#this is just like

[thepenguisalive7]

Canonically, he has been kidnapped! :D

thanks Richas

[applestruda]

Been messing around with like, a horn made of vex magic,, bc idk it just hit me one morning

[pixlokita]

Nope nope nope the second blog feels like extra work this is not organized. Okay sorry about that y’all gonna follow you back while I delete that one hang tight-

[tiptapricot]

I’m not an MK1 hater by any stretch of the imagination but god… any time I consume any further MKombat media it’s like… literally why would they ever do what they did with Kuai Liang and Hanzo. Like what was ever the thought process for them to do that with their stories.

[endcant]

bear with me bc i am drinking THC lemonade

whenever my “people shocked by me being interested in consumer aesthetics counter” ticks up by 1, i know that i have failed to express myself on the internet. i am obsessed with commercial ephemera. it’s not that i like it… it’s something deeper. something… worse? better? something more embarrassing, at least.

the only time i’ve ever done psychedelics my profound realization was that i really, really enjoyed going to target. i like the lights. i am always commenting on the products and whether i think they are on trend or off trend for what i understand the target demographic to be. i love nothing more than to watch someone pick up an object, briefly imagine their life with that object in it, and then either put it in their basket or put it back on the shelf. even moreso when i’m watching a friend shop. even moreso when we can only window shop and that friend starts explaining to me what they would do with the thing if they had the money to buy it.

i studied american pop music history in college and i continue to study the history of bubblegum pop in my free time. i want to eventually write up a video or a series or something about the extended international history of teenybopper bubblegum pop. i am trying to learn music industry jargon old and new in my target languages in an attempt to gain access to information about these things that i can’t access in english alone.

i read early 2010s posts about how minimalism was the only morally righteous visual style with rapt fascination. i had a vaporwave phase exactly one decade ago. my friends in high school would bring me arizona green teas because they knew i would find it aesthetic. my advanced painting teacher hated it because i kept painting pale minimalist watercolor pieces that looked like 90s waiting room wall decor. my dream at the time was moving to santa fe and becoming a fine artist.

i was a proto-cottagecore blogger before cottagecore was named. i have well over 100 blogs, considering i hit 96 at some point during my previously mentioned decade-ago vaporwave phase. i do not bother to count anymore

as a young child, i used to go to the store almost daily with my parents and look for unfamiliar packs of gum so i could assess their packaging, flavor, and concept. i *really* cared about this. i got into this because i was given free packs of 5 gum and orange mountain dew at the halo 3 midnight release.

i learned HTML from neopets and i used to code gaiaonline themes and put them up on tektek. they sucked really bad btw.

i spent around 2 decades looking for the source of a single image of an anime river angel i saw on quizilla because she meant so much to me as a child about the power of what mere images could be only to find last year that the artist now draws hentai on pixiv and their art quality is now quite rushed. i think about this regularly when i think about creators i have idolized, and i don’t know what it means to me, but it feels like valuable information.

last night i couldnt sleep because i kept wanting to get on my phone to look at ancient greek vases on jstor

the worst part is i feel that the way that seeing ONLY consuming-or-not-consuming as the primary way to interact with the world is a serious mental roadblock for people in capitalist society. i think that consumer identity is a tool often used to warp the minds of citizens. i think that if i could go back in time and strangle edward bernays i would. i think that it is meaningful that american society has generated dozens of terms for “someone who is stealing or misusing a cultural signifier, or otherwise engaging with a culture or subculture under false pretenses/without doing due diligence/without participating in proper cultural exchange” over just the past couple centuries and that seeing and acknowledging the cycle is essential for anyone working in the arts

ive spent the past couple years reading up on historical art movements since industrialization to see how other art workers have dealt with their jobs being mechanized away, and ive decided to choose to value myself as a human animal who gets to experience the process of making things with my human animal body.

i am compelled to play piano when i drink red wine and i feel that i’m a fundamentally superficial being in function, but i can be more in purpose. like a poster. like a mask. like someone screaming so hard on stage that you believe them. that you look behind you to see what they are screaming at. i think in symbols and colors front and center, with verbal background chatter like an ever-tuning radio, and i am frustrated when people don’t understand that i am speaking my mind when i show them what i’ve made.

