spring has been returned to me

What a month! Here's to the end of the year.

Movies

The Rescue (2021)
This is a documentary on the rescue of the Thai boys and their coach from the flooded cave in 2018. The incident made world headlines at the time, and it was interesting to learn more about what was actually going on. I thought this was pretty well paced and shot, and the insight into cave diving was pretty cool. Thank you flo for getting me interested in it!

Black Panther 2 (2022)
Wow wow wow. This was an incredible movie and I cried like 3 or 4 times in the theater watching it. For obvious reasons, it's a movie that's very intensely about grief, and also what it means to rule. Didn't love the external conflict but sometimes you need a plot device. All the moments with Shuri were incredible.

Star Wars IX (2019)
Watched this with a friend, mostly to poke fun at it. It's such a tragedy of a movie in terms of what it could have been. What the hell is that plot!!! There's just so many things going sideways that could have been fixed. Lots of fun to watch with a friend.

Avatar II: The Way of Water (2022)
Also saw this with a friend, it was fun! A visual spectacle of a movie. Don't think too hard about the plot.

Glass Onion (2022)
I love Beniot Blanc!!!!!! He is simply so good. Thank u Daniel Craig for this gift. Gay Southern detective bringing comedy back into mystery.

Books

Because Internet: Understanding the New Rules of Language by Gretchen McCulloch

• why I read it: One of the hosts of "wowiftrue" (a podcast I really like) recommended it!


• thoughts: This is such a fun book! McCullouch is pretty in touch with what internet linguistics are actually like, and this book is a fun romp through what informal writing looks like, now that it's become more popularized by the internet.
  
  It covers some cool stuff, like the difference between different internet "generations" (which aren't just strictly along age lines), and the ways emojis work (they're gestural!). She covers some stuff you're probably familiar with if you're at all familiar with internet linguistics (ie, using bangs to denote different iterations of characters). However, there'll probably be something you didn't know in there as well!
  
  Overall, it's a pretty approachable book in terms of tone. I enjoyed it a lot! McCulloch herself reads the audiobook, which was fun.

Sellout by Dan Ozzi

• why I read it: Tbh I picked it up because I knew it had a chapter on my chem. Also was interested in knowing some more about punk/hardcore music.


• thoughts: It was really interesting to see the progression of this book--seeing why My Chem chose Rob Cavallo (his work on Dear You) after reading about Dear You in the Jawbreaker chapter was cool. The whole book was structured like that, so the chapters built off of each other! I think this book does a good job of showing you the progression of this set of genres and the major label deals that went through around the time.
  
  (The bands the book covers are Green Day, Jawbreaker, Jimmy Eat World, Blink-182, At the Drive-In, The Donnas, Thursday, The Distillers, My Chemical Romance, Rise Against, and Against Me!)
  
  Part of the meditation Ozzi does on the idea of selling out is baked into the chapters themselves, though he does have a very short wrap up chapter in the end (very very short, like four-ish pages). He takes a very generous view to the concept overall (in terms of "forgiving" a band for selling out), though I think he also portrays some of the pitfalls of major label deals.
  
  The different bands he chose to showcase do a good job of showing the different sides of "selling out." On one hand, you have Jawbreaker, who famously signed a major record label deal and then dissolved as a band, partially from internal pressures, but also partly because of the extreme backlash of the punk scene. Take also, similarly, Thursday or The Donnas, who both got kind of screwed over by their major label deals in some way. On the other hand, you have bands like Rise Against who just had a kind of mediocre time, or My Chemical Romance, who used the momentum from Three Cheers to eventually produce The Black Parade.
  
  He ends with Against Me!'s major label debut, which he notes as kind of the last of its era.
  
  (Side note, it was exactly as interesting as I thought it'd be to read his work on Grace's memoir, and then read his work on the same period of time for the chapter on Against Me!. I spent some time thinking about the details he put in/left out for both, it was cool to think about on a technical level.)
  
