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Looking Like Meat
Oct. 12th, 2026 09:59 amI just finished Kazuo Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go for a book club, and it nailed a lot of themes and tones I've been craving. I had been aware of it for a while, but only to the extent of "sad sci-fi about kids grown to be harvested for organs," which is accurate but does a disservice to the depth and nuance.
We open with our narrator, Kathy H., discussing her role as a "carer" for "donors," and even as she skirts around what that means, it is clear that donors are people to be managed:
Even with no specifics, the coercive power dynamics are obvious. She is modest about her skills, but then turns cagey and defensive about being a "Hailsham student" with the privilege to choose who she cares for, and "of course you choose your own kind. That's natural." She is far from the top of the hierarchy, but by God will she hold on to whatever scraps she has.
( Spoilers for the entire book, and discussions of sexual violence in this story and others. )
We open with our narrator, Kathy H., discussing her role as a "carer" for "donors," and even as she skirts around what that means, it is clear that donors are people to be managed:
I know when to hang around and comfort them, when to leave them to themselves; when to listen to everything they have to say and when just to shrug and tell them to snap out of it.
Even with no specifics, the coercive power dynamics are obvious. She is modest about her skills, but then turns cagey and defensive about being a "Hailsham student" with the privilege to choose who she cares for, and "of course you choose your own kind. That's natural." She is far from the top of the hierarchy, but by God will she hold on to whatever scraps she has.
( Spoilers for the entire book, and discussions of sexual violence in this story and others. )
Rat Kid Lifestyles
Sep. 12th, 2026 11:40 pmI saw Ada Rook at Empty Bliss, a venue that requires you to contact them to get their address and does not sell tickets in advance. That was a little nerve-wracking, but with an artist this big in a venue this small, I see how first-come-first-served with a small hurdle is fairer than an online sale that would sell out immediately and get scalped to hell. I arrived about half an hour before doors and made it in just fine, though they hit capacity after the first act had started.*
-And they certainly needed to enforce that; the venue is a modestly-sized lounge above a barely-bigger basement with enough trapped body heat to prune my fingers just by standing in the crowd. I could barely stand up straight in the basement's tallest parts, and hit my head a few times on pipes or crossbeams, and it's just as well that I'm not really into moshing since I'd concuss myself if I jumped.
-Great fits, plenty of neon pink and green, a bunch of Rook shirts both official and homemade alongside Frost Children, Stomach Book, ponies, and so on
-I wasn't familiar with any of the other acts (Ameokama, Suroor, Sulffffffur) and I admit I was upstairs for most of their sets, since I could only take so much time in that basement at once, but from what I can tell they all slap and they pair well with Rook**
-The setlist was entirely from Cum Songs, 59 Nights, UNKILLABLE ANGEL, and UGLY DEATH, which makes sense - those are her last four solo albums - but it would've been nice to have something from Shed Blood or Parasite
-Right at the start of Rook's set, she accidentally broke a kandi bracelet given to her, then she urged the crowd to come in closer and someone broke a part of the sound system, and then it happened again, and then the sound was pretty subdued for a minute but the show must go on, and once that was fixed it was fine. I wouldn't have it any other way.***
-I admit I still haven't gotten my head around Cum Songs, there are individual songs I like but sitting down with the whole thing gets exhausting, though the songs worked well here (Risk Repeater and ~two others I can't recall)
-Palpable energy when PARTY TIME SEXY DISORDER got to "Why do all the hot girls call her LITTLE SISTER?"
-The set closed out with TRU U and 5H4D0W H34R7Z, which are great for a cathartic finale, and play off well with the other albums' tracks
-From within those albums, the track I'd most like to add to the setlist would be ALL Tails Deaths Animations but I'm not sure what I'd cut for it
-Someone brought a couple hundred mailing labels and some markers, which was a fun group activity in the lounge, and I saw some damn good drawings there
-wonderful moment afterward with about a dozen concertgoers rehydrating at the nearest 7-11 and chilling in the parking lot
-on the way home, I stopped in at work to get an ice cream sandwich and ran into the two girls who clocked me playing Jamie Paige the other day, because the Doll Egregore just does this shit sometimes
*If I hadn't made it in, my plan B would've been to go see Coyote vs. Acme, since I wasn't able to see that after Akira a few days earlier
**Though from what I've checked out so far, I love Sulffffffur remixing a Frost Children song into nine minutes of Techdog-ass abstract drones
***Also, it was funny to hear cortisol_inside cortisol_explosion excessive_cortisol cortisol_everywhere at such a chill volume
-And they certainly needed to enforce that; the venue is a modestly-sized lounge above a barely-bigger basement with enough trapped body heat to prune my fingers just by standing in the crowd. I could barely stand up straight in the basement's tallest parts, and hit my head a few times on pipes or crossbeams, and it's just as well that I'm not really into moshing since I'd concuss myself if I jumped.
-Great fits, plenty of neon pink and green, a bunch of Rook shirts both official and homemade alongside Frost Children, Stomach Book, ponies, and so on
-I wasn't familiar with any of the other acts (Ameokama, Suroor, Sulffffffur) and I admit I was upstairs for most of their sets, since I could only take so much time in that basement at once, but from what I can tell they all slap and they pair well with Rook**
-The setlist was entirely from Cum Songs, 59 Nights, UNKILLABLE ANGEL, and UGLY DEATH, which makes sense - those are her last four solo albums - but it would've been nice to have something from Shed Blood or Parasite
-Right at the start of Rook's set, she accidentally broke a kandi bracelet given to her, then she urged the crowd to come in closer and someone broke a part of the sound system, and then it happened again, and then the sound was pretty subdued for a minute but the show must go on, and once that was fixed it was fine. I wouldn't have it any other way.***
-I admit I still haven't gotten my head around Cum Songs, there are individual songs I like but sitting down with the whole thing gets exhausting, though the songs worked well here (Risk Repeater and ~two others I can't recall)
-Palpable energy when PARTY TIME SEXY DISORDER got to "Why do all the hot girls call her LITTLE SISTER?"
-The set closed out with TRU U and 5H4D0W H34R7Z, which are great for a cathartic finale, and play off well with the other albums' tracks
-From within those albums, the track I'd most like to add to the setlist would be ALL Tails Deaths Animations but I'm not sure what I'd cut for it
-Someone brought a couple hundred mailing labels and some markers, which was a fun group activity in the lounge, and I saw some damn good drawings there
-wonderful moment afterward with about a dozen concertgoers rehydrating at the nearest 7-11 and chilling in the parking lot
-on the way home, I stopped in at work to get an ice cream sandwich and ran into the two girls who clocked me playing Jamie Paige the other day, because the Doll Egregore just does this shit sometimes
*If I hadn't made it in, my plan B would've been to go see Coyote vs. Acme, since I wasn't able to see that after Akira a few days earlier
**Though from what I've checked out so far, I love Sulffffffur remixing a Frost Children song into nine minutes of Techdog-ass abstract drones
***Also, it was funny to hear cortisol_inside cortisol_explosion excessive_cortisol cortisol_everywhere at such a chill volume
Five months on from U, Underscores has released a pair of singles called after-U: Unlimited Love and Frost Children's remix of The Peace.1 They both extend U's themes into aesthetics beyond what would've fit well on the album; Unlimited Love's overt SOPHIE pastiche would've sat oddly with the Timbaland and Imogen Heap homages.2 The lyrics are more in line with U, but a bit more acidic and anxious -
The way you soak in your depravity/
Along with all your carbon copies/
It really kinda scares the shit out of me/
I don’t know your morals and I’m too afraid to ask directly
The exhuman slickness of the beat with the tight, bitter lyrics remind me of her mashup of SOPHIE's Ponyboy with Ayesha Erotica's They Like The Way I Grind, except instead of "party slut in an infinite brutalist megastructure," the effect is more like "shimmering cyberspace that has made all our insecurities so much worse." At concerts, the Nico Nico Douga-style scrolling comments are cute until they become part of a suffocating hall of mirrors; "unlimited love" indeed.
Frost Children's remix reads to me as a grim joke about turning a personal reflection on messy relationships into a grandiose EDM banger, feeding every part of your life into the thresher of Content. But it lands so well because it's a damn good production, fraying the vocal chops even further and building to drops between verses, keeping all the lyrics intact but cutting off verse 3; no room for catharsis or closure here. It's like the opposite gag of Black Dresses turning Crush from a tight, springy bop to a murky breakdown in the cleaning solvents aisle.
Meanwhile, Slayr has sample-flipped the vocal chops and "promise that you couldn't keep" into promise, which feels like a friend commiserating with his own relationship woes. It's a delightful jam, and I love the line "shoutout April for the sample, we should do some more" both in the way that rap has always acknowledged producers within songs and as a charming nod to a colleague.3 Between this, his surprise encores at Underscores' shows, and his own songs showing up in her DJ sets, I look forward to any future collaborations and influences.
Ninajirachi has scored Madeon's first official remix in fourteen years, a new take on iPod Touch with him interpolating his own nostalgia and dueting on the refrain. The Madeon-style production adds to that sense of nostalgia for me and many others who were around for his 2010s work; I get that music IP law would make it impossible for him to interpolate Pop Culture into this, but hopefully a fan remix can fill that gap.
However, given how the tone of his latest album is roughly "Madeon is BACK and he FUCKS," I'd love to see what he'd do with Fuck My Computer and Delete, which I think form a tryptych with iPod Touch: glossy nostalgia, the naive sexual fantasies of youth, and the messiness of actually being horny for another person. But the existing remixes do a good job of that: Frost Children give Fuck My Computer a deep, driving beat that reminds me of when ME!ME!ME! starts turning nightmarish.4 There is no "want" about it; they are going to fuck that computer.5
horsegiirL's take on Delete adds new lyrics that are largely just a lateral move from the original; I'm not opposed to a remix adding vocals, but I'd want them to be psychologically distinct from the main text, whether confident or pathetic or a secret third thing. Maybe it needs the same treatment Black Dresses gave to Crush, turning it from relatably anxious into a panic attack that feels violating just to witness. And speaking of violation, I'd love to see Infohazard remixed by someone like Lauren Bousfield who could make the reminiscing about snuff sites as gnarly as it deserves to be.
1. I love the skeuomorphic design of having Side A and Side B of a (so far) purely digital release, like the opposite gag of U's vinyl being stamped with its Ableton project files.
2. Well, the whole album is downstream of SOPHIE in many ways, but rarely so directly.
3. He's also sample-flipped BIRDBRAIN into keep me going, a great song that's sadly been overshadowed by drawing out all the most tediously racist vocaloid fans in the world.
4. ME!ME!ME! deserves a writeup of its own someday, and I have some ideas for what context to put it in.
5. I also like 2at's remix, especially its gag of "it says my name / it says [DIALUP STATIC]," a painfully accurate recreation of trying to jerk off at the turn of the millennium.
6. He's good on this, but it's always such a jumpscare to hear an American accent on a Nina track.
This Jam Is Not A Jam Of Honor
Jul. 23rd, 2026 12:09 am"You women have sex with each other."
"I won't do it anymore!"
"You do drugs, too."
"I've never touched those!"
"And you think about nothing but death."
"Well... not really!"
—ICE: The Last Generation
Notes on four games from the second-annual TOXIC YURI VN JAM. These are not reviews; most of them were made or edited by friends of mine, and conflicts of interest aside, these all hit my amygdala in ways I cannot be objective about. Here we go. Spoilers and transgression abound.
Original Mindfuck Animation (It_Came_From_Eden, Kara Buchanan, Edith_Is_Dead)
Magical girl Graviko loses very, very badly. And not for the first time.
I love the way the story keeps colliding three layers of narrative: the mundane early years, the campy magical girl adventures, and the nightmarish ero-guro cosmic horror. Dark and/or horny riffs on magical girls are nothing new, but the audacity of this one is truly incredible; yes, she does fuck the brain. The fact that she used to babysit its owner is the least-objectionable part of the situation.
But beyond that tagline, one of the most excruciatingly Real moments of the story comes from the mundane layer right before the cosmic horror finale; even when Zo is utterly clueless about sexuality, she already knows that trans bodies are something profoundly shameful. And as reality starts splitting apart, Graviko throws in some petty slurs for good measure.
The cosmology of this world gestures towards some Madoka/Dr. Manhattan/Buddha's Palm timeloop multiverse shit which isn't always fleshed-out enough to truly hit, but I realize that doing so would be far beyond the scope of a six-week game jam. As-is, the story is tight and punchy, with fifty-some bespoke CGs rather than recurring character sprites, which does a lot to sell the tokusatsu style.
I also recommend this team's previous VN Copycat Recipe, a superbly awful tale of parasocial Pygmalions. And speaking of parasociality...
Sycophantasy (Mado)
A riff on Misery crossed with What Happens Next - after Anita's suicide attempt, the niche internet artist is taken in by Sunny, a fandom-cop-turned-Nurse-Ratched. There's nothing supernatural or science-fictional here, just some of the rawest dread I've ever seen in a VN. Sunny's cloying sense of benevolence enables and excuses some harrowing shit, kidnapping and assaulting her idol while saying shit like "spicy" and "uncomfy." The only thing missing is "PDF file."
The presentation is gorgeous, too - agonizing closeups, vivid portraits (shoutout to Sunny's fucked-up teeth), the central metaphor subsuming everything, setting up templates and rhythms and shattering them whenever you get complacent. Bravo.
I don't think I've ever been at a significant risk of becoming a Sunny, but when I was making my first overscoped, underdeveloped webcomic a decade ago, I felt that yearning to be part of the Hiveworks-adjacent webcomics world. A fair bit of that was just displaced gender envy, but there's also the failure to recognize "do I actually think I'd click well with these people, or do I just want the clout and validation?" I've since come to be much more chill around micro-celebrities, and my pangs of craving validation are still here but far more under control.
