what i'm reading§

Hater Week @ Aftermath§

I've been enjoying Aftermath's style of blogs. It's just opinions and hobbyposting and hating on billionaires. It's like a good version Twitter.

Derrick McCormack§

The title "Sh*thole Oprey" made me check out this episode of the WAKE ISLAND podcast, and in the course of the conversation I realized I've heard of Derrick McCormack before and I've had Castle Faggot bookmarked for years.

Dark Rides§

A quaint compendium of unsettling Canadian countryside vignettes. Derrick gets his balls shocked for conversion therapy. Derrick's friend lights herself on fire with homemade fireworks they'd been selling on the road. Derrick knocks a coworker's lights out and presumably rapes him. They all have the same dry literary tone that relies on unfolding details and juxtopositions for tension.

The Show That Smells§

Smells couldn't be more of a 180 from Dark Rides. It's a fever dream of a bad 80s horror B-Movie: foppish fashionista vampires descend with a dark agenda upon a circus, and in putting their plot in motion, they make a Faustian bargain with American country singer Jimmie Rodgers. The aforementioned Shithole Oprey is an art book building on this concept, presumably creating a Shithole Oprey Cinematic Universe.

what i'm listening to§

Music, Fashion, Film (2026)§

Play-Mobil Sonic Youth

what i'm watching§

The Moment (2026) (spoilers)§

"I can tell you've not been honoring your Saturn Return."

I started out hating it, then I liked then, then I was blown away, then I hated it again.

D.C.F§

The "Deconstructed Concert Film" is a doomed genre. The Moment suffers all the same issues as another D.C.F, The Nowhere Inn (2020). They even use the same trope: a fan in a meet-and-greet gets hysterical, cries: "your music saved my life!"

These scenes are the problem in a nutshell. The talent is confronted with twin pressures-- the histrionics of the fan and the managerial need to keep the line moving. They are repulsed by, empathetic to, and pity the fan. The gulf between fan and star is impassable, and the point: the fan is not invested in the person of the star, but in the commodity. Fanaticism is financial leverage.

As Jaime Brooks has discussed^[1], the confessional turn in pop music is equal parts democratization via consumer tech, cultural zeitgeist, and industrial exploitation. On the industrial side of things, the century-old interlocking mechanism of promoter release and tabloid scoop keep The Spectacle going, irrespective of the individual star. The talent-fanatic duplex flow is independent of either, and the hit parade will march straight over each of them.

The star senses her fungibility, and wants simultaneously to expose the industrial relation and individuate herself from it.

The D.C.F. is an attempt at individuation through authenticity. But no matter how mundane your real-life problems are, making a movie about it is not a method accessible to normal people. There is only mythologization. And The Moment and The Nowhere Inn are aware this. That's why they lean into an amalgam of the authentic and the fabricated, and even the surreal in Nowhere Inn (as facile and ineffective it is). But that creates another problem: what are we watching for?

The point is that a concert film is a status marker. It marks an artist's graduation into a certain network of movers and shakers. The D.C.F. lets those inclined mark that notch in their belt without having to feel like they 'sold out'. The DCF probably ends of costing way more than just doing a regular concert film, anyway.

Dead Pop Stars§

As for the undercurrent of death in the film, there's a massive SOPHIE-shaped hole. On one hand, it would be depraved to keep milking her death. Like P-Diddy singing "Every Breath You take" about the man he (possibly) whacked. The posthumous album was bad enough. The homages . Not to pile on St. Vincent, she should've kept SOPHIE's name out of her mouth for the All Born Screaming cycle.

The scene were Charli's manager looks at a picture of Princess Diana and becomes paranoid Charli's died is so contrived that it's screaming for you to mentally substitute SOPHIE's face in the frame. Charli XCX was put on her current trajectory by "Vroom Vroom", and it feels like she has spent the years since SOPHIE's death pulling aggressively away from vision of the future SOPHIE engendered in the culture.

The Moment opened my eyes to how hard it is being really fucking rich and famous and having to deal with people that don't do everything you want 'the moment' (haha) you want it.

The Moment: Mumblecore Melania?

KOTH Season 3 is some creepypasta shit§

Why is King of the Hill season 3 suffused with so much darkness. I accidentally skipped over it at first, and the adjacent seasons don't have a fraction of its misery. It opens with violent, fiery death of Luanne's long-term boyfriend. The cast spends the rambling episode ruminating on death and grieving.

The episode where Bobby experiences his first breakup not only gives us that classic frame of abject misery, but also a performance from the voice actor that's simultaneously gut-wrenching and cringe-inducing from the second hand embarrassment. It's more emotion than you'll see in most films.

The cold open of the Christmas episode is just Bill sobbing while everyone stares silently. It's some creepy pasta shit.

what i'm working on§

ummmmmm§

Secerts

something i liked§

Detokenization Bath§

LLM2HUMAN CLINIC is a site offering bodies for LLMs to inhabit, with a functioning bitcoin wallet address ostensibly for a rouge agent to accidentally dump money into.

I also like that you can fax them.

something i hated§

the dr will zoom you now§

I can't find anywhere that will do an in-person eye exam. They all want me to go to an empty room with a screen and have an optometrist do my exam. What the fuck.

a picture:§

skepticat inquirer§

This random tiger cartoon from an issue of the Skeptical Inquirer. I don't remember what the context was.