what i'm reading:
Blue Flag
Watching The Summer Hikaru Died has caused me to backslide emotionally into a desire to read tenderqueer BL slop instead of my usual diet of, like, Peter Sotos.
I returned to Blue Flag like a pacing tiger to a corner of its enclosure, seeking stimulation in familiar disappointments. Its strength is the circuitous conversations its teenagers have about their emotions: angst, yearning, being closeted, struggling with self-image, anxiety-- all couched in the unbearable tropes a corny high-school love triangle.
In an unearned anticlimax, the male leads end up together-- after a time skip. Blue Flag is densely introspective up to this point, then just glazes over a lot of tantalizing character development: how did the relationship develop in the context of the events of the manga?; what did their reunion look like?; and, most bafflingly, when did the protagonist go gay?
His gay yearning is so sublimated as to be homeopathic. In fact, the final chapter plays on this subtlety to pull off a gotcha!: we're lead to believe it's illustrated in the first-person from the lead male's perspective until he himself appears, revealing it's from the other guy's perspective, and in the final panel we see their clasped hands with conspicuously matching wedding bands.
At least tell us who tops.
what i'm listening to:
Friend - james K
And so are youwhat i'm watching:
Lightmare (2018) dir. Josh Drake
https://vimeo.com/607632458
This was my favorite of a series of DIY avant-guard 16mm films shown during a local film festival. I hate to be that guy, but the digital upload doesn't do justice to the in-person screening, with the full force of the theater sound system. It's ominous, disorientating, worldmaking.
what i'm playing
pedantle
Here's my opening play for pedantle:
- be
- the
- a
- to
"be" gets automatically conjugated to all its forms, so that pretty much gives you the framework of every sentence.
"the" and "a" start giving you an idea of if the article is about a thing or a concept.
"to" starts filling out prepositions, which gives you a feel for the flow of sentences.
I can figure out pedantle more reliably than I can cemantle, so after I finish pedantle I plug in whatever the solution was to start cemantle. It doesn't usually help.
what i'm working on:
OOP design patterns
trying to do something more complicated in ebitengine than making sprites bounce around is very difficult. While doing research I found Game Programming Patterns by Robert Nystrom, which is very accessible-- too accessible. I want to reinforce my delusional self-perception of being a "smart person" who can "learn things," so I decided I'd go one better and read Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software. So now I've read the introductions to both of them and none of the design patterns. I'm really smart.
something i liked:
his neck just did that on its own
TW: Offensive
I watched the footage over and over again. It's just beautiful. When was the last time we had this kind of high-fidelity footage of the blood evacuating a political goon's head? R. Budd Dwyer? Beautiful.
I'm not going to pretend to virtue signal: I crave violence on the policy/pundit stratum. And why am I supposed to care about 'the backlash'? Everything is already going to get worse. The powers that be are already bent toward extermination. That's out of my hands.
As much as I enjoy political violence from the sidelines, I'm not interested in contributing to the pain in the world. The only thing I can do is be kind and helpful to the people immediately accessible to me.
something i hated:
flesh dissimulator
flesh simulator adopted the cadence of a CIA asset to call for the state execution of a guy who brutally murdered a random woman for no reason. the whole situation is just stomach churning and sad, and on top of that it's upsetting to have this guy whom I otherwise respect hop on the squawking punditry grift to impart the lesson on us that... the U.S. justice system gives people too many chances? psyop behavior.
a picture: