spraxinoscope

A praxinoscope is a wheel with a plot. He/him. On the left side of the adjacency. Mostly just weebposting on here. Gundam said punch fascists. 🇵🇸

[spraxinoscope]

About me

I mostly just post jokes but there's other things here that I'm interested in. I'm reading a lot of discourse on tumblr but i just lurk that stuff so it doesn't show up on my blog. But now I'm more serious about getting to know mutuals, so I want to make myself a little more legible.

I am: some guy, 35, in socal.

Interested in leftist/socialist/antifascist politics and organizing.

If you followed me for Homestuck art: Cool! I don't do that very often, but there will be more.

Grew up irreligious, in a majority white evangelical small town, in a red state, and that experience informs my politics. Fuck christian dominionism. i'm an edgy internet atheist at heart, but i do not have the redditor soul, so i have to wander elsewhere.

Edgy internet atheism brought me to lesswrong in the early 10s, and that brought me here via Ozy, but a lot of core rationalist spaces are way, way too racist for me to want to hang out there. over the last 15 years i've found a slice of the rat adjacency that appeals to me. but, however carefully i select the blogs i follow, i'm still being exposed to tendrils of slate star codexian thought, which pisses me off.

I have technically been on tumblr since 2012! but I wasn't paying much attention for most of that time. I made this account in 2020.

some larger politics blogs i like plus a rough percentage of how often i agree with them:

argumate 80% (do not disagree with his takes on chinese domestic policy, just don't really follow)

tanadrin 70%

quoms >90%

transgenderer ~80%

afloweroutofstone 70%

discoursedrome ~80%

collapsedsquid ~80%

honorable mention: the former triviallytrue 95% but that last 5% was terrible. never figured out what was up with him.

I am a left unity guy. I care about antifascist/anti-imperialist coalition-building. I would not call myself a marxist or an anarchist but i am interested in both of those strains of thought. I think they're important and meaningful. In a better world I'd call myself a socialist, but what I am in reality is a subject of empire and it sucks.

i do not have the ratsphere trait of liking argument for its own sake, or the trait of seeking earnest dialogue with right-wingers on here. i don't believe that accomplishes anything worthwhile.

am i a doomer? i am a pessimist about some things, but i promise i am not going to put unfiltered expressions of grief or despair on your dash. It's bad out there but there's important work to do, and that provides a sense of purpose that negates feelings of hopelessness. I think a vital part of forming connections is having things to feel good about and sharing those good feelings with other people, even in dark times, but we can't ignore the dark times either. It's hard to find that balance but it's possible. This is all to say that I still enjoy talking about frivolous nerd shit with friends.

general interests:

science fiction, classic anime, bad movies, crime, printing presses, independent animation

specific media interests:

(some of these are my real favorites, and some of these are more like things I'm a fan of, as in, I'm more likely to put fan content from these things on your dash. some are both! all of them are things I'd love to talk to people about)

books:

Seth Dickinson

Greg Egan

Charles Stross and Adrian Tchaikovsky, sometimes

Terry Pratchett and Douglas Adams

The Expanse

Frankenstein

nonfiction about

cults

disasters

submarines

narcotraffic

burglary

gambling (Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schüll is one of my very favorite books)

theory I've read at least a little bit of and liked:

Judith Butler

Fanon

Popper

Gramsci

Deleuze

tv:

Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex, my favorite show ever not even close.

classic tokusatsu. Ultraseven, Kamen Rider Black, Jetman

Gundam

Better Call Saul

i keep a mostly-up-to-date anime log with reviews here: anilist.co/user/spraxinoscope/

movies:

MST3K

dadcore crime thrillers, especially Michael Mann

games:

Metal Gear

Finals Fantasy 7-13

Armored Core 6 and Sekiro

neo XCOM

Kerbal

music:

00s electronica

Gustavo Cerati

Yoko Kanno soundtracks

neo-y2k aesthetic experimentation

grouptherapy.

internet:

the Abnormal Mapping / Ranged Touch / Friends at the Table podcast sphere

holly hollowtones

the Normal for Girls collective https://www.youtube.com/@lynnedrum

Homestuck

maybe still Wildbow a little bit

other interests:

gunpla

video editing

sketchin'

ridin' trains

for mutuals:

If we are mutuals and we never interact that is fine, but in general I would like to make connections that will outlast this website! I would be happy to give any mutuals an alternate way to reach me! I am often hanging out on Discord on sunday afternoons. I also have a Signal account. dm me about it.

