n.bodyproblem

I kind of feel sorry about having a life right now because I'd rather just update this site. I have so many new opinions and all.
But, alas.
Hyperpop is normies trying to be special by stating that being a normie is special now. Don't worry, it's gonna be alright.
- love, a fellow normie
I think we're past the point where "cozyness" has become a form of aggression.
Shoegaze is much improved by having a dishwasher running at the same time.
Can't wait for the day where listening to techno (and worse, writing about it) is not expected behaviour of an academic anymore.
I have not once met a person in my age bracket who didn't regret following their dreams.
I need to preface this with a statement: Everything I say here is anecdotal, and it happened around 15 years ago. My memory will have simplified the events, maybe even to a level of caricature. But I just realized that I have never written down what I remember, and in the light of recent events, I feel like even a reduced version of what happened might prove useful.
I always loved scouring niche forums, the kind that doesn’t really exist anymore. I would read people’s stories there for hours, and would be especially interested if their lives and views were entirely different from mine. The anti-vegan forum I liked for its accidental creation of meat-eaters as an identity without any of the members ever having heard of carnism; the Boypoint forum was just an exhilarating read into the lives and views of gay young men, with discussions about whether being bi meant that you weren’t gay enough, whether dating a trans male was gay enough, and whether shaving your legs was too gay. Masculinity is fragile in all its expressions.
My favorite, however, was the Thiazi forum. It’s weird to call it my favorite because to this day, when I mention it and then explain what it is, I get strange looks left, right and center. Thiazi is a now defunct neo-nazi forum whose hosts have long been arrested. When it was taken down, I was actually sad about that. Thiazi offered me a unique look into the world views and opinions of young fascists that school just couldn’t offer. There once was a poll on the forum on whether the Holocaust had actually happened or not, and if it had happened, if the version of it talked about in history books was accurate. About a third to forty percent answered that the Holocaust had not happened. Holocaust denial was not in our school’s curriculum, and the idea that there were large numbers of a certain demographic that called into question plainly observable facts was fascinating. When I dared to show the poll to an otherwise edgelord classmate, he was shocked while I wasn’t. He could neither believe that swaths of people denied one of history’s most well-documented atrocities, and also he was taken aback by my calmness. I had gotten used to Thiazi’s rhetoric and was able to digest this information, but his reaction also showed me that being exposed to it had desensitized me a fair bit, and that I needed to tread carefully. I knew that continued exposure to misinformation could lead to this information being accepted as true, or at least less un-true, in the long run, and I wondered whether being desensitized about such an outrageous claim could be the first step.
Thiazi showcased a variety of neo-nazi self expression, but this being the mid-2000s, the overall aim was clear: Be the best version of yourself to make our version of nationalism more appealing to the outside world. We don’t use hate, violence, or fearmongering, but instead we invite people politely to join a discussion consisting entirely of leading questions. If a member was into right-wing rock or rap music, other members would make sure that it wasn’t ones they perceived as blunt or stupid, and there certainly were contributors who tried to introduce classical music to these knobheads, the overarching goal being that they wanted to have a leg to stand on when it came to defending Germany’s cultural heritage: Maybe at least give Beethoven a listen.
Many members prided themselves with being top of their class in school or at uni; they did not want to be perceived as fearsome brutes, but as intellectuals to be reckoned with. They used small, subversive tactics like wearing a T-shirt to school stating “Härtere Strafen für Kinderschänder” (harder punishments for child molesters), a muted-down version of “Todesstrafe für Kinderschänder” (death penalty for child molesters), a slogan commonly used by the, back then, much more prominent National Democratic Party of Germany, nowadays almost entirely supplanted by the Alternative for Germany, who started out with wording things more carefully and now somehow got worse. “Kinderschänder” itself is a right-wing dog whistle and a certain wording of “child molester” unique to right-wing circles, its literal translation being “child disgracer”, signaling that an abused child is forever marked as damaged goods — fitting their ideology of people being resources. With the penalties for child molestation back then being pretty light compared to other crimes that don’t evoke visceral responses, plus the majority of Germans being uneducated about the term “Kinderschänder” being a dog whistle and even more uneducated about the legal system and its attempts of moving past the an-eye-for-an-eye-approach, this, according to Thiazi members, was useful in getting even their teachers to engage in discussions with them. Keep in mind that these were also a lot of teenagers stewing in their own juices together online, convinced that they all outsmarted the general German population and their teachers especially, but in fact I believe whenever you engage in a discussion with a nazi, they indeed win automatically: You grant them the illusion that what they have to say is indeed worthy of discussion. You humor the notion that denying the Holocaust is an argument or even a philosophical debate. It’s the same tactic that allowed corporate ghouls to convince many of us that global warming is a matter of personal opinion.
The thread of Thiazi I keep in my memory most fondly, however, is one that was, on the surface, much less ideological. Again, this being the mid-2000s, the tactic was that of the polite and presentable nazi, so women on Thiazi in general were being treated respectfully. Thiazi as a hive mind followed the “created equal but different”-approach, so the members at least acted as if they were convinced that women were equally as human as they were, but their abilities were different from those of men. And while there is a good chance that a lot of Thiazi members merely posed as female, like it happens now with fake profiles in most twitter wars, many of the members read as genuinely female-identified.
The thread I remember so fondly started with a simple question — I paraphrase: “Women of Thiazi, if you had a choice between two men, given both were of perfectly Aryan descent, which would you choose: A good looking one who does not share your world view and ideology, or a convinced national socialist who is not attractive?”
The overwhelming majority of women picked the good-looking candidate, their reasoning being simple: A world view can be changed, and they would do their best to achieve that, but a faulty gene cannot be improved, and you want to produce pretty Aryan offspring. Again: They’re nazis, and “good-looking” equals “healthy” and “superior” in their minds.
Of course, while some of the male Thiazi members saw no flaw in this reasoning, a good few of them took affront: You cannot interpret social nationalism like that, you cannot reduce people to just their looks.
But in fact, you can. These women followed their ideology to its logical conclusion: The best genes will always be a stronger argument than the best intentions.
This thread stayed with me because of the somewhat almost feminist idea of eugenics, but even more because of the male outrage: This was the first time that many of the members read their ideology being used not in their favor. Followed to its logical conclusion, most of fascism’s most ardent supporters will be left out of the gene pool. But they were sure, they were convinced, that at this juncture, their ideology wasn’t meant to be literal, that there would be made an exception for them. And this is were fascism proves that, for all its performatively logical slang, it is irrational: In realized fascism, these women would not have a choice, and the exception for many of these men will be made, not despite, but because of its contradiction with their ideology. The fascist depictions of Aryan people never directly say, but imply this: While the idealized depictions of Aryan women are meant to be literal or at least aspirational, the even more hightened fantasy depictions of Aryan men, hegemonic masculinity on display, are meant as metaphorical. The ideal Aryan man is almost unachievable, and that is necessary to always find reasons to exclude groups or individuals based on the current needs of the ruling class or regime no matter how well they fit the description, and to include people who contradict it entirely, but who fit into the system as useful pawns, or to specifically protect high-ranking members who don’t fit the definition either. In very simplified terms — since the point of fascism is for the rulers to be able to make exceptions whenever they feel like it — the male Aryan is an arbitrary political decision with a blonde and blue-eyed mascot, the Aryan broodmare is defined a lot more narrowly: By heritage, usefulness, or by who she is married to.
I don’t remember if anyone even hinted at this on Thiazi, if anyone told these women that ultimately, in the state they were trying to build, their opinions would not matter and they would have to accept the faulty genes, and would also be the sole entity to be blamed if the offspring came out less than ideal. But at the very least, for a few seconds, some members of the forum had to endure the feeling that, if they were truly convinced, if their beliefs were true, from a logical point of view, their purported version of Utopia would forever exclude them.
(It was also very funny to deduce from the responses which members thought of themselves as attractive.)
Synthwave is the entire internet grieving over a promised futuristic dystopia that never came.
Reading the preface of any monograph of any intellectual fifty years after the fact is the literary equivalent of the "old man yells at cloud" meme. If the author had beef with anyone, and usually there were heaps of beef to be had, they will let you know, and now you sit there, half a century later and usually decades after most involved parties have passed on, watching them sneer and bicker at at each other because how dare these Neo-Freudians (you know who you are! You know how they are!) discard a peripheral part of Freud's philosophy (but not of his methodology!) that is central to my analysis of repressed desire in disharmonious cultures and my thesis statement on how that's a really big deal! Well I would never, I tell you- Grandpa? Grandpa, are you coming down for dinner? Not now, sweetheart, someone is wrong at Harvard! Now let me continue with how I will, in this work that you will be reading, use the word "spoon", but not to mean "spoon", but rather "shovel", not inasmuch as a shovel is a "dirt spoon", but rather as it represents the shovel of societal uproar!
fighting your inner classist