In that same period, I've made a body of work to be proud of and a social world that takes me seriously. But now I'm closer to Anita's position; my work features a lot of weird and awful shit that carries a risk of catastrophic context collapse. I've had one or two instances of TERF harassment, and heard of some limp attempts at ostracizing people for liking my work, but thankfully I've built up enough firebreaks that they never went anywhere. I'm happy with how much my audience gets what I'm going for and knows how to act, and taking these themes seriously draws out a lot of people who've been hungry for that, but I do sometimes wonder how much I'm pushing my luck. I just don't have the grindset in me to carve out a career as an Internet Artist, but in an age of stifling legal pressure and harassment campaigns, maybe that's not so bad. I wish I could've made the choice without those on the scales, but oh well.
Friend of the show Pengy, who I have pastiched here before, beta-read it and wrote up some sharp thoughts on it as well. And speaking of her work...
YOU MUST AGREE TO CONTINUE (Princess Pengy)
At some point I need to properly write about Of The Devil, a legal-thriller VN with some of the most beautifully awful cyberpunk worldbuilding I've ever seen. The tectonic grinding of law and capital have turned the world into a nightmarish panopticon with cajoling paywalls over any source of relief. The game is well-aware of how the treatment of its androids parallels the worst things humans have done to each other, and doesn't belabor the point but rather hits you with razor-sharp reminders at regular intervals.
YOU MUST AGREE is not in that setting, but is locked in to exactly that tone. Flirting as a reverse Voight-Kampff test as a job interview as entrapment. "I've got problems too, y'know" not as any offer of solidarity but as "shut the fuck up and take it." It reminds me of when my husband and I were driving into Canada last month, and the agent holding the prospect of horrific state violence over us had a lovely sleeve of Pokemon tattoos. We made it through the banter without falling for any of the incrimination traps, and I was careful to only compliment the sleeve at the very end to avoid any sense of segueing into a bribe. This game summoned that same feeling, but with much more erotic thrill and dread. And it makes great use of the Pepsi Universe document and the best track off of TECHDOG 5. Remarkable stuff.
Kaschei (Bagenzo)
This is the most structurally-daring game jam entry I've ever seen, in any genre. It nails one of my favorite tones in fiction: being plunged into an abyss, and knowing there will be many more to come but having no clue how many or how deep. It's Silksong's title card of ACT 1: PHARLOOM. It's TECHDOG continuing past volume 4. It's the ending of chapter 1 of Foreach. It's what I tried to do with Act 3 of Replaceable Parts.
At first, I thought I messed up the download; when you first hit 'play,' you just get the placeholder text in a new Ren'py project. But then the Help option on the menu becomes HELP and I felt that first hit of artistic vertigo, which the game seized on quickly. It makes superb use of HTML webpages and additional Ren'py files, bouncing you between them in a way that's jarring without being too flow-breaking, with each new layer of dysfunction and betrayal weaving into the others.
Talking about the structure in any detail is spoiler enough; I won't get too into the plot and themes, partially because I don't feel I fully grasp them yet, but if that pitch above sounds enticing then you should absolutely check this out.
"I won't do it anymore!"
"You do drugs, too."
"I've never touched those!"
"And you think about nothing but death."
"Well... not really!"
—ICE: The Last Generation
Notes on four games from the second-annual TOXIC YURI VN JAM. These are not reviews; most of them were made or edited by friends of mine, and conflicts of interest aside, these all hit my amygdala in ways I cannot be objective about. Here we go. Spoilers and transgression abound.
Original Mindfuck Animation (It_Came_From_Eden, Kara Buchanan, Edith_Is_Dead)
Magical girl Graviko loses very, very badly. And not for the first time.
I love the way the story keeps colliding three layers of narrative: the mundane early years, the campy magical girl adventures, and the nightmarish ero-guro cosmic horror. Dark and/or horny riffs on magical girls are nothing new, but the audacity of this one is truly incredible; yes, she does fuck the brain. The fact that she used to babysit its owner is the least-objectionable part of the situation.
But beyond that tagline, one of the most excruciatingly Real moments of the story comes from the mundane layer right before the cosmic horror finale; even when Zo is utterly clueless about sexuality, she already knows that trans bodies are something profoundly shameful. And as reality starts splitting apart, Graviko throws in some petty slurs for good measure.
The cosmology of this world gestures towards some Madoka/Dr. Manhattan/Buddha's Palm timeloop multiverse shit which isn't always fleshed-out enough to truly hit, but I realize that doing so would be far beyond the scope of a six-week game jam. As-is, the story is tight and punchy, with fifty-some bespoke CGs rather than recurring character sprites, which does a lot to sell the tokusatsu style.
I also recommend this team's previous VN Copycat Recipe, a superbly awful tale of parasocial Pygmalions. And speaking of parasociality...
Sycophantasy (Mado)
A riff on Misery crossed with What Happens Next - after Anita's suicide attempt, the niche internet artist is taken in by Sunny, a fandom-cop-turned-Nurse-Ratched. There's nothing supernatural or science-fictional here, just some of the rawest dread I've ever seen in a VN. Sunny's cloying sense of benevolence enables and excuses some harrowing shit, kidnapping and assaulting her idol while saying shit like "spicy" and "uncomfy." The only thing missing is "PDF file."
The presentation is gorgeous, too - agonizing closeups, vivid portraits (shoutout to Sunny's fucked-up teeth), the central metaphor subsuming everything, setting up templates and rhythms and shattering them whenever you get complacent. Bravo.
I don't think I've ever been at a significant risk of becoming a Sunny, but when I was making my first overscoped, underdeveloped webcomic a decade ago, I felt that yearning to be part of the Hiveworks-adjacent webcomics world. A fair bit of that was just displaced gender envy, but there's also the failure to recognize "do I actually think I'd click well with these people, or do I just want the clout and validation?" I've since come to be much more chill around micro-celebrities, and my pangs of craving validation are still here but far more under control.
In that same period, I've made a body of work to be proud of and a social world that takes me seriously. But now I'm closer to Anita's position; my work features a lot of weird and awful shit that carries a risk of catastrophic context collapse. I've had one or two instances of TERF harassment, and heard of some limp attempts at ostracizing people for liking my work, but thankfully I've built up enough firebreaks that they never went anywhere. I'm happy with how much my audience gets what I'm going for and knows how to act, and taking these themes seriously draws out a lot of people who've been hungry for that, but I do sometimes wonder how much I'm pushing my luck. I just don't have the grindset in me to carve out a career as an Internet Artist, but in an age of stifling legal pressure and harassment campaigns, maybe that's not so bad. I wish I could've made the choice without those on the scales, but oh well.
Friend of the show Pengy, who I have pastiched here before, beta-read it and wrote up some sharp thoughts on it as well. And speaking of her work...
YOU MUST AGREE TO CONTINUE (Princess Pengy)
At some point I need to properly write about Of The Devil, a legal-thriller VN with some of the most beautifully awful cyberpunk worldbuilding I've ever seen. The tectonic grinding of law and capital have turned the world into a nightmarish panopticon with cajoling paywalls over any source of relief. The game is well-aware of how the treatment of its androids parallels the worst things humans have done to each other, and doesn't belabor the point but rather hits you with razor-sharp reminders at regular intervals.
YOU MUST AGREE is not in that setting, but is locked in to exactly that tone. Flirting as a reverse Voight-Kampff test as a job interview as entrapment. "I've got problems too, y'know" not as any offer of solidarity but as "shut the fuck up and take it." It reminds me of when my husband and I were driving into Canada last month, and the agent holding the prospect of horrific state violence over us had a lovely sleeve of Pokemon tattoos. We made it through the banter without falling for any of the incrimination traps, and I was careful to only compliment the sleeve at the very end to avoid any sense of segueing into a bribe. This game summoned that same feeling, but with much more erotic thrill and dread. And it makes great use of the Pepsi Universe document and the best track off of TECHDOG 5. Remarkable stuff.
Kaschei (Bagenzo)
This is the most structurally-daring game jam entry I've ever seen, in any genre. It nails one of my favorite tones in fiction: being plunged into an abyss, and knowing there will be many more to come but having no clue how many or how deep. It's Silksong's title card of ACT 1: PHARLOOM. It's TECHDOG continuing past volume 4. It's the ending of chapter 1 of Foreach. It's what I tried to do with Act 3 of Replaceable Parts.
At first, I thought I messed up the download; when you first hit 'play,' you just get the placeholder text in a new Ren'py project. But then the Help option on the menu becomes HELP and I felt that first hit of artistic vertigo, which the game seized on quickly. It makes superb use of HTML webpages and additional Ren'py files, bouncing you between them in a way that's jarring without being too flow-breaking, with each new layer of dysfunction and betrayal weaving into the others.
Talking about the structure in any detail is spoiler enough; I won't get too into the plot and themes, partially because I don't feel I fully grasp them yet, but if that pitch above sounds enticing then you should absolutely check this out.
Belle!
-The site we saw it on had bafflingly bad audio mixing between the dialogue and everything else, and had hard-coded Polish subtitles but only when Belle is singing
-So, it's both a Beauty and the Beast retelling and a story about the meat grinder of internet fame, but it doesn't really commit to either or merge them well
-From the director of Summer Wars, and I get that you can't just do Summer Wars again 12 years later; it's very specifically from that transitional period where smartphones and social media hadn't yet conquered the world
-The world of U is explicitly VR, but that never particularly matters beyond the biometric scans to create avatars; the controls or implications don't come up, and I much preferred Summer Wars' implicit gag of how the grand dreamworld of Oz might not be diegetic whatsoever
-The scenery of U is much less interesting than Oz as well (though the avatars are consistently great), but I wonder if that was intentional; the oppressive monocultural monolith of a five-billion-user social network
-(Also, I know this movie doesn't really give a fuck about fine-grained logistics, but committing to five billion users feels insane)
-In general, I can't tell how cynical the movie feels about U; it's got some fairly tepid "online fandoms and haters can be suffocating" and "mods are power-tripping assholes" themes, but I think that you could play this up while also getting out of the bind of having to write songs for The Biggest Star In The World. Make Belle's music diegetically mid, but algorithmically boosted in the way that TikTok shows your first few posts to millions of people to get you to keep chasing that high. With five billion users, discoverability is the name of the game, and it's a nightmare where the concept of "industry plants" has been replaced with something worse: a fundamentally arbitrary system of who gets to be famous. (It's like how I don't envy whoever's in charge of adjusting YouTube's algorithms; letting them get stale makes it even more of a hellish race to the bottom, but every tiny change wrecks a lot of peoples' livelihoods.)
-I wish more was done with the mods, but I love the gags of how half of them are furries and the lead mod's Doxxing Laser has a wall of corporate sponsorships.
-If I was a script doctor: Suzu starts by posting a few personal songs with no intention to be famous, they get massively algorithmically boosted as everyone's first few posts do, and she has to either lock in and become a real star or face an online mob. It's the tragedy of having to painstakingly self-censor to deny the world any attack surface against you when catastrophic context collapse can hit at any time. Then put in the Beast stuff somewhere if you really must
-Hiro, Belle's semi-deranged friend and self-appointed manager, is scene-stealingly great every time; the older women at choir practice are also great; the quality of the cast falls off rapidly from there
-given that U automatically generates an avatar based on your biometric scan, it's grimly funny to just be Assigned Age Regressor At Social Media
-I can grant it a lot of grace because it came out in 2021 and thus spent a lot of its development in the worst possible time to make a movie, but, like, come the fuck on
R.DOWNWARD_SPIRAL - I first came across this poem in a high school class on WW1, and it's stuck with me ever since - Hell as a series of bleak stone tunnels where you realize the futility of war far too late to do anything about it. It's some fantastically striking imagery, and I like how it works as a 20th-century quote to balance out the hypermodern ones.
R.56 - These creatures went through some rounds of evolution: at first they were blank player avatars (with corpse-eyes rather than none at all) in some kind of Ontologically Censored pocket dimension, with censor bars automatically appearing over any genitals, gore, or profanity. Lodestone was going to give them some weapons and teach them the joy of violence, then go on her way after acting as the serpent crowbarring apart their Eden. But it felt a bit goofy and anticlimactic, and didn't really mesh with the rest of the story especially well.
So the blank avatars became the prime-matter slimes in the guts of the game's machinery. Made in Abyss shaped a lot of the look and feel here, with bizarre consciousnesses in the depths of the world that neither love nor hate you but want your many tasty calories.R.57 - Anthology of the Killer was a big inspiration for the slimes' speech patterns - "futuredeadthing" recalls the "FUTURE MURDER VICTIM" t-shirt. The strange spacing, indentations, and line breaks are meant to evoke a G-Man-style stiltedness, especially with the typeset text.
R.58 - The slimes' split translations were inspired by similar dialogue from works like Floornight and CONTROL, and to make a mockery of the question "so what are this world's metaphysics?". I worried that it was a bit of a corny just-world-fallacy for the slimes to think fascists taste terrible, but I think it works in the sense of "players who have no intention of engaging with the world as intended taste terrible," and it segues nicely into "but you were delicious."
R.59-60 - I love doing shoujo-sparkles on baffling nightmare creatures. [Libido/utility function] getting glossed together was also inspired by Anthology of the Killer - the game's gag of "serial killers using the same banal language as the world's actual worst mass murderers" has been transplanted to rape. It's not their fault that they're utility monsters, you see.
R.61-62 - In a vacuum, the slimes' violence isn't any worse than what the normal gameplay loop expects, but we've completely breached the magic circle - they aren't doing this for points, or fun, or community bonding, they simply cannot fathom that you have any moral weight at all.
R.63 - I have never read Dune, but the concept of a ghola fucks very hard, and in this context I can fill in its approximate meaning even if the term is unfamiliar.
R.64-69 - I took inspiration from Serious Weakness and The Body Crushes the Soul for how to effectively blend humor and sexual violence, especially the analysis here (the question starting with "I appreciate the anal sadism in ur work"). The slime assuring Lodestone that it won't derive any personal pleasure from raping her is inspired by the narrator of Body insisting that he only targets trans women for logistical reasons, this isn't any sort of hate crime business. Sometimes the worst day of your life is also deeply ridiculous, but you can't lose sight of the actual emotional impact here.