  Would love to read something about how the music industry looks now! One of the other themes of the book was the shift of music sales from records to streaming. The My Chem chapter really emphasized how bands could take advantage of that, but other chapters showed how the major labels were struggling to adapt as streaming got bigger and albums began to leak online, which cut into album sales. One anecdote really stands out from Thursday's chapter, where someone mentions this comparatively lower album sales, compared to their live shows, where everyone knew the lyrics (implying that some percentage of those people had pulled the album online instead of buying a copy). Dan Ozzi would you like to explain TikTok music I think it'd be funny!
  
  It was especially interesting to think about how this book talks about selling albums compared to how kpop sells albums, they're such different strategies, and yet also very similar?
  
  Also, Cassie Whitt (someone who guested on the MCR podcast I listened to a couple of months ago) was cited in the MCR chapter. It was so funny that this is the order of "things I've heard her in" and not the other way around.
  
  I listened to a fair amount of the music from this book, and I particularly liked At The Drive-In's and Rise Against's albums.

Something That May Shock and Discredit You by Daniel M. Lavery

• why I read it: I got recommended this by my local library somehow, I can't remember exactly how it happened.


• thoughts: This was SO good. Big transmasc vibes big gender thoughts, lots of very braid essay feels. I liked it a lot because it resonated with me, and not always because I understood the media Lavery was talking about (for example, I have never seen an episode of Golden Girls or Columbo in my life). This book made me laugh a lot and think a lot and I think I want to buy a copy to read again later.

TV

Welcome to Demon School Iruma-kun
Omg… I forgot I watched this? Very light on plot and light in tone and heavy on wish fulfillment but not in a fanservice-y way. More of a KHR tone? If you've watched KHR this makes sense.

It's a cute anime about a human kid who, through some unfortunate circumstances, ends up at a school for demons. Don't think about it too hard.

I really liked one of the characters! Mostly a fluffy show, from the half a season I watched. Very good for something mindless to put on in the background.


Drink Masters
Finished up this show that I was watching last month! It was a lot of fun in the way that cooking shows are. More thoughts in November. The person I was rooting for won!!!!

MISC

N.K. Jemisin on science fiction, world building, and New York City
I listened to this after reading N.K. Jemisin's latest book! This was so cool, I loved an insight into her process, and hearing why she cut the planned trilogy into a duology instead was pretty cool. I also hadn't known much about her history before becoming a full time author, so that was cool to hear about as well!


100 Days of Art History Jinjins Gallery
An artist put together a 100 day project of painting herself into classic masterworks, which is really cool to scroll through!


(NSFW) Fucking Trans Women
This is very explicit, and the majority of it is more of a "how-to" than anything else, but this also has some really lovely language about bodies, and about how we think about them and how we think about others and unpacking the way we connect gender and sex.

As much as I say there are two parts to it, the two parts are one part, really. Like, take this bit that's in reference to pleasuring a soft dick and the underappreciated erotic nature of softness:

Our bodies are not hard by nature. The bones and nails and cartilage gristle in us are our hardest pieces, but they can also be the most fragile, the most brittle. Under the surface of our pliable skin are veins, soft subcutaneous fat, rubbery nerves, joints, meaty muscles, and squishy organs. We have asses, we have tits, we have bellies. We have second chins, we have muffin tops, we have thighs. Where there isn't fat, there's water, in our blood and muscles. All in all our bodies are somewhere between 50-70% water. Our bodies are so very soft.

In so-called mainstream culture hard bodies have been popular for a very long time, especially for men. It's no secret that our actors and models tend to be grotesquely thin; they're lean, bone-dry, apparently cut from wood, like Edward Norton in "Fight Club." They're so … solid that in movies they can survive being hit by cars or punch their way out of buried coffins with only a little blood to show for it. We live in a culture that venerates hard bodies above all other types, especially when it comes to masculine bodies.