If you want to be a left-wing intellectual, you must innoculate yourself against the mere idea of comfort. Class is marked along many lines, but few are as obvious as how one chooses to furnish their surroundings. And even if as a left-wing intellectual, of course you fight for a classless society and in solidarity with the workers yadda yadda yadda, like an ever-so-slightly chubby woman fighting for body positivity, you will not be taken seriously if you make yourself known as having lowly tastes.
I grew up with disdain and yet a longing for comfort. My childhood home was cold and full of smooth surfaces, antique furniture we just happened to have, and permanently broken in-floor heating. Flokati carpets and fabric softener were things about whose existence I learned through friends and family members who were considerably worse off, and we weren't particularly well off to begin with, but back then, "not particularly well off" still meant a single-earner household with two cars, a house, and multiple kids and pets. Doesn't mean we didn't own any particle board furniture (lots of it actually), cheap electronics (so many!) or tasteless (translation from classist: mass-market-oriented) décor. The coldness of our home was just how my parents had decided they felt comfortable, but indeed I remember snarky comments about fabric softener. I doubt that my folks were aware of how fabric softener is a demarcation tool to identify a low-income household; still, I grew up with towels hardened from exposure to water that was never de-calcified. I liked my grandma's smooth, perfumed towels better, and that my feet were never cold in her house, and the opulence of her water bed on her flokati carpet was o-so-suitable for watching cartoons all day. And the colors! Pastels everywhere, the kind that makes you look back and think "Ugh. Very obvious lower-middle-class taste", because childhood memories aren't safe from the assholes we become as life goes on.
And as life goes on, you learn that decorations, soft surfaces and most easily available materials signal complacency, consumerism, subservience to the system, and a lack of education or, worst case, a misguided attempt at being, of all things, upper-middle-class. Candles, perfumes, fuzzy anything. Picture frames, glitter, anything with a visible brand name or logo on it. To this day, I am unable to hang anything on my walls unironically. I would never decorate my window sill. I have never bought a house plant, and wouldn't want to be caught dead with an Apple product. I can curate a multi-room art exhibition. I cannot put a kitschy but heartfelt gift from anyone on display anywhere in my living room, I can't even attach a single feeling to such a gift but "eugh, how do I make that as invisible as possible?". Certain things are off-limits, or you're not living thruthfully. This is ingrained into my soul.
It's as if true left-wing thinkers trained themselves to be constantly irritated, detached and stressed by keeping their homes functional, or even slightly below that, while evading to make it look like they just romanticize frugal living, poverty, or normie minimalism. Above all, it's mandatory to never make it look anything but effortless. Effort is petite bourgeoisie, and we can't have that. The thing with that is, I have a bunch of habits and possessions to invariably mark me as a mindless consumer (tendency to collecting, bordering on hoarding), a shill (owning a bunch of harem pants), and lazy (dishwasher). And I'm trying to feel less guilty about it.
What helped was visiting a friend of mine, the ideal, a professor of philosophy, living alone, in their home for a few nights. They had just hit sixty, and the books were overflowing from their half a dozen bookshelves, taking up most of their apartment. That was the apartment's only charming quality. No dishwasher. Slightly broken shower. Dark rooms. They were working on a book (they always were), and the wood underneath their office chair was raw and exposed, because who has time to protect or renovate antique wooden floors? It was, as per usual, uncomfortable und slightly-below-functional. I had seen aparments like this a lot, but this was when it hit me: These people, we, are basically a socially acceptable version of otaku. We obsess over minute details in books and artworks sometimes so obscure that only about 150 other people on this planet have read/seen and understood them, and are barely functional outside of that realm. It's not seen as a problem because the knowledge we gather and obsess about is academically canonized. I'm not sixty yet, but when I am, I want to live in a place I'm at home at, not use it to sit there and fantasize about other worlds only I and a few chosen ones can see. I still can fantasize, but I can do that on a sofa, too. Surrounded by candles, next to a lava lamp. With my feet on a water bottle, because the heating is still broken, and I can't be asked.
Baby steps.
Kitty Powers over there, casually revolutionizing video game tutorials by making the lecturer a fun, engaging, matronly supervisor who gives you all the emotional stability that was missing from your childhood.
I'm no bicycle aficionado, and didn't own a new model in literally decades. Now I'm in need of one, and, dear kids, I just got to ask:
Why do all contemporary bikes either look like wheeled versions of the Instagram eyebrow, or like Batman recently lives on a budget?
A fun fact about Mercury: All fun facts about Mercury aren't fun facts at all. They are incredibly depressing.
Elon Musk is to the crypto community what Trump was to the Republican Party.
(neither one exactly ruined a good thing)
If you ever feel inadequate again, just remind yourself that the creators of the Slate 2 thought that thing was market-ready.
Is using shit devices that don't work out of spite/sunk cost fallacy its own genre? Digital Arte Povera? But the Slate was expensive, though it's kinda old already. Digital Bougie Trash? Let's go with Digital Bougie Trash.
The Academia aesthetic is what happens when you take kids out of school for a year and they become aware of how comparatively cheap used books and tweed jackets and how under-used as a photo op museums that don't feature Yayoi Kusama are.
This leads to an important question: How are we, as reasonable adults, about to complain about this particular youth of today? Accuse them of cultural appropriation? That's like, their thing. Accuse them of Eurocentrism and classist ideology? But that's what we olds are all about; how else could you convince any poor sod to spend a dime on an Ivy League education? Also they're aware and kinda proud of that. Accuse them of doing it only for the aesthetics? Like anyone ever read Camus because they enjoy his writing! Accuse them of displaying very kitschy lower middle class ideas about what constitutes 'higher education' anyone belonging to the class they aspire to emulate can easily discern because, c'mon, Dostoevsky? Russian high school literature? Why not read Goethe while you're at it. Oh dear. That would mean we'd have to pick up non-fun books after high school again and stop quoting 1984.
Accuse them of not understanding the works they reference because Hegel/Kant and Dostoevsky/Nabokov had opposing ideologies and aesthetics? But that is work, and think about it backfiring: Do we really want them to read stuff in a context-sensitive way and have them find out that Shakespeare isn't exactly high brow and that operas are loud and fun schlock? Is that the world we want to live in? Do we want them to find out that Disney's Little Mermaid is on a higher textual complexity level than Rusalka? Do we want them to realize we still haven't gotten rid of Gauguin because we enjoy his color palette and, frankly, we don't want to learn how to pronounce Téha'amana?

Nah. Let them work out how typewriters work and maybe I can sell my old one on eBay for less cheap in future. That shit worked wonders on phonographs a few years back.

Also let's maybe compliment them on having figured out that the unattainable yet aspirational wealth of the moment to pose with to distinguish yourself from your peers is not an LV bag or an inflated derrière, but, depressingly, basic conservative education.
I just watched a presentation about crypto art by a guy likening it to Pop and Street Art because, uhm, they too were not part of the canon and people found them gaudy and then they became financially viable.
What? Does he- I mean, ... what?
Then he argued that before crypto art there was basically just digital art done for exposure posted on Instagram and Deviantart.
...What?

All in all, fuck crypto art.
Interior Design YouTube is the official middle class but aiming to be nouveau riche YouTube.
Dick Tremayne is the only human being to ever appear in a David Lynch project.
Autocorrect, we've had this discussion many times: I never have, and never will, use the word "duck".
Adventures in quarantining, episode 12: Attempting to connect with strangers online through various apps since themed online communities have all but vanished outside of reddit and a few leftover boards teeming with conspiracy theorists, I noticed that I am more of a helpless antisocial recluse than I ever imagined. It was very easy to make friends online up until 2010 when most peeps went digital to be weird in peace.
Things I've learned:

- Humans like dogs for some reason (like, outside of "good doggo" and "best pupper" memes) and like to take photographs of and with dogs and know dog breeds and I thought dogs were more of an old people thing, like... at least older than me. In my life, I was friends with exactly one dog owner. Her dog was... okay? And very ugly.

- There's a trend to take photographs of coffee and croissants and crêpes the picture-takers didn't make themselves and I honestly don't know why.

- Many like to talk about traveling like it's a... thing. Like, a hobby. A genuine one including enthusiasm and building skill and character and it feels so, so white. Some post nothing but photographs of themselves on beaches and cliffs and sometimes Tokyo, Shanghai and Dubai. No idea why exactly Tokyo, Shanghai and Dubai.

- If they ever met a celebrity, they will mention it without fail, and it's never something exciting like "had a bar fight with Noam Chomsky" or "told Ryan Trecartin to shut it in a podium discussion", it's always "had a sip out of the same cup as a member of the Backstreet Boys".

- I didn't know anyone outside of a specific tumblr bubble actually gave a crap about love languages and Myers-Briggs. It was like finding out about that sub-segment of reddit that likes to discuss IQ like that aunt who did a lot of LSD in the seventies and that you try no to think about too much because she is elderly now and would be happy about a call but you really don't want to call her talks about horoscopes.

- Brand-name alcohol and coffee (especially coffee) and the pineapple on pizza discussion double as both talents and personalities and they have online profiles.

- Harry Potter is nerdy now? As are the MCU films? The... most popular things in existence?

- Anime, on the other hand, apparently isn't nerdy anymore.

- Everybody listens to different obscure indie retrowave bands of the "chill" persuasion, but they all sound basically the same. I reckon this is a Spotify algorithm thing.

- There's still a sizeable group of people who think that their phone's skin beautification is not very obvious, or don't know how to shut it off, and it's very disturbing to look into dozens of faces that claim to have owners aged thirty and above.

- Using big words like "raw" and "powerful" for Netflix shows is also a thing and it makes me think of that age-old question: "What will I say if I ever encounter something that is truly awesome?"

- Ironic detachment mixed with spiteful, self-conscious hedonism aka edgelordism has no age cap and other people are better at it than I.

I'm not trying to act like I have no access to the human experience or anything, and am keenly aware that it's a boilerplate internet thing to complain about boilerplate online profiles. It's more that I have trouble communicating with conversations skewing certain ways and I think that's on me. Communication fails because I don't know what to say or think without being juvenile-class "meh" about everything and that definitely makes me the stubborn one in this equation. If this is how a majority of peeps introduce themselves, that must mean that the majority of peeps also would react positively to this kind of introduction.
I, for one, would prefer to photograph waffles I made myself and not mention Harry Potter ever again.
I have finally succumbed to the cult of productivity and acquired one of the coveted tomes of aestheticized banality.
I bought a bullet journal.
Copying files from one hard drive to another for backup and watching the file names go by just makes me go into the folders right afterwards and delete all of these highly embarrassing DCIM folders from 2010 and below. Why did anyone on this earth ever keep any digital photograph pre-2012? What were we thinking? "Gee my digital camera that can take 12 images, eats 4 batteries every 2 hours, and saves low-res .JPG files on a 32MB CompactFlash card doubtlessly is preferable to nasty, highly-advanced, beautiful consumer-grade analogue film."
Can we all agree that the 00s don't exist in pictorial form?
You know you're listening to an incredibly white comedy podcast when the host can't stop lamenting how cancellable their highly interesting opinions are. They're begging sensible folks to puh-lease make them news and it's mostly the only funny thing they say in the full three hours of platitudes and rambling they deliver a day, but I believe they don't know why it's funny.
Having been an embarrassingly avid Sims fan since the game's first iteration, here is my final verdict on Sims 4 based on a scene from the five minutes I tested the much needed Star Wars pack:
My sim stood in front of the legendary Millennium Falcon. As I unsuccessfully tried to find a way to interact with it other than just staring at its glory, my sim took out his phone and texted his 27th daughter to cope with the unbearable boredom of being on an alien planet.
OK quick question - there's a big FOSS/Linux magazine currently searching for an editor and I think about applying b/c the job sounds rad and I want to know whether "I actually once got another human to permanently switch to Linux" counts as work experience.
Visiting an exhibition. Big (really big), terrible (really terrible) ink drawing on a crumply piece of paper hanging around. Called "BREATHE (for George Floyd)". Can tell the artist fucked up Floyd's day of death because one "two" in 2020 is suspiciously thicker than the other. Didn't take the time to have another go at it. Drawing barely worthy of mention on its own.
Roughly 13 grand asking price.
The fucking nerve.
I always complain and never actually give useful tips, and being a proper netizen I should do that from time to time. So for my fellow struggling writer friends:

How to publish a book in 3 easy steps
(0. Be kind of rich to begin with.)
1. Land a job at the White House or be within shouting range of a member of the Trump family for long enough for something illegal or immoral to happen (5 minutes to 2 days time investment).
2. Get yourself fired or screamed at online (really just a question of commitment).
3. Wait for the call.

