand and cultural foothold? Why would you abandon something that makes the platform what it is? This goes for Tumblr with its changes to the dashboard from Following (seeing things your followers post) to For You (algorithm).

[hylianengineer]

Homestuck crash course

In the mid to late 2000s a guy on the internet thought it would be fun to play a game with the forum he was in; he would draw an initial scenario and people would respond with What To Do and he would draw the result / explain with arbitrary game rules why they cannot Do That Thing. These came to be called MS Paint Adventures. Collected as the drawn results with links stating The Command, the whole thing kinda sorta looked like a webcomic with a specific narrative style, and eventually they were collected together on a website, mspaintadventures. The first one to actually be completed before being abandoned, and one of the best, was Problem Sleuth. It was about hard-boiled detectives, imagination, and fighting all sorts of weird beings. In April of 2009, Problem Sleuth was finishing up and the guy who did these began a new Adventure, about four kids who play a video game that has Extremely important consequences beyond our entire universe. While there were still some reader-submitted commands, this one was more plot-heavy and the author took more control of the narrative he wanted to tell, eventually outright closing the suggestion box but continuing to write the story in this Text Adventure Narration style. That new mspaintadventure became famous for its many characters, memes, distinctive speech, and multimedia usage. It was mostly still images and text, but there was also gif animations, clickable links, videos with sound, and whole-ass Flash Games. The adventure had highly-interesting game mechanics, as did the game the kids were playing, and something about the whole thing was a sort of perfect storm for Tumblr culture. Coupled with a really fast update schedule, and a huge wide open field of possibility for Canon and fic-writing it wasn't hard to see why fandom exploded. Yes, this was Homestuck. The webcomic itself ended in 2016, though a lot of its plot and hype happened in the first 2-3 years, which is why the fandom's heyday is more around the early 2010s and peaked in 2012-2013. TvTropes has more details but really that's the gist of "What Is Homestuck." For a lot of people it was Baby's First Serious Fandom; first time cosplayers, fic-writers, and musicians. Toby Fox's teenage and early adult years were spent in this fandom, including when he first reused Megalovania several years before Undertale. It was huge for early Tumblr and very intertwined with people's memory of cringe. It starts slow and gets Big and Confusing, fast. That's why attempts to Google it or asking someone who's read the whole thing could be overwhelming. There's a sort of Tumblr culture of refusing to explain because it's So Much (And I'll admit it's very funny when people are completely baffled as to what it could be) but you did literally ask for someone to explain so here you go

Thank you very much anon!

All I'd been able to gather previously us that it was a webcomic, and while that is true, your explanation is far more helpful in understanding why it was Like That. I very much appreciate the detailed backstory!

[lyrsui]

currently working on a poetry manuscript,

and that's been true for the last four years. but around this time in 2019, i had a handful of poems, and i had some vague ideas of what i was writing about--at first i thought i was writing a satirical commentary on internet culture, but then as i wrote more and more, i had these other pieces that were like... sadder. in early versions of the book, i tried to tell a straightforward sort of "story" but the poems didn't work quite that way. so, i found other ways to sort them.

so, what have i accomplished since then?

in the fall of 2019, i probably had like 6-8 poems tops

then i signed up for a yearlong writing program at the start of 2020. it was costly, but it helped me a lot. it was a crash course in poetry. i read books. i wrote new poems. at the end of the program, mid-2021, i had something like 20-25 poems, but i was not yet at a full-length count.

i spent another year writing poems on my own. i joined a writing workshop or two but mostly i wrote in solitude. i finally got to about 35 poems by the summer of 2022. i felt hopeful.

in fall 2022, i submitted my manuscript to first book contests. i had done a lot of revising on my own. i asked a person or two to be my beta-readers. i felt good about most of my poems, as i had been diligently revising the 2019 drafts to their best, and i was nervous about the newer pieces but happy to have them included.

i received a lot of rejections. but i had two poems published online, and a third included in a horror poetry anthology. i was also named a semifinalist for one of the book contests i'd entered. these were all small wins.

i took a break from the poetry stuff to focus on school, then on job hunting. now things in my life have settled down and i am back to thinking about poetry.

i signed up for a poetry conference this weekend, where real live editors offer their genuine feedback and talk craft with us. i'm excited by the opportunity. i was given the first ten pages of notes and some of it was cutting, but goodness it's been so long since i really had sharp feedback on my work, and i am appreciative of it nonetheless. the conference runs till Monday morning. the notes are truly invaluable.

i plan to pursue an MFA in 2025, which would only be an extension of the $$$$ i am invested in my writing already. the yearlong workshop was several thousand, the conference a couple thousand as well. the manuscript consultations i plan to pay for will also run me a few hundred each, and the submission fees add up quick. truly, no one is lying when they say that writing is a pursuit mired in privilege. I am grateful to work a day job that makes a lot of all this easier, but it's cushioned work, isn't it? i recognize that more and more lately.

i am not mentioning the price tags to brag, but really just to highlight that money has felt so necessary in lieu of organic connections or inner networks. money isn't buying me placements in top tier lit mags but i feel like it is buying me the notes and feedback to guide my revision towards stronger poems that may one day be lit mag worthy.

i am excited by the work ahead. invigorated by the energy of knowing i have work worth launching into the world. i plan to use october to edit and refine, as there are many upcoming contests and i want to have better drafts to send along than i sent last year.

i plan to sign up for more paid workshops that will help me with drafting my fiction. i only have one short story under my belt, and i'd like to slowly round out that list too, eventually having three then five then ten, all in rotation to lit mags submissions too. i want my name to hold weight eventually. to become familiar.

it feels really good to have clear dreams and a clear plan for my writing career. my goal is to work on these poems and continue trying to place them. to partake in writing programs that may help me get exposure to other editors and mentors, etc. i hope that by the time i am ready to apply to MFA programs that I will be able to ask for a reference or two out of these workshops. by the time i apply for a poetry MFA, i hope to just use the published poems and an unpublished one or two as well, to feel confident about my abilities. then i'll generate a second book of poetry, who knows about what, and publish that too.

it's all fun to think about!

[from-the-dark-past]

Interview with Anders Ohlin in The Black Metal Murders: English translation

Translator’s note: Black metal-morden (English: The Black Metal Murders) is a radio documentary from 2017 produced by Radio Sweden (download). It’s about Mayhem and the Norwegian black metal scene in the ‘90s and contains interviews with Jørn “Necrobutcher” Stubberud, Kjetil Manheim, Eirik “Messiah” Norheim and Anders Ohlin (Pelle Ohlin’s younger brother). 

Here, I’ve translated the parts where Anders Ohlin speaks into English (from Swedish). I’ve added time-stamps and short descriptions for the different sections of the interview. 

I am working on translating the interviews with Necrobutcher, Manheim and Messiah and will post them soon. 

1:51 - 6:35 [Talking about him and Pelle getting into extreme metal]

Anders: We’d started listening to hard rock and it was… We’d, like, worked through all of those… Judas Priest and Iron Maiden. 

Narrator: It’s the mid-1980s in Västerhaninge, a suburb of Stockholm. Pelle Ohlin lives here. He plays in the extreme metal band Morbid and his stage name is Dead. Pelle has introduced his five-years-younger brother to hard rock. Together, they’ve worked through all of the main bands. 

Anders: And you, like, hungered for this… This Other. 

Narrator: The ‘Other’ that younger brother Anders is talking about is extreme metal; music that is faster, darker and harder. A progression of hard rock. Music that isn’t easy to get your hands on at this time. Anders is in his early teens and has gotten his first girlfriend. 

Anders: It was my first relationship and it was super-exciting, and I was at her house, she lived in Jordbro, which is, like, the neighbouring suburb. 

Narrator: Anders’ girlfriend’s older sister has an LP that Anders simply must show his older brother Pelle. 

Anders: It was, like, you knew it was good music, and it was that Destruction record. 

Narrator: Anders sees the German death metal band Destruction’s cover and it’s enough for him to understand that this must be good music. [...] 

Anders: This. This here isn’t Judas Priest and it isn’t Iron Maiden; it’s something else. I’ve got show this fucking record to Pelle. 

Narrator: Anders nags [his girlfriend’s older sister] to borrow the LP. He’s allowed to, but only for the day, so he bikes home in the rain from Jordbro to Västerhaninge as quickly as he can. 