i care about aesthetics a lot. consumer and otherwise. it just so happens that i live in a capitalist society wherein the market attributes value to certain aesthetic information, which generates conversation about what certain images mean, what gives them value, what detracts from their value, what they are responding to, what responses they require in turn. but anywhere, anytime that there is a conversation about aesthetics, i want to be there.

i have always loved to perceive and to make, since the earliest stories anyone has to tell about baby cave. if i lost everything that makes me who and what i am right now, i believe i would still care about aesthetics. if there is anything left for even a cell of my body to experience, it would want to experience it beautifully and enjoy it deliciously.

happy 420

[lastoneout]

I think ship hate in general is pointless and best kept in private where you can vent without bothering anyone but there is something profoundly idiotic about how often I see people who ship The Biggest Ship in a fandom get so so SO upset when any other ship involving their characters exists. Like if I can't even go into the general tag without 85% of the posts being positive content for your ship you don't get to be upset when 0.1% of those posts are positive content for a ship that contradicts your ship.

[torifuckingspring]

spoiler to season 1 of loki i guess

this is clearly bothering me too much so i am making a poll

it might have been important to the plot i just didn't like it

i also think it was very in character of loki to kiss a version of himself

[yume-fanfare]

omg finally. eichi's zombie apocalypse

[whimsyprinx]

I shouldn’t even have to say this but in light of a recent ask PLEASE do NOT send me asks about wanting to murder people?????

[twilightarcade]

I hate cutting onions. I cut you and weep. Not for you, but because of you. I wish I could stop crying but I'm not willing to stop cutting you. I find my tears to be an annoyance, and, by extension, find you to be an annoyance, even though I'm the root of the problem. You didn't do anything wrong. Making me cry is the only level of self defense you have. It infuriates me more instead.

[anartificialsatellite]

That punk post reminds me of a vaguely? slightly? related argument I got into with someone about nazi aesthetic in the broader industrial/EBM/whathaveyou scene.

In the end it boils down to the fact that some people are primarily interested in stirring shit and making a ruckus than they are in doing anything actually productive and helpful, and they'll search for whatever allows them to justify it, no matter how flimsy the pretext is, whether they're in a music and aesthetic focused subculture or a social movement or whatever.

The history of the use of fascist imagery in the industrial scene is pretty much as old as the scene itself, and one can make arguments about art and subversion and etc. etc. but if you want to be subversive you need to do more than adopt the aesthetic elements of fascist movements for the sake of being provocative. Being provocative for the sake of provocation is fucking nothing.

[nonagonathan]

are we ready for season 2 guys? ahahahah

[curiosity-killed]

Next time I look for a new job, I am prioritizing working somewhere with a functional HR division

[letapollojusticesayfuck]

today's headcanon: 17-year-old klavier is wearing prescription sunglasses, for the specific reason that he's too unnerved by the concept of contact lenses to wear them yet (this changes fairly quickly as gavinners management tells him that he can't have a law-themed rock band and wear glasses and expect to be taken seriously) and also he managed to sit on his real glasses and break them the night before the gramarye trial because he was so anxious about getting everything perfect

[canonslut]

this post is about an irl man so if you're here for self shipping stuff only then you can just scroll past this <3<3<3

tell me how i'm supposed to be normal when me and irl crush were together last night and spent hours having the most intimate and vulnerable conversation about sex that i've ever had. tell me how i'm supposed to be normal when he's asking me questions about me and my sexuality and he's reminding me that i don't have to share anything i don't want to share, that i can tell him if he's asking too much or sharing too much or i just don't want to talk about it anymore. tell me how i'm supposed to be normal when he's confessing to me his deepest darkest desires. tell me how i'm supposed to be normal when he's giving me a safe place to share my own in return, not even giving me a chance to feel embarrassed or shameful but meeting me with nothing but curiosity and support. tell me how i'm supposed to be normal when i tell him that i like praise, that i want affection and sweetness and that i wouldn't mind being called a good girl and he responds with "well olivia, you are a good girl :)"