Additional tips:
- You can substitute [0] by having a PhD in something. Doesn't matter if it's psychology or geoengineering or comparative literature studies; if asked, just wing it.
- You can skip [1] and/or [2] by taking your pre-written non-fiction book and changing the title slightly to accomodate the word "Trump": "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Trump!", "Sapiens: A Brief History of Trump", "Into Thin Air: A Personal Account of the Trump Disaster", "Trump: The Psychology of Persuasion" - the concept should be clear.
- If [3] doesn't work, mention you already have a book written and get the White House to threaten you and your livelihood. If the book is #1 on the New York Times' Nonfiction Best Seller list without a single copy printed, some publishing house eventually will gladly help you out.
You know whether an artist or his discipline is established based on whether his blatant rip-offs of other artists' works are called "fan art" or "deconstructivist analytical re-interpretation".
I heard there once was a time when the art world was not filled to the brim with "enfant terribles of the art world". How did people cope with not being incessantly called rebels while selling terrible graffiti to millionaires?
Adventures in quarantining, episode 11: Kind of afraid I might one day get through my book, movie & game backlog. Early stage of delusion?
Adventures in quarantining, episode 10: I can't pinpoint exactly what happened between 2012 and now where Family Force 5's "Cray Button" video intro changed from just feeling like a tacky but enjoyable, slightly self-ironic party song intro to "I can imagine this being part of a horror film". Maybe Jordan Peele. Maybe some other things. I don't know.
Favorite genre of everything: Stories about people lost in a digital or virtual life who need to realize that there is a whole world outside there waiting for them, yet first they need to go through the motions to understand that the confines of their digital/on-line/scene/movie/otherwise escapist prisons are something they have outgrown; all of this written in 900 pages by a writer who didn't leave the house for three years to finish and find a publisher for his challenging and provocative piece.
Second favorite genre: The same story, but with classical music & books as the escapism device, which makes the escapism immediately justified and positive.
Complaisant, light-emitting entity on my right shoulder: You shouldn't use the term "Karen". It's just a more sexist way to say "white trash", and "white trash" is just masked classism.
Kinda sparky dude on my left shoulder with a healthy deep-red complexion: Let me remind you of the three years you worked in retail.
Adventures in quarantining, episode 9: Kafka's relationship to his father starts to appear somewhat ok.
At times the Metal Gear Solid series seems like heterosexualized fanart of a different game made by someone with no proper concept of heterosexuality, i.e. bizarro world fan fiction.
Adventures in quarantining, episode 8: Found the time to listen to the entire discography of a band a friend recommended, not noticing I had left my player on 1.25 speed that entire afternoon. I reset it to normal after an artist I was accustomed to sounded unnaturally fast and now can't listen to this band anymore because every song seems slow and dragging. I am sorry, friend.
Adventures in quarantining, episode 7: Looking for new spring cleaning opportunities after having run out of all meat spacey ones, I activated all the Steam keys that I never used and that were rotting in various accounts (264 activations...) because I'm a DRM free snob, thinking I might at least increase the percentage of Linux activations for fellow Tuxers who actively use the platform - and I have so many doubles. Gifted most of them to friends, but there are still leftovers.
I thought about donating them, but it seems that posting keys openly might just lead to bots picking them up and handing them over to resellers. So if whoever wants a copy of one or two of the following games or just a random one from the list as a nice social distancing distraction writes me an e-mail (address is at the bottom of the page), I'll send the keys over. I can't guarantee that all of these still work because there is no way to test them beforehand; sorry about that:
~~Armello (x2)~~
~~Mountain~~
Machinarium
~~Gunmetal Arcadia Zero~~
Magic Wand
Guacamelee Super Turbo Championship Edition
~~Mini Metro~~
Tower of Guns
~~Age of Wonders~~
Overgrowth
~~System Shock: Enhanced Edition~~
~~System Shock 2~~
Broken Age
No Time To Explain Remastered
MirrorMoon EP
Regular Human Basketball
Framed Collection
Rise of the Triad
Egyptian Senet
~~Fortune-499~~
Ladykiller in a Bind
I will update this page once something has become unavailable.
NGL calling anything "Donald Trump's plan" seems a bit rich.
Adventures in quarantining, episode 6: Getting really annoyed by my fellow middle class peeps moaning how it's time for the quarantine to be over 'cause the weather is nice and we've been, like, semi-following these guide lines for about three weeks already, only had like, one picnic so far and that barbecue that wasn't really a real-real barbecue because it was in our backyard because you have to do that shit clandestinely now so no one can see that you invited six people and their dogs. And isn't it annoying to hear about Corona every day? What about Easter? What about *our* mental health maybe outweighing the lives of immunocompromised people we don't even personally know?
I know experiencing some mild discomfort during a global pandemic is really fucking hard for us, but still. The fuck.

And after the commercial break, we might talk about how maybe we can turn some of this middle class pain into a lesson what isolation and imprisonment can do to people and maybe re-think incarceration methods. Followed by the next commercial break 'cause thinking about inmates in a non-schadenfreudy manner is boring.

After that, new insights on why the world will go back to normal (read: economy needs to grow, poor people need to [be] shut up, kids need to go into overcrowded and underfurnished classrooms eight hours a day, animals need to be mass produced and mass medicated to form new diseases like it's a sport, and work needs to be from 9 to 5) in no time after this because that is absolutely necessary for all of us not to notice that maybe none of us ever were happy in the old normal and would prefer a new, fresh, different normal and maybe the old normal also is what caused all of this shit and will cause it again repeatedly and at the end of the century there will be documentaries on this decade with bad and heavy-handed metaphory titles like "Schrödinger's collapse", "Ignorance is mandatory" and "An inconvenient downfall" and there will be ominous music playing throughout all of them and they will stream on the last streaming service to survive the purge:
Shudder.
(They'll just sit out the streaming service war between Disney, Amazon and Netflix, hide in their comfy lil niche while the other redundant niche streaming services are sold or destroyed, and then will be victoriously streaming a horror docu mini series about the carnage that will, no doubt, have included a bunch of creepy women in Elsa costumes campaigning for brand loyalty and fighting to the death with overworked Amazon warehouse employees.)

Lastly, if anyone misses work, I full-heartedly recommend Temtem's early access version. It perfectly recreates the feeling of Pokémon, which perfectly recreates the feeling of work: You start motivated, energetic and fresh, but quickly realize you spend most of your time doing bullshit jobs like repeating menial tasks that only exist to make your day longer, play rock paper scissors with your colleagues, and stare at kind of terribly gamified tables and calculations all day to optimize your proactive-productivity-efficientness for an unknown end goal that may or may not exist.
Adventures in quarantining, episode 5: Reading Reemtsma's "In The Cellar". Inopportune timing.
Adventures in quarantining, episode 4: I now sleep on the other side of the sofa.

