Jan 26, 2024
a story in two parts
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from China
seen from United States
seen from Yemen
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Canada
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seen from Chile
seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from United States
a story in two parts
okay i’m intrigued
I like Vi a normal amount, I say, drinking tea out of my Vi mug, surrounded by my Vi merch, on my 12th watch of compilation videos of her fight scenes that day,,,
i spend lot of time thinking about all my mistakes and fuck ups and stuff but then i remember. i’m literally just some guy
no media experience will ever top the random thai movie I watched in 2020 because my fave was in it. it had a surprisingly high budget and highlights include:
-main character gets vampire boyfriend who is defective because he just has regular ass teeth
-said boyfriend gnaws on mc’s forearm ineffectually for like. minutes.
-mc promises to find his shit tier vampire bf blood and goes to commit murder about it
-movie ends with mc strongly implied to have hallucinated the vampire bf by showing a plot significant guitar in his jail cell, which I guess he smuggled into the jail in a way that is never explained, and that also I don’t believe anyone ever actually plays during the runtime but ALSO the vampire bf gets an extended sequence with his own father, I’m talking like 20 mins of closure, directly contradicting the hallucination ending for mc
-fail vampire ends the movie by climbing into a trash can. I’m not joking. he climbs into a trash can and the last shot we see is him pulling the lid on top of himself
-none of the main characters’ actors showed up on the red carpet to promote the movie so all promo for it is just the side character actors awkwardly trying to say “uh, I wasn’t in any of the porn scenes actually” to the interviewer
In the aftermath of my mother’s death, I was terrified that grief albums would change for me. I was sure that they would unlock some kind of new pain and become unlistenable. Specifically, I was afraid of Carrie & Lowell making me cry, because it’s always been one of my favorite albums and despite the subject matter (or maybe because of it? unclear) I associate it with life, and joy, and the insane natural beauty I was surrounded by all through college and still live in now. I love my city with an almost religious fervor. Carrie & Lowell has Tryon and my campus and the gorge and sitting in the sun with my friends at the pavilion in it.
Turns out I was wrong to worry, because Carrie & Lowell doesn’t have my mother’s death in it. It has Sufjan’s mother’s death in it, and to quote CSH (another college favorite) my pain is my own, etc. It’s still a positive album for me. What DOES have my mother’s death in it is Folklore by Taylor Swift, because that’s what I was listening to at the time.
All of this is to say: be careful what you listen to when someone is dying, because that’s (probably) where the grief is going to live.
you know I don’t think it’s quite as much of a contradiction as people thought that right wing people like rebel music. like the whole rage against the machine or green day or whatever bands. we made a huge deal of the ironic clash back in like 2018, but… the current right wing are edgelords. their entire politics is about going against whatever anyone tells them to do. so sure, the exact messaging of antiestablishment music is different than their own aims, but the emotional core is something they resonate with. and that’s often how people engage with music. they don’t care about the specifics. they like the emotion, and that’s what they remember. so, clockwork orange type stuff. haha. 😔
I think more people would benefit from learning about roman and medieval history. my main takeaway from learning more about these times has been the realization that modern life is not actually uniquely horrible or wonderful. it's all been pretty much the same, when looked at from the perspective of the most zoomed out view possible. this is pretty much the opposite of what much of my traditional education taught me. there are obviously reasons for why it did so, both valid (in my opinion) and invalid (in my opinion)
but yeah if you want to learn about the black death, the great courses company has some pretty good lectures! and for roman history mary beard is very solid