The slime heads popping up in increasingly absurd locations was inspired by Safe for Work, and especially the behind-the-scenes commentary about how the facility deliberately doesn't have a centralized avatar like GLaDOS or the Iterators - "ceiling mommies," in the parlance of my friend Ty. That made me think about leaning into the opposite direction, with a facility capable of sprouting avatars literally anywhere, like an inescapable mycelial network.
R.70 - R.72 - After thinking about the above point, I wanted to avoid the pitfall of coding "Lodeslime" as scary-because-she's-disabled or anything like that. The horror is squarely that your daughter-by-rape will have to live in a world controlled top-to-bottom by your rapist, and she has exactly the kind of spirit this place is meant to destroy. Also, after gradually layering in the incestuous theming in the first story, it felt good to have a character just say outright "I want to fuck my mother."
R.73 - This was definitely inspired by the "It's been fun. Don't come back" speech from the end of Portal 2, and shoutout to Jed for immediately making an Eric Andre Show We'll Be Right Back edit of panel 3.
R.74-75 - A safe but undignified exit into some new environment; we see the buildings and the highway but nothing else for now, too locked in to Lodestone's tunnel vision.
R.76 - As the name suggests, panel 2 is riffing on the cover of Revengeseekerz, but with the badass aura farming replaced by struggling to stand up at all. (And in the more direct sense, it's setting up a 'rape/revenge' plot beat too.)
R.77 - The page title is an homage to the Isidore volume of the same name, and Lodestone's expression is somewhere between I LIE HERE BURIED and STOMP ON HEADS.
R.78-79 - The revenge completely falls flat - this system has no understanding of what it did and cannot be harmed by an individual. Drawing this much of the Torment Nexus over and over got to be pretty exhausting, reaching past the fourth wall to torment me, but I'm happy with how well it sells the sheer untouchable scale of it all.
R.80-81 - Finally, we get a good look at the city I've teased. I thought about giving the street signs some smeary nonsensical AI-style text, as a teaser for the next segment, but I couldn't quite fit it in.
R.82-84 - This zone was inspired by Armored Core 6's style of endless nonsense infrastructure drunk on pure capital, and the surreal artifacting of older AI art engines. So much Art About The Evils Of AI just bores me to tears, so I wanted to keep a light touch here and not belabor the point; it's just one brief stop on a historical tour.
R.85-86 - The theme of this sequence comes into focus with the trains and midcentury tech; we're delving backwards through time, with the slimes reframed as the nightmare at the end of history. No love, no malice, no consciousness, just death and torture in the name of vague game theory buzzwords. But now we're in the World Wars, with cattle cars evoking both stockyards and the Holocaust.
R.87 - These statues are based on The Motherland Calls and the Mansudae Grand Monument. There are a few layers to this - they're both Soviet Bloc monuments, and as horrendous as it was, it did still beat the Nazis. The nudity and headlessness are based on Yinka Shonibare's mannequins doing ridiculous shit at strange cultural crossroads. They're also teasing the classical statues in a few pages, inspired by Anthology of the Killer's points about the worst tyrants of today building up prestige by collecting art from the worst tyrants of the past.
R.88 - The telephone lines turn to nooses, then crucifixes. I wanted to evoke the pre-Christian feeling of the crucifix as a symbol of endless state violence with no redemption in sight.
R.89-90 - The world is getting impatient; you no longer choose when you descend. The graffiti on the aqueduct reads "Caecilius is in the garden" (from the first lessons of the Cambridge Latin Course), "Hafdan was here" (runes found on the Hagia Sophia), and "I will sodomize and facefuck you" (from Catullus 16).
R.91-92 - The chained titan is based a bit on Kroxa, and the two arguing statues are meant to at least vaguely suggest Athena and Ares. (Also, drawing figures in full perspective is a pain in the ass.)
R.93-94 - The stars and watery texture are a bit of a riff on the Dream Blocks from Celeste. More relevantly, I'm still very fond of the void sequence from the first story, but it had bugged me that the objects within it were basically thematically meaningless even on a page that went as hard as this one. But now I've got a whole index of symbols to work with, built in nonsense configurations outside of time.
R.95-96 - I debated for a bit whether to have Copper's avatar here, but decided against it - her Yuri Of Absence needs to stay intact. However, I do have Guy-Copper from But With Boys, both because I like his design and to make Girl-Copper's absence that much more glaring. And I had a lot of fun with Sulfur's "hole in the world" effect, raising more questions about just how fused with the game she is. The "last online" timeframes were given for a sense of the game falling out of the popular consciousness but not necessarily buried by history; I also knew I wanted to dodge giving specific dates for any of them, to preserve some amount of historical ambiguity.
On June 19th, I went to see Underscores at Radius with a friend I met at Steamworks, because this is my life now I guess
-A few weeks out, the show switched venues from Metro (which I've only been to once, to see Ginger Root in 2023); Radius is several times bigger and it still sold out. There were ~4000 people, apparently, which was her biggest-ever crowd for a solo show (or about 1/4 of last year's Furfest).
-The ticket packages above mine included a kpop-style handheld light modeled on the water tower from Fishmonger, which were remotely synced to flash in unison; it was a very cool effect, and also served well as a "hey, the show's about to start for real" signal to get everyone hyped.
-While I can't make definitive statements on a four-digit crowd, they were plenty queer but a bit less overtly furry/kinky than, say, a Femtanyl show; there were a fair few ears and tails but I didn't see any fursuits. T-shirts I saw included 100 Gecs, Lucy Bedroque, and Signalis. Someone near the front had a little Filipino flag, which ruled, and on the way out I saw someone in a FATMOGGING AT THE UNDERSCORES CONCERT shirt. God bless.
-The show opened with an hour-long DJ set from Umru, which seemed pretty good but I admit I'm not very good at judging the structure of DJ sets and I recognized only a couple of the tracks in it. Perhaps an hour is a bit much, but I think it worked well as a buffer to give everyone time to show up for Underscores.
-Back when I saw her as an opener, she killed it but didn't have the full AV setup that really bring her shows together. She certainly had that now, and made great use of it, with some fun panopticon motifs. It opened with a live feed of her coming up from the green room, occasionally a camera operator would come out and circle her and output the footage to the screen (much like Ginger Root), and there were frequent hall-of-mirrors effects when the camera was recording the stage. And during Tell Me, the screen cycled through a whole mall's worth of logo-stylings of "Underscores" (but I'd totally get some Underscores Legos, I'm just sayin'.) The concert was plenty upbeat, but this added some acidic ambivalence that I really appreciate.
-However, the screen stayed blank during The Peace, but I think it's absolutely the right call to not have a bunch of Cool Smoking Imagery at an all-ages show, y'know?
-I'm pretty sure that one of the camera operators in the sound booth was Noah Sellers, the host of Backlight (and producer of the Tell Me (U Want It) video).
The EDM-styled rework of Locals goes hard, but I think it loses a little by dropping the Buzzword Cloud before "arms, body, legs, flesh..." Regardless, it still felt transcendent to yell that chorus in a room full of transsexuals.
-I only noticed here that the Innuendo line "I need a longer miniskirt" can plausibly be read as a dick brag; it would be pretty out of left field for Underscores, but then I suppose that's the point.
-It's funny how the elaborate AV setup punctures any fiction of the encores being spontaneous, but there was a good showing from Slayr (who I haven't sat down with much but who I gather is a big deal in the underground) and then Music, the one track off of U that hadn't been played yet.
-Spoiled Little Brat was one of the only tracks here from Fishmonger, and now it feels like a bitterly sarcastic victory lap.
-A few weeks out, the show switched venues from Metro (which I've only been to once, to see Ginger Root in 2023); Radius is several times bigger and it still sold out. There were ~4000 people, apparently, which was her biggest-ever crowd for a solo show (or about 1/4 of last year's Furfest).
-The ticket packages above mine included a kpop-style handheld light modeled on the water tower from Fishmonger, which were remotely synced to flash in unison; it was a very cool effect, and also served well as a "hey, the show's about to start for real" signal to get everyone hyped.
-While I can't make definitive statements on a four-digit crowd, they were plenty queer but a bit less overtly furry/kinky than, say, a Femtanyl show; there were a fair few ears and tails but I didn't see any fursuits. T-shirts I saw included 100 Gecs, Lucy Bedroque, and Signalis. Someone near the front had a little Filipino flag, which ruled, and on the way out I saw someone in a FATMOGGING AT THE UNDERSCORES CONCERT shirt. God bless.
-The show opened with an hour-long DJ set from Umru, which seemed pretty good but I admit I'm not very good at judging the structure of DJ sets and I recognized only a couple of the tracks in it. Perhaps an hour is a bit much, but I think it worked well as a buffer to give everyone time to show up for Underscores.
-Back when I saw her as an opener, she killed it but didn't have the full AV setup that really bring her shows together. She certainly had that now, and made great use of it, with some fun panopticon motifs. It opened with a live feed of her coming up from the green room, occasionally a camera operator would come out and circle her and output the footage to the screen (much like Ginger Root), and there were frequent hall-of-mirrors effects when the camera was recording the stage. And during Tell Me, the screen cycled through a whole mall's worth of logo-stylings of "Underscores" (but I'd totally get some Underscores Legos, I'm just sayin'.) The concert was plenty upbeat, but this added some acidic ambivalence that I really appreciate.
-However, the screen stayed blank during The Peace, but I think it's absolutely the right call to not have a bunch of Cool Smoking Imagery at an all-ages show, y'know?
-I'm pretty sure that one of the camera operators in the sound booth was Noah Sellers, the host of Backlight (and producer of the Tell Me (U Want It) video).
The EDM-styled rework of Locals goes hard, but I think it loses a little by dropping the Buzzword Cloud before "arms, body, legs, flesh..." Regardless, it still felt transcendent to yell that chorus in a room full of transsexuals.
-I only noticed here that the Innuendo line "I need a longer miniskirt" can plausibly be read as a dick brag; it would be pretty out of left field for Underscores, but then I suppose that's the point.
-It's funny how the elaborate AV setup punctures any fiction of the encores being spontaneous, but there was a good showing from Slayr (who I haven't sat down with much but who I gather is a big deal in the underground) and then Music, the one track off of U that hadn't been played yet.
-Spoiled Little Brat was one of the only tracks here from Fishmonger, and now it feels like a bitterly sarcastic victory lap.
Hello,
As I checked in tonight, I was told that as a trans woman, I was technically only allowed in on the monthly transfem nights and if anyone had a problem with my presence tonight I would be ejected. Nobody did, and the only visit made worse was my own. When I checked out and told him this, he told me that I was "being sensitive" and he was "being nice," pointing to the F marker on my ID.
I would like to have this admission policy clarified before I return, whether on a transfem night or otherwise.
Thank you for your time,
-Alexi
As I checked in tonight, I was told that as a trans woman, I was technically only allowed in on the monthly transfem nights and if anyone had a problem with my presence tonight I would be ejected. Nobody did, and the only visit made worse was my own. When I checked out and told him this, he told me that I was "being sensitive" and he was "being nice," pointing to the F marker on my ID.
I would like to have this admission policy clarified before I return, whether on a transfem night or otherwise.
Now, the very first rule is:
You are aware that Steamworks is a private club for gay/bi men with public nudity and pornography.
I am aware of this, but it does not say exclusively; my understanding was that as long as guests understand that queer men are the primary audience and behave well, there is no strict gatekeeping of identity. Indeed, over the past two years, I have been to Steamworks many times on days outside of the transfem events with no problems from either guests or management. If that policy hasn't changed, the clerk was making up a stricter version, and if it has, then he was bending it in my favor while still ruining my visit. If I'm not allowed in, I would rather just be turned away than have the threat of expulsion hanging over me all night.
He also did not answer any of my follow-up questions about how this rule handles trans men who haven't updated their IDs or do not pass to his satisfaction, or any other edge case of identity that cannot be immediately parsed. He did not give me any impression of this being a robust, standardized policy rather than his own snap judgements, and I would like to have an official ruling in writing before I return.
Thank you for your time,
-Alexi
[The goose-step] is simply an affirmation of naked power; contained in it, quite consciously and intentionally, is the vision of a boot crashing down on a face. Its ugliness is part of its essence, for what it is saying is ‘Yes, I am ugly, and you daren't laugh at me’, like the bully who makes faces at his victim. [...] Beyond a certain point, military display is only possible in countries where the common people dare not laugh at the army.
—George Orwell, England Your England
I've enjoyed a fair few strategy roguelikes in my time. Balatro1 is a go-to stim toy during Zoom calls or long travel, I've sunk an ungodly amount of time into Slay the Spire 1 and 22 , and enjoyed the ludicrous language-Calvinball of Cursed Words. But in the past few days, friends and I have been captivated by Pronoun Palace, which pares down its mechanics in order to say something in a way that none of these other games are trying to.
To be clear, that's not a knock on them - Balatro doesn't need a story, it's a beautifully timeless box of whimsy.3 Slay the Spire has an intriguingly odd fantasy style, and the sequel adds a slideshow-narrative and some space-fantasy elements with its cunty alien prince;4 adding any more would just tie itself in knots. In the delightful Muppet pastiche of Cursed Words, the dark machinations of the Secret Syntactic Society are just "brainstorming new ways to cheat at Boggle."
Your first run of Pronoun Palace opens with a letter from the government:
Wilson Nguyen,
You have been found to be in possession of illegal pronouns. For public safety, your pronouns were confiscated from your person at 3:15 this morning by the New Police. We expect this shall improve the quality of your work performance. Recall that language is the enemy of truth.
—The Bureau of Information
2. Right before I started writing this post, I had a wonderful Regent card-generation run with the best possible Colorful Philosophies pull of Defect cards: Turbo, Smokestack, and Flak Cannon.
3. I think the only thing conclusively dating it to within the past decade is one money-producing joker called "To The Moon".
4. I like how the Regent's cards suggest that he's only funny and pathetic while he's deposed, and the moment he has an ounce of power he becomes a genuinely nightmarish tyrant.
5. Apparently the devs are straight-up veterans of Isaac's modding community, which explains a lot.
6. Using a word finder tool makes it easier but by no means trivial - you've still got to consider status effects, optimizing crits, and balancing attack and defense. And at a certain point I feel I do better without it, like how fighting the Last Judge without tools will teach you a lot about its attack ranges and timing windows.