On a positive note, it's a teensy bit great to witness the feelings of betrayal and disappointment that become increasingly tangible in preppers and memelords that the apocalypse does not include them being turned into Mad Max. The fetishization of the downfall of civilization as an empowerment myth for the totally disenfranchised solitary male, finally reduced to the wet dream it always was (now they only have the zombie apocalype to hope for, poor things). Turns out a global pandemic isn't all that sexy and cool, but messy and terrible for the affected and limiting and boring for the unaffected. Who would've thought?
It's equally slightly great that the same people also have to witness that civilization doesn't just instantly collapse like a poorly played Jenga tower that somehow survived the Great Bubonic Plague, the Spanish Flu and the Seventies, but not an infectious respiratory disease in an age of modern medicine.
Lastly, I tend to like the growing unease in market moguls who seem to find it distressing that a recession doesn't lead to buildings instantly collapsing, cities burning down, and people losing their will to live, as if the market was not our primary cause of being alive.
Reality being so incredibly underwhelming is a really good thing.
Adventures in quarantining, episode 3: Went to a nearby park to keep my worsening circulation going. People walk aimlessly about because we all want to be outside, but have nowhere to go to. You just start at one point in the park and then take turns randomly. Ran into the same people at entirely different places repeatedly. It's as if we're all background extras on a film set.
Adventures in quarantining, episode 2: Sleeping on my own sofa to have a change of scenery.
Adventures in quarantining: Isolated and lonely, I installed a chat/dating app just to talk some bullshit with some people who are not reddit or IRC users. One contact who did not immediately offer to be my sugar mum quickly asked for a "full pic" of me. Because I never take selfies and therefore didn't have any, I inserted a gif of an adorable piglet playing on a meadow and wrote back "Here you go. Full pig."
They didn't get it.
What happened to the internet while I was outside? I swear I was only away for like five minutes.
I just had a soft baked lemon oil white chocolate chip cookie that was the culinary equivalent of licking the armpit of someone named Chad after a 90 minute workout session. I did not know "sweaty" and "bodyspray-like" was a taste and consistency you could aim for. Thank you, food trends!
My first and only ever "I would like to talk to the manager" moment was when I walked into a toy store (the children's toys kind) last year and three steps in they blasted Michael Jackson's "Bad" out of their speakers. I considered going to a clerk and ask them whether they might reconsider if their choice of music was appropriate. The friend I was there with kept me from doing so to "not embarrass ourselves". He was very stern about that. Dude, we were two way-too-adult guys alone in a children's toy store looking at plush toys and trading cards. There were so few inches downward from there, a less creepy music selection could not possibly have made anything worse, no matter if now one more clerk in the world was annoyed at one more entitled customer. Because with the song playing along, we left within what must have been around two minutes to get out of this nightmare scenario.
Thought experiment: A reasonably overhyped artist mandates that whenever one of his works goes on auction, the lowest bidder will win. I don't mean a sealed auction or anything - a public auction where a piece starts with an arbitrarily high price tag and then bidders will try to get it for less, publicly. What will happen?
The first and quite logical assumption would be that no piece the artist puts out there will ever sell for anything more than one cent because multimillionaire collectors tend to not give a shit whether the stuff they own was sourced ethically, i.e. if the artist or the auction house can survive this bargain. This is fine as an initial assumption, but loses its credence once one takes into account that what makes big sellable art ("Siegerkunst", lovely term) presentable is its price tag and little else. So no collector would want to own a piece he got for one cent just to devalue his entire "priceless" collection. The only somewhat priceless pieces are the ones which are not even worth one cent because they are permanently not on sale - museum art. If the piece has never been in a museum, its price tag and the price tags of its companion pieces from the same artist or movement are all there is to it from a serious collector's point of view; also it's embarrassing to appear like a cheapskate. So might the first person to call a ridiculously high price be the winner in a or any given scenario?
Probably not if you'd want to derail and force them to buy the piece for less. Bidding down a work that started at twenty million to twenty thousand does not have to devalue your collection at all if the other one then still goes lower because they really want to have it or because you can surely think of a way to dispose of it once you acquired your worthless garbage AND angered your fellow collector frenemy AND ruined the career of an artist you might not like and who might be a rival to the artist you actually DO collect. So, maybe stuff regularly goes down to a tenner or so?
I did not look much into whether something like this has been attempted before. It probably happened as part of some performance I either did not hear anything about or just forgot. Also I have no idea if one had to establish additional rules, for example making going down more than 20% from the previous amount an illegal move (Otherwise stuff like the first bid being 1 cent would be absolutely possible). But installing that as a rule might skew the dynamic in such a way that no one bids on a piece priced too highly, because if no one after you wants to pay more than 79% of what you offered, you might endow yourself with an overpriced kitsch piece you actually only wanted to pay half the initial sum for.
If no one attempted this to troll Christie's yet, this idea is completey public domain. So, one of the undoubtedly many A-listers of the art world who religiously read anything I post, feel free to try this and keep me updated. Thanks in advance.
Thesis: Both "ontology" and "epistemology" are just philosophical expletives, i.e. the "like" of intellispeak.
Video game humour that is conveyed verbally is the worst humour. Devs and writers produce visual humour about as well as your average Adam Sandler "comedy" "film" (i.e. they repeatedly mistake pop cultural references and violence for jokes, but I can't blame them, since smart people games repeatedly mistake cultural references for intellectualism and that is arguably worse PS: did you know that Nietzsche exists), mechanical humour, which they could excel at beyond any other medium, is twenty years behind of what it could have developed into, but emergent (as in, you see traces here and there), but almost anything that uses words is just plain bad. It's either edgelord humour, dad humour, or "attempts at adult humour", possibly the worst kind. I can live with edgelord humour. That just makes me roll my eyes and hope that the devs will have outgrown it in five years when they've realized that South Park is not the pinnacle of comedy, but rather just privilege soliloquizing. Most devs don't make it a full five years in the industry anymore though. Or they just never outgrow South Park. Then there's dad humour, which is attempts at jokes that are not edgy, but the only people the devs ever heard making jokes are George Carlin and their dads. I find that version kind of funny because it's twentysomethings who ostensibly hate dad jokes making dad jokes because that's their full repertoire of joke techniques. The absolutely worst though is jokes that are made to seem like adults wrote them for other adults, which usually coalesces into animated adults quipping or bickering sarcastically at each other because the writers of Dr. House had this grand idea of mixing a Byronic hero, the mould for everything that ever wants to be a video game protagonist, with surface-level bitterness and a five o'clock shadow. Yes, let me spend more time with this character who childishly verbally abuses his coworkers while aliens attack. I am so sold.
For some reason, Ludosity's brand of silly humour is a rare and wonderful exception. I should feel too old for this, but I repeatedly find myself booting up Card City Nights and just enjoying the purity of it. They even make pop cultural references that make me not roll my eyes. How is that even possible?
I made the mistake of googling PopCap. I knew they were owned by EA for years, but their website's deadness is sad nonetheless.
Then I remembered distinctly how much hatred they got from the hardcoregamerdudebro league back in the day for producing notoriously derivative cash-in games that looked nothing like CoD. I, being the dirty casual I am, sung their praises because of how much I loved Bookworm Adventures 1 & 2, Talismania and Chuzzle Deluxe (their best games by far because no zombies), then PvZ hit (which I also invested 60ish hours into because I also am a hopeless completionist) and I think it's safe to say that that was what basically destroyed them because its unprecedented success made them miss the cultural shift in gaming around 2009 and delayed an adaption to the new mobile market - and it made them attractive to big-budget investors and thus they were never allowed to move on and create anything new after the buyout. The 'new' stuff is not even worth raising an eyebrow about, which is so strange considering that this once was a 'dirty' company that now seems so quaint and admirable compared to what's on the market today because in the end, they made functional, stand-alone, one-time-purchase games that were on the addictive side to keep you playing (instead of urging you to pay additional fees to not have to play as much), which does not fit into modern games culture at all. I'm almost happy that they died because I would've hated to see them evolve into an actual dirty company. I prefer the sad shadow of themselves that kinda attempts to exploit their player base, but so anaemically you barely even notice.
Nowadays the hardcoregamerdudebro league reminisces about the good ol' times when PopCap were still a thing. Nobody ever hated them, promise.
This is the first time I first-handedly experienced how a cult following is born. You'd think it would either be cool or melancholic or nostalgic. Instead it's just really awkward. It makes me wait for the time when the hardcoregamerdudebro league reminisces about the good old days when Clash of Clans and Candy Crush were still a thing because their exploitation mechanics were negligible or something, either retroactively confessing they played it back then or trying to retcon their own gaming history to belong to an in-group no one should want to belong to. I don't want to belong to the PopCap first generation player base in-group because that looks bad on a resume which otherwise tends to make me look like a kinda sophisticated fella. But I do. That's my legacy. I played PopCap games before they were cool.
How embarrassing.
Adventures in cognitive dissonance, episode #326:
While I take cultural appropriation very seriously, I also think that all of music history is easily eclipsed by the short period in Europop when it was de rigeur to create disco songs centered around historical figures while wearing incredibly inappropriate and culturally insensitive stage attire.
Also, it is a wonderful experience to introduce Boney M to someone who genuinely never heard of them.
A friend of mine is reading Crime and Punishment for the first time and two chapters in he informed me how surprisingly sad and dismal the setting and how not just flawed, but outright unlikeable and rough every single character is. He's not one of those who think world literature is supposed to be candy-coloured self-help bollocks, but still... brah, it's world literature as imagined by a Russian. What were you expecting? World literature is essentally normal literature with the saturation on low, contrast on high, colour temperature on cold and a vignette added on top. Y'know, like when they try to make superhero movies look like films for grown ups. And a Russian writer is essentially a normal writer who lives in Russia.
I hereby propose the term "poshlivious", henceforth to be applied whenever a writer employs a copious amount of undoubted and obvious elitism in their verbiage or narrative while simultaneously appearing entirely oblivious to the fact.
Case in point: Obrist's Ways of Curating contains a passage in which he describes his struggling as a young curator, aged 23, with no gallery to curate (we've all been there), so he had to host an exhibition in his kitchen. The artists who participated? Oh, no one special. Just a bunch of dudes like Fischli & Weiss, whomst he happened to know casually.
The book is nicely written and all, but mainly consists of name-droppings and the regurgitation of opinions of people Obrist likes - most of whom he knows personally, and fear not, he will mention it. So what I'm learning from the book is as follows:
1. To be a curator, you need to be humble, somewhat reserved, willing to steer off the beaten path and know a lot of famous people willing to help you out.
2. The word "curator" or "curated" is applied to many shitty things that would have better used the term "trash collector" or "damage minimiser". (We agree on that one, but he worded it with a tad more grace.)
3. Isn't it a shame that as a poor struggling student in Switzerland, all you can afford is a multi-room apartment on your own of which you don't use the kitchen because you always eat out, an old (!) station wagon and the occasional Interrail ticket to visit your artist friends in Rome and Venice?
It's hard to decipher game reviews sometimes. Whenever there is a Western indie game with slightly anime-esque graphics of the 'comfy' persuasion, they will be described as "Ghibli-esque" or "reminscent of Studio Ghibli", and that can mean so many things:
(0. It actually took inspiration from Studio Ghibli's animation style and even borrowed some narrative techniques.)
1. "It looks like anime, but, y'know, not the shitty kind of anime. The one other kind of anime there is. The artsy kind that was not a mistake."
2. It's cutesy and commercial, but divorced enough from everyday, garden variety cutesy and commercial to not warrant the description.
3. There's talking animals in it.
I haven't read much of Mary Stewart Relfe, but the UPC-666ers are a very fascinating bunch, especially because I believe they are close to nonexistent outside the US and so gradually I get the feeling that this is specifically a Cold War era thing - I mean, Relfe saw the devil in basically everything, but the overall stance seems to have been that Satan will get you for your consumerism - these people felt very uncomfortable about capitalism and its turning people into buyers and non-people into wares, but they lived through the McCarthy era and thrived during the midst of Reagonomics, so everything criticizing capitalism was communism to them, and communism was evil, so they could not use left-leaning language (or never even learned how to use it), and right-leaning language was absolutely not on their side for this particular thing, but since they were used to (and probably liked) its prohibitive nature, they borrowed from the same source right-wingers in general like to borrow from when it comes to demonizing something - bible verses they heard once, several years ago.
I got this weird pipe dream of paying someone to hack into some really big influencer accounts and make them post stuff like "my January reading list #bookstagram #bookworm #booklove" and "finishing my TBR #readwhatyouown" with the same lame photographs as always but instead of the usual suspects (poor Joan Didion, poor Baudelaire) they then post really long and complicated quotes by Deleuze, Butler, Saussure, Foucault and Kristeva about power, language and intertextuality.
This could have multiple great effects:
One: if big enough, the seized account (idk, is Kylie Jenner still relevant?) would inspire hundreds of thousands of young people to buy those books, confuse bookstore owners, and the kids might at least read them up to a point where they can find a good quote to post online.
Two: The influencers might see this as a new way to generate revenue and try their hands at paying some job seeking scholars to produce more #booklove quotes: "Power is not an institution, and not a structure; neither is it a certain strength we are endowed with; it is the name that one attributes to a complex strategical situation in a particular society. -MF #OMGsotrue #power #institution #complex #society #particular".
Three: It would make all of the aforementioned writers so popular that academia and critics would immediately abandon them for a while because nothing hurts an academic more than being perfectly intelligible at parties. They'd find some new stuff, maybe Lautreamont, maybe Heidegger, to write PhDs about. Then I'd pay my hacker again to ruin those as well.
Four: Some of the info might actually stick.
I know that entertaining pornography exists, but because I guess I hate myself, I decided to playtest CherryKiss's catalogue of terrible hentai VNs to see if there was something worth talking about to friends and family in them.
Weirdly enough, there is (my friends and family are very understanding people).
I guess because I got lucky (?), I happened to get my hands on two games in a row in which the basic scenario is that you, the protagonist, are the only man or one of very few men in all of Japan to not suffer from erectile dysfunction. Which means that by default, your dick is important business and your morning wood an act of pure heroism because Japan's survival depends on your ability to find a hole to stick it in (Welcome to a universe with no such thing as a fertility clinic or viagra).
In the first, uh, "game" (it was a kinetic novel, no choices at all except for picking your own name, much disappoint), that led to my character being tasked with impregnating an entire village of horny women while their barren husbands cheered him on (they are never seen though). This was accomplished by basically having sex at least eleven times a day (the number of women in the village) if not much, much more (What was this VN's idea of "older women", by the way? The ones calling themselves old women looked exactly the same as the ones who were supposed to be in their early twenties. Is it that christmas cake thing and the "older women" were all just like, 26?) while they praised and worshipped the existence of hard dick. No foreplay, no buildup, just boob jobs and vaginal intercourse because women's erogenous zones are basically "Whatever a dick touches", and weird abstract descriptions of the scent of semen that led me to question either the veracity of the translation or the translateabilty of certain Japanese idioms I was unaware of (that is most of them).
I sat in front of this laughing and also deeply, deeply afraid because for an old fuck like me this reads like a complete horror scenario. Only a 15-year old lad who thinks he has no qualities besides his raging pubescent morning wood and his seemingly indiscriminate lust for anything with a boob or two would think that having to constantly copulate with a village of women thinking of literally nothing but his genitals day in, day out is a desirable scenario. Women throwing themselves at you constantly is nice if you have genuinely no other interests, but let's just assume the guy wants a day off at, like, age 25 to go on a hike or meet up with his parents or read a newspaper from start to finish (In a world with no fertility clinics, they probably didn't develop past newspapers yet). These women are so mentally unstable that they'd become horror villains in less than a second once they realised that he really, really is not in the mood this one day. I was actually not only completely turned off because man, how can you get harem fantasies that wrong, but really uncertain at some point whether I was approaching a very horrific twist near the end in which my character would be turned into a sex slave by the cult of dick.
The twist is that the game designers really needed to bend reality to make this scenario work. Just like pandering to the assumed player's weak ego and self-esteem not by giving him any desirable qualities, but by taking his one (assumed!) noteable real-life quality from every other male character around, the game cuts off before any of the women's due date because then we would be hit with the harsh reality of the women becoming temporarily unavailable or just being really psychopathically shitty mothers, and option one is inacceptable for the player's ego, option two would break the reality of the game that everything is good because of hard dick. By the way, the character you play is an emotionally immature asshole and all the ladies dig that shit because of course they do because assholery equals dominance.
The second game (no kinetic novel! Options to screw people in different orders! Game qualifying mechanics!) was similarly horrific. The main character, man who can get it up, takes advantage of his aunt and cousin who instantly mindbreak and become his "breeding pets", that universe's equivalent of 100% 24/7 BDSM subs as envisioned by Christian Grey. The game makes clear that your cousin, a well-respected honour student and tennis player, is also a bitch because she mentions that you constantly play video games and tend to wake up late and maybe her mum shouldn't be the one responsible to wake you up every morning AND HOW DARE SHE (the designers of these games must think very highly of their player base). So, rape, repeat. In this scenario, you are a truly shitty person (no dom would ever roleplay that bad) and "your pets" love it and when you copulate with them in public, women are swooning over you and talk about how lucky your "pets" are and men admire your manliness. It had all the hallmarks of Bo Burnham's "beautiful dick" skit without any of the wit and charm.
The game also cuts off before the two women are due because, well, they are so absolutely mindbroken that I can only assume that the newborns would immediately be taken into state custody or the player character had to take care of them.
Come to think of that, that would have been an exciting twist, having the player mindbreak around for three hours, then followed by sixty hours of tedious baby-raising gameplay while your "pets" in their cages also need care and attention. The Final Fantasy of hentai VNs. But these games being what they are, it would've just turned into Princess Maker with incest at the end. Correction: It would have just turned into Princess Maker.
And here I come back to a game that was very boring. Doki Doki Literature Club, which I dislike for a variety of reasons, one being that the game designers acted like the game was about fighting harmful tropes'n'shit, but then started selling waifu merch for the different characters. But Doki Doki has at least two much bigger issues - One: they add in too much gratuitous horror elements. The horror in these strange VNs is already there. Both of the games I played were creepy from start to finish. I didn't need the game to be literally possessed by a demonic waifu. Doki Doki spelled the horror out in words because, uh, easy, and then added visual horror in because, uh, I dunno, creepy anime girls stabbing themselves to death is also easy.
Two: Doki Doki assumed that the player is actually a good person who wishes the dateable characters well and the game mechanics kind of prohibit a healthy relationship from developing because the women are just programmed to fall for you. That's what it gets wrong about the games it satirises (though I know it tackles dating instead of hentai VNs): The designers of the VNs I played here knew (or assumed) that the sex is only part of what gets the fapping going. The characters I embodied here were relentlessly manipulative, enjoyed degrading women and reveled in being able to honestly perform these parts of their limited personalities. They did not like these women, they liked the idea of being the one to fuck them and build up their own wounded masculinity through that. The fantasy is not the part where sex is happening. It's the part where it's made clear that this is because of you being, not just having, a huge dick.
If you want to play a good VN poking fun at tropes successfully, play The Senpai. Or Hatoful Boyfriend. Hatoful Boyfriend is a joy.
Žižek is a sagacious fella and also very formulaic and... wrong. Like, wrong like popular science is often wrong. Wrong because for popularity, you need to be wrong a bit. A how-to Žižek writing guide would basically be:
1. Tell an older news story in an anecdotal decontextualized manner. Generalize it broadly.
2. Liken it to a scene in a film. "As it were..." Lacanian reading of the film is a given.
3. "As we can clearly see in the writings of Hegel/Lacan/Agamben, this exemplifies..."
4. Insert opinion left-leaning people will dislike, but give it a spin to actually make it pro-left. Then berate the left for not getting it.
5. Then state a weirdly popular leftie opinion that is so general and well-established that it's kind of weird that you even mention it.
6. "And so on and so on."
But: BOY, is he fun to read. I actually look forwarding to reading page after page of his stuff no matter what. Whenever I get frustrated with a writer whose opinions I actually find interesting if it weren't for their dry, self-referential, repetitive style, meandering, obfuscated verbalization of very simple concepts that wouldn't sound high-brow if not embedded in layers upon layers of unnecessary stylization, and their very recognizable impostor syndrome ("People will find out I'm a fraud if I write one sentence below 25 words!") keeping them from being straightforward when applicable, I turn to Žižek. I take wrong and blunt and obvious over right and complexified and obvious.
Streaming services and the ever-increasing rental culture is big money saying "Fine. You want your communism, here you have it. For a fee."
And who can blame 'em, we're not getting it from anywhere else anytime soon and I need my fix. I wouldn't even know how to deal with proper communism anymore outside of a subscription-and-consumption model. If you told a bunch of younger people that libraries are free, they'd probably just argue that that sounds like a terrible business model (an aside: the amount of understanding and honest concern for unethical companies some kids radiate when talking about the disregard of workers' rights, environmental issues or money laundering is comical and I love having conversations with many of them because no one needs to say anything against anything - They usually just enunciate their deep compassion for Amazon firing people who want to be treated as people and then suddenly seem deeply horrified by themselves, and that's the end of the discussion).
The only downside except for everything else is that most subscription services just let you subscribe to stuff you'd rather own while not letting you rent stuff you don't want to own. I like to have my music, films, books and games on my hard drive where they belong. But a second table for guests? I neither need nor want a second table for guests. I'd rather occasionally rent one. But furniture leasing is a hassle if you don't do it in bulk and/or for unreasonable time periods.
And that's why communism doesn't work I guess.
Bone Tomahawk is a strange beast of a movie. And I don't mean the superficial stuff every other better reviewer already remarked on - that it foolishly attempts to tell a deeply racist narrative without the racism parts by having a Native American in a suit declare the Native threat a troglodyte (and therefore not even properly human) threat instead, as if racism was an ingredient instead of an integral part of the whole effing structure the movie apes off. That's not #deep, that's noticing that the movie thinks "I have a black friend" is a valid defense strategy in an otherwise hopeless situation.
No, Bone Tomahawk's strangeness lies in the movie I actually would like to watch while seeing this sad shadow of the rollercoaster ride that could have been. Because there is something interesting about a movie that seems so convinced that it's very much PC by having removed all interpersonal acts of racism while leaving the systemic parts of it entirely untouched and which therefore, accidentally, becomes more realistic; it's like cognitive dissonance examining itself in a fever dream.
I want to see the inverse of that movie. And I don't mean the movie as told from the troglodytes' perspectives. Nah, I want to see the exact same movie, same camera work, same editing, same screenplay and dialogues, same direction. But with Native Americans, none of them played by Johnny Depp, attempting to save people from an inbred Puritan settler clan even other white settlers don't want to have anything to do with. See how a narrative birthed from racist ideas works if it's used in reverse. Then watch the three film reviewers who'd pick it up for their B-movie blogs call it a strange revenge fantasy / exploitation film / victim narrative.
Are hot takes old people stuff yet? Because then I can finally do one.
I know about as many of Tom Clancy's novels as I absorbed Jordan Peterson's alphabet soup: Ten paragraphs I actually read, the rest is cultural osmosis and pattern recognition allowing me to fill in the gaps between the garble.
(btw it's completely fine if you like stuff like that and I only judge you because I have to. Guilty pleasures keep us three-dimensional.)
But LET'S TALK ABOUT THE BEAUTY OF JACK RYAN. The Amazon show. The Amazon show I recently watched the first episode of on DVD, because I'm old. The Amazon show based on Tom Clancy's iconic (as I've been told) Jack Ryan.
GOD THE BEAUTY.
What this episode did for me was not exactly something to make me thank a higher being for the gift of sight so I could behold all of the intense stares between entirely heterosexual manly men. It was rather something that made me wonder, and then gave me answers to a question: Who is this show seeking to empower?
Let's talk about John Krasinski. Let's talk about why they cast someone who was born to play an uncredited supporting role or someone's accountant as the lead of... I guess an action TV show? - the exact genre left me confused.
Basically, Krasinski does play an accountant. He does accounting things. Watches money transfers. Quarrels with middle management. Exchanges heated dialogue and intense stares with older, more powerful men. Then awkwardly flirts with their daughters. Then white people are shot by brown people, then the same happens the other way round. Basic stuff. Very boring. And I need to emphasize: This show is very, very boring. And I like boring usually. But this was a bit much and I was ready to give up, but then a scene happened.
A perfect scene.
A scene Neil Breen could have come up with if he weren't on such a tight budget and knew how coherent dialogue basically should sound and look like. Just not as creepy.
(btw as someone who lived with someone who thought of himself as a/the messiah/Jeebus, I struggle to find Breen amusing at all. I just get flashbacks to arguments about brain damage via boiling through WiFi signals, the necessity of toilet paper and fridges and someone listening in and then chatting me up on my shower soliloquies to tell me that he thinks I might be insane, a pervert, and also I should clean the shower more often after he washed his sheep wool pullovers in there because the devil lives in our washing machine or something.)
Sooo that scene. I don't remember it perfectly and I don't have to, but here's the gist:
Jack Ryan/someone's accountant is on a birthday/work related party of an old friend/employer who wants him to do something he really does not want to do. Jack Accountant tells his former boss he won't do the thing he does not want to do. His former boss then insults him and calls him a loser in front of all of his rich people friends. Someone's Ryan then chats up blonde lady who turns out to be the former boss's daughter, which is so embarrassing.
THEN A HELICOPTER APPEARS ABOVE THE OCEAN; A BUNCH OF ELITE SNIPER PEOPLE OR WHATEVER JUMP OUT OF IT AS IT LANDS ON THE PARTY GROUNDS, YELLING: "DOCTOR RYAN, YOUR EXPERTISE IS NEEDED." JACCOUNTANT RYAN HUMBLY FOLLOWS THEM, EXCUSING HIMSELF IN A CHARMINGLY AWKWARD FASHION. EVERYBODY SEES HOW HE WAS ACTUALLY THE COOLEST GUY ALL ALONG AS THE HELICOPTER DISAPPEARS INTO THE SUNSET.
This scene is the heart of Jack Ryan. It's the wet dream of every guy who looks like Krasinski minus the abs and probably plus some body hair. It is a series about how the accountant from middle management is secretly always right, full of unseen potential and actually the coolest guy at the company barbecue.
There are other scenes in this pilot that are similarly rich in symbolism, but not as "And then the whole bus clapped" in terms of excitement. The show establishes that Ryan and his new boss have some kind of thing where they don't respect each other's opinions very much whenever they meet, but then it turns out the boss believes Ryan is right and does the right thing, namely whatever Ryan suggested. This is visually explained by the boss looking at pictures of Ryan and his credentials. Not at evidence. Not at anything relating to the topic at hand. He uses his office hours to dote on images of his subordinate and then freezes a bunch of bank accounts in the Middle East. This is how we're gonna stop ISIS, people.
And I get it. After an argument with your boss, the thing that hurts the most is that you know you're thinking more about it (and him) than he ever will about you. He goes home not thinking about you one bit while you fall asleep fantasising about how you'll show him how right you were in increasingly exaggerated ways. Don't tell me at no point in your fantasies a helicopter descended onto your workplace's parking place, followed by soldiers jumping out, screaming how your country needs you right now. It happened to me. The fantasy, not the helicopter thing.
Jack Ryan (the show, not the accountant) establishes that this boss thinks about his employee all the time whenever they argue, while Jack Ryan (the accountant, not the show) does not think about his boss personally, but about his rational and important topic. After all, he explained everything with FACTS and LOGIC.
Also every episode of Jack Ryan I've seen so far seems to rely on at least one tiny shot in which we experience Ryan topless so the audience is reminded that he has been tortured and is no mere accountant at all, but rather a retired special agent. He also wakes up from bad dreams a lot. This show takes all the shortcuts.
Jack Ryan is for the poor nameless white human male resource who's a tad too old to still feel empowered by Call of Duty, but not quite old (or progressive (or imaginative)) enough to relish the escapism of Star Trek. It's for someone who would have loved John Wayne a few decades earlier if only John Wayne had some more scenes in which he worked in an office. Jack Ryan is for the guy who doesn't quite hate himself, but who hates that no one treats him like a hero for doing splendid, grade-A accounting.
Most provincial things to do in your life, written as a fun game:
Level 1
Talking about how much you're over this fucking place in fucking nowhere and how everything and everyone here is just so terribly provincial.
Level 2
Moving to a (the!) big city officially to be out of bucolistan and "see more of this world than just the same three streets every day before you turn 50" or "hunt for realistic job opportunities", but inofficially to prove to yourself that you, too, can be a hip city kid.
Level 3
Realising the hip city kids are fed up with your ilk and the ones who aren't are these weird types that tend to only talk about how great living in a (the!) big city is like... y'know... you.
Level 4
Realising you're sitting in a room with 20 other 20-somethings who all moved here from 500-soul villages and small towns because moving places does neither change your habitus nor your social capital and in fact you never quite hated your surroundings that much, you just hate being insignificant and lower middle class, which you still are.
Level 5
Realising the hip city kids don't even come to your part of town and you're basically trapped in the province of a (the!) big city just like you were before, but your rent is higher and you can't delude yourself into thinking that if only you got your chance, you'd make it.
Level 6
Moving back, sick of seeing the same three streets every day and in need of some realistic job opportunities, acting all "I had my adventurous big city phase, but now I want to move on from that part of my life". All your friends do or did the same and nobody ever talks too much about why exactly that adventurous big city phase was retconned into a phase, hence the cycle continues.
Level 100
Telling people you "had to get out of there" because you "got into some trouble with some - uhm, some shady people, one might even say, uhm, no, I can't safely name names", being all mysterious and stuff. In the distance, a cow moos.

