I Repeatedly Spend An Increasingly Unnerved 10 Dream-minutes Trying To First Turn Off The Clock Radio,

Look at this. Look. At. This.

I don't give a flying flet how unfinished or crude this is. I love it. It's cute and whimsical and the lack of polish just inspires me to share my own stuff.

At the same time, I am awed by anyone who is able to coax this much of their artistic vision out of a damn computer.

Hehe, cow

Good morning, fellow Americans! Are you enjoying each having a house and two cars? I like to mow my lawn

I imagined a dyscalculic child, who isn't getting any help or support in learning math, nobody understands that they just don't get it...

Nobody understands that the child tries to solve math problems by making up stories about the numbers and operational symbols, fascinating, beautiful mythical or fairy-tale stories, and "drawing" the ending of the stories where the solutions should go.

Every math problem is a hypothetical situation involving stock characters, and the child believes they have to parse exactly what the situation is supposed to be, given the limited "shorthand" consisting of numbers and operational symbols and the arithmetical frameworks, and work out what the result would be.

And nobody, or almost nobody, ever gets to hear the stories.

I dont fuckin knows!!!!!!!!

A Christmas Pop Song Rant

You see, the thing I hate isn't Christmas music as a whole. I adore carols and Christmas hymns. It's the Christmas-themed popular music I can't stand.

Maybe I should explain the difference, although I expect a lot of folks already know: while we all use the terms indiscriminately, a "Christmas carol" is technically a song that's worded and structured as either a lullaby for the newborn Jesus, or a joyous announcement of His arrival. Most carols are very old traditional songs, or started out that way, but there are a few notable modern compositions that achieve a similar feel to the traditional carols, notably "Silent Night."

A "Christmas hymn" is generally addressed to God the Father instead of Jesus, but deals with Christmas themes. It's a hymn for the Christmas season. This does overlap quite a bit with the definition of "carol," especially if you want to bring Holy Trinity semantics into it, but I think calling "O Holy Night" a Christmas hymn is a fairly uncontroversial choice. The fact that it's a great song to sing while caroling doesn't disqualify it.

Christmas popular music, on the other hand… is popular music with a secular-Christmas theme. By "popular music," though, I mean any commercial music product that was originally produced to make money, whether it's "Jingle Bells" or a modern pop megastar's latest charity-fundraiser Christmas album. These songs almost exclusively shy away from older religious elements of Christmas in favor of celebrating secularized versions like Santa Claus and Christmas trees, or generic winter traditions like snowmen, coziness, and winter sports. And, yes, there are a few weird, cursed things like "Deck the Halls" (a traditional Welsh tune repurposed in the 19th century as a Christmas pop song), and there's probably some contemporary-praise artist who tried creating a new, contemporary-praise, Christmas song instead of making pepped-up versions of old Christmas carols and hymns… almost certainly equally cursed.

I should probably clarify that I'm not denouncing the secularization of Christmas. Midwinter celebrations are far, far older than Christianity, and the modern Christmas shopping season is not only a crucial element of late-stage Capitalist society, but also a highly visible example of consumers acting neither rationally nor in their own "enlightened" self-interest, and as such, I'm not going to knock it.

What I object to is the nature of most Christmas pop music. Almost without exception, there's a strong "I heard you like Christmas, so I made you some Christmas with a Christmas, so you can Christmas your Christmas with Christmas while you Christmas the Christmas this Christmas" vibe to this music, and worse, a sense of forced cheerfulness and jollity. It reaches deep down to my hindbrain and makes all my social anxieties say, "Oh, crap, here we go again." Much of it also is obvously just thrown together with minimal effort, expense, or artistic expression, simply as shovelware for a jingle-bell-addled consumer market.

The most heinous Christmas pop songs are formulated specifically to target children. Little children, Mandrake! And despite this, we are all subjected to these songs for up to four months prior to Christmas. Can you imagine what would happen to a sporting-goods store if they habitually played "Baby Shark" and the Barney theme on their Muzak?

While I can say that most of it "just isn't very good," that's a personal opinion and I refuse to claim it's relevant. But I theorize that one more reason I find so much Christmas pop music tedious and irritating is because the concept of a safely non-religious, uncontroversial "holiday season," based almost entirely on subjective feelings and concepts, is too vague, confused, and artificial to truly inspire either artist or audience.

By contrast, most Christmas carols and Christmas hymns were products of the old Christendom society, and the creators and intended audience were shaped their whole lives by European Christendom, whether they believed or not. The subject matter and relevance were powerful to them in a way that it's hard for us to understand today.

There are some anti-Christmas songs I enjoy, but anti-Christmas songs occupy a very precarious niche in the popular music ecology. A song can only be "anti-Christmas" until the Monolithic Secular Christmas Music Juggernaut adopts and assimilates it. We need to learn from what happened to "Fairytale of New York."

I don't have any problems with romantic ships, but I often find platonic friendships in media more interesting. Sure, I'll ship VR-LA and MX-IM, but as friends and research partners, not lovers. As much as I love Stolitz, I'm way more affected by the father-daughter relationships of Blitz and Loona or Stolas and Octavia, and the potential surrogate-sister possibilities of Loona and Octavia. I got so much more mileage out of Elliott's relationships with the other characters in original LEVERAGE than either of the couples.

I will go for the interesting and plausible character dynamic, every time, regardless of whether it's romantic or not. I'm just weird that way, I guess.

Not that it's never romantic. I do wistfully stan Mako and Gamagoori... they could improve each other in so many valuable ways. But I understand why it's not canon.

I guess I just want to make it clear to all the fandoms I may participate in, that if they see me shipping something, it doesn't always mean I'm shipping it romantically.

Full disclosure, I've never actually seen Melancholia, but from your video, I arrived at a very different interpretation of Justine's character… it occurred to me that, if someone was used to hearing that the world was doomed, and had both ruined their own life with their actions and come to full acceptance of the fact that they had nobody to blame but themselves for their situation, that discovering that the entire planet genuinely IS doomed, in short order and quite demonstrably… wouldn't that come as a great relief? None of the guilt or crises would matter any more, because the advent of Melancholia would be so much more immediate… and since nobody can do anything about it, there would be no pressure to try, no pressure to be "productive."

It doesn't quite meet the definition of sanity in the ordinary sense, but when inevitable doom is rushing towards the entire planet, I kind of think the definition of "sanity" would shift, as values and priorities shift, because most of what we think matters… would suddenly no longer matter.

On a weirder note, I used cosmic bliss-horror when I put unicorns into my original high-fantasy worldbuilding project. In that world, unicorns are fearsome interdimensional incursions that cannot abide the impurity of the world's setting… Mesmerizingly beautiful, but lethal without exception. But they also contain a Mr. Toots reference, because I simply cannot help myself. Yes, my unicorn's ultimate ability is a discharge of superheated, rainbow-colored plasma (B308), shot out of its ass. But it's magical plasma, and when it burns you right to the bone, you fall under the Ecstasy spell (M139) as an affliction.

Who's afraid of the big bad eldritch horror?

And what happens when you're not? We made a video on it!

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This character is debonair and very attractive. Very sexily attractive, and has a sexy accent to top it off.

But their knowledge of the common language is worse than just having a shaky accent... they get idioms comically wrong, all the time, in their sexy accent, ruining the effect. They'll say "Boum, schockolat" instead of "boom, shakalaka," for example.

When other characters try to correct them, they just flip their hair sexily and say, "My vairsion is bettair."

You are NOT fucking living this down, Gaud.

insanity that they trained us to dislike body hair. body hair. that's just fuzz. that is just FUZZINESS!!! humans being fuzzy, it's one of our most adorable traits????