I only follow blogs I really like. So even if I don't interact with your posts much, if I follow you, you can assume I'm a fan of your whole deal.

i have edited this post a little to keep it up to date. last edit jan 2026

[spraxinoscope]

mnemonic for remembering the order of brackets in discord masked links, so i don't have to keep looking it up every time:

Square before curved, your link shall be served.

Curved before square, formatting beware.

[goodgirl-inc]

[goodgirl-inc]

nevermind post cancelled he's dead again

[zeitghost]

[replicasoul]

the fucking line delivery of this

[spraxinoscope]

If a Piplup was staring at me like that I'd grab it and spike it like a volleyball

[kaiasky]

it's like charming and silly that anthropic sponsors a F1 team like. aren't you a bit busy creating the serpent that will swallow the world to be worrying about the fuckin Monaco GP y'all

[spraxinoscope]

They sponsor Williams, which is one of the worst teams but does have two of the most shippable drivers. Make of that what you will

[spraxinoscope]

They re-killed pjackk before i even had time to post about it...

[lakemojave]

Happy Pride Month everyone! Remember 4 months ago when the CEO of this platform harassed and chased a trans woman off this website just for posting her transition timeline, then chased her to other social media platforms to continue harassing her, and threatened to call the FBI if she continued disputing the multiple dubious terminations of her blogs that did not violate tumblr's terms of service in any way? And despite tumblr staff insisting that the CEO was acting against their interests, the broad transmisogyny evident in the site's culture and moderation policy has still not been adequately addressed?

[lakemojave]

Remember that staff is continuing to nuke the blogs of trans women even after all of this. Remember this post when they call this site the queerest place on the internet again this month

[lakemojave]

It's 2 years later. It's gotten worse. Happy pride month.

[spraxinoscope]

[thursday-paradise]

[spraxinoscope]

Going to meet up with a friend by the Vermont/Sunset metro station and desperately trying to think of a better way to describe my location than "next to the enormous chastity cage"

[spraxinoscope]

Been having a lot of dreams about the fimbulwinter lately. Which is probably fine

[spraxinoscope]

Yesterday I smoked a joint and went to see Gundam Hathaway 2 in a theater. Recommended! A review, with no spoilers beyond general impressions:

Very rewarding payoff for having become a Tomino Understander over the last several years.

This is a movie about, like, oligarchs. The connected members of the ruling class, how they live, and how they treat the workers around them. It's mostly about really expensive hotels. It's built on top of a layer of Tomino writing, so it knows what class is, and then that's layered with a nice, terse script and garnished with some really top-shelf character animation. Wait a minute, who's this director? Shuko Murase? Let's check out his imdb...

Holy shit! He worked on several Gundam projects including some classics, sure, but also the Cowboy Bebop movie? The Escaflowne movie? Motherfucking Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within??? He was a key animator on Nadia??????? What the fuck! This guy's so cool! He must know everybody. That is a long, storied career. And the thing is: Hathaway 2 can absolutely hang with the rest of those entries.

And like, hasn't Sunrise been completely in shambles for the last ten years? I mean, I guess it still is; spending this much money on a project with a niche audience like Hathaway is not a good strategy no matter how much I personally appreciate it. But, man, I thought the era of the anime prestige thriller was over for sure. And not only is there a really good one of those in 2026 somehow, it's a Gundam thing. And not only that, but it's also directed by the guy who did the Escaflowne movie and he's showing up to work every day to prove that he can still do character animation like nobody else on earth! I'm so grateful this movie exists at all. They do not make them like this anymore. They shouldn't make them like this any more, as far as fiduciary responsibility is concerned. But, somehow, they made it anyway, and it rules. I hope nobody at Sunrise had to sell their own kidneys to fund this project.