7. Pedantically you could say they're both sampling Wervin', but just demographically I'm almost certain the composer found the riff via Ain't It Funny.
—George Orwell, England Your England
I've enjoyed a fair few strategy roguelikes in my time. Balatro1 is a go-to stim toy during Zoom calls or long travel, I've sunk an ungodly amount of time into Slay the Spire 1 and 22 , and enjoyed the ludicrous language-Calvinball of Cursed Words. But in the past few days, friends and I have been captivated by Pronoun Palace, which pares down its mechanics in order to say something in a way that none of these other games are trying to.
To be clear, that's not a knock on them - Balatro doesn't need a story, it's a beautifully timeless box of whimsy.3 Slay the Spire has an intriguingly odd fantasy style, and the sequel adds a slideshow-narrative and some space-fantasy elements with its cunty alien prince;4 adding any more would just tie itself in knots. In the delightful Muppet pastiche of Cursed Words, the dark machinations of the Secret Syntactic Society are just "brainstorming new ways to cheat at Boggle."
Your first run of Pronoun Palace opens with a letter from the government:
Wilson Nguyen,
You have been found to be in possession of illegal pronouns. For public safety, your pronouns were confiscated from your person at 3:15 this morning by the New Police. We expect this shall improve the quality of your work performance. Recall that language is the enemy of truth.
—The Bureau of Information
So you settle in for a dark-comedy retelling of 1984 with a style somewhere between The Binding of Isaac5 and Homestuck - you fight some quirky enemies who menstruate on the board, whack you with yaoi paddles, and douse tiles in Mountain Dew. How whimsical.
And then you die and unlock the second playable character: a child with a giant hole cut out of his chest, directly based on the cover of the transphobic screed Irreversible Damage. His opening cutscene uses that phrase verbatim. His special ability is to hole-punch tiles, then use them as spaces to play multiple words per turn. It's a very strong power.
And so, the game shows its hand as a fine example of Dark Woke Neo-Edgelordism - it is well-aware that the word 'pronoun' is a bitter cultural punchline by now. It knows the exhaustion of grinding out any value at all from a government with utter contempt for its citizens. The Party turns people into liquid brains and pooltoy-cops and bloodbags for their own clones, but letting you have some titty skittles is just beyond the pale.
There's certainly strategy to be had here, but the mechanical focus is kept tight. Playing actual words in Cursed Words is often a losing game, and you'll eventually start making absurd chains of wildcards that cannot possibly cash out to real words - any plausible set of English phonemes will do. Pronoun Palace is much stingier with wildcards, keeping a tight focus on picking actual words from a board of often-dangerous tiles. Sure, it would be funny to yell FUTANARI at the bureaucrat who put you through Hell, but can you afford to say it?6 Language is a minefield, and if you don't step carefully you'll end up dead in a ditch.
The mechanical tension and horrific worldbuilding aren't at odds with the comedy, they're entwined. the Party is flailingly pathetic in the way that all authoritarians are, but that makes them more nightmarish - they can ruin your life for years because they can't get their paperwork straight. As![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tresfoyle put it,
The way it talks about controlled opposition and the system's ability to absorb critique does feel like the Party's corncobbing about its inability to really manage dissent.
"We're definitely not mad about the juggalos who keep printing and circulating all this yaoi samizdat. Actually we meant for them to do that."
It feels very much like a deliberate reassessment of the Orwellian nightmare scenario with, y'know, going on 80 years of observation of How All That Shit Actually Went through a fairly sober lens, which is amusing given how arch and hyperbolic it all is. Orwell could not have anticipated "Anhui and Lanzhou criminalizing danmei web serials specifically to garnish the profits in hopes of balancing the provinces' budgets."
In the darker moments of The Current Era, I've kept going because my ego will not let me be taken out by the most tedious "why isn't there a STRAIGHT pride month?" motherfuckers alive, yet them being in positions to write policy is no less horrifying. I reject their demands for dignity just as much as I reject it for myself - show your respect by playing alongside me in the gutter.
This is a game by and for people who come home from an exhausting day of being queer in public and crave an art culture with no interest in defending or explaining itself. It is gleefully gross, erotic, and Extremely Online. Multiple enemy designs come from Porpentine's stories. One of the best songs on the soundtrack is clearly sampling Ain't It Funny7. The age regressors and bunnygirls have the alien-brutalist aesthetic of Half-Life 2's Combine empire. It is locked the fuck in to its artistic vision, and it's been delightful to see people realize how much they've been wanting this flavor all along.
It's been getting a steady stream of patches since launch, mainly bugfixes and internet-poisoned additions to its dictionary. I'm curious about what DLC for it might eventually look like, but it might just detract from the sharp, tight package we've got now. One way or another, I wish the developers the best and I hope this puts them on the map to make even wilder shit.
1. My favorite way to play is the Omelette challenge, where you have no natural money generation and have to fit an econ engine into your gameplan somehow, whether it's a responsible set of jokers or lucky cards + Hanging Chad.And then you die and unlock the second playable character: a child with a giant hole cut out of his chest, directly based on the cover of the transphobic screed Irreversible Damage. His opening cutscene uses that phrase verbatim. His special ability is to hole-punch tiles, then use them as spaces to play multiple words per turn. It's a very strong power.
And so, the game shows its hand as a fine example of Dark Woke Neo-Edgelordism - it is well-aware that the word 'pronoun' is a bitter cultural punchline by now. It knows the exhaustion of grinding out any value at all from a government with utter contempt for its citizens. The Party turns people into liquid brains and pooltoy-cops and bloodbags for their own clones, but letting you have some titty skittles is just beyond the pale.
There's certainly strategy to be had here, but the mechanical focus is kept tight. Playing actual words in Cursed Words is often a losing game, and you'll eventually start making absurd chains of wildcards that cannot possibly cash out to real words - any plausible set of English phonemes will do. Pronoun Palace is much stingier with wildcards, keeping a tight focus on picking actual words from a board of often-dangerous tiles. Sure, it would be funny to yell FUTANARI at the bureaucrat who put you through Hell, but can you afford to say it?6 Language is a minefield, and if you don't step carefully you'll end up dead in a ditch.
The mechanical tension and horrific worldbuilding aren't at odds with the comedy, they're entwined. the Party is flailingly pathetic in the way that all authoritarians are, but that makes them more nightmarish - they can ruin your life for years because they can't get their paperwork straight. As
tresfoyle put it,The way it talks about controlled opposition and the system's ability to absorb critique does feel like the Party's corncobbing about its inability to really manage dissent.
"We're definitely not mad about the juggalos who keep printing and circulating all this yaoi samizdat. Actually we meant for them to do that."
It feels very much like a deliberate reassessment of the Orwellian nightmare scenario with, y'know, going on 80 years of observation of How All That Shit Actually Went through a fairly sober lens, which is amusing given how arch and hyperbolic it all is. Orwell could not have anticipated "Anhui and Lanzhou criminalizing danmei web serials specifically to garnish the profits in hopes of balancing the provinces' budgets."
In the darker moments of The Current Era, I've kept going because my ego will not let me be taken out by the most tedious "why isn't there a STRAIGHT pride month?" motherfuckers alive, yet them being in positions to write policy is no less horrifying. I reject their demands for dignity just as much as I reject it for myself - show your respect by playing alongside me in the gutter.
This is a game by and for people who come home from an exhausting day of being queer in public and crave an art culture with no interest in defending or explaining itself. It is gleefully gross, erotic, and Extremely Online. Multiple enemy designs come from Porpentine's stories. One of the best songs on the soundtrack is clearly sampling Ain't It Funny7. The age regressors and bunnygirls have the alien-brutalist aesthetic of Half-Life 2's Combine empire. It is locked the fuck in to its artistic vision, and it's been delightful to see people realize how much they've been wanting this flavor all along.
It's been getting a steady stream of patches since launch, mainly bugfixes and internet-poisoned additions to its dictionary. I'm curious about what DLC for it might eventually look like, but it might just detract from the sharp, tight package we've got now. One way or another, I wish the developers the best and I hope this puts them on the map to make even wilder shit.
2. Right before I started writing this post, I had a wonderful Regent card-generation run with the best possible Colorful Philosophies pull of Defect cards: Turbo, Smokestack, and Flak Cannon.
3. I think the only thing conclusively dating it to within the past decade is one money-producing joker called "To The Moon".
4. I like how the Regent's cards suggest that he's only funny and pathetic while he's deposed, and the moment he has an ounce of power he becomes a genuinely nightmarish tyrant.
5. Apparently the devs are straight-up veterans of Isaac's modding community, which explains a lot.
6. Using a word finder tool makes it easier but by no means trivial - you've still got to consider status effects, optimizing crits, and balancing attack and defense. And at a certain point I feel I do better without it, like how fighting the Last Judge without tools will teach you a lot about its attack ranges and timing windows.
7. Pedantically you could say they're both sampling Wervin', but just demographically I'm almost certain the composer found the riff via Ain't It Funny.
Kinkreetkontext
Jun. 9th, 2026 12:35 amAs with Summer Wars a while back, I caught a screening of Tekkonkinkreet with friend of the show Mousemousemoose for the first time since seeing a pirated copy circa high school. Unlike Summer Wars, this was based on an existing manga, which I finally finished reading the night before. So!—
-Story-wise, it's quite faithful; pretty much every single plot beat and much of the script is taken from the manga, with surprisingly little cut for time or reshuffled. The opening action scene comes from midway through the original, and some interstitial moments are removed, but that's about it. However, I like the choice to move the final showdown to the middle of Kiddie Kastle - it's a good way to have the park undone by the violence of the capitalist class, while staying ambiguous whether they'll rebuild it or cut their losses.
-It's a remarkable visual adaptation as well; a lot of the character designs are streamlined for the sake of being remotely feasible to animate, but the city itself is incredible. They had some absolute sickos painting these environments, with such beautiful layers of pan-Asian culture and industry and trash and graffiti. (There's also a fun "hyperreality" visual gag with people on posters being much more realistically rendered than any of the characters.) It's a clear forerunner of the Grind Fiction style (Jet Set Radio, Splatoon, The World Ends With You, etc.) but much weirder and bleaker; there's no Y2K slickness, just the relentless weight of history and violence and neglect.
-The story is fixated on the question of what it means to say this is my city - how do you enforce that, and what does it get you? Kids, the local gangs, the Yakuza, the police, and the developers all make the claim, and as you go up the chain it becomes more about coercion and hierarchy. The kids and the petty gangsters are the only ones who are shown with friendships based on trust and respect, the only person with an on-screen romantic partner is a Yakuza member, and at the very top they've gotten so used to violence and domination that they're incapable of understanding those below them.
-This isn't the movie's fault but the sound at our screening was loud as hell, which got frustrating in a movie that has a lot of children screaming.
-It retains some problems from the manga; there's only one woman with a speaking role relevant to the plot, and she's a Pregnant Wife (the manga wasn't much better, but at least had a short interlude with Chocolate's mom). It's like the quote I've heard applied to Tolkien and Kurosawa - "it's not that he hates women, he just doesn't think about them that much." I'm also not thrilled about the capitalists being effete, nefarious, possibly-literal-aliens (but I do enjoy how their bizarre language gets rendered in the subtitles as punctuation-keysmashes.)
-I'm glad I got to see this in a theater rather than on a laptop via a dubious pirate site, even though I feel like the latter experience fits well with the whole thematic thrust of the story.
-Story-wise, it's quite faithful; pretty much every single plot beat and much of the script is taken from the manga, with surprisingly little cut for time or reshuffled. The opening action scene comes from midway through the original, and some interstitial moments are removed, but that's about it. However, I like the choice to move the final showdown to the middle of Kiddie Kastle - it's a good way to have the park undone by the violence of the capitalist class, while staying ambiguous whether they'll rebuild it or cut their losses.
-It's a remarkable visual adaptation as well; a lot of the character designs are streamlined for the sake of being remotely feasible to animate, but the city itself is incredible. They had some absolute sickos painting these environments, with such beautiful layers of pan-Asian culture and industry and trash and graffiti. (There's also a fun "hyperreality" visual gag with people on posters being much more realistically rendered than any of the characters.) It's a clear forerunner of the Grind Fiction style (Jet Set Radio, Splatoon, The World Ends With You, etc.) but much weirder and bleaker; there's no Y2K slickness, just the relentless weight of history and violence and neglect.
-The story is fixated on the question of what it means to say this is my city - how do you enforce that, and what does it get you? Kids, the local gangs, the Yakuza, the police, and the developers all make the claim, and as you go up the chain it becomes more about coercion and hierarchy. The kids and the petty gangsters are the only ones who are shown with friendships based on trust and respect, the only person with an on-screen romantic partner is a Yakuza member, and at the very top they've gotten so used to violence and domination that they're incapable of understanding those below them.
-This isn't the movie's fault but the sound at our screening was loud as hell, which got frustrating in a movie that has a lot of children screaming.
-It retains some problems from the manga; there's only one woman with a speaking role relevant to the plot, and she's a Pregnant Wife (the manga wasn't much better, but at least had a short interlude with Chocolate's mom). It's like the quote I've heard applied to Tolkien and Kurosawa - "it's not that he hates women, he just doesn't think about them that much." I'm also not thrilled about the capitalists being effete, nefarious, possibly-literal-aliens (but I do enjoy how their bizarre language gets rendered in the subtitles as punctuation-keysmashes.)
-I'm glad I got to see this in a theater rather than on a laptop via a dubious pirate site, even though I feel like the latter experience fits well with the whole thematic thrust of the story.
So, I switched avatars for the first time since making this blog. The last one was The Author, my self-insert in the world of Isidore with a philosophy that I described back here. It's a fun design, it's seen me through a lot, but I thought it was time to rotate it out.
