the injury of finally knowing you

my grandpa was a good man. and it really wasnt his fault - recreationally lying to kids is a proud family tradition - but he told me, once, that cutting a worm in half resulted in two worms.

i think he said it so i'd be more morally okay with fishing? i actually dont remember the context.

point was, he told me this, and he understimated (by a very large margin) how much i liked worms. i was a worm boy. very wormy. and after hearing that, i went home, and i dug through the garden, flipped over every rock, did everything i could to gather as many worms as i could, and then i uh.

i cut them all in half. every worm i could find. all of them. with scissors.

i then took this pile of split worms, and i put them in a box with a bit of lettuce and some water and stuff and went to bed expecting to double my worms overnight. i have math autism, so i had a vague understanding that if i did this just a few times in a row, i would eventually have a completely unreasonable amount of worms.

i was very excited to become this plane's worm emperor.

(i think i was...six?)

anyway, i did not become the inheritor of the worm crown. i instead woke up to a box of dead worms and cried. a lot. i got diagnosed with panic attacks as a teenager, but i think i had them as a kid, i just had no idea what they were. i was kind of processing that a.) i had killed what i had assumed was every single worm in my yard, and thus would have no more worms, and b). i was going to like, worm hell.

(six year babylon spent a lot of time worrying about god.)

so i kind of freaked out, and i climbed a tree, because god can only smite you if you're touching the ground (?) and i sat up there mostly inconsolable until my mom came out and asked, hey, what's up? what happened?

so i explained to her that i had killed all of the worms, forever, and was also Damned, and she took me to the compost pile, and we dug for all of five seconds and found like twenty more worms.

the compost pile was full of worms.

and she told me that a). there were more worms, and we could put them back under rocks and stuff and recolonize our yard and b). that one day, i would die, and i would go to heaven, and i would be able to talk to the worms, and i would be able to tell them all that i was very sorry, and that i killed them on accident out of excessive Love, and that they would forgive me, because worms have six hearts and no malice.

at that point, i think i was sixty percent tear-snot by weight, and i had no choice but to gather enough worms that i could hug them. which my mom helped with. and then after that she helped me put some worms back under each rock.

and for my epilogue: i spent a significant portion of my childhood in trees. and for many years after, even when my mom didnt know i was watching, i would catch her giving the space under the rocks a light spritz with the hose. not because she loved worms.

but because she loved me.

Wait, you're telling me I spent the latter half of my childhood deathly terrified of worms for NOTHING? That was a lie?

huh. you viewed worms entirely mythical regenerative powers as something to be feared. i viewed it as an opportunity. something something The Duality of Man.

i am considering that fear produced a better outcome for you and the worm than love did. this feels like an important thought.

To expand on this a little bit: Ryoko Kui takes the tools of character design seriously, and uses them with forethought and consideration to set her characters apart, give them personality and specificity, and thinks very carefully about what each piece of design communicates and how it interacts with all the other design in her story.

Body shape, face shape, noses, eyes, brows, hair, proportion, fashion, ears, posture, roundness and angularity, broadness and slenderness, posture... Kui clearly thinks about ALL of it, and incorporates all of it.

And this is part of what gives her story such a profound sense of taking place within a world, a whole world inhabited by thousands of people each of whom are as full and unique and distinct as every other one. You look at a group of her characters and none of them feel like Copy Pasted NPC Placeholder #3457, they each feel as though there is a life there, an individuality, even if they are never actually deeply explored in the story.

Compare and contrast with something like Genshin Impact's style of character design:

Now, I don't bring this up just to sh** on Genshin - its character design style is adapted very effectively to the kind of story and world it is trying to build, which is to say a gacha story where every part of a character is formulated towards the singular goal of appeal. It's a world inhabited by nothing but main characters, essentially, and it is a laser-focused power fantasy structured around constantly pursuing the high of maximum damage numbers pumped out by maximally cool and badass battle moves executed with maximal grace by physically perfect avatars who provide the player with maximal aesthetic pleasure.

