#yompthoria talks

[yompthoria]

Tagged by @princeofmotherfuckery here.

Last songs I listened to + songs I've listened to a lot lately + also songs I thought about and remembered during the process of rounding up the recent listens because why not actually:

"Rhinestone Eyes" — Gorillaz

"The Tower" — from the Nier: Automata soundtrack

"Batsu Forever" + "The Fortress" + "Status" — Machine Girl

"Hello Meow" — Squarepusher

"Faith in Strangers" — Andy Stott

"Mouthbreath-r" — Iglooghost

"Butcher Vanity" — Flavor Foley

"RUINOUS INTNT" + "Let Me Out"— from Corru.Observer

"Rodl Glide" + "D.I.S." + "World Outside" + "The Station" — Oneohtrix Point Never

"Haunted Casio" + "Pure Data" + "Satan 66" — The Buttress

"Fire Jewels" — Adam Neely + Ben Levin + Fire Jewels

"Phone Marrow" — Flesh Simulator

"Rubberband" — Big Fun

"Forever War" — Clipping

"Like A Pen" — The Knife

"Stunt Double" — Ho99o9

"Earth Intruders" + — Björk

"Autoimmune" + "Self-Regulating System" + "No Natural Order" — Pharmakon

"Drone Bomb Me" — ANOHNI

"Tear Gas" + "The Orchard (In Motion)" + "Urgency" — from 1000xRESIST

"Mess On A Mission" — Liars

"Bebin" — Sevdaliza

"Sacrifice (Death Grips Remix)" — Björk

"OLD STORIES" — Kevin Penkin

Music For Bondage Performance 2 (the whole album, as a very soothing mental environment for calming down and getting ready to sleep) — Merzbow

Going through all this music makes me want to talk in detail about the music so much but I don't really have time for that right now.

Favorite color: I am a complete freak about anything green, especially anything that is chartreuse, lime, or olive. I used to not connect as much with like, kelly green, but it's been inevitably growing on me, especially as my affinity for rich jewel-tone emerald green grows. I am also deeply fond of red. I like super clashy, jarring red-green color combinations......it tastes zingy like Tajin in my head.

Currently watching: I forget what I'm currently watching......... I finished watching season one of The Summer Hikaru Died relatively recently. I tried to start watching Sayonara Zetsubou Sensei but was thwarted by being unable to access more episodes. I have Haibane Renmei on my watchlist. Some friends turned me on to Gundam 76. I watch Portlandia and Cunk on Earth every so often. It occurred to me recently that I totally forgot to finish watching Twin Peaks of all things in a way that is genuinely shocking to me and this problem begs to be fixed. I may reluctantly leave Killing Eve unfinished but still might stick with it through its infamous final season. Most of what I've been watching lately is niche little movies. I play Subnautica for a while every so often as my current escape to creatureland*.

*also see: Rain World, Scavengers Reign

*I should rewatch Scavengers Reign...

Currently reading: I've been reading the last third of Cyteen by CJ Cherryh but I've been reading it for ages.....I will probably need to backtrack a bit to regain context the next time I return to it. The main thing I've been reading is Becoming Noise Music by Stephen Graham and a few other things here and there. Some of the miscellaneous here and there stuff is philosophical, academic, or theory focused, while other stuff is like, particularly unhinged fiction. I have the book version of Paprika, the republished version of There Is No Antimemetics Division, and lots of books in the CJ Cherry Foreigner series on my reading list. I also casually keep up with various webcomics and the work-in-progress webnovel/illustrated novel Syn7ropy.

Current obsession: The concept of phantom sensations and how they happen, the concept of neuromancing and neural interfacing, uncanny architectural structures, caves.

Currently working on: My extended zine project Existential Torso Compilation, some collaborative projects, some art business related projects, and A CSS/HTML-heavy Fanfiction That I Have and Will Probably Continue To Reference Here Without Directly Naming It. I'm a bit creatively blocked on ETC because of some emotional baggage type things around themes in it hitting a little unexpectedly too close to home on some things and needing to take time to process those things separately for a while.