The whole Isidore project is very dear to me; it taught me a lot about comedy and transgression and catharsis and just how many new friends you can draw out of the woodwork by caring about the craft of filth. Every time I flip back through it, I get a sense of "damn, I really was cooking with this." But as I said in the finale, it ran on a type of early-transition spirit that I just can't access anymore. Still, though, its DNA lives on in everything I've made ever since - Solipschism was applying the lessons I learned about pacing and dialogue to mystery/drama rather than comedy. Replaceable Parts is nakedly Isidorean. Hell, she's inked on my thigh forever!
But then what becomes of The Author? Even back then, drawing all my tattoos was starting to get annoying, and now I've got twenty of the damn things. I'd drawn some other self-portraits, like myself in Replaceable Parts, but I hadn't settled on any new consistent avatar. I threw around some dog designs, which I'm fond of, but they didn't truly click.
And then on a trip to Hawai'i with my in-laws, I saw some tiny beached Portuguese men o' war. I kept a safe distance but admired their squiggly tentacles, their buoyant sacs, their refusal to fit our sense of how a creature coheres. Whether it has an austerely alien intelligence we can't yet grasp or it really is an unthinking bag of slop, I love how it can hunt and kill without understanding life or death or suffering whatsoever. My mind snagged on these ideas and began rotating them.
I've been using the alias "Utilitymonstergirl" for a while now, which I like as a reminder to claim some of the selfishness I've been too quick to throw away. But I never did answer the question of so what is a Utilitymonstergirl?
And there I had it - a bit of a pooltoy, a bit of a siphonophore, a bit of a lava lamp. The thagomizer-tail came from Aggie back in the Isidore days, and the head shape came from this piece I made three years ago that's been bouncing around Tumblr ever since. I gave it a rubbery ragdoll physicality and it all just clicked.
To be clear, this isn't a wisecracking mascot like Isidore was, and I haven't yet drawn it as an autobiographical stand-in. It's more like a stress toy, a form for when I'm sick of human society and human bodies and want to be an aconscious thing that can be hurled against a wall with zero consequences. Its spectrogram-speech owes a lot to the Centaurs from Runaway to the Stars, who can blast infrasonic noise as a distress call; sometimes it's not enough to not use words, I want to not even think in language. It freed itself from the idea of deserving, but now it doesn't even bother explaining why it should have everything it wants.
I might make a cleaned-up version of this avatar in a bit, but for now it feels right to use a hastily-cropped face from a pornographic sketch.
The whole Isidore project is very dear to me; it taught me a lot about comedy and transgression and catharsis and just how many new friends you can draw out of the woodwork by caring about the craft of filth. Every time I flip back through it, I get a sense of "damn, I really was cooking with this." But as I said in the finale, it ran on a type of early-transition spirit that I just can't access anymore. Still, though, its DNA lives on in everything I've made ever since - Solipschism was applying the lessons I learned about pacing and dialogue to mystery/drama rather than comedy. Replaceable Parts is nakedly Isidorean. Hell, she's inked on my thigh forever!
But then what becomes of The Author? Even back then, drawing all my tattoos was starting to get annoying, and now I've got twenty of the damn things. I'd drawn some other self-portraits, like myself in Replaceable Parts, but I hadn't settled on any new consistent avatar. I threw around some dog designs, which I'm fond of, but they didn't truly click.
And then on a trip to Hawai'i with my in-laws, I saw some tiny beached Portuguese men o' war. I kept a safe distance but admired their squiggly tentacles, their buoyant sacs, their refusal to fit our sense of how a creature coheres. Whether it has an austerely alien intelligence we can't yet grasp or it really is an unthinking bag of slop, I love how it can hunt and kill without understanding life or death or suffering whatsoever. My mind snagged on these ideas and began rotating them.
I've been using the alias "Utilitymonstergirl" for a while now, which I like as a reminder to claim some of the selfishness I've been too quick to throw away. But I never did answer the question of so what is a Utilitymonstergirl?
And there I had it - a bit of a pooltoy, a bit of a siphonophore, a bit of a lava lamp. The thagomizer-tail came from Aggie back in the Isidore days, and the head shape came from this piece I made three years ago that's been bouncing around Tumblr ever since. I gave it a rubbery ragdoll physicality and it all just clicked.
To be clear, this isn't a wisecracking mascot like Isidore was, and I haven't yet drawn it as an autobiographical stand-in. It's more like a stress toy, a form for when I'm sick of human society and human bodies and want to be an aconscious thing that can be hurled against a wall with zero consequences. Its spectrogram-speech owes a lot to the Centaurs from Runaway to the Stars, who can blast infrasonic noise as a distress call; sometimes it's not enough to not use words, I want to not even think in language. It freed itself from the idea of deserving, but now it doesn't even bother explaining why it should have everything it wants.
I might make a cleaned-up version of this avatar in a bit, but for now it feels right to use a hastily-cropped face from a pornographic sketch.
Two plunderphonics projects lately:
Jane Remover has dropped status update music* under their alias Leroy, a sonic barrage with enough uncleared samples that Bandcamp won't let you pay any money for it. I won't pick through every sample–Genius already identifies a lot of them–but taking it holistically still provides a lot to talk about.
Jane's already written about frustration with their old aliases and the baggage they've accumulated, most vividly on JRJRJR, so it's interesting to see them willfully return to one of them. Leroy was the name they used for their "Dariacore"** mashup albums, which influenced Scaring the Hoes and have a clear imprint on Jane's later projects; some of its tags and samples*** show up again, and the spirit of gleefully shoving all of culture in a blender has kept evolving.
This project feels most directly descended from their essentials set for NTS Radio, sharing some specific samples but with a more frenetic tone. Jane still includes some of their own songs, but where essentials pulled mainly from heart, this one brings in Revengeseekerz. Putting their most overtly audience-resenting album into a Leroy mixtape feels like a statement of making peace with that identity, especially with how the opener's title casts Leroy as an alter ego:
IF YOU THINK I'M A BITCH, YOU SHOULD MEET JANE REMOVER. Leroy isn't a too-tight shell that Jane discarded, it's a facet of their art that they can step back into as they wish.
That's most of the serious thematic analysis I have, so here are some scattered impressions:
-It makes good use of Lift You Up and Baby from Stardust, the album that just keeps wrapping around so much of the music I write about. (Speaking of Danny Brown, LOVE.ANGEL.MUSIC.BABY. brings in Psychoboost in ways that had me hooting and hollering.)
-A trans artist in the 2020s sampling Y'all don't wanna hear me, y'all just wanna dance is pretty haunting.
-The Silent Hill/Sopranos intro on CHASE THIS FEELING is incredible, and reminds me of and now for something completely/Gay Luigi?
I'll need to keep revisiting this, turning it over, letting it come up on shuffle until I can produce more thoughts on it, but as-is I'm glad to have more of Jane's DJ work in my library. I look forward to whatever comes next.
//
I had never heard of tsubi club or their new album trinket until it randomly came up on my YouTube front page the other day, but apparently it's already gotten a good bit of attention. I can see why; the Louie Zong-esque cover art enticed me into a click, and I was quickly pulled in by the chaotic collage of sound. It's something like "what if Frost Children had made Love & Ponystep" - a blend of 2010s throwbacks via indie sleaze and pop-rock rather than outright dubstep.****
Instead of L&P's narrative interludes with Disco Elysium narrator Lenval Brown, we've got barks and ad-libs from Daniel Riordan, the voice of Alduin among a slew of other roles across games, movies, and TV. I'm not sure if these were recorded specifically for the album or pulled from his existing work, and I can't decide if they're obnoxiously grating or a brilliant way to set the tone. Guess I've just got to listen through it again.
//
BONUS ROUND: Femtanyl has released MAGFEST, which continues the trend of MAN BITES DOG's more understated vocals with a tighter emotional focus too. They've made plenty of songs about gory, hyperbolic self-loathing, but this hits an experience I've had in a way that GIRL HELL 1999 doesn't. On many occasions, I've been out of my mind with stress and hoping that a convention, concert, or other social gathering can be a respite from it.***** It broadly works, but results have been mixed.
And amid all this, we've got body dysmorphia, impostor syndrome, and a gutting bridge that reminds me of You Were Cool by The Mountain Goats:
saw when i was a child
100 karat smile
in cringe comp number 9
i hope that you're alr-
I'm excited for more of this style from Femtanyl; it's a good tonal counterbalance to the hard-hitting bangers, and the confessional style makes me think of 2009 by their collaborator Astrid, or the rage-and-apologies of Ada Rook's shed blood. Even if they never want to perform this song live, it's a good omen for their career.
*I'm pretty sure that I know exactly where the cover photo was taken and I could be there in under an hour (the downstairs food court of HuengSeng Square in Chicago's Chinatown).
**Dariacore has been called a genre a fair bit, and to be honest I don't see it. I think it's squarely in the tradition of playful pop/EDM plunderphonics, sillier than All Day but not an outright joke like Mouth Sounds.
***I'm especially fond of the tag this song is fucking garbage showing up on Dancing with your eyes closed.
****Tracey Brakes is credited on both this and Love & Ponystep, and I can see the connection.
*****I've never been to Magfest in particular, but I've felt this way about Scintillation, Midwest Furfest, and plenty of local events.
Jane Remover has dropped status update music* under their alias Leroy, a sonic barrage with enough uncleared samples that Bandcamp won't let you pay any money for it. I won't pick through every sample–Genius already identifies a lot of them–but taking it holistically still provides a lot to talk about.
Jane's already written about frustration with their old aliases and the baggage they've accumulated, most vividly on JRJRJR, so it's interesting to see them willfully return to one of them. Leroy was the name they used for their "Dariacore"** mashup albums, which influenced Scaring the Hoes and have a clear imprint on Jane's later projects; some of its tags and samples*** show up again, and the spirit of gleefully shoving all of culture in a blender has kept evolving.
This project feels most directly descended from their essentials set for NTS Radio, sharing some specific samples but with a more frenetic tone. Jane still includes some of their own songs, but where essentials pulled mainly from heart, this one brings in Revengeseekerz. Putting their most overtly audience-resenting album into a Leroy mixtape feels like a statement of making peace with that identity, especially with how the opener's title casts Leroy as an alter ego:
IF YOU THINK I'M A BITCH, YOU SHOULD MEET JANE REMOVER. Leroy isn't a too-tight shell that Jane discarded, it's a facet of their art that they can step back into as they wish.
That's most of the serious thematic analysis I have, so here are some scattered impressions:
-It makes good use of Lift You Up and Baby from Stardust, the album that just keeps wrapping around so much of the music I write about. (Speaking of Danny Brown, LOVE.ANGEL.MUSIC.BABY. brings in Psychoboost in ways that had me hooting and hollering.)
-A trans artist in the 2020s sampling Y'all don't wanna hear me, y'all just wanna dance is pretty haunting.
-The Silent Hill/Sopranos intro on CHASE THIS FEELING is incredible, and reminds me of and now for something completely/Gay Luigi?
I'll need to keep revisiting this, turning it over, letting it come up on shuffle until I can produce more thoughts on it, but as-is I'm glad to have more of Jane's DJ work in my library. I look forward to whatever comes next.
//
I had never heard of tsubi club or their new album trinket until it randomly came up on my YouTube front page the other day, but apparently it's already gotten a good bit of attention. I can see why; the Louie Zong-esque cover art enticed me into a click, and I was quickly pulled in by the chaotic collage of sound. It's something like "what if Frost Children had made Love & Ponystep" - a blend of 2010s throwbacks via indie sleaze and pop-rock rather than outright dubstep.****
Instead of L&P's narrative interludes with Disco Elysium narrator Lenval Brown, we've got barks and ad-libs from Daniel Riordan, the voice of Alduin among a slew of other roles across games, movies, and TV. I'm not sure if these were recorded specifically for the album or pulled from his existing work, and I can't decide if they're obnoxiously grating or a brilliant way to set the tone. Guess I've just got to listen through it again.
//
BONUS ROUND: Femtanyl has released MAGFEST, which continues the trend of MAN BITES DOG's more understated vocals with a tighter emotional focus too. They've made plenty of songs about gory, hyperbolic self-loathing, but this hits an experience I've had in a way that GIRL HELL 1999 doesn't. On many occasions, I've been out of my mind with stress and hoping that a convention, concert, or other social gathering can be a respite from it.***** It broadly works, but results have been mixed.
And amid all this, we've got body dysmorphia, impostor syndrome, and a gutting bridge that reminds me of You Were Cool by The Mountain Goats:
saw when i was a child
100 karat smile
in cringe comp number 9
i hope that you're alr-
I'm excited for more of this style from Femtanyl; it's a good tonal counterbalance to the hard-hitting bangers, and the confessional style makes me think of 2009 by their collaborator Astrid, or the rage-and-apologies of Ada Rook's shed blood. Even if they never want to perform this song live, it's a good omen for their career.
*I'm pretty sure that I know exactly where the cover photo was taken and I could be there in under an hour (the downstairs food court of HuengSeng Square in Chicago's Chinatown).
**Dariacore has been called a genre a fair bit, and to be honest I don't see it. I think it's squarely in the tradition of playful pop/EDM plunderphonics, sillier than All Day but not an outright joke like Mouth Sounds.
***I'm especially fond of the tag this song is fucking garbage showing up on Dancing with your eyes closed.
****Tracey Brakes is credited on both this and Love & Ponystep, and I can see the connection.
*****I've never been to Magfest in particular, but I've felt this way about Scintillation, Midwest Furfest, and plenty of local events.
Gator Nuggets
May. 11th, 2026 09:13 pmTaking this bit wholesale from tresfoyle, blurbing some neat stuff on Comicfury that's caught my attention. So!
Sharkteeth – FastPuck
I've only been to Hawai'i once in my life, but the sheer sense of cultural violation is impossible to miss. Even if you avoid the most grotesquely touristy parts and take the land seriously, you can never ignore how much you're still complicit in something profoundly evil.
Sharkteeth presents a microcosm of that violence that I could easily see festering in the shadows of Waikīkī. Its world of organized crime and sex work is inevitably less bleak than the reality, but it never forgets the rancid underpinnings of its sex scenes hot enough to awaken my Fujoshi Genes. Also, I always love to see some delightful twink-on-twink violence.