Our "heroes" these days don't qualify by having brilliant minds, excellent morals, superior compassion, or making great things. Instead their main qualification is that they can crawl through broken glass and gunfire and emerge, perhaps bloody, tired, likely coated in a thick layer of soot for no evident reason, but still hard. John McClintock, Jack Bauer, and every male cast member of "LOST" except Hurley, yes I *am* looking at you. Put your shoes on. (page 35)

Reminds me a lot of that one essay in Bloodknife about superhero movies, actually.

(I recently learned that the author has passed from cancer, which was devastating to hear, even secondhand.)

Why Spotify Playlists Never Truly Shuffle
This video's editing style actually really annoyed me but I wanted to know the answer badly enough that I sat through the whole thing. It's not really worth your time, and the answer in the end is that spotify's algorithm isn't truly random (there's some brief exploration of what random really means compared to our perception of randomness, but it wasn't really new to me? which might have been part of why I found it annoying).

Anyway, she doesn't come to an answer I found satisfying.


The Entire History of The Strawberry Dress & Beading One Entirely By Hand
On the other hand, this video was a delight! I love fashion history, and while the strawberry dress is a lot more recent than a lot of other stuff, it was really interesting.

The interspersing of the history with how she made her version of the dress really worked for me. Liked this a lot!


K-Pop is not popular in America
This was interesting to think about! It also made me realize I need to know more about how the Billboard charts actually work.

In Progress

I finished Omniscient Reader's Viewpoint in January and it's taken over my brain, expect thoughts on that.
I've checked out some other stuff, we'll see what I get through.

Poetry

Inupiaq Women by dg nanouk okpik

Sunflowers by Jenny George
Having died
all the way back to the root, I grow again
into a version of the thing I love.

The Aim Was Song by Robert Frost

At Sixty-Five by Henri Cole

from “Parallax” by Nancy Cunard
This thin edge of December
Wears out meagrely in the
Cold muds, rains, intolerable nauseas of the street.

apocalyptic lyric by Cintia Santana
a line break is a kind of lie my friend says
yet still he writes
an encore over and over the lyric
a border wall topped by concertina wire

Theft by Esther Popel

Origin of Planets by Jennifer Elise Foerster
In this version, the valley
lime green after rain
rolls its tides before us.

Owl by Anne Haven McDonnell
In winter, we find her invisible
against the furrows
of cottonwood bark.

Retirement by Monica Sok
When he becomes a monk, he says I will no longer be his daughter.
To one another, we would be people. Strangers.
But what if I have children? They will not be your grandchildren?

XIII. Return to Suzhou: Master of the Nets by Jacqueline Osherow
Not sure how I felt about this one!

Music

SCROBBLES: 2,566

SCROBBLES PER DAY: 82
This is nothing new! Pretty much the same as my yearly recap except compressed into a month.

Ty skz for released Replay! Ty wayv for phantom! I have no idea what I was listening to honestly.

Artists:

1. My Chemical Romance - 260
2. Gerard Way - 203
3. Stray Kids - 146
4. RM - 112
5. PVRIS - 65
6. Paramore - 52
7. Seventeen - 49
8. Carly Rae Jepsen - 34
9. Autoheart - 32
10. IVE - 32

Albums:

1. Hesitant Alien by Gerard Way - 193
2. Indigo by RM - 112
3. The Black Parade by My Chemical Romance - 96
4. SKZ-REPLAY by Stray Kids - 53
5. Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys by My Chemical Romance - 44
6. SKZ2020 by Stray Kids - 44
7. Life on the Murder Scene by My Chemical Romance - 43
8. Three Cheers for Sweet Revenge by My Chemical Romance - 35
9. Paramore by Paramore - 34
10. The Loneliest Time by Carly Rae Jepsen - 33

Songs:

1. How It's Going to Be by Gerard Way - 64
2. Bury Me In Black - Demo by My Chemical Romance - 37
3. Proof by Paramore - 34
4. Question by Stray Kids - 34
5. Change pt.2 by RM - 32
6. LOVE DIVE by IVE - 30
7. This Is How I Disappear by My Chemical Romance - 28
8. Winter by PVRIS - 25
9. My Way by PVRIS - 21
10. POPPY by STAYC - 20