#visualizing utopia

[imiteeshon]

[murderenjoyer]

[bugbarians]

"Descent Into Utopia" Original Digital Art ©2024 Bug Barians Ltd., LLC

[momo-de-avis]

Do you guys remember the british tv show Misfits that truly introduced the insane acting range of the guy who in Game of Thrones cut Theon Greyjoys's dick off and just how insanely good that show was

[visualsdon]

the greatest of all time showing up at Travis Scott's UTOPIA show at Circo Massimo (Roma, Italia).

[ginkovskij]

gin, we need your critical opinion about megalopolis. was it really that bad?

i mean.

is it unwatchable? no. but also it is not good for sure. would love for it to be a case of "so bad it circles back being somehow good", but unfortunately no, becasue in order to achieve such a thing coppola should have gone camp and embraced the style instead of taking himself too seriously.

there are. ideas. that considered by themselves sort of make sense if you are desperate to find sense in this insanity of a movie, but whether within or without context for the large part they remain disjointed. and are anyway very cringe at core. i don't know how to put it kindly but the script just sucks. and choices were made.

[kuruvn]

🕑Date A Live (VNs)🕑~ KURUMI-Only

💖 🖤 because she's waifu desuwaa~

[u-t-o-p-i-a-6-6-6]

#african #eagle #white #wildlife #cute #awesome #animalkingdom #birding ...

[operationrainfall]

REVIEW: DATE A LIVE: Ren Dystopia

Title DATE A LIVE: Ren Dystopia Developer Idea Factory, Compile Heart, Sting Publisher Idea Factory International Release Date September 5th, 2024 Genre Visual Novel, Dating Sim Platform PC Age Rating Mature Official Website After a long time, it’s finally time to review DATE A LIVE: Ren Dystopia. Following the release of Rio Reincarnation out west in 2019, this writer has been eagerly…

[fenixthreads]

LABORATORIO MENDIA Proyecto Parásito Benigno Polilla Corazón

A study of a fascinating insect.

[itgetsbetter]

📚 QUEERBOOK 2024 is hereee! We made a book by and for LGBTQ+ youth! 🏳️‍⚧️🏳️‍🌈

Last year, we asked LGBTQ+ youth: what's your idea of a "queer utopia?"

Not gonna lie - with more than 150 bills introduced in 35 states in 2023 that aimed to restrict student access to inclusive and diverse books and other library materials, the theme felt pretty radical.

And you DELIVERED. With the help of our Youth Voices (amazing queer youth activists from across the country), we compiled your amazing submissions of poetry, short essays and letters, visual art, photography, and more into Queerbook 2024. Like a yearbook, it captures what queer youth are feeling, going through, and hoping for - right here, right now across the U.S.

It's also no accident that it's the perfect small-ish size to stash in your locker or backpack so you can crack it open any time you're looking for some queer connection. :3

Read some more about the book and grab your own limited-run copy of Queerbook 2024 now here.

[fuiru]

A 44 year old man goes to a K-Pop Concert

I promised you a report on the K-pop concert that I, a 44-year-old accountant, went to a couple of weeks ago with my wife and daughter in Toronto. So here it is.

The band we saw were Ateez. They're my daughter's favourite band and my wife's second favourite. I know most of my mutuals are similarly aged like me and may not be familiar with them so let me give you a brief primer on Ateez.

Imagine the most attractive eight men you can think of, just unfathomably beautiful specimens of aesthetic perfection, and make them sing songs that somehow combine the subjects of 'dancing like nobody is watching' with 'we live in a dystopian hellscape that we must all work together to overthrow'. Give them an ongoing music video story lore that literally nobody - not even the band themselves - understand, so that online discussion of their visual motifs looks more like the fevered rantings of a conspiracy theorist, complete with speculation about alternate realities and time being a Moebius strip. There is also a giant sand timer, for some reason.

That's Ateez. That's what you need to know.

Now, K-pop concerts are very different to the gigs I've been going to for the last 28 (!) years. There's no support act, for a start. Also the band perform for like, three hours, with breaks for costume changes and interpretive dance. Furthermore, hanging above everything is the constant looming threat of mandatory military service.

So this being my first such concert, I wasn't sure what to expect. What happened was difficult to explain, but I will try as I am already six paragraphs into this write-up and I'm too invested to stop now. Here goes:

In his Wicked + Divine comics series, Kieron Gillen places modern pop icons as deities, feeding upon and gaining strength from the worship of their fans at the altar of musical performance. I thought I understood that metaphor. I thought I understood it AS a metaphor. I was wrong, because that night Ateez WERE Gods with a capital G and we were their worshippers, a crowd emanating adoration (in the religious and non-religious senses), bestowing strength upon them and gaining their strength in return.

If that sounds weird, it probably is. But as pointed out above, I have lived over four decades and never yet experienced anything like the overwhelming passion of that crowd, the utter abandon with which they conveyed their love for the band.