But because of that, its character design style is under severe pressure to regress to the mean - i.e. skinny bodies, young bodies, beauty ideals, and a minimal amount of physical difference. This style of character design tends to focus all of its effort in colorful, detailed and attention-grabbing fashion and hair styles, and generally avoids "alienating" design features like, well, literally anything that could be conceptualized by anyone as "ugly." Big strong noses, for example, or larger ears, or wrinkles, scarring, skin folds and so on. Fatness functionally does not exist in Genshin Impact's character roster for this reason, and it's part of the reason why the franchise struggles so notably to design characters of color - the concept of "beauty" is deeply bound up in systemic biases of class, race, gender and nationalism, and since Genshin's character design ethos is "make every character as broadly beautiful as possible" it has to keep hitting the same limited set of beats over and over and over again, and it reinforces the biases it inherits with its inability to step outside of them.

So Genshin Impact characters have a tendency, for me at least, to all kinda blur together into a brightly colored cavalcade of lowest-common-denominator ambulatory clothing racks, characters whose bodies exist for the primary purpose of transporting a highly elaborate costume around.

Kui by contrast very very actively seeks out elements of physical difference, and incorporates them into her design process - she seems to delight in inventing as many nose shapes as possible, as many different kinds of eyes as she can think of, and the result is that she has a character roster which is recognizable even if you change or remove very important parts of their basic design.

Where Genshin Impact (and that style of character design) would severely struggle to make characters recognizable without their costumes, because the characters in large part are their costumes, Kui's design style makes characters extremely recognizable not only in and out of costume, but even if the fundamental nature of their bodies change across species, and it makes her characters of the same race and species eminently recognizable from one another, even while sharing many physical traits and aesthetic features.

anyway tl;dr Ryoko Kui is the best to ever do it.

"𝐈𝐟 𝐈 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞 𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐝𝐮𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐦𝐲 𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝟏𝟗𝟓𝟎𝐬, 𝐈 𝐰𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐧𝐨𝐭 𝐡𝐚𝐯𝐞 𝐡𝐚𝐝 𝐚 𝐜𝐚𝐫𝐞𝐞𝐫. 𝐈𝐧 𝐦𝐲 𝐩𝐞𝐫𝐬𝐨𝐧𝐚𝐥 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞, 𝐈 𝐰𝐚𝐬 𝐪𝐮𝐢𝐭𝐞 𝐚 𝐝𝐢𝐟𝐟𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐭 '𝐁𝐨𝐲 𝐍𝐞𝐱𝐭 𝐃𝐨𝐨𝐫' 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐨𝐧𝐞 𝐌𝐫. 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐌𝐫𝐬. 𝐌𝐢𝐝𝐝𝐥𝐞 𝐀𝐦𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐜𝐚 𝐢𝐦𝐚𝐠𝐢𝐧𝐞𝐝 𝐦𝐞 𝐭𝐨 𝐛𝐞. 𝐈 𝐥𝐢𝐯𝐞𝐝 𝐚 𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐲 𝐝𝐨𝐧'𝐭-𝐚𝐬𝐤, 𝐝𝐨𝐧'𝐭-𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐥 𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐞." -𝐓𝐚𝐛 𝐇𝐮𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫 Vintage articles from Photoplay and Modern Screen magazines published during the 1950s featuring stories about Rock Hudson, Montgomery Clift, Anthony Perkins, James Dean, Tab Hunter, Sal Mineo, and George Nader (with a quick nod to Marlon Brando) illustrating how closeted lgbtq+ actors were written about in fan magazines. Though the truth about their private lives was never specifically stated and the articles were largely puff-pieces designed to deceive the public and keep the actors bankable, it's of interest to note that many of the headlines alluded to the gossip and whispers that were pervasive at the time, dangling hints about what was really going on behind the scenes.

the captain

by okaysuper

banned from the clock app for making too many alarms. you set too many alarms girl! banned from clock app.

thing that happened to famous singer-songwriter andrew hozier-byrne

this little glamorized misogyny "joke" has run its course right. can we leave this corny demonic shit in 2023. it is done now. we've had enough.