Anders: And it was like [excited noise], like a cartoon; the evil wolf, their eyes bulge out and we both ran -- because we hadn’t heard the LP, only seen the cover -- ran to the record player och then Mom walks up and is like: ‘Stop! You’re forbidden from using the gramophone.’ And it was like, fucking hell, is it going to die here and then we explained to Mom -- ‘This is an extreme record and we’ve borrowed it for the day and it’s going back tomorrow,’ -- and Mom was super-harsh and was like: ‘It doesn’t matter. [...]’ And then we started negotiating and agreed that we could record the LP onto cassette [because you don’t need volume for that]. So, it was on full-blast the entire night and we recorded it and stood bent over the record scratches and were like,‘Shit, this is good stuff’. 

Narrator: Pelles hard rock style stands out against the usual sweatpant-Bagheera-jacket [style], not least the music. 

Anders: The ideals that existed at that time were that you were supposed to look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, which neither he nor I did [laughs]. You were supposed to be handsome and cool and have some fucking helipad on your head. 

Translator’s note: Anders is talking about a flat-top haircut commonly referred to as a ‘helikopterplattafrisyr’ -- helipad haircut -- in Sweden. Think H.R. Haldeman. I’m not sure what the English term for this haircut is. 

Narrator: Anders and Pelle are apart of a small subculture; extreme metal, with subgenres such as trash metal, death metal and black metal, which provokes with its satanic and morbid symbols. Pelle’s band Morbid pushes the limits of what music can sound like. With his stage-name Dead, Pelle sings on the demo December Moon. The new subculture is not embraced by the adult world. 

Anders: Like, we faced this fucking cultural oppression as hardrockers. It was that time-period… And especially if you wanted to do something that was worse than hard rock; it was completely judged. 

14:52 - 15:53 [Talking about Pelle being bullied] 

Anders: He was beaten at school and to such an extent that he actually died for a while, or however you put it. 

Narrator: There’s an explanation to Pelle’s obsession with death. At 13, he was bullied at school and once, he was beaten so badly that his spleen burst. Pelle’s brother Anders Ohlin tells the story.

Anders: He was beaten to death and had some near-death experience as he was laying in the hospital and he kept coming back to that all the time, and I think you can see that as some sort of theme in his songs too. Like, it’s always about the fact that he was actually there and touched something that he doesn’t know what it is, and that was the engine in all that. He was definitely [at the bottom of the pecking order] at school, precisely because he was a bit… He had his special... his special style and was, like, uncompromising, and that was what singled him out, I’d say, markedly from other teenagers. 

18:07 - 18:30 [Talking about Pelle’s depression]

Anders: He would neglect to eat, just to get a cassette tape out or arrange a gig somewhere. 

Narrator: Anders Ohlin, Pelle’s brother. 

Anders: To be a bit harsh, I think that the others gave up at some point. And that’s my personal interpretation. That he suddenly turns around and notices that he hasn’t got the gang with him. And I think that destroyed him. 

21:50 - 22:30 [Talking about Pelle’s suicide] 

Anders: At first, I was actually really pissed at him… Or, like, angry, enraged. I thought that he’d abandoned us -- which he has. That it was so shitty of him; to just take off and leave this big fucking abscess to the rest of us that just kept growing and growing as the years passed. 

Narrator: Christmases become especially painful for the Ohlin family, because that was the time Pelle usually came home. 

Anders: No one felt good on Christmas Eve. It was like a fucking ghost all Christmas. Brutal. So, I remember that I couldn’t celebrate Christmas at all for a very long time. 

1:06:39 - 1:09:31 [Talking about how he and Pelle’s Swedish friends remember him and his life today]

Anders: All of his Swedish friends see him as this exuberantly happy guy that spews ideas and is funny and has a sense of humor and stuff. Then, it’s like a line is drawn when he goes to Norway and they see him as introverted and mysterious and, like, difficult. And that’s two opposite images. 

Narrator: The Pelle Myth is associated with a lot of darkness and death but that’s not how his brother Anders and Pelle’s Swedish friends remember him.  

Anders: I think that’s been the devastating part, but it, like, helped him build… strengthen that myth. It’s hard being that funny dude and saying that you’re, like, Satan. It’s hard, it becomes, like, silly. 

Narrator: Anders is often reminded of Pelle. Usually because of happy memories but also because of that image that he is fighting to remove; the image that Øystein took of Pelle’s corpse which spread because it became the album cover of a Mayhem bootleg, Dawn of the Black Hearts. The image lives its own life on the internet. 

Anders: It’s difficult. It’s very difficult. 

Narrator: Pelle’s fans often want to become Facebook friends with Anders; he receives 3-5 friend requests per day. Sometimes, the people sending the friend requests have themselves shared the image on their social channels. 

Anders: You say you want to be my friend yet you have an image of my brother from when he’s just killed himself and like… body parts all over the wall. Would you think it was okay if I had an image of your brother like that? ‘What,’ they excuse themselves. ‘Oh, fuck, I’d forgotten that I had that image, that’s… Of course, I’ll remove it and I’m ashamed.’ 

Narrator: When Anders asks people to remove the image, most do. 

Anders: I’m terrified for when my children will start to Google those images… Øystein’s parents inherited the rights after Øystein died and [Øystein’s dad] has destroyed the images and I’ve received the rights, gotten to take over the rights from Øystein’s dad, so if anyone uses them in any form is printed media, I can sue the shit out of them. 

Narrator: It’s a small comfort every time one of Pelle’s fans tells Anders how much Pelle means. 

Anders: Most often, they have some story. They tell me how they’ve had a tough period in life and how they’ve, like, really been at a crossroads or something and feel that they received guidance from Pelle’s music. That warms -- That makes you happy. That really warms your heart. 

Narrator: Pelle’s grave is well-visited and every now and then, there’s a handwritten letter or a box of snus by it. 

[acrossthewavesoftime]

I hope you aren’t cross with me for answering this question in a post, but I didn’t want to be dependent on the character limit for direct messages, so here’s a little post. :-)

If I remember correctly, you did ask me once before, and alas, I still have no idea. The closest I can offer you is The Female Sailor, which dates to approximately 1710.

That however, does not necessarily mean anything at all; considering the wealth of dancing instructions, books and annual releases such as Playford’s English Dancing Master or Thompson’s Country Dances, not to speak of the many, less famous others, I’d say chances that the one internet rando you know who does that sort of thing is familiar with this one specific dance or knows exactly where to find it were low from the start.

The ‘problem’ with country dances is, they’re vastly different from what would count as traditional ballroom dancing nowadays in that each melody has a distinct choreography. Consider now the amount of country dances in existence, and it becomes nigh impossible even for professionals to know them all. That’s also why different instructors or dance groups often have drastically different repertoires; there are just so many to choose from. To illustrate this, as I was chatting with my dancing instructor about personal writings as sources on dances and the social events connected to dancing, I mentioned reading about a Scottish tune and accompanying dance called Mony Musk in Elizabeth Simcoe’s Diary, which I knew because I have a background in making traditional (albeit Irish, not Scottish) music and thus had come across one or the other video of people dancing to the tune and assumed it was fairly popular and well-known. Well, she’d never heard of it before.

There is a reason why modern-day historical dance events are either regulated by sending you a list of choreographies to study beforehand, or opt for a person explaining each dance to the room while dancing. Historically speaking, particularly the latter option isn’t even that off; when a specific dance was requested, the leading couple (i.e. those who requested it) would show how it is done to their immediate neighbours, causing the dance to ‘travel’ down the rows of dancers who’d proceed to observe and then join in with a little delay.

Of course, I looked around some databases and indexes, but sadly couldn’t find what you are looking for.

As for the naming of country dances, the people who choreographed them needed to come up with a distinctive title for each dance, because on account of the sheer number of dances there were, vague descriptions such as “the one with the dos à dos“ or “yet another double minor longways” wouldn’t have helped.

…Which is how we end up with the most randomly named country dances such as Wooden Shoes, The Chestnut, Johnny I’ll Tickle Thee, Excuse Me, or, my favourite, Lawyers Leave Your Pleading. It’s probable the person coming up with the name often just let themselves influence by their immediate surroundings. There are also lots of country dances named for places, people both real and fictional or specific dates and holidays. Current affairs or patriotic sentiments could also inspire a choreographer in need of a name (e.g. Marlborough’s Victory, His Majesty’s Health), not to speak of the slightly more risqué titles (e.g. Frisky Mollie’s Delight, Buxom Betty).

So who knows, maybe the person who named The Female Soldier was indeed inspired by Deborah Sampson, particularly if the dance was of local origin. I would guess though that particularly in the case of dances whose titles were chosen as references to current events, people (unless really famous like e.g. royalty) and pop culture of the day, these would have faded over time, particularly since these dances enjoyed a long history, with some of them, e.g. from the first Playford manuals in the mid-17thcentury, still being danced in the early 19th century.