The thing I like the most about Hathaway 2 is that there's barely any robots in it. There are a couple 20 minute sections in which there are no signs of the mecha genre at all. The whole thing takes place on Earth. It's not very futuristic. So, in those rare shots when a robot or an implausibly big vehicle trundles by in the background, it feels deliberately intrusive-- it defamiliarizes the audience, reminds us that we're looking into another world, and asks us to consider the differences and similarities between that world and the real one.

One fun way of relating to Gundam is to imagine the Universal Century as an alternate present. After all, Gundam starts airing in 1979 and takes place in UC 0079, and there's a bunch of other UC shows where the production year aligns with the UC year in which the story takes place. So there's always been this reading where the Universal Century is just a metaphorical gloss applied on top of the present day. This isn't the True Secret Reading of Gundam or anything. Tomino is doing a lot of stuff and some of it is straightforward sci-fi futurism, so sometimes the alternate present reading breaks down. But this reading strongly applies to Hathaway 2. This is a version of the Earth Federation that is just America. It's not the future, it's now.

And this makes the mobile suits all the more terrifying and otherworldly, when they make their brief appearances. This may be a dry thriller about an idealistic radical out to confront hegemony, but also, there's a really good mech fight in it, and those two aspects of the story reinforce each other. I've seen like, idk, ninety hours of Gundam media. I know what to expect. But this time, when the Gundam shows up, I'm still like JESUS CHRIST WHAT IS THAT because the defamiliarization trick worked so well.

I had a great time with this one. Liked it more than Hathaway 1.

Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway The Sorcery of Nymph Circe: 5/5 stars

Smoking a joint and then taking a bus to an AMC theater: 1/5 stars

[spraxinoscope]

The grounded tone and rebellious spirit of Hathaway is making me crave a fic about Saul Goodman in the Universal Century

[spraxinoscope]

Yesterday I smoked a joint and went to see Gundam Hathaway 2 in a theater. Recommended! A review, with no spoilers beyond general impressions:

Very rewarding payoff for having become a Tomino Understander over the last several years.

This is a movie about, like, oligarchs. The connected members of the ruling class, how they live, and how they treat the workers around them. It's mostly about really expensive hotels. It's built on top of a layer of Tomino writing, so it knows what class is, and then that's layered with a nice, terse script and garnished with some really top-shelf character animation. Wait a minute, who's this director? Shuko Murase? Let's check out his imdb...

Holy shit! He worked on several Gundam projects including some classics, sure, but also the Cowboy Bebop movie? The Escaflowne movie? Motherfucking Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within??? He was a key animator on Nadia??????? What the fuck! This guy's so cool! He must know everybody. That is a long, storied career. And the thing is: Hathaway 2 can absolutely hang with the rest of those entries.

And like, hasn't Sunrise been completely in shambles for the last ten years? I mean, I guess it still is; spending this much money on a project with a niche audience like Hathaway is not a good strategy no matter how much I personally appreciate it. But, man, I thought the era of the anime prestige thriller was over for sure. And not only is there a really good one of those in 2026 somehow, it's a Gundam thing. And not only that, but it's also directed by the guy who did the Escaflowne movie and he's showing up to work every day to prove that he can still do character animation like nobody else on earth! I'm so grateful this movie exists at all. They do not make them like this anymore. They shouldn't make them like this any more, as far as fiduciary responsibility is concerned. But, somehow, they made it anyway, and it rules. I hope nobody at Sunrise had to sell their own kidneys to fund this project.

The thing I like the most about Hathaway 2 is that there's barely any robots in it. There are a couple 20 minute sections in which there are no signs of the mecha genre at all. The whole thing takes place on Earth. It's not very futuristic. So, in those rare shots when a robot or an implausibly big vehicle trundles by in the background, it feels deliberately intrusive-- it defamiliarizes the audience, reminds us that we're looking into another world, and asks us to consider the differences and similarities between that world and the real one.