Found this gem in the comments.

it's kinda comforting to me when my friends are a little annoying or longwinded or abrasive or tired and inarticulate, or they don't do the exact politest thing in every interaction, and stuff, because I know I'm sometimes annoying, or take up a more than my share of conversational space, or forget to ask them questions, etc etc, and... like, I'm always working to be nice to my friends and to get better and better at friend-ing, but it just makes me feel more human about it :}

anyway I love you friends plz know I'm not counting, in fact I feel great affection toward you even (especially) when conversations go less than Perfectly Ideal

I'm not proud to say it but this line from a 60 year old detective novel made me re-think some things about friendship

I cant take a man seriously if hes bad at fishing minigame

not to be a sap or anything but this particular piece of little mermaid trivia does something to me

Meet Ditto’s family and their friend Cubone, in へんしんメタモン  “Transforming Ditto”, the 1997 Pokémon Tale by the legendary Sumiyoshi Kizuki. Scanned by us and translated by @jeikonbuhonyaku 

The fandom doesn’t talk enough about Crowley and Aziraphale having a room where they lock themselves away to speak in private.

The fandom also doesn’t talk enough about them getting “caught” by “police” and Crowley commenting about it being a hobby of certain policemen.

Brilliant social commentary and how it relates to their relationship being forbidden.

There's a lot of queer allegories in Good Omens, even in Season One. Aziraphale finally giving Crowley the Holy Water the same year that gay sex was decriminalised speaks volumes: This thing could destroy you, please be careful, "you go too fast for me" but maybe one day, one day.

1941 - drinking in a dark secluded back room of Aziraphale's shop, the audience peeking through the bookcase and behind the staircase like we're watching them.

2010s - out in a public area, bright and romantic, both looking unabashedly smitten.

I adore how Good Omens parallels their forbidden celestial relationship with queer culture. Crowley & Aziraphale have British culture imbedded so much in their personalities, I love that they reflect the realities for gay men in these periods. It's subtle but so easily recognisable for the queer community.

I constantly think about the quote (literally no idea what it’s from) I read once about how teenage girls want to fuck their band guy idols because it’s the closest they can get to wanting to BE their band guy idols. Like damn… way to recontextualize my entire adolescence with 1 sentence

this is the quote

(banging pots and pans together)

This is The Erotics of Trent Reznor by @judedoyle! He is one of the best pop culture critics out there today, double especially on the feminist horror beat. His newsletter is the best thing in my inbox and I fought with my comic shop for weeks to get the floppies of Maw. You want meditations on how having a body is horror and also holy? You want to hear from someone who survived being a Weird Girl (not in the cute way but in the "something is Wrong" way)? Jude's the ticket.

One thing for those who have watched The Boy and The Heron or will watch it. The Japanese title for it is How Do You Live? And Miyazaki stated he was leaving it for his grandson, saying, "Grandpa is moving onto the next world soon but he is leaving behind this film".

The deaths of contemporaries and friends such as Satoshi Kon and Isao Takahata and also the expected successor of Yoshifumi Kondo were things that have always weighed heavily on the back of Miyazaki's mind.

He recognizes the industry and the occupation for how soul crushing it was, grinding up either the spirit or the physical body of those who work in it. He loves and hates the industry he stands on the peak of and fully recognizes how it will probably be the death of him. And he knows it'll leave him unable to say a lot of things to his Grandson.

So How Do You Live? is a lesson. For his grandson. For himself. For his two sons. And probably for anyone else willing to pay attention.

Hayao Miyazaki is a flawed man that makes things so important to so many people. And I think more than any other film of his, in this you get to pull back the curtain a bit and see him at work. And what should be this giant unblemished titan can be seen for what he is, a sad old man who had higher hopes for himself and has even higher hopes for the people he makes his work for.

It's a beautiful thing to see another's humanity in their work. To look past the artifice and glam of commercialized art and find humans behind it. And humans willing to show their humanity and mortality is even rarer. And something to be celebrated. So when you watch it. Or if you've watched it already. Understand that this film is Miyazaki kneeling down, weary after years of weaving dreams and making mistakes, reaching out and saying to you that he hopes you can do better. It's an old man who's made all the mistakes of the world passing it on to you, hoping you do better, and making sure you know it's okay if you don't.

How do you Live? By making mistakes. By messing up. But still moving forward. And still reaching out.