Perhaps the document you found the reference in might be helpful in uncovering The Female Soldier. Are there any other clues? I know my way around the dancing manuals of the British Isles to some degree, but perhaps looking for American publications might be an option worth exploring? Assuming the title does indeed refer to Deborah Sampson, I’d guess she would have been more famous stateside than in Britain.

Happy searching, and be assured that you’re not the only one searching for an obscure dance; my goal is to find the mysterious Le Jupon rouge (The Red Skirt), a French dance Elizabeth Simcoe enjoyed on one night out partying in Québec.

So, to everyone out there: if you happen to know The Female Soldier or Le Jupon rouge, please contact @benjhawkins or myself! :-)

[do-you-have-a-flag]

saw a video commentating on how toxic (buzzword, i know, but i want to capture the general sense of the term before it got overused) twitter is and while it was 100% correct in it’s points (addictive design, harmful culture, negative impact on mental health, encouragement of harassment, lack of control over how things spread ect) hearing this sort of stuff discussed over and over again is kind of repetitive to me and really reminds me that not everyone had the same internet experience i do

i have a moderately addictive tendency with entertainment, i know it so i am extra careful to moderate my use of online spaces so i don’t fall down hate motivated engagement too often (e.g: i will watch a carefully worded essay about an internet weirdo for the sake of curiosity, i won’t view or engage with direct bullying of that person) 

i spent a chunk of my teens in the 2000s looking at memes on one of the most extreme online forums and while it was definitely less consumed by actual hate groups then it still contained a LOT of horrible content so i quickly 1: got desensitised to shock images 2: got to see the risks of being a victim of online targeting 3: learned the syntax or tone of edgy internet humour/trolling. So I learnt how to spot certain patterns and be wary of certain types of people

the result of all of this is that even when encountering tumblr’s brand of harmful content (the sheer amount of E//D and S//H in the early to mid 2010s on here was atrocious) things like dogpiling and sock puppet accounts and drama provocation didn’t really phase me i learnt how to curate it and the same goes for twitter (although i have less control there of how much shit is promoted BY twitter trending)

so like i sympathise with criticisms of tumblr or twitter or tiktok or any other social platform because the attention driven infrastructure of these types of websites really accelerate the WORST messages and behaviours. but at the same time i kind of despair what i consider to be web literacy. 

Web literacy, for lack of a better term, is the kind of learned practicality in using online spaces similar to how people should ideally be taught to evaluate the news and media and social interaction ect. i’ve said it before but when computers became more household standard in the 90s there was a push for child and adult education that was primarily hard/software based, in the 2000s there was SOME online safety stuff introduced but it’s really not until now that the actual impact of the internet as a social space is discussed in how it effects culture. I feel like there’s a gap where older adults have little frame of reference to cope with the web, children lack the critical skills to deal with it on their own, and teens and young adults grew up having to figure a lot of this out on their own so there are gaps.

I wish there were more standards and oversight for how people are taught to interact online and what large web companies were allowed to do with their platforms. i wish other than grouping everything in with “bullying” cyber safety was paired with lessons in curation and restraint and critical thinking. i wish that the predatory and gambling-esque practices of bigger online companies in their infrastructure was restricted and penalised. I wish that the internet was treated as a utility and people’s information and attention weren’t bought and sold as products to companies. I wish a lot of things about how people behave and react online.

i spend too many hours online and not all of it is constructive or engaging with positive topics. but i’m careful about malicious content and negativity bingeing. i make sure that the online spaces i do frequent are wrangled either via algorithm or organised exploration into environments i find fun and engaging. mainstream media like tv and radio didn’t allow for the level of customisation we have now and i like to take advantage of that fact, i acknowledge that the way i engage with the internet creates a bubble.

but just because i am under-informed about the darker aspects of web culture at the moment doesn’t mean i take for granted the existence BECAUSE i spent my teens and early 20s seeing the worst of it. the last several years has been an eye opener in just how much online behaviour is not just an extreme version of real world behaviour but it also feeds back into irl spaces creating new and complex problems. the kinds of problems that MIGHT be less pervasive if we had more social structures to support digital literacy and critical media engagement. 

sorry about the essay but tumblr was originally intended as a blogging platform so consider this a semiformal blog post of my thoughts idk. internet’s fucked but no more than the rest of reality. I wish more people actively worked to make their online spaces pleasant for their own sakes at the least. 

[marginalgloss]

I turn 35 tomorrow. How better to celebrate that than with some notes on the handful of video games I have managed to finish over the last ten months. In no particular order:

Judgment (PS4)

Something I think about often is that there aren’t many games which are set in the real world. By this I man the world in which we live today. You can travel through ancient Egypt or take a trip through the stars in the far future, but it’s relatively rare to be shown a glimpse of something familiar. Hence the unexpected popularity of the new release of Microsoft Flight Simulator, which lets you fly over a virtual representation of your front porch, as well as the Grand Canyon, and so on.

I found something like the same appeal in Judgment, a game which took me longer than anything else listed here to finish — seven or eight months, on and off. Like the Yakuza games to which it is a cousin, it’s set in Kamurocho, a fictional district of a real-world Tokyo; unlike other open-world games, it renders a space of perhaps half a square mile in intense detail. I spent a long time in this game wandering around slowly in first-person view, looking at menus and in the windows of shops and restaurants. The attention to detail is unlike everything I have ever seen, from the style of an air conditioning unit to the range of Japanese whiskies on sale in a cosy backstreet bar. And this was a thing of value at a time when the thought of going anywhere else at all, let alone abroad, seemed like it was going to be very difficult for a very long time.

It’s a game of at least three discrete parts. One of them is a fairly cold-blooded police procedural/buddy cop story: you play an ex-lawyer turned private eye investigating a series of grisly murders that, inevitably, link back to your own murky past. In another part you run around the town getting into hilarious martial arts escapades, battering lowlifes with bicycles and street furniture. In another, you can while away your hours playing meticulous mini-games that include darts, baseball, poker, Mahjong and Shogi — and that’s before we even get to the video game arcades.

All these parts are really quite fun, and if you want to focus on one to the exclusion of the others, the game is totally fine with that. The sudden tonal shifts brought about by these crazy and abrupt shifts in format are, I think, essentially unique to video games. But the scope of Judgment is a thing all its own. As a crafted spectacle of escapist fiction it’s comprehensive, and in its own way utterly definitive.  

Mafia: Definitive Edition (PS4)

I was amazed when I found out they were doing a complete remake of Mafia, a game I must have finished at least three or four times in the years after its release back in 2002. Games from this era don’t often receive the same treatment as something like Resident Evil, where players might be distracted by the controls and low-poly graphics of the original. 

A quality remake makes it easier for all kinds of reasons to appreciate what was going on there. (Not least because they have a lot of new games in the same series to sell.) But in the early 00s PC games like this one had started to get really big and ambitious, and had (mostly) fixed issues with controls; so there’s a hell of a lot more stuff going on in Mafia than in most games of that era. It was also a very hard game, with all kinds of eccentricities that most big titles don’t attempt today. Really I have no idea how this remake got made at all. 

But I was so fond of the original I had to play it. The obvious: it looks fantastic, and the orchestral soundtrack is warm and evocative. The story is basic, but for the era it seemed epic, and it’s still an entertaining spectacle. The original game got the balance of cinematic cutscenes, driving and action right the first time, even while Rockstar were still struggling to break out of the pastiche-led GTA III and Vice City. 

They have made it easier. You’re still reliant on a handful of medical boxes in each level for healing, but you get a small amount of regenerating health as well. You no longer have to struggle to keep your AI companions alive. Most of the cars are still heavy and sluggish, but I feel like they’re not quite as slow as they once were. They’ve changed some missions, and made some systems a little more comfortable — with sneaking and combat indicators and so on — but there aren’t any really significant additions.

The end result of all this is that it plays less like an awkward 3D game from 2002, and more like a standard third-person shooter from the PS3/360 era. Next to virtually any other game in a similar genre from today, it feels a bit lacking. There’s no skill tree, no XP, no levelling-up, no crafting, no side-missions, no unusual weapons or equipment, no alternative routes through the game. And often all of that stuff is tedious to the extreme in new titles, but here, you really feel the absence of anything noteworthy in the way of systems. 

My options might have been more limited in 2002 but back then the shooting and driving felt unique and fun enough that I could spend endless hours just romping around in Free Ride mode. Here, it felt flat by comparison; it felt not much different to Mafia III, which I couldn’t finish because of how baggy it felt and how poorly it played, in spite of it having one of the most interesting settings of any game in recent years. But games have come a long way in twenty years.    

Hypnospace Outlaw (Nintendo Switch)

If this game is basically a single joke worked until it almost snaps then it is worked extremely well. 