My biggest complaint so far is how most of the yaoi cast is skinny white twinks and darker-skinned burly men, both as a tired stereotype in general and for how much it undercuts the whole point of setting it in the modern Pacific.
Peony – heyitscorinth
Absolutely gorgeous use of neons, jewel tones, and all types of sickly and bleary lighting. We meet Peony, a delightfully awful failgirl, who quickly gets conned and bodysnatched by someone even worse. Goofy and terrifying hijinks ensue, and the comic is in its final act; it's an admirable mix of lushly-detailed and tightly-scoped. I'm excited to see just how this powderkeg blows and who's left standing.
Double Life / Growing Troubles – ReptileFan24
Know Not a Man - Makkine
A failgirl many degrees worse than Peony gets into some wildly unethical lesbian fertility research. I've never worked anywhere near biotech, but the texture of the gripes give me the sense that Makkine has been down in the goddamn trenches. The grubby, sordid world mixes well with the escalating religious imagery - after all, Christ's life began and ended in the most humiliating, disgusting ways possible. And as with the miracle of the Annunciation, ugly material consequences are not far behind. Truly, God forbid women do anything.
tresfoyle, blurbing some neat stuff on Comicfury that's caught my attention. So!Sharkteeth – FastPuck
I've only been to Hawai'i once in my life, but the sheer sense of cultural violation is impossible to miss. Even if you avoid the most grotesquely touristy parts and take the land seriously, you can never ignore how much you're still complicit in something profoundly evil.
Sharkteeth presents a microcosm of that violence that I could easily see festering in the shadows of Waikīkī. Its world of organized crime and sex work is inevitably less bleak than the reality, but it never forgets the rancid underpinnings of its sex scenes hot enough to awaken my Fujoshi Genes. Also, I always love to see some delightful twink-on-twink violence.
My biggest complaint so far is how most of the yaoi cast is skinny white twinks and darker-skinned burly men, both as a tired stereotype in general and for how much it undercuts the whole point of setting it in the modern Pacific.
Peony – heyitscorinth
Absolutely gorgeous use of neons, jewel tones, and all types of sickly and bleary lighting. We meet Peony, a delightfully awful failgirl, who quickly gets conned and bodysnatched by someone even worse. Goofy and terrifying hijinks ensue, and the comic is in its final act; it's an admirable mix of lushly-detailed and tightly-scoped. I'm excited to see just how this powderkeg blows and who's left standing.
Double Life / Growing Troubles – ReptileFan24
1d20 recently updated webcomics is the funniest, meanest description of Comicfury's front page I've ever encountered. Possibly my favorite entry is #17:
fetish art so profoundly idiosyncratic and personal to the author that adult content tags feel misplaced. Unfortunately, it's also not funny or interesting except as a case study of someone very odd.
These two comics are the good version of what this is roasting. The plots are mainly chill slice-of-life, but we're here to luxuriate in the surreal furgonomics of it all - it's Sinkdog. It's Outsidewolves. It's character designs from the depths of e621 just going about their business. It's the radius around a furry con where half the people in line at Panera Bread have tails. These stories are in the same clade as Curse/Kiss/Cute, but a little less horny and a little more mumblecore. I love them dearly.
Know Not a Man - Makkine
A failgirl many degrees worse than Peony gets into some wildly unethical lesbian fertility research. I've never worked anywhere near biotech, but the texture of the gripes give me the sense that Makkine has been down in the goddamn trenches. The grubby, sordid world mixes well with the escalating religious imagery - after all, Christ's life began and ended in the most humiliating, disgusting ways possible. And as with the miracle of the Annunciation, ugly material consequences are not far behind. Truly, God forbid women do anything.
Absence-Of-A-Concert Writeup
May. 10th, 2026 03:50 pmA few weeks ago, I picked up a cheap ticket on a whim for FEM&M X ASTRID - EMO GIRLS VS RAVE GIRLS (ft. Charloux and Milkypossum). I ended up staying home due to a bunch of obligations that popped up around the date, plus not knowing the acts terribly well and not especially clicking with what I had heard.*
I enjoyed the Astrid tracks that introduced me to her, WAR GIRL and KILLING STALKING, but I felt a bit lukewarm about the rest of her discography**. There's certainly potential here, and I trust she'll do well with some more artistic growth; I'll check back in with her in a few years.
FEM&M, on the other hand, I actively disliked. I checked out Mentally sILLy and was broadly indifferent to its warmed-over breakcore until GenreFluid almost made me say "oh my god go fuck yourself" out loud. The killing blow was the line "my sounds stay transfem", which blasted me back to a post frombiddyfox I've thought about a lot:
I meant to parodize the cliche of (white) Trans Woman Music - loud, poorly mixed amalgams of colonized genres, self-referential and based around idiotic in-jokes (I was thinking of an artist I'd seen around called "DJ Submissive and Breedable") - juxtaposing it with themes of erotic horror and midwest emo. unfortunately I overestimated the amount of attention the average internet user would pay to an album cover or title. people took it as an example of that kind of Ada Rook worship instead of a raging expression of fear. TONY ZARET'D! POE'S LAW'D! whatever.
Look, my music collection is majority-transfem. I dearly love my sisters' artistic output; it is threaded through everything I make in ways great and small. But there's something repugnantly solipsistic about identifying with this art culture while papering over all the genre precursors who are already whitewashed away.
Contrast this to Vylet Pony's whole essay about genres as dense networks of influence and conversation, the fundamentally Afro-Caribbean roots of all electronic music, and the many cultural forces seeking to obscure that. And this love and respect of music history shows in her work - Monarch of Monsters alone samples and interpolates a huge range of sources, from fellow pony musicians to Six Impala to League of Legends to quite a lot of Genesis***.
Also, making any sweeping claims about queer or trans culture is inevitably just a self-report of your own social circle. I think of the girls I meet at the bathhouse who skew working-class Black and Latina, putting effort into femme hair and makeup and clothes that I absolutely don't, living a very different transfemininity than me in the same city. Does their art get to be called Transfem Music?
This is a lot to spill out of me in response to one disappointing album, but this shit matters to me. I don't want my art culture to be one stagnant little tidepool, I want it to dive into the bottomless depths of human culture and hold its own in the conversation. As Vylet put it,
And when you talk about genres like Jungle and Dubstep, say it with your whole chest. Be proud of the human race, show respect and love for the people who have forged the greatest parts of music with their bare hands. We will always stand on the shoulders of giants as musicians, so instead of pretending you yourself are the giant, build monuments and maintain the history of these people. You as an artist are nothing without them.
*Also, all-ages concerts can feel a tad suffocating, especially at a venue as small as the Subterranean.
**My favorite other track I've found from her is 2009, which is achingly sad in a very well-told way.
***The band, not the first book of the Bible.
I enjoyed the Astrid tracks that introduced me to her, WAR GIRL and KILLING STALKING, but I felt a bit lukewarm about the rest of her discography**. There's certainly potential here, and I trust she'll do well with some more artistic growth; I'll check back in with her in a few years.
FEM&M, on the other hand, I actively disliked. I checked out Mentally sILLy and was broadly indifferent to its warmed-over breakcore until GenreFluid almost made me say "oh my god go fuck yourself" out loud. The killing blow was the line "my sounds stay transfem", which blasted me back to a post from
biddyfox I've thought about a lot:I meant to parodize the cliche of (white) Trans Woman Music - loud, poorly mixed amalgams of colonized genres, self-referential and based around idiotic in-jokes (I was thinking of an artist I'd seen around called "DJ Submissive and Breedable") - juxtaposing it with themes of erotic horror and midwest emo. unfortunately I overestimated the amount of attention the average internet user would pay to an album cover or title. people took it as an example of that kind of Ada Rook worship instead of a raging expression of fear. TONY ZARET'D! POE'S LAW'D! whatever.
Look, my music collection is majority-transfem. I dearly love my sisters' artistic output; it is threaded through everything I make in ways great and small. But there's something repugnantly solipsistic about identifying with this art culture while papering over all the genre precursors who are already whitewashed away.
Contrast this to Vylet Pony's whole essay about genres as dense networks of influence and conversation, the fundamentally Afro-Caribbean roots of all electronic music, and the many cultural forces seeking to obscure that. And this love and respect of music history shows in her work - Monarch of Monsters alone samples and interpolates a huge range of sources, from fellow pony musicians to Six Impala to League of Legends to quite a lot of Genesis***.
Also, making any sweeping claims about queer or trans culture is inevitably just a self-report of your own social circle. I think of the girls I meet at the bathhouse who skew working-class Black and Latina, putting effort into femme hair and makeup and clothes that I absolutely don't, living a very different transfemininity than me in the same city. Does their art get to be called Transfem Music?
This is a lot to spill out of me in response to one disappointing album, but this shit matters to me. I don't want my art culture to be one stagnant little tidepool, I want it to dive into the bottomless depths of human culture and hold its own in the conversation. As Vylet put it,
And when you talk about genres like Jungle and Dubstep, say it with your whole chest. Be proud of the human race, show respect and love for the people who have forged the greatest parts of music with their bare hands. We will always stand on the shoulders of giants as musicians, so instead of pretending you yourself are the giant, build monuments and maintain the history of these people. You as an artist are nothing without them.
*Also, all-ages concerts can feel a tad suffocating, especially at a venue as small as the Subterranean.
**My favorite other track I've found from her is 2009, which is achingly sad in a very well-told way.
***The band, not the first book of the Bible.
1d6 Sci-Fi Political Factions
May. 8th, 2026 07:07 pmThe Heliopolity Foundation, once a think tank for still-largely-hypothetical space law, now the de facto legal authority for the Sol system. They insist that they're just a coordinating body, not a government, which can feel awfully academic when they've cast your station out of trade discussions and you've only got a few weeks of rations left.
The Gas Giants, the colloquial name for the set of hypercorps headquartered in the orbits of Jupiter and its moons. Standouts include the biotech firm Chimeric Solutions (XSOL), mining-and-energy titan Hephaestus Holdings (HEPH), megaproject constructor Crucible (CRCB), and blue-sky research lab Firmament (FRMT). Though Mars has its own autonomous governments, the Giants' heavy investments in its capital city of Olympus has given it the nickname "the throne of Jupiter".
The Vitruvian League, chauvinists of the human form, organized in response to XSOL's genuine atrocities but mainly picking fights with anyone they deem to be degrading humanity's gene pool. They tend to wear as little clothing as they can legally and logistically get away with, the better to show off their finely-crafted bodies.
Offmodels, a subculture with a firm commitment to morphological freedom. Adherents will commonly have animated tattoos, esoteric plastic surgeries, visible cybernetic components, or some combination thereof. While their artistic output and political advocacy are both impressive, there is also a streak of infighting and picking dubious policy battles.
Bayt al-Hikmah, a collection of universities, archives, and think tanks focused primarily on the creation and ethics of sapient AI. Creating or duplicating an AI citizen requires the approval of their Ethics board after a day-long marathon of impossible questioning. Primarily based in the Lunar capital of Eskendereyya, with historic ties to Lagos. Its primary religions are fairly normal Islam, fairly normal Judaism, and bizarre syncretic AI cults.
Occlusion, an opaque group of hackers, pirates, and subversives who needle all of the above for their hypocrisy, moral failings, and unsecured shipping lanes. Though membership stats are deliberately impossible to pin down, they contain plenty of Offmodels, autonomous AIs, and disillusioned al-Hikmah dropouts.
ONE ENORMOUS TIMESKIP LATER
Worldtree, an interstellar transit network built in strained partnership with a semi-tangible species identifying itself as Hyperfilaments, also known as Ribbonsquid (casual) and Redtapeworms (derogatory). While the human leadership is still deeply uncomfortable with acknowledging their de facto legal power, Hyperfilaments make no claims to be anything other than violently antisocial; a genuine compliment from one could be reasonably glossed as "you would be interesting to hunt." A division of labor quickly emerged where the species made of sapient math handles the infrastructure and the species that understands cooperation as more than the iciest possible game theory handles PR. Still, miscommunications are common.
The Outstretched Hand, the vanguard of human justice, piety, and civilization. Pay no attention to how they define "human", or what emerges from their printer-nurseries to do the scutwork. Its two capital flagships are the HABIT OF VIRTUE and the JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF.
Geocentrists, a political faction determined to protect the relevance of the Earth. Although its civilizations are functioning broadly fine, several near-misses with Kessler syndrome have led offworld polities to seek greater economic independence from it, with mixed results. Geocentrists are split on whether they should strengthen their offworld ties, keeping Earth as the keystone of an interstellar humanity, or to hunker down to minimize risk exposure too. Of course, all of this is purely in the realm of level-headed policy discussion.
The Clade, allegedly a foundation running a chain of clinics catering to spaceborn humans. Digging deeper, it is an insular and dogmatic group fixated on spacer mutations that break physics and causality, searching for ways to breed them at scale without ruinous health complications. Even if most specimens fatally wash out, and the survivors disproportionately end up employed in nightmarish wetwork, it is a small price to pay for cultivating the future of the species.
Rhakotis, the Moon rebuilt into a brutalist megacomputer. It imports superconductors and disaffected AIs, and exports prime numbers and inscrutable statues. It still has a nominal organic population, but they tend not to stay organic for long.
BAKUNAWA, the least ideologically changed from its ancestor, but quantitative differences inevitably become qualitative. Hacking Hyperfilament encryption is as far from futzing with al-Hikmah servers as those servers were from clay tablets, and the new filters for skill and recklessness are plain to see in their projects. Their current mascot is the puppeteered corpse of a warp wyrm, a naturally faster-than-light planet-cracking predator that Hyperfilaments have not yet hunted to extinction.
The Gas Giants, the colloquial name for the set of hypercorps headquartered in the orbits of Jupiter and its moons. Standouts include the biotech firm Chimeric Solutions (XSOL), mining-and-energy titan Hephaestus Holdings (HEPH), megaproject constructor Crucible (CRCB), and blue-sky research lab Firmament (FRMT). Though Mars has its own autonomous governments, the Giants' heavy investments in its capital city of Olympus has given it the nickname "the throne of Jupiter".