"But Fuiru, what of the actual music?" you ask. Thinking back, there was a moment in one of their songs - I can't remember which - where I watched the stage, and the people around me, taking it in, and I thought, "Man, I just love Music". But that doesn't answer your question, sorry.

Ateez's music is bloody great. As a tiresome indie/rock/metal kid I'm resisting the urge to add the usual tiresome indie/rock/metal caveat of "...for pop music" because honestly that does it a disservice. They have some genuinely amazing songs. Halazia is an absolute fucking masterpiece that descends into furious hardcore breakbeat. Bouncy is a big, brash racket that somehow is also a perfect pop song. Utopia, Wonderland, and Guerrilla are similarly superb. The obligatory boy band slow number is represented by Dancing Like Butterfly Wings which will make you cry because you will forever associate it with your twelve year old daughter being pointed to and waved at by her favourite Ateez member (Seonghwa) because of her Seonghwa-branded lightstick.

That might just be me, though.

So in summary: being a 44 year old dad at his first K-pop concert rules and you should endeavour to partake in the experience if the opportunity arises.

Finally, for any Atiny reading this: my bias would be San or Seonghwa but my wife and daughter said they were taken so it’s Mingi. My concert outfit (designed and created by my offspring) reflects this.

[sugar-petals]

a taemin-appreciating loveletter on XLOV going viral with “1&only” right now as a genderless concept group which i absolutely love! have you seen how incredible they are? at a first glance i could already feel that they can shake things up, make a difference and enter a new, exciting cultural trajectory. and that was just the first watch. it gets even better from there! XLOV just leaves you wanting more immediately: the outfits, the dance, the sets, the beat, and so many killing choreo parts it’s ridiculous. what - or who - led to this beautiful culmination of art, kpop history-wise? i think we all know. 

i wish i could thank taemin and shinee every day as due to their pervasive influence, kpop (think hyunjin, jimin, chungha, kai, haechan and more mentioning taemin’s impact on them) is so ahead of the curve and a female or neutral gaze on things is pretty much established, breaking the mold is celebrated, both a rarity. a group like this, then, is long overdue. to me, someone as courageous as XLOV (as a group comprised of otherwise often conflicting nations on top of that, uniting japanese, chinese, korean and taiwanese members as a statement) is what we’ve been waiting for. XLOV says, why not, what’s stopping everyone else? utopia is possible! they simply came to drop jaws without any compromise and delivered.

XLOV doesn’t have a “shinee” signature nor do they need it (nor can shinee be truly, fully copied ever), nevertheless i see what inspired them to go all out. taemin has never tried to pander to an existing status quo, much less emulating a stereotype-laden ‘straight’ or ‘gay’ pre-made mainstream formula, which i think is astounding at his scale of impact, in this politically challenging age. i think that art directors showcase an increasing feel for it, and we can slowly create a safe space where idols can come out or break free from oppressive standards like XLOV, even against the escalating odds of korean society and whatever backlash is there. taemin shows: you can prevail. 

he has always taken an androgynous, bi-friendly, fluid, whatever you want to call it aesthetic for granted. that’s how ‘idols from the future’ like seonghwa, g-dragon or felix are created and i love it - it proves how the radicalizing shift in masculine norms over the last decade is not a thing of absolutes (think about CL vice versa, who has always had a successful alpha woman concept) and encourages everyone to do their thing outright. so i was giddily happy to see ppl discussing and protecting XLOV everywhere with their amazing sensual visuals and THAT incredible choreo. it’s a must-watch for pride month and beyond if you love unisex as a concept in kpop.

[kqutie]

| ICE CREAM |

EPIC SERIES MASTERLIST key : [✿] fluff [❄︎] angst [☁︎] hurt/comfort [❤︎] nsfw

P O L Y

EPIC: THE FAIR MAIDEN || MINI SERIES [✿ ☁︎]

sum. : you get sent into the EPIC: The Musical universe and, equipped with your skills and the game mechanics of animal crossing: new horizons, you help make Odysseus's journey back to Ithaca go smoothly. relationships : platonic epic characters/female reader tags. : epic x acnh ; reader is a comfort gamer ; female reader ; pure comfort ; reader helps ody get home ; happy ending for everyone! ; isekai and transmigration ; fix it fic ; animal crossing new horizons game mechanics ; characters know their future length : 5-7(?) chapters | 37k... [ongoing]

O D Y S S E U S

FLOATING UTOPIA || TWO-PARTER MINI SERIES [✿ ☁︎ ❤︎]

COMING SOON sum. : after odysseus escapes calypso's island and gets past charybdis, he gets stranded on another island where he meets another goddess who has the power to get him home. an unlikely friendship blossoms, one that odysseus has to leave but eventually finds his way back to many years later. relationship : epic odysseus/goddess reader tags. : goddess of islands reader ; stranded and lost odysseus ; strangers to friends to lovers ; fluff ; angst ; hurt/comfort ; long time skip ; build-up of tension ; tension eventually resolved ; eventual smut length : ... [tbw]

one : the goddess of islands and the stranded king two : the passage of time and the sweet reunion [❤︎]