It seems to set itself up for an obvious riff on the way in which elements of the web which used to be considered obnoxious malware (intrusive popups and so on) have since become commonplace, and sometimes indispensable, parts of the online browsing experience. But it doesn’t really do that, and I think that’s because it’s a game which ends up becoming a little too fascinated by its own lore. 

The extra science fiction patina over everything is that technically this isn’t the internet but a sort of psychic metaverse delivered over via a mid-90s technology involving a direct-to-brain headset link. I don’t know that this adds very much to the game, since the early days of the internet were strange enough without actually threatening to melt the brains of its users. 

(This goes back to what I said about Judgment - I sometimes wonder if it feels easier to make a game within a complete fiction like this, rather than simply placing it in the context of the nascent internet as it really was. Because this way you don’t have to worry too much about authenticity or realism; this way the game can be as outlandish as it needs to be.) 

But, you know. It’s a fun conceit. A clever little world to romp around in for a while. 

Horace (Nintendo Switch)

I don’t know quite where to begin with describing this. One of the oddest, most idiosyncratic games I’ve played in recent years. 

As I understand it this platformer is basically the creation of two people, and took about six years to make. You start out thinking this is going to be a relatively straightforward retro run-and-jump game — and for a while, it is — but then the cutscenes start coming. And they keep coming. You do a lot of watching relative to playing in this game, but it’s forgivable because they are deeply, endearingly odd. 

It’s probably one of the most British games I’ve ever played in terms of the density and quality of its cultural references. And that goes for playing as well as watching; there’s a dream sequence which plays out like Space Harrier and driving sequences that play out like Outrun. There are references to everything from 2001 to the My Dinner with Abed episode of Community. And it never leans into any of it with a ‘remember that?’ knowing nod — it’s all just happening in the background, littered like so much cultural detritus. 

A lot of it feels like something that’s laser-targeted to appeal to a certain kind of gamer in their mid-40s. And, not being quite there myself, a lot of it passed me by. Horace is not especially interested in a mass appeal — it’s not interested in explaining itself, and it doesn’t care if you don’t like the sudden shifts in tone between heartfelt sincerity and straight-faced silliness. But as a work of singular creativity and ambition it’s simply a joyous riot. 

Horizon: Zero Dawn (PS4)

I stopped playing this after perhaps twelve or fifteen hours. There is a lot to like about it; it still looks stunning on the PS4 Pro; Aloy is endearing; the world is beautiful to plod around. But other parts of it seem downright quaint. It isn’t really sure whether it should be a RPG or an action game. And I’m surprised I’ve never heard anyone else mention the game’s peculiar dedication to maintaining a shot/reverse shot style throughout dialogue sequences, which is never more than tedious and stagey.

The combat isn’t particularly fun. Once discovered most enemies simply become enraged and blunder towards you, in some way or another; your job is to evade them, ensnare them or otherwise trip them up, then either pummel them into submission or chip away at their armour till they become weak enough to fall. I know enemy AI hasn’t come on in leaps and bounds in recent years but it’s not enough to dress up your enemies as robot dinosaurs and then expect a player to feel impressed when they feel like the simplest kind of enrageable automata. Oh, and then you have to fight human enemies too, which feels like either an admission of failure or an insistence that a game of this scale couldn’t happen without including some level of human murder. 

I don’t have a great deal more to say about it. It’s interesting to me that Death Stranding, which was built on the same Decima engine, kept the frantic and haphazard combat style from Horizon, but went to great lengths to actively discourage players from getting into fights at all. (It also fixed the other big flaw in Horizon — the flat, inflexible traversal system — and turned that into the centrepiece of the game.) 

Disco Elysium (PS4)

In 2019 I played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons. I’m talking about the actual tabletop roleplaying game, not any kind of video game equivalent. For week after week a group of us from work got together and sort of figured it out, and eventually developed not one but two sprawling campaigns of the never-ending sort. We continued for a while throughout the 2020 lockdown, holding our sessions online via Roll20, but it was never quite the same. After a while, as our life circumstances changed further, it sort of just petered out.

I mention all this because Disco Elysium is quite clearly based around the concept of a computerised tabletop roleplaying game (aka CRPG). My experience of that genre is limited to the likes of Baldurs Gate, the first Pillars of Eternity and the old Fallout games, so I was expecting to have to contend with combat and inventory management. What I wasn’t expecting was to be confronted with the best novel I’ve read this year.

To clarify: I have not read many other novels this year, by my standards. But, declarations of relative quality aside, what I really mean is that this game is, clearly and self-consciously, a literary artefact above all. It is written in the style of one of those monolithic nineteenth century novels that cuts a tranche through a society, a whole world — you could show it to any novelist from at least the past hundred years and they would understand pretty well what is going on. It is also wordy in every sense of that term: there’s a lot of reading to do, and the text is prolix in the extreme. 

You could argue it’s less a game than a very large and fairly sophisticated piece of interactive fiction. The most game-like aspects of it are not especially interesting. It has some of the stats and the dice-rolling from table-top roleplaying games, but this doesn’t sit comfortably with the overtly literary style elsewhere. Health and morale points mostly become meaningless when you can instantly heal at any time and easily stockpile the equivalent of health potions. And late on in the game, when you find yourself frantically changing clothes in order to increase your chances of passing some tricky dice roll, the systems behind the game start to feel somewhat disposable. 

Disco Elysium is, I think, a game that is basically indifferent to its own status as a game. Nothing about it exists to complement its technological limitations, and nor is it especially interested in the type of unique possibilities that are only available in games. You couldn’t experience Quake or Civilisation or the latest FIFA in any other format; but a version of Disco Elysium could have existed on more or less any home computer in about the last thirty years. And, if we were to lose the elegant art and beautiful score, and add an incredibly capable human DM, it could certainly be played out as an old-fashioned tabletop game not a million miles from Dungeons and Dragons.

All of the above is one of the overriding thoughts I have about this game. But it doesn’t come close to explaining what it is that makes Disco Elysium great.

[foreverdavidbyrne]

David Byrne’s interview in NME magazine

In 1979, David Byrne predicted Netflix. “It’ll be as easy to hook your computer up to a central television bank as it is to get the week’s groceries,” he told NME’s Max Bell, sitting in a Paris hotel considering the implications of Talking Heads’ dystopian single ‘Life During Wartime’.

He predicted the Apple Watch in that interview too: “[People will] be surrounded by computers the size of wrist watches.” And he foresaw surveillance culture and data harvesting: “Government surveillance becomes inevitable because there’s this dilemma when you have an increase in information storage. A lot of it is for your convenience, but as more information gets on file, it’s bound to be misused.”

In fact, over 40 years ago, he predicted the entire modern-day experience, as if he instinctively knew what was coming. “We’ll be cushioned by amazing technological development,” he said, “but sitting on Salvation Army furniture.”

The 68-year-old Byrne says today, “You can’t say that you know,” chuckling down a Zoom link from his home in New York and belying his reputation for awkwardness by seeming giddily relieved to be talking to someone. “It’s crazy to set yourself up as some sort of prophet. But there’s plenty of people who have done well with books where they claim to predict what’s going on. I suppose sometimes it’s possible to let yourself imagine, ‘Okay – what if?’ This can evolve into something that exists, can evolve into something more substantial, cheaper – these kinds of things.”

It’s been a lifelong gift. Byrne turned up at CBGBs in 1975 with his art school band Talking Heads touting ‘Psycho Killer’, as if predicting the punk scene’s angular melodic evolution, new wave, before punk was even called punk. In 1980, Talking Heads assimilated African beats and textures into their seminal ‘Remain In Light’ album, foreshadowing ‘world music’ and modern music’s globalist melting pot, then used it to warn America of the dangers of consumerism, selfishness and the collapse of civilisation. Pioneering or propheteering, Byrne has been on the front-line of musical evolution for 45 years, collaborating with fellow visionaries from Brian Eno to St Vincent’s Annie Clark, constantly imagining, ‘What if?’

The live music lockdown has been a frustrating freeze frame, but Byrne was already leading the way into music’s new normal. Launched in 2018, the tour to support his 10th solo album, ‘American Utopia’, has now turned into a cinematic marvel courtesy of Spike Lee – the concert film was released in the UK this week. The original tour was acclaimed as a live music revolution. Using remote technology, Byrne was able to remove all of the traditional equipment clutter from the stage and allow his musicians and dancers, in uniform grey suits and barefoot, to roam around a stage lined with curtains of metal chains with their instruments strapped to them. A Marshally distanced gig, if you will.

“As the show was conceptually coming together, I realised that once we had a completely empty stage the rulebook has now been thrown out,” Byrne says. “Now we can go anywhere and do anything. This is completely liberating. It means that people like drummers, for example, who are usually relegated to the back shadows, can now come to the front – all those kinds of things – which changes the whole dynamic.”