[number1wah]

rambles on go2

I think GO2 feels a bit off for people (me included tbh) for a couple of reasons. The big one, obviously, is that it's mostly New Material and Sir Terry wasn't around to help write it, so it's only Neil's voice (and I'm sure at times Neil attempting in some ways to channel Sir Terry, which is just an impossible task), so it lacks that extra special spark that only Sir Terry could really bring it. And there's absolutely no way it ever could have, frankly. (A fact I'm certain everyone on set or in the writing room was aware of. Neil is a wonderful writer. Sir Terry was a wonderful writer. Together they made a particular kind of magic that can never be captured again.)

Secondly though, is that it feels like a bunch of side stories. While things do change and progress in many ways there's just this feeling, to me anyway and I think to others that struggled with it, that a lot of it doesn't actually go anywhere in particular. There's a lot of fluff that doesn't fully impact the story that we see currently (but I do think will enlighten us for next season)

Rather than pushing the story forward in some large way it seems more like it's just expanding on what was there. (Which is definitely not a bad thing by any means.) The first time I watched GO2 I had multiple moments where I straight up just said: "Wait why are we doing things? What's the point of this scene???" And a lot of that was Aziraphale and Crowley's 'minisodes' (which tbh i hate the concept of. why call them minisodes when they are interwoven with the episode?? idk thats a rant for another time). Like their whole bit in Edinburgh and body snatching has little if anything to do with the mystery of Gabriel and it's kinda weirdly thrown inbetween the Main Story in a way that I don't think hits the way they intended it to.

Again, It's not that I don't love seeing the backstory of the Ineffable Idiots but it's done in a way that gives you a bit of whiplash I think. The first season put all (or at least most of) the historical flashbacks in a contained episode, with the intent to show just a bit of the progression of this relationship.

Also, as much as I absolutely adore Azriphale and Crowley, this season focused so so heavily on them that the rest of the cast felt so small. Season 1 had a whole slew of characters that you were able to sit with longer, and I think that's missing here. (And that might also be in part due to filming in the middle of a pandemic) You saw Aziraphale and Crowley interact with each other but you also had a sense of the whole world around them and how they interacted with it more, and how the people in the world interacted with each other. Not just the two or three shops on Aziraphale's street. (And thinking of it now they do interact with people in the flashbacks but because they're one off characters for the episodes and not series regulars it just doesn't have the same impact)

Don't get me wrong, I had some issues with Season 1 (particularly some lines by Pepper that felt wild lol) but I think it was more balanced in it's approach to all the characters and their journey.

This also isn't to say that I dislike Season 2 at all, just that on first watch I can definitely understand why some people struggled a bit with it. I think the biggest thing that helped me appreciate GO2 was understanding that this was more of a "bridge" (for lack of a better term) to get to the sequel. That this was just ramping up to get people to that place. (They absolutely could have chosen to jump in to the sequel story and do some creative story telling to fill us in on the important bits and I am very grateful they chose to tell this story and walk with us to that jumping off point instead.) And I think a lot of trilogies struggle with the second part in particular because so often it is a bridge from the start to the conclusion, but this just feels like that x10 to me?? Because the first season is a complete story, even if there's room to grow from that, it's a closed book essentially.

Idk I'm very much rambling here and can't get my thoughts down in a very coherent way.

I do just want to say that I just finished my second rewatch and, again, I so thoroughly enjoyed it, even though I still think it fumbled parts in comparison to the first one. And I'm absolutely not mad at it in any way for expanding on the both Aziraphale and Crowley individually and together. I just think it may sit better with people when the 3rd season is out (fucking fingers crossed so help me) and the story is a complete entity again.

edit to add: I also don't really think TV executives have ever really given us this style of story before. (fucking especially with a queer couple jfc)Where you go from this crazy story of an apocalypse to a story very obviously about love. Like this feels very much like New Territory and I am so grateful to have it, wort's and all.