the message in the bottle is the booze

I ... uh ...

If you haven't watched this, I highly recommend it. Not because it's good, but because it's hilarious. I especially recommend watching it while live chatting with a friend who shares a love for terrible but bonkers TV.

The tone of the entire series, episode to episode, scene to scene, is non-stop DRUMS! CHOIR! PRIMAL SCREAM!

I watched it expecting something like Castlevania because it's done by the same animation studio, but it has absolutely no subtlety or self-restraint. Castlevania could be entertainingly extra too, but it also had things like characterization and storytelling. They both have a penchant for "edginess" but Castlevania's edgy moments are more earned.

I think it could have been an actual good show if it was longer. There was simply no time at all to make us care about the characters and their conflicts. As it was, it was just crammed full of:

(a) exposition

(b) more exposition

(c) seriously is the exposition over

(d) tragic backstories (told though more exposition)

(e) the female gaze

(f) tropes turned up to 11

( In case you don't want to be spoiled for the, uh, plot, I'm putting my favorite moments behind a cut. They're not super-spoilery, because I'm keeping details vague, but I dunno you. )

I actually hope there will be fanfiction for this series. The thing is, we know almost nothing about most of the characters. We see very, very little of their lives and their relationships outside of the (very compressed) events in the series. There's a lot of room for for fun.

P.S. Hermes looks like a penis.

Oh no, I've reached the end of the Ao3 tag.

I've determined that exactly 13% of the fics in it are readable. That's not a bad ratio, tbh, but somehow, ... knowing the number just makes it seem like there are fewer possibilities, like the world is a bit smaller...

Every year, I get nostalgic for the days of fandom past - when I had an active reading page full of people that I knew, when I regularly talked to friends on chat, and so on.

Over the years most of my online friends have drifted away, even really good ones. Some of that is my fault. I have two that I still talk to regularly - we switched to Discord, but just hang out in private.

I miss specific people. But I also want to make new friends? The problem is, I'm not really a fandom content creator. I never have been. Whatever creative energies I have - which isn't much these days, after working on the dissertation - generally end up being shifted into original characters and worldbuilding for stories I just haven't got the energy to write.

I'm also not like, super into any one fandom. So there's really no reason for people to find me, follow me, talk to me ... I'm orbiting around fandom and kind of feeling like an outsider all the time.

So how do you meet people? I'm trying to be more active here, but I think I'm missing real-time communication - you know, chat and IM. I know a lot of people hang out on Discord these days. Any good servers that you would recommend?

(Also, people who make friends on Tumblr are like, alchemists or something.)

I can rant all day about how Tumblr ruined fandom, but right now I'm annoyed at a specific thing:

People misusing tags to get attention for their stupid, uninteresting blogs.

I'm talking about when someone posts a vague "AU idea" or "imagine" that doesn't have anything to do with a particular fandom, and they tag it with every popular fandom and pairing they can think of to get the most views. For some tags I'm monitoring, there is more of this bullshit than actual relevant content.

And people like and reblog, validating the behavior. Meanwhile I'm sitting on my hands even though I just want to reply, "STOP DOING THIS, UGH YOU ARE THE WORST."

Tumblr incentivizes this bullshit because blogging on Tumblr, unless you already have a social circle, is like posting into a black hole. You have to catch the attention of people through tagging in order to build followers. And the social currency is likes and reblogs, not discussions. So you can understand why people do it.

This is one of the ways I think that the LJ model is much better. Sure, I don't have many active followers, and it's a lot slower than it was back in the glory days, but there are some people who will read this. Someone might even comment, and it will be a name I recognize, rather than an anonymous person who just like my post because it had a certain keyword in it. I don't need to collect huge numbers of notes in order to feel like I'm connecting with people.

I decided to watch Star Trek a few days ago. I haven't watched much of it since I was a kid, and if there's one thing that makes me giggle madly, it's science fiction writers who can imagine faster-than-light travel but not women holding a higher position than secretary.

It's been great fun.



No comment on this, though.

(Icon strangely appropriate both for Star Trek and Doctor Who! Oh man, Haruka needs a space ship.)

I think in the hands of a very talented author the basic world and characters she's created could have had a certain amount of staying power - maybe not Odyssey-like but Middle Earth standard.

-- A commenter on fanficrants, in a discussion about the "epic" worldbuilding in the Anita Blake vampire porn series, here.

It took so little time for me to give up on the Antique Bakery anime. One minute and eleven seconds, to be exact.

For those of you who aren't familiar with the original manga, it's a charming series about four men who work in a pastry shop in Japan: the owner, who mysteriously detests sweet food; the homosexual pastry chef who has a mile-long trail of broken hearts behind him; the apprentice, a former boxer who had to quit boxing due to injury; and finally, the owner's manservant, who works as a waiter because he isn't good at anything else.

It's written by Yoshinaga Fumi, who turns almost everything into gold with her delicate touch.

The first thing that I noticed about the anime is that the art is bad. On top of it being strikingly bad, it doesn't bear any resemblance to Yoshinaga's style at all. It took me a moment to realize that the guy having a nightmare-slash flashback on the couch is supposed to be one of the main characters.

When I realized that it was Tachibana on the couch, reliving his most painful memory, at one minute and eleven seconds in -- that was when I gave up. I knew that they had missed the point. I could image the writers going, "Hey, these emotional conflicts are too subtle and nuanced. What we really need is some more melodrama and some tiny violins!"

I kept watching a little while longer to see just how bad it could be. There was nothing as horrible as the beginning, but even the scenes that were copied directly from the manga seemed off. There are a lot of reasons why I thought they were off, but it's late, and what it boils down to is that even in its best moments the anime is only a pale imitation of the manga; it adds nothing worthwhile to the experience of the story.

In summary: Tiny violins are too crunchy and do not go good with cake.