H E R M E S

THE THIEF WHO STOLE THE DUCHESS || MINI SERIES [✿ ☁︎]

COMING SOON sum. : Hermes is a thief who steals from the rich to give to the poor. One day, he attempts to steal from the household of a known, corrupt noble and almost gets caught if it weren’t for the help of the corrupt noble’s daughter. relationship : robin hood hermes/noble woman reader tags : robin hood au ; robin hood!hermes ; maid marian!reader ; nobles au ; thief!hermes ; noble lady!reader ; fairy tale au? ; fluff ; slight angst ; attempted escape ; eloping ; eventual happy ending length : 4 chapters | ...k [tbw]

property of kqutie ; all written content is mine and no one else's unless stated otherwise ; do not steal, plagiarise, modify or translate to other sites

art/visual media does not belong to me

[artbyblastweave]

Did you ever read WW historia?

I have now!

In terms of pure visuals, easily the prettiest thing I've read this year (in the February-to-February sense of the term, I'm not pulling a 30-rock cutesy non-statement here.) It definitely feels constructed as a negotiation with some of the tensions I've been waving at, but it's a deft one- handily resolving the overarching "what's the exact nature of the project here" energy through its aggressive commitment to a specific direction- an epic in the idiom of the Illiad or the Oddessy- it's status as the narrative of the founding of a nation, with enumerated mythological lineages for the Amazons, godly politics-of-personality jerking around the protagonists even at their best-intentioned, slaughters predicated on myopic cries for "justice" that are couched in a fundamentally misogynistic moral ordering of the universe (Getting Oresteia flashbacks with Apollo.) Zeus is a particularly compelling villain in the piece, with that cheerful, condescending, paternalistic adherence to a bronze age morality that's not nearly as alien to the present day as one might like it to be. From within his own moral system, he does nothing wrong, which is as good a condemnation of that system as any.

What I really like about it is how it in particular addresses the longstanding tension- not unique to Wonder Woman as a franchise, but always present to some extent- of an impossibly-advanced sequestered utopia trying to provide guidance to a population under so many more material constraints than them that they might as well be space aliens. The book expresses that there's a level on which the initial group of 30 goddess-crafted Amazons- the divine, born-as-adult utopian agents- can look like women, intervene on the behalf of, fundamentally align with women, but, before they meet Hippolyta, there are important ways in which they only fleetingly interact with women as a human social category. They strike from the shadows, kill some oppressors, and fuck right back off- which is cathartic, but none of the mortal women they "rescue" are left in a significantly better position by this alone. That's not an arbitrary strategy; In suitable Greek tragedy fashion, everyone in this narrative is beholden to something, and the original Amazons are beholden to the system in the sense that they have to hide what they're doing so they don't get turbofucked by Zeus and company. But they are very pointedly not beholden in the sense of having to make soul-destroying choices as a result of the gendered boot that they're under. They don't have to, say, live with the guilt of being made to leave an extraneous newborn girl to die of exposure.

Moreover, even in isolation, even with a headcount of 30, the book gestures at the idea that the first wave of Amazons are developing their own systems of norms, orderings of power and hierarchy, valorization of specific traits and rigid systems of categorization based on aligning with different goddesses:

Hippolyta bounces off these requests for categorization hard even as she petitions to join- she sees value in the category, but not the expectations. What DeConnick has done here is engineer a situation where the Amazonian founding narrative is a story about how the identity category of "Amazon" was forcibly expanded until it could accommodate everyone to whom it would be useful- do the work it was intended to do as a positive force in the world. Strict ontology subordinated to questions of practical harm. I think the intended applicability to other issues is obvious.

This brings me to the tail end of the narrative, another of many things I like- As I mentioned before, this whole thing is constructed as a national founding myth, right? The Aeneid, but for Themyscira. But it's not a triumphant story. It's not a tale of glorious conquest, it's not a narrative about how the Amazons turned their backs on a fallen world and carved out their utopian little enclave. They don't live on Themyscira because they're nationalists, or female separatists, or whatever other dunk Azzarello wants to advance. They live on Themyscira because they aren't allowed to leave. Themyscira is an act of suppression. Partly a "cruel mercy" punishment from Zeus and company, loss of freedom constructed as worse than death for the Amazons; implicitly, also a containment tactic, to keep their ideas from spreading.

Much of this was engineered through the machinations of Hera, who presents this National-founding-as-tragedy as the best that could be done under the existing constraints; a setback, a compromise, a launch pad for future endeavors, but still a meaningful defeat, something that Diana, the first and only child actually born on the island, is going to have to work to rectify.