Last search query: "Endothrix" and "Oenothera", because spellcheck saw the Oneohtrix in Oneohtrix Point Never as a misspelling and suggested those two really intriguing words as corrections and I needed to know with all my heart what they were. They're a parasitic fungus that colonizes the inside of hair cuticles and a genus of plants, respectively. I guess this is the part where I tag other people who maybe potentially will be interested but who are by no means obligated to also do one of these: @3-frogs-in-a-suit @drakonishe @blueviola-rebloghub

[yompthoria]

Sometimes all you need to do to heal your soul a little is to listen to an hour and a half of gamelan music while your sleepy bearded dragon falls asleep on your chest and soaks up your body heat, and slowly let yourself become calm and sleepy with the creature.

[yompthoria]

I'm reading A Masterpiece In Disarray: An Oral History of David Lynch's Dune, and some of the things I'm learning are REALLY amusing/interesting to me.

David Lynch beefed with HR Giger over the design for the chestburster from Alien because he thought that Giger took too much inspiration from the Eraserhead baby when designing it. This led to Lynch totally excluding Giger from his adaptation of Dune, even though Giger was famously involved in making very unique and cool concept art for the Jodorowsky version of Dune that imploded. Giger, when asked about this beef, basically commented: "He really loves his baby."

He really loves his baby.... he loves it. He protecc the baby.

Val Kilmer was originally totally set to play Paul Atreides and was in the role pretty deep into pre-production, but then various people, including the film's producer Raffaella DeLaurentiis, started having doubts, so they scouted for alternatives. This is when Kyle Maclachlan, who was initially just a small-scale, relatively unknown theater actor, but who was absolutely the biggest Dune fanboy ever, came into the picture, stumbling into the role as a coveted sudden recast.

The thing about Lynch's casting style for Dune was that he was super vibes based, putting faith in his intuition and his casting director's pipeline and not doing extensive auditions or readings when he met his prospective cast in person, instead focusing on talking to them to see if he connected with them personally and could work with/direct them. And it just so happened that he really hit it off with Kyle Maclachlan this way! In addition to Mclachlan having a distinctly different vibe from Kilmer that people thought served the vibe of Paul Atreides better, this rapport really cinched the deal on the recasting.

Friendship ended with Val Kilmer, Kyle Maclachlan is now my best friend Paul Atreides.

Some people quoted in the oral history speculated that Lynch cast Maclachlan because the two of them were exactly alike (from a similar background with a similar disposition) and even visually looked the same, like they were cousins or something, in a way that felt comfortingly familiar to Lynch. The author of the book, Max Evry, joked to one of the rejected possible Pauls, (paraphrasing from memory) "Do you think David Lynch would have picked you for the role if you looked more like him?" The actor he was talking to seemed to have a different theory, related to him not getting to actually show off his acting in person, but didn't entirely dismiss the question.

Some people think the idea of David Lynch casting Kyle Maclachlan due to them being clones of each other is totally bogus or greatly exaggerated. This is extremely valid and non-sensationalistic. The two generally have distinct differences despite their similarities. The clone-casting theory is still extremely amusing to me in concept, though, because it's so conspiracy-board-able and whimsical in a freudian pop psychology way. I think I can understand why some people are so into the Lynch-clone theory. Like, all you need to do is find one picture where Lynch and Maclachlan look alike, and then you can just vibe-check yourself with it over and over again until you're raving like Alex Jones. I did this to myself inside a compartmentalized area of my psyche as a thought exercise and it was pretty fun.

The fun thing about the format of the book is that as an oral history, the bulk of it is interviews with the cast and crew and people adjacent to it, and it reads very much like the transcript of a very interview driven documentary that cuts between different interviews and juxtaposes contradictory opinions/perspectives. So, sometimes it's like certain people are arguing with each other from totally different rooms.

I'm still reading this book. Perhaps I shall return later with more liveblogging.

[yompthoria]

My deep dark secret (which I first disclosed as a comment on a post somewhere, and now feels less like a deep dark secret and more like something I should actually whip out at parties) is that I like to mentally play around with the idea of experimenting with ne/nem/ner pronouns but don't feel socially comfortable taking full ownership of that even in spaces that are amenable to this concept, so instead I am worldbuilding a story universe in which there are sentient plants, and entities that speak tend to refer to those plant people with ne/nem pronouns. My doofenshmirtz plan is to influence society with infomemetics and multimedia literature and then leap out from behind the curtains being like, "Behold, it is I, ne/nem, author of the plant neopronoun story. Tell me, has your subjective experience with encountering and using certain plant pronouns gotten a little easier? Yes? Ah, do I have some fun next steps for you!"