Speedrun Cheat
Quit after playing Level 1 for a while, embrace your destiny, and mock those who even try to achieve anything beyond the realm of "very likely to work". Be very philosophical about how perpetuating the system by just trying to become a bigger actor within its limits won't lead to the revolution we need to actually make life bearable for everybody. Act very cosmopolitan and point out to your interlocutors that you are not an anti-city village idiot like the rest of the people you're surrounded by (you're still better than those) and that judging by habitus alone actually could have been a hip city kid if you had ever wanted to. In the distance, a cow moos.
I mean, sure, I could continue using CycleGAN for serious experimentation and research. Or I could block myself from using my work station for several hours to train a perfectly fine machine learning system composed of two perfectly fine neural networks to turn images of Angela Lansbury into images of Nicolas Cage. But I'm not a meme person per se. I heavily dislike deepfakes and I think we should just leave Mr. Cage alone. I don't see why I should do that. It's like, entirely on me whether I would want to do such a thing.
I would have to have a serious need to deepcage my entire Murder She Wrote DVD collection to even think of any useful application for such a 5GB monstrosity. Or, I dunno, would want to see Lansbury act her heart out in Mandy. Or The Wicker Man. Depending on my mood.
Dear art museums and galleries still doing shows "On Video Games" and "On Social Media": To people who found out the internet exists before 2017 this looks like you're doing an art exhibition "On Painting" or opening a library section "On Books".
A few years ago I wrote cheap-o song lyrics on demand for one or two musicians. They liked it cheezy and depressive and angsty and I remember writing a closing line for a blues that went "And when my father was my age, he was already my dad" and that rhymed with "long dead" and "dread" and I recall I had to mention Jimi Hendrix somewhere in between as per requested by one of the gentlemen. It was terrible and luckily never saw a release.
Anyway the angstiness, and I know I shouldn't brag about the bad job I did as a lyricist, of that particular line encapsulates your average twentysomething-guitar-boy's arrested development so superbly that I wanted to share it. It became a regular quote whenever the musician in question wanted to remind himself of what a huge failure he thought he was.
He was an okay failure. Nothing spectacular really.
I don't need to read again that an exhibition celebrates an artist for at least a hundred years.
Pro Tip: Don't read Nietzsche on your way to a job interview.