With six performers making up an entire drum kit and Byrne meandering through the choreography trying to navigate a nonsensical world, the show was his most striking and original since he jerked and jived around a constructed-mid-gig band set-up in Jonathan Demme’s legendary 1984 Talking Heads live film Stop Making Sense.

The American Utopia show embarked on a Broadway run last year, where Byrne super-fan Spike Lee saw it twice and leapt at the chance of turning the spectacle into Byrne’s second revolutionary live film, dotted with his musings on the human condition to illuminate the crux of the songs: institutional racism, our lack of modern connection, the erosion of democracy and, on opener ‘Here’, a lecture-like tour of the human brain, Byrne holding aloft a scale model, trying to fathom, ‘How do I work this?’

“I didn’t know how much of a fan Spike was!” Byrne laughs today. “He’d even go, ‘Why don’t you do this song? Why don’t you add this song in’. We knew one another casually so I could text him and say, ‘I want you to come and see our show; I think that you might be interested in making a film of it’.”

Are the days of the traditional stage set-up numbered? “Yes, I think so,” he replies. “At least in theatres and concert halls the size that I would normally play, yes. The fact that we can get the music digitally [means] a performance has to be really of value. It has to be really something special, because that’s where the performers are getting their money and that’s what the audience is paying for. They’re not paying very much for streaming music, but they are paying quite a bit to go and see a performance, so the performance has to give them value for money… It has to be really something to see.”

How does David Byrne envisage the future possibilities of live performance?

“I’ve seen a lot of things that hip-hop artists have done – like the Kanye West show where he emerges on a platform that floats above the stage,” he says. “I’d seen one with Kendrick Lamar where it was pretty much just him on stage, an empty stage with just him on stage and a DJ, somebody with a laptop – that was it. I thought, ‘Wow’. Then he started doing things with huge projections behind. There are lots of ways to do this. I love the idea of working with a band, with live musicians. ‘How can I innovate in this kind of way?’ It’s maybe easier for a hip-hop musician who doesn’t have a band to figure out. The pressure is on to come up with new ways of doing this.”

In liberating his musicians from fixed, immovable positions, American Utopia also acts as a metaphor for freeing our minds from our own ingrained ways of thinking. As Byrne intersperses Talking Heads classics such as ‘Once In A Lifetime’, ‘I Zimbra’ and ‘Road To Nowhere’ with choice solo cuts and tracks from ‘American Utopia’, he also dots the show with musings on an array of post-millennial questions: the health of democracy; the rise of xenophobia and fascism; our increasing reliance on materialism and online communication; the climate change threat; the existential nightmare of the dating app; and, crucially, the distances all of these things put between us.

“The ‘likes’ and friends and connections and everything that the internet enables,” he argues, “even Zoom calls like this, they’re no substitute for really being with other people. Calling social networks ‘social’ is a bit of an exaggeration.”

Byrne closes the show with the suggestion that, rather than isolate behind our LCD barriers, we should try to reconnect with each other. In an age when social media has descended into all-out thought war and anyone can find concocted ‘facts’ to support anything they want to believe, is that realistic?

“I have a little bit of hope,” he says. “Not every day, but some days. I have hope that people will abandon a lot of social media, that they’ll realise how intentionally addictive it is, and they’re actually being used, and that they might enjoy actually being with other people rather than just constantly scrolling through their phone. So, I’m a little bit optimistic that people will, in some ways, use this technology a little bit less than they have.”

A key moment in American Utopia comes with Byrne’s cover of Janelle Monae’s ‘Hell You Talmbout’, a confrontational track shouting the names of African-Americans who have been killed by police or in racially motivated attacks – Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin, George Floyd and far, far too many more. Does Byrne think the civil unrest in the wake of Floyd’s death and the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement make a serious impact?

“We’ll see how long this continues,” he says, “but in projects that I’m working on – there’s a theatre project I’m working on in Denver, there’s the idea of bringing this show back to Broadway, there’s other projects – those issues came to the fore. Issues of diversity and inclusion and things like that, which were always there. Now they’re being taken more seriously. The producers and theatre owners realise that they can’t push those things aside, that they have to be included in the whole structure of how a show gets put together.”

“At least for now, that seems to be a big change. I see it in TV shows and other areas too. There’s a lot of tokenism, but there’s a lot of real opportunity and changed thinking as well.”

Elsewhere, he encourages his audience to register to vote, and had registration booths at the shows. He must have been pleased about the record turnout in the recent US election? “Yeah, the turnout was great. Now you just got to keep doing that. Gotta keep doing it at all the local elections, too. It was important for me not to endorse a political party or anything in the show but to say, ‘Listen, we can’t have a democracy if you don’t vote. You have to get out there and let your voice be heard and there’s lots of people trying to block it.’ We have to at least try.”

Will Trump’s loss help bring people together after four years with such a divisive influence in charge?

“Yes. I think for me Trump was not so much a shock; we knew who he is. He was around New York before that, in the reality show [The Apprentice], we knew what kind of character he was. What shocked me was how quickly the Republican party all fell into line behind him, behind this guy who’s obviously a racist, misogynist liar and everything else. But it’s kind of encouraging – although it’s taken four years and with some it’s only with the prospect of him being gone – that quite a few have been breaking ranks. There are some possibilities of bridge building being held out.”

But, he says, “It’s too early to celebrate,” concerned that Senate Majority Leader and fairweather Trump loyalist Mitch McConnell will use any Republican control of the Senate to block many of Biden’s policies from coming into effect. “[This] is what happened with Obama… I want to see real change happen. [Climate change] absolutely needs to be a priority. The clock had turned back over the last four years, so there’s a lot to be done. Whether there’s the willpower to do everything that needs to be done, it remains to be seen, but at least now it’s pointing in the right direction.”

How will he look back on the last four years? Byrne ponders. “I’m hoping that I look back at it as a near-miss.”

American Utopia is as much a personal journey as a dissection of modern ills. Ahead of ‘Everybody’s Coming To My House’, Byrne admits to being a rather socially awkward type. He claims that a choir of Detroit teenagers, when singing the song for the accompanying video, had imbued the song with a far more welcoming message than his own rendition, which found him wracked with the fear that his visitors might never leave. How does someone like that deal with celebrity?

“In a certain way it’s a blessing,” Byrne grins, “because I don’t have to go up to people to talk to them – they sometimes come up to me. In other ways it’s a little bit awkward. Celebrity itself seems very superficial and I have to constantly remind myself that your character, your behaviour and the work that you do is what’s important – not how well known you are, not this thing of celebrity. I learned early on it’s pretty easy to get carried away. But it does have its advantages. I had Spike Lee’s phone number, so I could text him.”

Talking Heads drummer Chris Frantz’s recent book Remain In Love suggests that the more successful Byrne got early on, the more distant he became.

Byrne nods. “I haven’t read the book, but I know that as we became more successful I definitely used some of that to be able to work on other projects. I worked on a dance score with [American choreographer] Twyla Tharp and I worked on a theatre piece with [director] Robert Wilson – other kinds of things – [and] I started working on directing some of the band’s music videos. So I guess I spent less time just hanging out. As often happens with bands, you start off being all best friends and doing everything together and after a while that gets to be a bit much. Everybody develops their own friends and it’s like, ‘I have my own friends too’. Everybody starts to have their own lives.”

The future is far too enticing for David Byrne to consider revisiting the past. “I do live alone so sometimes it would get lonely”, he says of lockdown, but he’s been using his Covid downtime to cycle around undiscovered areas of New York and remain philosophical about the aftermath.

“We’ll see how long before the vaccine is in, before we return to being able to socialise,” he says, “but I’m also wondering, ‘How am I going to look at this year? Am I going to look at it as, “Oh yes, that’s the year that was to some extent taken away from our lives; our lives were put on pause?”’ We kept growing; we kept ageing; we keep eating, but it was almost like this barrier had been put up. It has been a period where, in a good way, it’s led us to question a lot of what we do. You get up in the morning and go, ‘Why am I doing this? What am I doing this for? What’s this about?’ Everything is questioned.”

Post-vaccine, he hopes to “travel a little bit” before looking into plans to bring the ‘American Utopia’ show back to Broadway, and possibly even to London if the financial aspects can be worked out. “Often when a show like that travels, the lead actors might travel,” Byrne explains, “but in this case it’s the entire cast that has to travel. So you’ve got a lot of hotel bills and all that kind of stuff. We wanted to do it. There might be a way, if we can figure that out.”