The Vitruvian League, chauvinists of the human form, organized in response to XSOL's genuine atrocities but mainly picking fights with anyone they deem to be degrading humanity's gene pool. They tend to wear as little clothing as they can legally and logistically get away with, the better to show off their finely-crafted bodies.
Offmodels, a subculture with a firm commitment to morphological freedom. Adherents will commonly have animated tattoos, esoteric plastic surgeries, visible cybernetic components, or some combination thereof. While their artistic output and political advocacy are both impressive, there is also a streak of infighting and picking dubious policy battles.
Bayt al-Hikmah, a collection of universities, archives, and think tanks focused primarily on the creation and ethics of sapient AI. Creating or duplicating an AI citizen requires the approval of their Ethics board after a day-long marathon of impossible questioning. Primarily based in the Lunar capital of Eskendereyya, with historic ties to Lagos. Its primary religions are fairly normal Islam, fairly normal Judaism, and bizarre syncretic AI cults.
Occlusion, an opaque group of hackers, pirates, and subversives who needle all of the above for their hypocrisy, moral failings, and unsecured shipping lanes. Though membership stats are deliberately impossible to pin down, they contain plenty of Offmodels, autonomous AIs, and disillusioned al-Hikmah dropouts.
ONE ENORMOUS TIMESKIP LATER
Worldtree, an interstellar transit network built in strained partnership with a semi-tangible species identifying itself as Hyperfilaments, also known as Ribbonsquid (casual) and Redtapeworms (derogatory). While the human leadership is still deeply uncomfortable with acknowledging their de facto legal power, Hyperfilaments make no claims to be anything other than violently antisocial; a genuine compliment from one could be reasonably glossed as "you would be interesting to hunt." A division of labor quickly emerged where the species made of sapient math handles the infrastructure and the species that understands cooperation as more than the iciest possible game theory handles PR. Still, miscommunications are common.
The Outstretched Hand, the vanguard of human justice, piety, and civilization. Pay no attention to how they define "human", or what emerges from their printer-nurseries to do the scutwork. Its two capital flagships are the HABIT OF VIRTUE and the JUSTIFIED TRUE BELIEF.
Geocentrists, a political faction determined to protect the relevance of the Earth. Although its civilizations are functioning broadly fine, several near-misses with Kessler syndrome have led offworld polities to seek greater economic independence from it, with mixed results. Geocentrists are split on whether they should strengthen their offworld ties, keeping Earth as the keystone of an interstellar humanity, or to hunker down to minimize risk exposure too. Of course, all of this is purely in the realm of level-headed policy discussion.
The Clade, allegedly a foundation running a chain of clinics catering to spaceborn humans. Digging deeper, it is an insular and dogmatic group fixated on spacer mutations that break physics and causality, searching for ways to breed them at scale without ruinous health complications. Even if most specimens fatally wash out, and the survivors disproportionately end up employed in nightmarish wetwork, it is a small price to pay for cultivating the future of the species.
Rhakotis, the Moon rebuilt into a brutalist megacomputer. It imports superconductors and disaffected AIs, and exports prime numbers and inscrutable statues. It still has a nominal organic population, but they tend not to stay organic for long.
BAKUNAWA, the least ideologically changed from its ancestor, but quantitative differences inevitably become qualitative. Hacking Hyperfilament encryption is as far from futzing with al-Hikmah servers as those servers were from clay tablets, and the new filters for skill and recklessness are plain to see in their projects. Their current mascot is the puppeteered corpse of a warp wyrm, a naturally faster-than-light planet-cracking predator that Hyperfilaments have not yet hunted to extinction.
Chuuni Tunes
May. 8th, 2026 02:05 amThis is a bunch of largely "yes-and" commentary for tresfoyle's piece here, laying out a definition and theory of "Dark Woke Neo-Edgelordism". It stands alone perfectly well, but I couldn't resist scribbling in the margins in a way that wouldn't fit in a comment box. So, here's my Live Utilitymonstergirl Reaction:
"I’d say femtanyl’s musical ouevre is frequently Dark Woke Neo-Edgelordist; Jane Remover’s dabbled; Vylet Pony plays in the space" - I get the sense that a lot of Femtanyl's audience is about half my age (I'm 29), and I'm thrilled that they get to grow up with this. I expect the fandom to be a hell of a talent incubator, given the sheer number of fanworks and covers and bedroom producers taking cues from them. And the members themselves give me that same sense of "the kids are alright" when I see these girls younger than me just commanding a stage for an hour. Good stuff.
I agree that Jane isn't really a central example, but I think "posing with a blunt and a flaming katana in a nuclear control room" deserves a mention as one of the all-time-great Transfeminine Chuuni works of art. (Likewise, underscores is even further out, but she did make a song around the premise of "what if Pumped Up Kicks was about getting groomed", and fishmonger sounds a lot like the soundtrack to a 2000s teen dramedy that never existed.)
I'd say Monarch of Monsters qualifies for this cluster by being an immensely traumahorny prog rock album wrapped in a pony fanfic novella, but you can engage with it while preserving your self-image as a Serious Music Critic. Love & Ponystep and Gonarch's Lair offer no such protection; you must grapple with the recession pop pastiches and the cringe-ass 2010s web culture and Call of Duty samples and meditations on what "pony music" can even be. I think that level of inescapability is important for this culture, stress-testing "new sincerity" as hard as you possibly can.
"[ISSBROKIE's] sheer meathead braggadocio" - A few months on, the part of Stardust that's stuck with me the most is two lines from Whatever The Case - "How come it's politics whenever oldheads discuss me?" / "How you gon' comment some hater shit, still tryna fuck me?" The Edgelord Heir Apparent, who kicked off her verse with a Bad Dragon joke, stares right down the camera and says, Hey, I am inescapably seen as a political football and a sex object. I think that's really neat.
Insane Clown Posse and the Juggalo subculture as a whole laid a lot of groundwork - Every piece I see about "the Gathering of the Juggalos is fun as hell actually" makes me more convinced that it serves the same emotional needs as a furry con - what if your ridiculous, maligned, horny subculture got to run shit for a weekend? - for a broadly lower-class audience. (There's no stereotype of Juggalos as IT professionals, after all.) Also, looking through the Gathering's lineups, there's something kind of intersectionally beautiful at work, in the spirit of "the Jay-Z/Linkin Park mashup album solved racism in middle schools for a good three months." More on this later.
"before the Wachowski sisters’ works were publicly reassessed" - I'm also reminded of Tyler, the Creator's early work getting recontextualized as a closeted queer kid going through it in the early 2010s. And now, Chromakopia has back-to-back tracks with a thoughtful examination of internalized homophobia and a genuinely really funny pronoun joke.
"ultraviolent Flash power fantasy simulators on Newgrounds" - I'm delighted to see a fandom resurgence for Madness Combat, one of the great standard-bearers of that culture, which I think was due to a Friday Night Funkin mod? Oh, the whims of history.
"Hyperbolic violence, psychosexual bewilderment, antisociality, bile, vitriol, good old fear and loathing" - The adolescent/chuuni sensibility definitely goes hand-in-hand with how pervasively transgender this scene is. When you reboot puberty while grappling with the duties and constraints of adulthood, plus facing horrific political besiegement, of course you're gonna enjoy all its most goofy excesses as best you can.
"works in this new vein [...] can only speak in the language of the ideologically fluent and cannot claim neutrality or some kind of agnostic self-interest, populism or tribalism" - I think a core part of the politics is Intersectionality That Fucks; solidarity and diversity pitched not in a moralizing eat-your-veggies way, but as the inevitable result of getting all the most interesting artists of today in a room together. I discussed some of these dynamics back here, and I think it's telling how much of this movement is built on strengthening ties between Black and queer art cultures that have each been doing their own forms of this for a very long time.
"twee liberal triumphalism in the culture industry that set up a lot of cute wins for the marginalized" - I think that DWNE is driven a lot by a deep frustration with this style, and confronting how mainstream representation is inseparable from respectability. Trashy problematic stuff can hit emotional frequencies that tasteful depictions fundamentally can't, because to be marginalized is to have your life shaped by ridiculous undignified bullshit. Cutting it out completely just makes art ring hollow, and I get that it's hard to extract the toxicity from trash without making it utterly sterile, but it's a worthy goal to attempt.
"Dark Woke Neo-Edgelordism is our inheritance from Isabel Fall" - I think Coquette Dragoon stands out in this lineage, pulling no punches with its hellish forever war while never, ever letting you escape the premise of 'babyfur mech pilot'. Of course having your childhood devoured by this world produces some deeply silly sexual hangups. It is funny, sad, horny, terrifying, adorable, and tragically beautiful in equal measure.
"When Sulfur shares a poignant little moment with The Gamer on the couch" - [I am making a heart with my hands] I'm very happy with how that scene drives home the story's metanarrative - a game that cluelessly used trans bodies for shock value gets re-appraised and resurrected by a modern queer audience. It serves as catharsis for both eras, whether the world doesn't know you exist or explicitly wants you dead. I'm happy with how The Return is pushing that theme in new directions, and am excited to see what you make of it.
So those are my notes on this, and even if I don't end up writing my own thesis on the genre, you can absolutely analyze my work through this lens. Maybe future scholars will place me in some completely different -core or -wave, but I want to help them out by being transparent about my taste and inspirations. More on this soon.
tresfoyle's piece here, laying out a definition and theory of "Dark Woke Neo-Edgelordism". It stands alone perfectly well, but I couldn't resist scribbling in the margins in a way that wouldn't fit in a comment box. So, here's my Live Utilitymonstergirl Reaction:"I’d say femtanyl’s musical ouevre is frequently Dark Woke Neo-Edgelordist; Jane Remover’s dabbled; Vylet Pony plays in the space" - I get the sense that a lot of Femtanyl's audience is about half my age (I'm 29), and I'm thrilled that they get to grow up with this. I expect the fandom to be a hell of a talent incubator, given the sheer number of fanworks and covers and bedroom producers taking cues from them. And the members themselves give me that same sense of "the kids are alright" when I see these girls younger than me just commanding a stage for an hour. Good stuff.
I agree that Jane isn't really a central example, but I think "posing with a blunt and a flaming katana in a nuclear control room" deserves a mention as one of the all-time-great Transfeminine Chuuni works of art. (Likewise, underscores is even further out, but she did make a song around the premise of "what if Pumped Up Kicks was about getting groomed", and fishmonger sounds a lot like the soundtrack to a 2000s teen dramedy that never existed.)
I'd say Monarch of Monsters qualifies for this cluster by being an immensely traumahorny prog rock album wrapped in a pony fanfic novella, but you can engage with it while preserving your self-image as a Serious Music Critic. Love & Ponystep and Gonarch's Lair offer no such protection; you must grapple with the recession pop pastiches and the cringe-ass 2010s web culture and Call of Duty samples and meditations on what "pony music" can even be. I think that level of inescapability is important for this culture, stress-testing "new sincerity" as hard as you possibly can.
"[ISSBROKIE's] sheer meathead braggadocio" - A few months on, the part of Stardust that's stuck with me the most is two lines from Whatever The Case - "How come it's politics whenever oldheads discuss me?" / "How you gon' comment some hater shit, still tryna fuck me?" The Edgelord Heir Apparent, who kicked off her verse with a Bad Dragon joke, stares right down the camera and says, Hey, I am inescapably seen as a political football and a sex object. I think that's really neat.
Insane Clown Posse and the Juggalo subculture as a whole laid a lot of groundwork - Every piece I see about "the Gathering of the Juggalos is fun as hell actually" makes me more convinced that it serves the same emotional needs as a furry con - what if your ridiculous, maligned, horny subculture got to run shit for a weekend? - for a broadly lower-class audience. (There's no stereotype of Juggalos as IT professionals, after all.) Also, looking through the Gathering's lineups, there's something kind of intersectionally beautiful at work, in the spirit of "the Jay-Z/Linkin Park mashup album solved racism in middle schools for a good three months." More on this later.
"before the Wachowski sisters’ works were publicly reassessed" - I'm also reminded of Tyler, the Creator's early work getting recontextualized as a closeted queer kid going through it in the early 2010s. And now, Chromakopia has back-to-back tracks with a thoughtful examination of internalized homophobia and a genuinely really funny pronoun joke.
"ultraviolent Flash power fantasy simulators on Newgrounds" - I'm delighted to see a fandom resurgence for Madness Combat, one of the great standard-bearers of that culture, which I think was due to a Friday Night Funkin mod? Oh, the whims of history.
"Hyperbolic violence, psychosexual bewilderment, antisociality, bile, vitriol, good old fear and loathing" - The adolescent/chuuni sensibility definitely goes hand-in-hand with how pervasively transgender this scene is. When you reboot puberty while grappling with the duties and constraints of adulthood, plus facing horrific political besiegement, of course you're gonna enjoy all its most goofy excesses as best you can.
"works in this new vein [...] can only speak in the language of the ideologically fluent and cannot claim neutrality or some kind of agnostic self-interest, populism or tribalism" - I think a core part of the politics is Intersectionality That Fucks; solidarity and diversity pitched not in a moralizing eat-your-veggies way, but as the inevitable result of getting all the most interesting artists of today in a room together. I discussed some of these dynamics back here, and I think it's telling how much of this movement is built on strengthening ties between Black and queer art cultures that have each been doing their own forms of this for a very long time.
"twee liberal triumphalism in the culture industry that set up a lot of cute wins for the marginalized" - I think that DWNE is driven a lot by a deep frustration with this style, and confronting how mainstream representation is inseparable from respectability. Trashy problematic stuff can hit emotional frequencies that tasteful depictions fundamentally can't, because to be marginalized is to have your life shaped by ridiculous undignified bullshit. Cutting it out completely just makes art ring hollow, and I get that it's hard to extract the toxicity from trash without making it utterly sterile, but it's a worthy goal to attempt.
"Dark Woke Neo-Edgelordism is our inheritance from Isabel Fall" - I think Coquette Dragoon stands out in this lineage, pulling no punches with its hellish forever war while never, ever letting you escape the premise of 'babyfur mech pilot'. Of course having your childhood devoured by this world produces some deeply silly sexual hangups. It is funny, sad, horny, terrifying, adorable, and tragically beautiful in equal measure.