I mean, I got the job, but still. You'll be an asshole and massively insecure at the same time. Reading this dude is like voluntarily infecting yourself with narcissistic personality disorder for a few hours.
I respect Anodyne 2 for all the things it attempts. Most of these attempts fail and I enjoyed hardly any of them and the overall mawkishness in both storytelling and writing style is not for me (I'm over the Porpentine school of writing for now) and man does it have flaws, but I do respect it and its developers and I'd buy a third part because I guess this is my Final Fantasy now. Great visual presentation and soundscape and very interesting choices in gameplay, mechanics and referenced material.
But in general Anodyne and Anodyne 2 juxtaposed are a good lesson on why some vague feelings and ideas should better be left vague because their ascertainment and overexplanation only lead to major and integral contradictions and awkward forced sentimentality. Anodyne was made by very young, idealistic and pensive people who knew that they did not have the language to properly express a certain set of moods and feelings in writing, but they had the artistic ability and skill set to do so in a game. Anodyne 2 is a game by people who are still all of the things mentioned above and who either now think they got the language part of things pinned down (No) or that they need the language because it's a much bigger game now and they need it to say something instead of just expressing it (Also No). A lot of the game is very text-heavy, to the point where a proper script editor might have been very helpful.
Also, please don't tell me at the beginning of your game that it says something. That's an AssCreed 1 move.
And maybe don't just randomly pop up after the standard ending telling me with your author's voice what you think the true ending is. Don't take me by the hand all the time. This game made its message and intent clear in spades and all it lead to is that I didn't try to find a way to fight the game's intended (and, from the start, very obvious) villain, but the game itself.
I ignored transhumanism categorically because I find it a particularly boring sci-fi theme, but now it's popping up everywhere as if it were a real thing and I forced myself to check online how it's doing as if I didn't care about my embarrassing search history.