Once we all get our jab, will everyone come to recognise that, as Byrne sings on ‘American Utopia’s most inspiring track, ‘Every Day Is A Miracle’? “Optimistically, maybe,” he says. “There will be a lot of people who will just go, ‘Let’s get back to normal – get out to the bars, the clubs and discos’. That’s already been happening in New York; there’s been these underground parties where people just can’t help themselves. But after all this it’d be nice to think that people might reassess things a little bit.”

And with the algorithm as the new gatekeeper and technology beginning to subsume the sounds and consumption of music, what does the new wave Nostradamus foresee for rock in the coming decades? Will AIs soon be writing songs for other AIs to consume to inflate the numbers, cutting humanity out of the equation altogether?

“It seems like there’ll be a kind of factory,” Byrne predicts, “an AI factory of things like that, and of newspaper articles and all of this kind of stuff, and it will just exaggerate and duplicate human biases and weaknesses and stupidity. On the other hand, I was part of a panel a while back, and a guy told a story about how his listening habits were Afrofuturism and ambient music – those were his two favourite ways to go. The algorithm tried to find commonalities between the two so it could recommend things to him and he said it was hopeless. Everything it recommended was just horrible because it tried to find commonalities between these two very separate things. This just shows that we’re a little more eclectic than these machines would like to think.”

And in the distant future? Best prepare to welcome your new gloop overlords. Byrne isn’t concerned about The Singularity – the point at which machine intelligence supersedes ours and AI becomes God – but instead believes that future technologies will emulate microbial forms.

“I watched a documentary on slime moulds [a simple slimy organism] the other day,” he says, warming to his sticky theme. “Slime moulds are actually extremely intelligent for being a single-celled organism. They can build networks and bunches of them can communicate. They can learn, they have memories, they can do all these kinds of things that you wouldn’t expect a single-celled organism to be able to do.”

“I started thinking, ‘Well, is there a lesson there for AI and machine learning, of how all these emerging properties could be done with something as simple as a single cell?’ It’s all in there… when things interact, they become greater than the sum of their parts. I thought, okay, maybe the future of AI is not in imitating human brains, but imitating these other kinds of networks, these other kinds of intelligences. Forget about imitating human intelligence – there’s other kinds of intelligence out there, and that might be more fruitful. But I don’t know where that leads.”

His grin says he does know, that he has a vision of our icky soup-world future, but maybe the rest of the species isn’t yet advanced enough to handle it. But if we’re evolving towards disaster rather than utopia, we can trust David Byrne to give us plenty of warning.

December 18, 2020

[sunshinereversed]

Okay, the late 90s were creepy, and I’m not just talking about columbine. Do you also feel that? Idk how to explain it. Maybe it’s different for me because I didn’t live through it, but true crime from the mid to late 90s always fucks me up. Weird vibes is all I’m saying. People want to time travel back to the 90s, but I’m always like no it was a creepy decade. Like weird occult shit and moody music and early internet scapes... it would be cool to go back I guess, but something about that time period is unsettling.

your emotions are valid. a lot of past decades, especially ones you haven’t lived through, will seem like that. they’ll seem haunted, alien, and totally remote from our lives now because we can’t experience them except through second-hand sources. I sort of feel that way about the 60s/70s.

the 90s definitely had its own “weird vibe,” as you put it. i think it’s creepy in the same way that people find liminal spaces creepy. there’s something dreamy and nostalgic about it, but at the same time, something cursed and nightmarish. so, i think i get what your saying.

i can really only speak for the united states, but the anxieties pre 9/11 had a different feel. before ‘96ish, HIV/AIDS was one of the things i remember being scary. it was the topic of many tv show special episodes. there were racial issues, the LA riots. the lgbtq+ community wasn’t nearly as accepted back then compared to now.

social media wasn’t a thing yet, so it was kinda nice in that sense. AOL was a big deal. and fashion trends came and went. the fashion of the early, middle, and late 90s were very distinct, but some things carried over.

the true crime of the 90s is certainly disturbing. mass shootings/terrorism weren’t really an everyday thing yet, so it rattled the nation when it did start to happen. a bit of satanic panic from the 70s/80s survived through the 90s, creating fear surrounding goth/occult culture. an interesting documentary on youtube called “teens and the dark religion” is worth checking out to get a sense of the absurd intolerance.

the 90s suburban youth culture, while part of my experience, was sort of directionless, looking back. movies like “kids,” “mid-90s,” “the craft,” “bully,” “thirteen” sort of capture that unsettling, cautionary tale you’re getting at. 

[raeseddon]

Why New Age Spirituality Was Always Going to Have An Extremist Problem

As the daughter of an activist who came of age in the 60's and 70's, I spend a lot of my time talking to my dad about the many, many facets of the counter-culture, and how some aspects of it eventually caused more harm to my generation, and the generation after ours than anyone living at the time could possibly imagine. "New Age" ~alternative~ religions (if it even deserves to be called that) is probably the big one, when you follow the thread of its development and impact in the 21st century. What began as a racist and utterly fetishistic orientalism has become a clear and present danger to all who believe in science and reason. I have a friend who's really into it (not to the point of science denial, if that were the case, we wouldn't be friends) but I'm not sure I could bring up the origins of New Age with her without hurting her deeply, especially because it's something she's come to after a lot of personal struggle, the same way I came to Buddhism.

The thing is, you can't separate what New Age is now from where it began, which was largely a thought experiment carried out by the Hippy/Yippy movement. A note: There is a big difference between Hippies/Yippies and the people who were actually involved in the activism of the time. Hippies/Yippies were upper middle class/rich kids in it for the drugs and the sex and because they wanted to piss off their parents. If there's blame to be laid for the existence of New Age, it's at their feet. They're the people who started the cults and turned a lot of the movement into an aesthetic rather than rooted in any sort of social or political ethos. (If you want to get galaxy brain about it, it's their fault "distressed" denim jeans exist.) I digress. So where did New Age come from?

"New Age" began as this chaotic, totally nonsensical mish-mash of Nichiren Buddhism, Hinduism and Sufism, mixed in with "tribal" beliefs like that of the Romani (name a group, New Age stole someething from them,) and Native North American peoples-- every inch of it embodied the worst of racism and orientalism at the time it was created, treating adherants' abitrary interpretations of each as "elevated thinking" that was supposedly greater than the sum of its parts. When the commune movement died out, New Age became a very behind closed doors/personal belief that didn't experience a big surge until the mid 80's, when the commercialist aspect of it really picked up-- that's when the crystal shops, incense, "dream catchers" (yet another type of racism to add to the pile!) crystal balls, aroma therapy you name it exploded everywhere you went. Every mall in North America had at least one of these stores, some of them masqurading as import/export stores dealing entirely in East Asian and Far East "religious supplies." Gen X and elder Millenials will no doubt have at least one memory of shops like these-- beaded curtains, sitar music, sandlewood insense, and as you edged into the early 90's, at least one white shop worker had "dreds." It was capitalist branded racism at its most rampant. But there was worse to come.

Once the internet was commercially available, like every other interest, there were websites, message boards and the people who had these beliefs could network in ways they never imagined. This was also when alternative medicine became big, but not because there was finally a large body of research that showed how and why it worked: the New Age spiritualists weren't interested in that-- all they took away from it was a sense of superiority that this "new, radical" thing they had known about for ages was now legitimate in a way it had never been before. And once the community was well and truly established on the anonimity of the internet, that's when the personal racism of each individual could really come out, totally unfiltered.

More insidiously, it's also when the conspiracy theory community really began to edge in, especially with the "wellness" freaks who were convinced that "big pharma" was Not To Be Trusted and only natural things, unadultered, straight from Mother Gaia could ever really heal someone. That was the groundwork for the explosion of the anti-vaxx movement, which would have happened with or without celebrity endorsement. It was there, an abcess below the surface waiting to burst. The pediatric medical community had been trying to warn people for years before Kathy Lee and Austism Speaks opened their mouths and got Loud and Proud about it. And once those gates were open, nothing was going to close them--which is why we have people arguing that all drugs are actually the causes of diseases they're meant to "cure" and people who will drink colloidal silver and stick garlic up their noses before getting a vaccine to one of the most virulent plagues of it's kind in a hundred years. It's why you have people about to be put on ventilators in complete denial because they "did everything right" -- ate all the right things, did yoga for hours a day, sat surrounded by their crystals "absorbing their energies" that would protect them-- so no, they don't have Covid, this isn't happening.

It's vitally important, now more than ever to understand how we got to where we are now so we can hopefully do more in the future so things aren't this bad. People will always need to believe something, but that's not really the problem, the problem is uncritical belief, because if you show that you're not willing to think about the things you believe, people will do anything to exploit that for the worst. New Age, from its inception was always going to have an extremist problem, because it was inheirtantly racist and valued white superiority for making false equivalencies and connections between disparate systems of belief. There was no way it wasn't going to go the direction it did because people convinced of their own superiority will never believe that they've been manipulated into believing the worst conspiracy theories out there.