One fun way of relating to Gundam is to imagine the Universal Century as an alternate present. After all, Gundam starts airing in 1979 and takes place in UC 0079, and there's a bunch of other UC shows where the production year aligns with the UC year in which the story takes place. So there's always been this reading where the Universal Century is just a metaphorical gloss applied on top of the present day. This isn't the True Secret Reading of Gundam or anything. Tomino is doing a lot of stuff and some of it is straightforward sci-fi futurism, so sometimes the alternate present reading breaks down. But this reading strongly applies to Hathaway 2. This is a version of the Earth Federation that is just America. It's not the future, it's now.

And this makes the mobile suits all the more terrifying and otherworldly, when they make their brief appearances. This may be a dry thriller about an idealistic radical out to confront hegemony, but also, there's a really good mech fight in it, and those two aspects of the story reinforce each other. I've seen like, idk, ninety hours of Gundam media. I know what to expect. But this time, when the Gundam shows up, I'm still like JESUS CHRIST WHAT IS THAT because the defamiliarization trick worked so well.

I had a great time with this one. Liked it more than Hathaway 1.

Mobile Suit Gundam Hathaway The Sorcery of Nymph Circe: 5/5 stars

Smoking a joint and then taking a bus to an AMC theater: 1/5 stars

[fallingtowers]

in golden age comics when people got injured they'd be like "zounds! i'm injured! i have to get back to my secret lair so i can dress my wounds! there's no time to waste! evil never sleeps... and it won't wait for me to recuperate, either!" and these days their speech bubbles will just get really scrunkly and they'll say some shit like "khff... hff..."

[fallingtowers]

in the future comics will be a nonvisual medium conveyed entirely via ant pheromones

[spraxinoscope]

Comic book writing with the frequent bolding is so weird. Why'd they do that. Totally ubiquitous for the medium, totally unheard of in any other context. And yet every comic publisher remained convinced for decades that this is simply the way it's done

[markovchaingang]

ultrafujoshism

cryptofujoshism

post-fujo

fujo-adj

[trans-girl-nausicaa]

neo-fujoism

antifujosche aktion

defujofication

[spraxinoscope]

fujuche

[captain-price-returns]

Footage of a mid air collision between a pair of Navy Super Hornets/Growlers during the Gunfighter Skies Air Show at Mountain Home Air Force Base today, with all four crew bailing out. 17 May 2026

[sugary--sheep]

[spraxinoscope]

Media reports say that all four pilots survived, which is wild. Also:

Each unit costs approximately $67 million, according to the U.S. Navy.

awesome. Also:

An average of 3.8 deaths a year occurred at U.S. air shows from 1991 to 2006, said John Cudahy, president and CEO of the International Council of Air Shows. That fatality rate has been improving and since 2017 there have been an average of 1.1 deaths per year even including the 2022 crash.

They're talking about pilots and ground crew, not civilians. That's still a lot though! Is the USAF the most lethal enemy of the USAF?

[spraxinoscope]

My anime club's been good as hell lately. Come check it out if you want.

[spraxinoscope]

The phrase "The work, which becomes a new genre itself, will be called... COWBOY BEBOP" appears in the background of the show's opening as a kind of mission statement. Bebop was an ambitious project; its success would confirm Yoko Kanno's status as the greatest composer in anime bar none, and grant director Shinichiro Watanabe the license to continue creating original, experimental works for the next twenty years.

Distilled from elements of 60s Yakuza films, mecha anime, and the tradition of American blues, Cowboy Bebop's particular flavor was too distinctive for anyone else to easily recreate or develop further. Despite being influential, and despite its breakout success in the US in 2001, the show's genre identity proved inimitable.

Now better remembered than some of its primary influences, Cowboy Bebop stands alone: a genre containing only one work.