Holy effing cow, the transhumanist declaration of humanity+ surely is something else.
Have here point 1: Humanity stands to be profoundly affected by science and technology in the future. We envision the possibility of broadening human potential by overcoming aging, cognitive shortcomings, involuntary suffering, and our confinement to planet Earth. This seems to be from 1998 and introduces the basic idea all following points are based on and it's like... guys... no one has even beaten cancer yet. Or Ebola. Or Alzheimer's. Or measles, because some people don't vaccinate, but probably would put computer chips in their kids' brains to 'cure' their autism once they find out the bleach-drinking method doesn't work. Plastic surgery can still lead to comically unpredicted results. How about taking tiny steps?
Everything I read or found so far about it makes transhumanism appear like a hopelessly naive, elitist, narcissistic and consumerist futuresexual tech-bro wet dream about creating some sort of individualism-as-religion-infested utopia based on the cleaner entries in the chronically aesthetics-obsessed cyberpunk subgenre mixed with eugenics and some other crackpottery, entirely dependent on the idea that throwing enough money at the richest megalomaniac who promises to make, well, at least himself (I'll go with a male instead of a neutral pronoun here because let's be real) immortal, will somehow advance humanity as a whole.
Also, I refuse to believe that the movies and games that operate like transhumanism is an actual philosophical discipline with any credible scientific background are made by people who are at least semi-literate in history. Not a single idea in transhumanism itself is new, and it's not exactly smart or pushing the envelope to talk about Übermenschen like it's 1883. It's an ages old form of escapism that promises that no one will ever have to deal with death again in mushy and inaccurate tech-speak.
I'm curious whether parasocial delusion has become common enough by now to rather be regarded as a regular pastime. Asking for a friend.
If I were a mangaka in the 1980s I'd totally make a sentai series built around the fundamental forces. Main character would be Strong Force with his two forms "Fundamental" and "Residual", fighting side by side with his awkward younger sister Weak Force (signature attack: Left-handed fermions) and Electromagnetic, the electrically charged yaoi-bait rival bad boy. They'd be searching for their fourth and most powerful member, Gravitation, a mysterious figure whose true nature is yet to be discovered (mauve hair). The show's title would obviously be Theory of Everything, spin-offs pre-planned with subtitles like "Planck [insert thunderbolt here] Scale" and "Particle Acceleration!!!" (though those might also be the Sega Genesis titles) and themes like string-theory-tastic dimension hopping and fusing different fighters for the ultimate "quantum gravity" attack.
Thank you Netflix, I'd now like to collect my paycheck. And since I already included an onii-chan focused female character, you don't even need to genderbend a fan-canonically gay favourite.

[A friend made me watch one episode of the CG animated 2019 Saint Seiya series to prove that things you don't care about can still make you suffer. I never had any interest in Saint Seiya or the 'violent boy wish fulfillment' genre and yet I still felt bad for the source material and all of the voice actors who had to read their text straight-faced.]
Whatever drove Yuji Naka to focus on being the Sonic guy when he could have built a career on Girl's Garden is beyond me.
A few quick remarks on ma boi Xenophon, whom I've been reading recently when I couldn't fall asleep:

1. Reading Xenoboi and Plato side by side is like reading two weebs' wildly different fanfics about their identical favourite waifu from some obscure anime no one else ever watched back when it aired, making it difficult to distinguish canon from fan canon - Was Socrates an elitist nagging condescending piece of work or was he a funny drunk condescending piece of work?

2. I concocted this whole theory in my brain that Donald Trump is not an irate madman constantly wallowing in self-pity, but rather an ardent Xenoboi devotee and dedicated performance artist re-enacting "Hiero" absolutely faithfully in front of the public. Can't wait to see who he cast as Simonedes, because his tyrant impression is incredibly spot-on.

3. If Xenoboi's depictions of parties including Socrates and the gang are in any way credible, it must have been a wild mixture of bantering about man love interwoven with geezy sexist jokes on the expense of women in general and Socrates' wife specifically, so basically the atmosphere of a bro bar mixed with the atmosphere of a gay bar, with both a pinch of Wednesday afternoon strip club and Sunday morning country club buffet vibes. The plot of Symposium basically focuses on a rich guy lusting over a socialite athlete and to get to the shagging part of things he invites the athlete, Soc and the gang and his date's dad to a banquet. Then someone calls Socrates ugly. Hilarity ensues.
Occupy White Walls really drove home the point for me that I'm completely done with memes and vaporwave and digital fetishism and the pastel goth color scheme in art and art curation and that the hip young artists the developers got involved in the project all learned what art technically looks like and that you get a lot of "W O W" out of people for creating 2D-renditions of melting blue faces and glitching oversaturated sunsets and collapsing voxel tunnels and ironic MS Paint recreations of classical paintings. What they didn't learn was the difference between design, illustration, decoration, kitsch, camp, and that just repeating "Movements and styles and genres are meaningless, I'm mixing it up, anything goes nowadays #contemporary" isn't exactly a novel idea either (coming from someone who had a glitch phase on this very blog).
Also, as a Sims aficionado, I find the build mode offensive.
I spend a lot of my free time in that game, though. The game's far too conservative for my taste, and yet I build the most conservative gallery I've seen so far. Like, it gets out the worst in me. The newest works I purchased are dated around 1935. AND I bought TWO terrible hyper-Swiss Ferdinand Hodler pieces.

EDIT: I just spent another 5 hours in the game and bought ANOTHER Hodler piece. What's happening to me?
Also I found out that a lot of the art featured in the game is taken from the game's Discord channel and therefore these are probably mostly hobbyist works, which explains a lot and makes me much more relaxed about the melting faces.
You need to put something on the walls of your kitchen, otherwise it's just an empty room with a stove and visitors'll think you're a weirdo with all those cold white walls surrounding you. But whatever you put on the walls will eventually be covered in grease and you'll have to dispose of it if you don't want to put everything in glass frames beforehand, which brings us back to the weirdo side of things because who does that?
So the task is to find something not too tacky or tasteless you would like to see on your wall every single day that you also care so little about that its destruction via grease film and absorbed smoke and spill doesn't bother you at all.
Which is why my walls are still weirdo-white.
Okay. I read my obligatory ten paragraphs of Jordan Peterson and watched some of his interviews. And I'd like to tell a story, just as he likes to do.
Once upon a time, I had a housemate. Seemed innocuous, nice enough, voice a little high-pitched and drawn out, eyes never blinked, but I'm not judgmental (Of course I am). When I told him jokingly once that I thought that after two weeks of living with him I'd be lying cut into pieces in his bathtub, he looked very surprised and, in all seriousness, informed me that he did not have a bathtub.
Turned out he was suffering from a severe psychosis and paranoid schizophrenia that he was keeping at bay with medication, but since he had come into contact with some esoteric baloney recently that had convinced him that mainstream medicine was evil, he was down to a minimum dosage and at one point stopped taking it entirely. Landed him a vacation in the ward, obviously.
Point is, he was convinced that he was some kind of saviour. He wrote articles and entire books about how to combine all three major monotheist religions into one omniferous philosophy for mankind. How homesexuals should not be persecuted, but rather be treated as people who had gone astray and must be lead to get back on the literal straight and narrow (And don't even try to get him started on trans* people. The word "self-mutilation" came up a lot in that context). How eating this and that was damaging our bodies or souls or the environment, how too much freedom for specific groups was damaging to society as a whole et cetera. I read that garbage and I hated it just about as much as he called my writing banal and meaningless. He wrote a letter to my parents, asking them to get me out of the apartment because I was trying to psychologically terrorize him.
He wrote letters to Donald Trump and the Pope, trying to convince them of stuff he commanded. Pestered gallerists in the area, asking them to exhibit his childhood drawings next to his, uh, religious sculptural works. Felt a weird sense of ownership over female bodies in his proximity. Talked about the devil or "the evil" a lot.
Interestingly, once in a blue moon, he brought a woman home. Mostly younger than him and apparently searching for something. One of the women was his age, highly religious, and had lost her husband less than one year ago in an accident. Two adolescent kids and all. Not before long, when she visited, he greeted her with "Why did that take so long?" - She did not leave him for a year.
I found him ridiculous. Most people found him either ridiculous or menacing. His weird messages of love and peace sounded like tyranny, and they were unstable. If he found out he couldn't follow one of his own commands, he just forgot about it. If you called him out on his misinterpretation of a text passage (turned out I and most other people knew the bible better than him), he first wouldn't believe you, then forget about it entirely or later tell the story in a different way, how he had convinced you of his idea. He forgot most things that included him having done something wrong because his psychosis was busy convincing him that he could do no wrong and therefore had to rewrite his memory day after day after day and his paranoid schizophrenia was busy nourishing his persecution complex. He was, however, able to convince quite a few people, at least for a while, that his nonsensically worded rants and opinions were some sort of higher wisdom by an enlightened intellectual. He never had any and never was one. He was a deeply ill man whose own parents didn't know how to help him anymore and whose only saving grace turned out to be that he fell ill long before he had a career and could accumulate any kind of professional pedigree to back up his claims with his social and/or financial status.
In the end, most women didn't show up more than once or twice. Once you saw his part of the apartment was in utter disarray while he proclaimed the new world order and that he blamed not just all of your, but all of his problems on you, it only took you so long to realize your key problem was that this guy was still in your life.
Thanks for tuning in.
Time to be negative!
I stumbled over several redemption story blog and vlog entries and some reddit posts in the past week that all read roughly the same way: Impressionable kid finds Sargon, thinks he's kewl, becomes fash, then finds ContraPoints, realizes she's cooler, unfashes, changes Patreon donations. And while it's nice that that happened, I find it a bit underwhelming, to say the least, that most redemption arcs now can be condensed to "I followed a different YouTuber". Maybe I'm old, but the ex-nazis that got invited to my high school had more... story in their stories.
It's not like I never had my mind changed by a person with better lighting and make-up skills than a previous one, but that just is a story about how the YouTube algorithm decided their viewers might enjoy a change of scenery. There's very little introspection going on in most of these posts (except that they were young, impressionable, vulnerable and depressed) and rarely ever a thought spent on why any kind of real-world interaction or actual research (Not the "Do your own research" kind where you just come out with these convenient kinds of results that solidify your precast opinions as rational facts and logic btw I've definitely never done that), if it ever took place, has less value than a person with some clout and followers talking into a camera, completely relying on Google and Facebook to get their message across. Treating politicial alignment as a streamable outside stimulus basically owned by two corporations does not sit well with me.
I'm also mighty uncomfortable with the possible equation of likes, shares, confession vlogs and donations with reparations, though more from the "How are the trolls going to turn this one around?" kind of angle once they pick up on the new trend of ContraPoints reformists (she seems to be fairly troll-safe so far, but I'm not so sure about her fans).