[jingers994]

Hey. So. I haven't ever actually made a real post on here like ever, even back in the day when I actually used Tumblr. That's just not what I used it for, I just followed artists & writers whose work I enjoyed. Lots of them have stopped posting since I left in 2016, but to anyone I'm still following who does still post stuff, that's probably because you're awesome and I love your work. <3 Shoutout to literally every person who actually sees this post, never stop being cool. I first joined in 2014, and I left around mid-2016. So in the years since making this account I've spent less time off Tumblr than on it, and enough of the accounts I used to interact with have left that I don't expect any response to this post. I guess I'm just venting. During the 2014-2017 period I was attending university full time. I graduated, so yay for me. I stopped following a lot of web comics and serials that I used to read around 2017, because I kind of just didn't have enough time in the day anymore, and playing video games was a more efficient and less mentally draining way to unwind. Even before that I was essentially just a ghost in those communities, I never really interacted with any of the artists or other fans, I just consumed what they were making and hoped that they kept making it. To this day, not making an effort to become involved in any of those small communities is maybe one of my biggest regrets. Many of them have either entered indefinite hiatus, just became very quiet, and some have finished or just stopped altogether for other reasons. The web culture I wanted to come back and interact with, in large part, doesn't really exist anymore; it was a product of its time, and time has made everyone move on. I can mostly still go back and grab archived copies of the stories and comics themselves, but the communities, the active fans waiting for new episodes and discussing old ones, are basically gone from public view. Many of the artists I used to follow haven't had active accounts that I can find since 2016, or 2015, or earlier, and even if I did want to just drop a heartfelt message thanking them for making something so treasured and nostalgic to me, they'll likely never read it. Maybe lack of such community feedback is why they stopped posting, and people like me are why those projects ended. After graduating, I just needed time to mentally recuperate from the draining final year, and I never really managed to recover all of the interests I used to have or pick up my old online haunts & habits again. They just fell by the wayside because my horribly depressed brain didn't want to spend energy thinking about them. I think I might be starting to ramble. Since graduating, I've pretty much put my personal life totally 'on ice' until I found a job, or went back into postgraduate study. I just didn't think it would take so long, and I was far too shy and embarrassed to continue answering questions about 'what I was doing now'. The years since graduating have very much not been kind to me, and making these decisions was a mistake. Culture isn't something that just 'exists' behind a screen, waiting for you to look at it; it's created by the interaction between artists and their fans, and producers and consumers, and people exchanging ideas. Refusing to engage in this because you just want to look at the final product, kills the culture. So, so many things I used to enjoy are no longer enjoyable to me, and that's my fault for engaging in extreme time-wasting, and spending no energy *trying* to enjoy them anymore. So many things I used to enjoy, are no longer being worked on for a number of reasons, and I guess you could say that's sort of my fault as well, or at least is maybe the fault of people like me. I've always been a bit of a data hoarder, and just recently I was backing up stuff on an old hard drive into a newer one in case it failed, and I came across copies of webcomics I haven't really thought about for close to 5 years. I also happened to be listening to a song that I used to listen to a lot back in the day but haven't for years, and the nostalgia rush literally made me cry. After backing up everything else I could find on that hard drive, I rushed to try and look for anything I could remember I was interested in that was still on the internet, which also lead me back here. Some of you, if anyone is reading this at all, might remember the Drowtales: Moonless Age webcomic. Or you might remember Girl Genius, or Exiern, or the Whateley Universe web stories. You might have gotten into the Fallen London universe, maybe via the Sunless Sea/Skies games. You might have looked at some CYOAs from way back when, or checked out the Jumpchain or Exalted threads on SpaceBattles or SufficientVelocity. You probably haven't, because even if 3 or 4 people actually do read this it's unlikely they have the same interests I used to, but that's okay. I used to quietly geek out about these things for hours on end, and my life has honestly been lesser since I stopped doing that. I've had a horrid, wistful lump inside my stomach since yesterday when I started looking for these things, and I've felt like I'm on the verge of crying ever since as well. After 2 and a bit years of grey, empty anhedonia this is a huge win, and I'm very glad that finding these things again has wrangled some emotion out of me. Many of these projects are still active, several communities actually are still around, and I've resolved to go and introduce myself, no matter whether it makes me anxious to do so or not. Not doing so back when they were more active is an enormous regret, and I don't want that to happen again. I'm hoping to extend this mindset out into the real world as well, and hopefully I'll be arranging some volunteering, part-time study and/or going back and trying to publish some of the work I did in my last year of university, finally. Everyone's been memeing about the 'curse of 2020' for a while now, but I think 2020 was just the culmination of some horrible stuff happening since as early as 2015, and it feels like the final verse of some grotesque voodoo curse on the entire planet. Hopefully it's going to get better from now on. I've never been what you'd call an optimist, or an extrovert, but I really do hope that reaching out to like-minded people can help life be better than it has been. No idea if I'll keep looking through Tumblr, since the buyout and all that, but I guess I'll probably check in from time to time now that I've had this revelation, haha. Anyone who actually took the time to read this; first of all what are you still doing on Tumblr after the porn purge, lmao. Secondly, You're great, and I really hope life has been treating you better than it has me. Have a good one!

[noboo98]