"When Sulfur shares a poignant little moment with The Gamer on the couch" - [I am making a heart with my hands] I'm very happy with how that scene drives home the story's metanarrative - a game that cluelessly used trans bodies for shock value gets re-appraised and resurrected by a modern queer audience. It serves as catharsis for both eras, whether the world doesn't know you exist or explicitly wants you dead. I'm happy with how The Return is pushing that theme in new directions, and am excited to see what you make of it.
So those are my notes on this, and even if I don't end up writing my own thesis on the genre, you can absolutely analyze my work through this lens. Maybe future scholars will place me in some completely different -core or -wave, but I want to help them out by being transparent about my taste and inspirations. More on this soon.
Hip-Clop / They Throw Me Into Wals
Apr. 30th, 2026 12:42 amTwo of the albums I talked about the other day1 are now out! First up, Gonarch's Lair:
( Long, footnoted discussion of Gonarch's Lair and Crash Test under the cut )
( Long, footnoted discussion of Gonarch's Lair and Crash Test under the cut )
I saw Femtanyl on the Chicago stop of their MAN BITES DOG tour, my third time seeing them after their opening for Danny Brown and their smaller Chicago show last June. I was only able to get tickets for that June show at a ridiculous scalper's markup, so this time I wanted to be quick on the draw for the presale, and as I fumbled with my phone on the train I could only seem to complete the sale by getting a VIP ticket. And even if it was mainly by accident, I'm glad I did - I got a lovely signed tour poster out of it, and even though I usually spend concerts chilling on the balcony,* I knew I'd be a fool to pass up the perfect chance to get a good spot in the pit.
And it ruled! My feet ached and I had to hold steady against moshers, but seeing the performance up close is stunning in a way the balcony can't capture. I even got to stage-dive for the first (and likely only) time, and did my part holding up other divers.
The show was 18+, unlike last summer's all-ages event, which seemed a little icy to their large teenage audience. But I imagine that it makes a lot of the safety logistics easier, and the show still sold out anyway, so the age restriction might've been a way to make it at least sell out a little slower. And I appreciated the greater leeway for the crowd to be openly horny, even if I didn't see much overt flirting from the edge of the pit.
Speaking of: good lord is Noelle hot, in both a "scrawny wet rat" way and a "living cartoon character" way. Her eyeshadow and grand gestures are great for playing to the cheap seats, and together create a vivid sense of "gen-Z tgirl Gerard Way" that I expect will take her far. I would not be surprised if she eventually builds up a decent acting career.**
MAN BITES DOG gave the set some good depth and variety, and the tracks went over well, but each concert impresses on me more just how iconic CHASER truly is. In six tracks - less than fifteen minutes - they made a pristine mission statement that I'm so glad this generation of faggots gets to grow up with. BODY THE PISTOL went hard as an opener, but there's a reason the encore was P3T and ACT RIGHT.***
I've got some more concerts lined up for May and June, I'll be back to write about them too.
*At my last show, seeing Stomach Book on Valentine's Day, I was on the balcony next to a very sweet, very normie older couple who turned out to be the parents of Vialice, one of the openers. They were politely bemused by all the gay-ass nerd kids down in the pit, and I'm glad I got to tell them "that girl at the merch table is zombAe, she's another great artist worth checking out."
**I would love to see a buddy comedy with her and underscores.
***My one kvetch about the setlist: they played M3 n MIN3 with a recording of Danny's verse, and didn't play it last November when he was right there with them. (I get that there are broader setlist considerations, but I think it absolutely clears 1L0v3myL1f3!.)
And it ruled! My feet ached and I had to hold steady against moshers, but seeing the performance up close is stunning in a way the balcony can't capture. I even got to stage-dive for the first (and likely only) time, and did my part holding up other divers.
The show was 18+, unlike last summer's all-ages event, which seemed a little icy to their large teenage audience. But I imagine that it makes a lot of the safety logistics easier, and the show still sold out anyway, so the age restriction might've been a way to make it at least sell out a little slower. And I appreciated the greater leeway for the crowd to be openly horny, even if I didn't see much overt flirting from the edge of the pit.
Speaking of: good lord is Noelle hot, in both a "scrawny wet rat" way and a "living cartoon character" way. Her eyeshadow and grand gestures are great for playing to the cheap seats, and together create a vivid sense of "gen-Z tgirl Gerard Way" that I expect will take her far. I would not be surprised if she eventually builds up a decent acting career.**
MAN BITES DOG gave the set some good depth and variety, and the tracks went over well, but each concert impresses on me more just how iconic CHASER truly is. In six tracks - less than fifteen minutes - they made a pristine mission statement that I'm so glad this generation of faggots gets to grow up with. BODY THE PISTOL went hard as an opener, but there's a reason the encore was P3T and ACT RIGHT.***
I've got some more concerts lined up for May and June, I'll be back to write about them too.
*At my last show, seeing Stomach Book on Valentine's Day, I was on the balcony next to a very sweet, very normie older couple who turned out to be the parents of Vialice, one of the openers. They were politely bemused by all the gay-ass nerd kids down in the pit, and I'm glad I got to tell them "that girl at the merch table is zombAe, she's another great artist worth checking out."
**I would love to see a buddy comedy with her and underscores.
***My one kvetch about the setlist: they played M3 n MIN3 with a recording of Danny's verse, and didn't play it last November when he was right there with them. (I get that there are broader setlist considerations, but I think it absolutely clears 1L0v3myL1f3!.)
Project Hail Mary
Apr. 14th, 2026 09:44 pmFun in a lot of ways, deeply silly in others, but my biggest structural complaint is that Ryan Gosling is simply too Hollywood-handsome for this schtick of "b-but I'm just some schlubby science teacher!"
I would've preferred someone like Sam Rockwell, who is much better at playing a bedraggled dipshit, but my Magical Christmasland casting wish would be to make this character an offputting transsexual, which would juice up the core themes of the story quite well: they're already a heterodox weirdo who gets cast out of the scientific establishment, makes ends meet with gigs they're vastly overqualified for, then gets scooped up and treated as both a brilliant auteur and disposable lab rat, and after someone else's catastrophic fuckups they get strongarmed into becoming a martyr at a distance where nobody from Earth will ever have to look at them again. The transmisogynist subtext already writes itself!
I like the ending's exhumanism of Grace choosing to stay on Erid, but if I'm being mean, I could say that him bringing the American education system to aliens is the same type of horror as the space station in Interstellar recreating American suburbia.
I would've preferred someone like Sam Rockwell, who is much better at playing a bedraggled dipshit, but my Magical Christmasland casting wish would be to make this character an offputting transsexual, which would juice up the core themes of the story quite well: they're already a heterodox weirdo who gets cast out of the scientific establishment, makes ends meet with gigs they're vastly overqualified for, then gets scooped up and treated as both a brilliant auteur and disposable lab rat, and after someone else's catastrophic fuckups they get strongarmed into becoming a martyr at a distance where nobody from Earth will ever have to look at them again. The transmisogynist subtext already writes itself!
I like the ending's exhumanism of Grace choosing to stay on Erid, but if I'm being mean, I could say that him bringing the American education system to aliens is the same type of horror as the space station in Interstellar recreating American suburbia.
Unbeatable
Apr. 12th, 2026 12:15 amI finished the story mode of the gorgeous rhythm game UNBEATABLE, and I feel the same way about it as I did about Mouthwashing - I wish the scope was either a little smaller or a lot bigger.
(This will require spoiling the full plot of the game, as well as some details from the first two-thirds of 1000xRESIST.)
The split between light adventure-game walkarounds and rhythm challenges mostly works, but it's odd how nothing you do in the former affects how the latter plays out.* It would be neat to fuse them, embracing Paper Mario-style rhythmic combat in an RPG framework, but I get how that's a combinatorial nightmare of design and balancing that would produce a vastly different game.
However, I think my issues could be largely resolved if the script was much tighter. As-is, it sketches out some potentially-neat themes in its first five chapters before the final act tries to do way too much on a weak foundation. The stakes and metaphysics of this world just don't land the way they need to; the Silence - monsters summoned by music - never feel like a real existential threat, and the police state charged with suppressing them does not feel authentically brutal.
The character writing is undercooked, too - Beat is kind of an asshole, and we get occasional dream-monologues about her troubled past, but we don't feel the band's alleged struggles with money and morale and police attention. Adding some management-sim mechanics, even light ones, could do a lot to sell a sense of an exhausting pressure cooker - choosing gigs to balance income vs. risk exposure, for instance. And when the finale tries to grapple with how to handle people who have been deeply complicit in atrocities but want to genuinely change, it falls flat because the police state was such a cartoon the whole time.
And the final act's greatest reveal: This whole world is a dream or alternate universe** conjured when Beat in the real world fully snapped after a chain of personal crises, and the origin of the Silence is a clear parallel to her failure to handle the death of her mother. While this reminds me of Pengy's problems with OMORI, I think there is some real potential in the existential horror of living in a world fully extrapolated from your own trauma, knowing that all other people in it exist only to serve your metaphors. Like Masumi in The Power Fantasy, you can't trust anyone to talk to you honestly when the world objectively revolves around you; what does that do to you? Is this any better than struggling just as much at the margins? Even if it the story didn't go that route, these themes should inescapably strangle the whole story rather than come in at the eleventh hour.
1000xRESIST knew how to handle those themes, built from the start around a mundanely-shitty teenager becoming the God-Empress of the last stronghold of humanity. We get plenty of angles on what it's like to be a bit player in someone else's grand psychodrama, and our frameworks of The Protagonists and The Present Day get destabilized over and over. And wrapped around all of it is the beauty and tragedy of Hong Kong and its diaspora, which brings me to another persistent problem with UNBEATABLE.
Its Japanifornia setting is lovely but never really amounts to anything; it's possible I'm missing subtext, but I was expecting it to have some sort of distinct commentary on Orientalism or the Asian-American diaspora. It isn't obliged to, by any means, but when the lushly-realized dreamworld cuts to one dingy little Chinese-American restaurant in reality, I expect that thread to keep going places. Nothing here is half as biting as RESIST's tiny pan-Asian bunker-city, with its grim joke of having to live and die and engage in serious politics in this ridiculous pastiche of an extinct culture.
The final rhythm segment wraps up my complaints nicely: after playing as just Beat*** for the whole game, we end with a grand performance from the whole band, switching characters every few measures, but there's no observable difference in how their sections play out. If we're not going to use the main gameplay for storytelling here, then what the fuck are we doing?
*Inexcusably, the cop-punching is the least interesting of the rhythm minigames.
**I appreciate the game's refusal to pin down what the two worlds' relationship is, that was the correct thematic choice.
***Well, Quaver shows up for times when you have to hold down two notes at once, but still
(This will require spoiling the full plot of the game, as well as some details from the first two-thirds of 1000xRESIST.)
The split between light adventure-game walkarounds and rhythm challenges mostly works, but it's odd how nothing you do in the former affects how the latter plays out.* It would be neat to fuse them, embracing Paper Mario-style rhythmic combat in an RPG framework, but I get how that's a combinatorial nightmare of design and balancing that would produce a vastly different game.
However, I think my issues could be largely resolved if the script was much tighter. As-is, it sketches out some potentially-neat themes in its first five chapters before the final act tries to do way too much on a weak foundation. The stakes and metaphysics of this world just don't land the way they need to; the Silence - monsters summoned by music - never feel like a real existential threat, and the police state charged with suppressing them does not feel authentically brutal.
The character writing is undercooked, too - Beat is kind of an asshole, and we get occasional dream-monologues about her troubled past, but we don't feel the band's alleged struggles with money and morale and police attention. Adding some management-sim mechanics, even light ones, could do a lot to sell a sense of an exhausting pressure cooker - choosing gigs to balance income vs. risk exposure, for instance. And when the finale tries to grapple with how to handle people who have been deeply complicit in atrocities but want to genuinely change, it falls flat because the police state was such a cartoon the whole time.
And the final act's greatest reveal: This whole world is a dream or alternate universe** conjured when Beat in the real world fully snapped after a chain of personal crises, and the origin of the Silence is a clear parallel to her failure to handle the death of her mother. While this reminds me of Pengy's problems with OMORI, I think there is some real potential in the existential horror of living in a world fully extrapolated from your own trauma, knowing that all other people in it exist only to serve your metaphors. Like Masumi in The Power Fantasy, you can't trust anyone to talk to you honestly when the world objectively revolves around you; what does that do to you? Is this any better than struggling just as much at the margins? Even if it the story didn't go that route, these themes should inescapably strangle the whole story rather than come in at the eleventh hour.
1000xRESIST knew how to handle those themes, built from the start around a mundanely-shitty teenager becoming the God-Empress of the last stronghold of humanity. We get plenty of angles on what it's like to be a bit player in someone else's grand psychodrama, and our frameworks of The Protagonists and The Present Day get destabilized over and over. And wrapped around all of it is the beauty and tragedy of Hong Kong and its diaspora, which brings me to another persistent problem with UNBEATABLE.
Its Japanifornia setting is lovely but never really amounts to anything; it's possible I'm missing subtext, but I was expecting it to have some sort of distinct commentary on Orientalism or the Asian-American diaspora. It isn't obliged to, by any means, but when the lushly-realized dreamworld cuts to one dingy little Chinese-American restaurant in reality, I expect that thread to keep going places. Nothing here is half as biting as RESIST's tiny pan-Asian bunker-city, with its grim joke of having to live and die and engage in serious politics in this ridiculous pastiche of an extinct culture.
The final rhythm segment wraps up my complaints nicely: after playing as just Beat*** for the whole game, we end with a grand performance from the whole band, switching characters every few measures, but there's no observable difference in how their sections play out. If we're not going to use the main gameplay for storytelling here, then what the fuck are we doing?
*Inexcusably, the cop-punching is the least interesting of the rhythm minigames.
**I appreciate the game's refusal to pin down what the two worlds' relationship is, that was the correct thematic choice.
***Well, Quaver shows up for times when you have to hold down two notes at once, but still