EDIT: Well, Miss Points herself acknowledged what she calls "her boys", and that by now they've become a cliché. That's ought to be a good sign.
I used to be very much against post-irony, but since I'm reading Chuck Tingle's books for the plot now, I guess that part of my personality went out the window.
I genuinely never read the original Peter Pan before and thought I might give it a go to see what I missed as a kid.
I missed to witness the adventures of an abusive, manipulative and terminally sad psychopathic child gaslighting his friends, taking advantage of a little girl's affection and murdering people for shits and giggles whilst a handsome, cultured and depressed motherfucker named Hook, who is my patronus if nothing else, suffers his way through anxiety issues and the eternal aftermath of his societal downfall whereas admirably managing to not descent into madness like everyone else around him.
10/10
My lame take on Suspiria 2018 after having re-read "Against Interpretation":
This is very much an anti-allegorical movie, isn't it? Dr. Klemperer lived through WWII and knows how euphemisms work in favor of oppressors (he even says so in the police station), but faced with a patient bluntly telling him she's being hunted down by a coven and evidence for her point of view is piling up, he still goes for an allegorical approach and interprets the shit out of his patient's "hallucinations" when what is going on is plainly and directly available to him through her diary. The film is so much against subtext that even the witches tell Klemperer into his face that his main flaw is that he prefers to read things allegorically or metaphorically while the movie almost never does. The dances do not represent spells, they are spells. Mother Markos' followers have their heads exploded for believing her to be a re-incarnation of an allegorical figure that decides to show up and make clear how very literal she is.
I even think it does the film a disservice to follow many critics' assumption that this is 'about' something like betrayal between women of different social status. If we cast aside the idea of the Berlin Wall and the RAF as hackneyed metaphors, they instead become the exact environment in which the coven can flourish because the world is busy with other things. "They've been underground since the war" is not so much a reference to reblossoming fascism but more to the blossoming German art and dance scene that is referenced in the movie through nothing but posters and Swinton taking hints from Pina Bausch and, I assume, a good portion of Abramovic otherwise. Gender is strictly and openly a performative thing throughout the entire film and the psychological dependence of the dancers on their instructors isn't so much metaphorical as it is an actual 2011 Wim Wenders documentary.
This is so different from the first movie, which goes all the way "open for interpretation", and my guess is that the idea behind this is that the target audience of "Suspiria 2018" has seen the original film and the reveal of the dance instructors being witches won't come as a surprise for them, so the creative leads of the remake just inverted the thin plot: Let's make the allegory literal, and make it all about the idea of literal witches living in literal Berlin casting literal spells through dancing, and have the reveal be that none of this is open for interpretation. Put in a vagina dentata for good measure. This is mirrored perfectly in the super-precise filmmaking and muted color palette and just the exactitude of the edit.
(I'm very aware I just interpreted a lot of stuff after having read an essay saying that interpretation is the intellectual's revenge on art.)
The only part of the film I completely disliked was the final meetup between Mother Suspiriorum and Klemperer in which she tells him about his wife's death and how she wasn't afraid and thought only of him 'cause true love and hope. That's such a Hollywood thing to say and it is so incredibly odd especially in a movie like this. Suspiriorum is revealed as an unusually kind being (minus head explosions), but her kindness can't retroactively change a bleak, terrible death in Theresienstadt.
Other than that, thumbs up and I'm off to fanfiction.org to search for some Madame Blanc/Susie Bannion slash fics.

EDIT: Oh my God I found the one fetish no one has written anything about. I went out of my way and even searched through Wattpad. There is nothing, nothing, I'm shocked.

EDIT 2: Oh, also Dakota Johnson's wig was very distracting since it was so obviously a wig. I mean, nice foreshadowing with the red hair = witch thing, but still.
Nerdy shit I won't care about in a week, but do so now:
1 - If they hadn't cast Danny Glover as the protagonist of Predator 2, that film might have been the most racist film since Birth of a Nation.
2 - It's uncanny how obviously the Borg were inspired by the Cenobites from Hellraiser and how the Hellraiser franchise acknowledged that and paid back the compliment in its third iteration and how much every clickbait article about the top ten worst Cenobites throws so much shade at these Techno-bytes because I unabashedly love them.
3 - The Sokal affair is only a powerful means for the destruction of postmodernism for people who haven't looked into postmodernism or the Sokal affair.
If someone ever wanted to display petite bourgeoisie in a zoo, the whole exhibit would comprise of people discussing tableware.
Very late to the party, I finally heard about and watched The strange thing about the Johnsons. Maybe it's because I'm a terrible person or because the acting was so stiff or because I'm used to much, much more intense stuff (thanks Ubuweb!), but I laughed for half the time and was kinda bored at the other half and now I have trouble feeling bad about that and should I even? I'm not very good at the suspension-of-disbelief thing and never was.
This just feels like a rebellious film student's attempt to make something a little more out there than usual. Furthermore, this was a reaction-video-worthy film? 2011, what innocent times.
The film certainly is not a catastrophe, but sadly hasn't much to offer except for its premise, at least for me. I read Malcolm Harris' take on the movie and he sees something valid and important in the film I really didn't, so I might be wrong. Or people come from different points in life and therefore see different things in artistic production.
Other than that, it is always amusing to see how filmmakers imagine writers' lifes.
Donut County says more about the current state of the US than any New York Times non-fiction bestseller reiterating the point that the current POTUS is quite not great.
I wish I had as much going on as the color red in We need to talk about Kevin.
They Live is an effing brilliant movie about a guy catching a glimpse on privilege and inequality, then believing himself to be starring in an action film and relentlessly shooting at the privilege-havers, beautifully oblivious to the idea that the aliens aren't the main problem in 1988's hypercapitalist Los Angeles and maybe also just wanna go to a grocery store, buy a magazine and get a perm like everybody else because "Consume, marry and reproduce" is also kinda their motto. They see those ads 24/7 without obfuscation, after all.
Also, I can see why antisemites dig this movie. It's because they're dumb and they think the movie is just as dumb.
Second worst habit: Incessant quoting.
Worst habit: Incessant quoting of shit you haven't read.
Most of contemporary German cinema consists of Nazi or GDR schmalz and terrible gross-out comedies that peaked in the US around 2001. Sure, language-wise you have Haneke and Seidl, but Austria is a whole ‘nother story. And then there are the Reding brothers making actual movies with interesting perspectives on the German psyche and no one ever watched any of these films, but rest assured everybody knows f*cking Combat Girls. Oi!Warning was almost exclusively available through piracy for a good while, and man, we all need access to b/w films about punks and skinheads making out in the mud or white German rappers playing journeymen.
I've been sad and tired in my life, but never "Peter Jackson in behind the scenes footage of The Hobbit reminsicing his artictic integrity" sad and tired. Holy moly.
Who'd have thought that the hardest artist to rip off base fanart on would be Linda Karshan? When I imagine showing her work to the average non-gallery-loving Joe, I expect an answer like "Huh, like, just straight lines? I could do that!" and then I imagine myself shouting "Yeah, good luck trying, asshole!" but I'd never actually scream in a gallery. Best case scenario is it's taken as an impromptu performance and god I'm bad at those.
The Disaster Artist sounds like a great film idea on paper, and then it's just five minutes of gratuitous meta exposition and far too many minutes of vicarious embarrassment and Dave Franco's face covered in pubic hair, followed by another five to ten minutes of pointless re-enactments of a movie many things have been said about, but certainly not "no one could act like that". And that's not even mentioning that Tommy Wiseau is still alive and, if even remotely similar to James Franco's interpretation of his character, probably not in a mental state in which he can fully understand what is being done to him.
Random comparison: Yu-Gi-Oh! is kinda like Fight Club.
Similarities:
1) Fights/Duels are surrogate intimacy for people out of touch with acceptable human behaviour.
2) The Fight Club/Tournaments are realities, separate from that of grown-ups, in which every inner turmoil and outer conflict will be resolved through this surrogate intimacy.
3) The whole split personalities thing.
4) The decks/The fights are representations of the duelists'/fighters' worldview and personality, dictating twistedness and level of brutality.
5) It's hella gay, and the token female characters thrown in can do nothing about it.
Differences:
1) Fight Club, sadly, has no "Heart of the Fist" motif, instead winners are irrelevant. Cop-out.
2) Yu-Gi-Oh! could definitely adopt the mandatory "no shirts allowed" rule.
3) Tyler (book version) is expected to come back as-is. Atemu only comes back temporarily when Konami smell cash they don't yet own and need to do something about it.
The Sexy Brutale was a good thing, then the directors decided that it needed the most basic, cookie-cutter, Shutter-Island-ripoff-y, tarot-card-psychology-heavy plot possible because it didn't mean something yet. Now it means that people (men?) cannot endure feelings like guilt except through forty years of violent puzzle game fantasies that look very silly and involve cutesy one-dimensonal burlesque characters, but are super-painful and brutal, believe me, they are. It turned the game into a tour de force about how the mere existence of an explanation can destroy something that otherwise could have been a solid piece of art. I wouldn't like to write an interpretation about something that spells out the very meaning of every polygon in painful detail already. It would be too hard not to write something insultingly condescending.
The parts of myself I am least proud of are also the parts I want to put online the most. So, welcome to this sentence. I'm not proud of it.
I Am A Hero has the best possible ending of any comic book series because it is unsatisfying, explains nothing and is inconclusive. I don't know many non-artistique comic books that dare to go there.
It's really hard to take a philosophy professor seriously after he emphasizes several times that "Batman kills at night", no matter how much you remind him that there's this universe thing and the code and timelines but you can't stress it too much because then you risk your colleagues believing you actually read that garbage. And then you let him have his point, which is based on the "killing at night" thing and all, but hey. Foucault based a whole lot of theories on Las Meninas, and those still work though he read the entire painting wrong. So maybe this man's theory will also survive the fact that Batman's characterization is completely off.
Fight Club is pure sublime gayness, made so surface-un-gay that a straight male audience can bear it and even mistake it for a proto-fascist men's rights cult movie/book instead of just a kinda clumsy gay Republican fantasy.

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