http://www.madamepickwickartblog.com/2011/08/smile-happy-days-were-once-again/

THIS logo was used on a very popular little (3/4″) button that was a very trendy item worn in the punk scene in seattle. it gradually was lifted and used on a tshirt for the band nirvana, around the time of the release of their record ‘bleach’. i remember watching lisa orth paste it together in the production room at the rocket, where she had just quit as the art director. i’m not sure who picked the image – the band or lisa. i’m not even sure whether they altered the image or not. but, it was classic ‘sub pop’ marketing move of the time – appropriate an interesting piece of local weirdness and then exploit the hell out of it. that image became synonymous with nirvana and was a huge hit . they probably sold a million of those tshirts alone. who knows what else it was used on. AC:...haven't really looked at that nirvana logo in over a decade or more. i remember discussion about using the logo straight across and the risk of lawsuit. so, lisa may have altered it to avoid that. but the lusty lady logo was the idea. that's undeniably the case. i was there. the result is that most people around the world think of this blissed-out happy face as the ‘nirvana’ logo. go figger. in reality it was a promotional branding icon thingie used to promote the notorious ‘lusty lady’ strip club on seattle’s first avenue. every cool punky hipster in seattle wore one of these things as a sort of ironic joke. the popular story of the lusty lady is as peculiar as their logo’s morph into pop celebrity. as the story goes, the place existed as an act of defiance by the owner of the building (situated directly across the street from the glamorous new robert venturi-designed seattle art museum main entrance). in an attempt to expand the area into a yuppie upscale fern bar sort of neighborhood the city supposedly attempted to use “emminent domian” laws to acquire the building (condmnation) for development. the owner fought them hand and foot and eventually won. so the story goes, the landlord, in an act of apparent retaliation, began to rent out the space in the building to the sleaziest worst tenants he could find. the basement was rented to the First Avenue Service Center – that charity who tended the needs of the street homeless with food, medical, counceling and even shelter. the main first avenue street level was leased to the lusty lady ‘exotic private dance’ club (aka – strip joint front for everything imaginable). the top stories were apparently left vacant and were notorious ‘shooting galleries.” so, the building was a huge festering eyesore int he middle of the seattle power structure’s attempt to railroad the downtown into microyuppiedom. the lusty lady maintained this attitude for years by boldly placing clever off-color slogans and jokes on their reader boards poking their filthy finger into the eye of the seattle art/downtown/political power structure. (i wish i could remember some of them, but they were so wink wink naughty naughty that they often get displayed in the local news. anybody out there remember any of the slogans?) this button (later nirvana logo) was just one of their many many PR campaigns to stay as public and visible as possible in the battle against the city. everybody loved it! in fact, when the lusty lady announced they were finally closing down (after a couple of decades of this) the entire city seemed to mourn the loss. but, the lusty lady also has another rather sordid chapter to add in the unwritten history of seattle underground culture. for one thing, the lusty lady seemed to maintain a lot of goodwill among the hipster bohemian community because it was ‘women owned’. all that means in my book is that there was a female face on the front of the power structure – a “front” for much darker ownership. but, the hipsters thought that it meant it was some feminist defiant re-interpretation of ‘the oldest profession’. so, it became a badge of honor to actually dance there (believe it or not). many women in the scene proudly let i be known that’s where they worked. everybody was usually dully impressed. one seattle documentarian photographer even did a well-received book about the club that resulted in an exhibit inside the seattle art museum itself (the across the street enemy of the club). many of the ‘girls’ working there behind the scenes and the ‘art of erotic dancing’ became synonymous with ‘outsider’ art (or something.) at any rate, the result was a sort of “acceptance’ of the lusty lady as a sort of ‘outsider art palace.” pretty strange. but it was thought of as as ‘cool’, where every other dance club in town was ‘sleazy.’ the truth was, that the place (like most of these places) was a front for extensive prostitution and drug-abuse lifestyles. it was as bad (or maybe even worse) than any strip club. turning tricks was the unspoken part of the duties there. ‘wom wned’ and ‘art museumed’ or not, it was the same old shit. so it goes. the other little dirty secret of the seattle rock scene is that many of the bands (some of whom went on to stardom) were supported by girlfriends who “danced” there. it was so common to have a girlfriend dancing at the lusty lady associated with a band and financially helping to support them that it was almost a standard accessory. hooker money helped feed and house and clothe man many ‘grunge rockers’ over the years. without the girlfriends’ selling their bodies, the rock stars boyfriends would have had to get jobs and sacrifice their futures (as they hopefully imagined them). so, the loving gal pals hit the streets to support the rock star redemption fantasies that kept them going in the form of their personal rock god boyfriend. it’s a sad dirty little ignored fact that never seems to make it into the pop history books. most of those rock stars never were, they never made it. most of those girl friends became professional sex workers for their entire short lives. most of those dreams of salvation never materialized. the bottom line is that every time time i see that nirvana tshirt with that blissed-out happy face logo, i think about those pathetic little girls turning tricks to keep their rock star boy friends in cigarettes and beer. i think of the amazing amount of damage the rocknroll fantasy has done to everybody. sometimes i think poor little curt did, too. ADDENDUM: AC:i remember back in the mid-80’s, interviewing a guy while i was working on that old “instant litter ‘ book i did about seattle punk posters. this guy was a fixture as a manager of several dozen rock bands over the years. the whole time i interviewed him, there were rock stars hanging out around his house and these beautiful scantily clad young women cruising about. he kept interrupting the interview – which consisted primarily of me holding a poster and asking, “who did this?” and him answering, oh, i dod that. turns out, he never designed a poster in his life. – to answer this portable phone (it was a briefcase phone, no less! just like maxwell smart.) he’d mumble into the phone and he’d point at a girl and give her a slip of paper and she’d leave. he was running an ‘escort’ service to support all the bands. i guess the ‘guys’ got ‘bennies’, too. apparently, eh was also the first local pimp to utilize early computer online services to run hi biz, too. he’d get busted and the cops would take his portable phone and his computer and then try to find names. they couldn’t because they had no idea how the internet worked. the pimp would just get a new phone, contact his server and be back in biz. it took the cops a few years to figure out his game. i guess he went tot the big house,eventually. all those bands collapsed in flames. so, this was not a new phenom in the scene. it may be a part of every rock scene that ever existed. there would be a greta book about this stuff you could write…. Related Posts in the name of love… some kind of wonderful? history is written by the whiners This entry was posted in Feature Article, Ideas/Opinion, Marketing/Advertising/Media, Modern Arts/Craft and tagged art chantry, Courtney Love, Curt Cobain, lisa orth, lusty lady, lusty lady seattle, Nirvana, nirvana bleach. Bookmark the permalink.

[theabsolutelytru]

Hot Take: Millennial should be 1981-2001.

Also, nobody in the category “Millennial” seems to think they’re a Millennial, even if they’re firmly in the middle of it, because of all the negative propaganda against this age group.

First, let me start by saying that the spread IS large, and I get that it’s confusing and hard to say that someone born in 1981 is similar to someone born in 1997, or whatever, but honestly, that’s just age difference. Someone born in 1949 isn’t similar to someone born in 1961, either. The similarities should be just enough that it doesn’t change much between the ages.

Like, a lot of people calling themselves older Gen-Z or Zennials, I have a ton in common with, and I was actually born in 1989. I don’t, strangely, have much in common with someone born in the early 80s. I honestly think the 80s is different enough from the 90s and 00s (when I was a child and teen) that if anything, the Millennial generation is drawn incorrectly on the older end. Like, maybe instead of my earlier category, it should be something more like 1986-2001? Like, people who are a bit too young to actually remember the 80s. But I digress.

My point is, I think people calling themselves “older Gen-Z” are actually younger Millennials. The problem is that the cut-off age has been in flux for about a decade (the debate between 1994, 1996, and 1998), but also, I think one of the major problems is how Boomers made it their goal in life to use Millennials as the scapegoat for everything wrong with society. It doesn’t help that they used Millennial as code for “young person” until a few years ago when Gen-Z got coined (sometimes they still do. So many older people are still calling teenagers Millennials. I’m so sorry, teens.). So, anything teens did wrong, they went “Millennials are so stupid/bad/weird”. So, I think people who are squarely in Millennial, hitting their mid-20s/early-30s were all “Uhhh... we’re not the ones eating Tide Pods” which sort of threw the kids under the bus, and the kids were like “uhhh, we’re not actually Millennials lol.”

So, we got off on the wrong foot, in the first place. Then, people who were born in the mid-late 90s decided they didn’t necessarily want to be grouped into the Millennial thing, either. Thus, the cut-off ages getting older, and the term Zennial being coined. 

The gag is, a lot of the things Gen-Z defines as Gen-Z things are Millennial things... especially Black Millennial things. A lot of stuff that’s “Gen-Z language” is just AAVE or Black slang that’s been around for decades. A lot of the whole “Gen-Z are activists” thing is just Gen-Z continuing the work of Millennial activists, but then pretending that Millennials never did anything. Like, Black Lives Matter totally started in 2013 and was created by Black Millennials... today, Gen-Z white girls put a BLM sticker on their TikTok and think they did something.

Also, I think there’s confusion about, like... conservative Millennials being representative of a problem in Millennial culture rather than, like... just that they’re white. Mostly. Like, a lot of white Gen-Z are conservative, too, just like white Gen-X, and white Boomers. The problem, as much as we like to pretend it is, isn’t really the generation. There’s a problem within whiteness as a whole, and we’re just... not talking about it because it’s easier to say, like “Okay, Boomer” and pretend it’s not... a whiteness problem. (Also, Black Boomers similarly aren’t really the problem when people complain about Boomers... but, that’s another topic for another day.)

Anyway, back to, I think that this whole Gen-Z vs Millennial thing started because of the same reason nobody has ever wanted to refer to themselves as a Millennial. Boomer media demonized Millennials as lazy and entitles babies, and then a few Gen-Z kids did some activism and media started going “Gen-Z are great!!” (and I honestly think that a lot of that was Millennial and Gen-X writers praising the kids for using their voices, which somehow got lost...) so everyone who is a younger Millennial was just like “Nope, I’m Gen-Z” and everyone who is actually Gen-Z is like “lol yeah, Millennials are whiny babies who won’t get a job to actually get a house instead of a shoebox apartment lol” and when negative press about Gen-Z came out the term didn’t really exist, so everyone was still just saying “Millennials” and then Millennials were like “uh, no, we’re not actually in high school anymore, that’s not us.” So, it was also sort of like throwing Gen-Z under the bus, so I think it created a line of animosity among them and yeah... here we are, where Gen-Z seems to think we all are “plant moms” and “girl bosses” who are obsessed with Harry Potter, and Millennials... for the most part seem to be really proud of Gen-Z, so it’s weird that they actually dislike us so much...

...while simultaneously liking our celebs, activists, and internet personalities, so I don’t actually think they dislike us, I think they’ve just bought the propaganda. 

And I think the propaganda made young Millennials not want to be... and decide they’re Gen-Z...

which makes our generation ridiculously short. Like, if you listen to everyone who says they’re not Millennials, so older Millennials and younger Millennials, it leaves like 8 years of Millennials. Which isn’t a generation.

So, either we get rid of the distinction and split it down the middle and give the older half to Gen-X and the younger half to Gen-Z, or we admit that it should be the standard 18-20 years that every other generation is, which would be 1981-1999/2001, or we shift it properly, which would actually be probably 1986/7-2001.

Because it’s strange to me that I have to be in a category with people I don’t relate to (I don’t remember The Never Ending Story and didn’t know what a Teddy Ruxpin was until they started talking about it in Umbrella Academy) and that people I have a lot more in common with are a different generation from me because they were born 6 years later (I like ATLA, YouTube & TikTok, I grew up watching Disney Channel on basic cable, most of my college classes had online components and I remember the dreaded 11:59pm, most of my formative teen/young adult years were spent on social media.)