homemade in Northern Ireland

Japan eats your culture and shits cute

Oh man that reminds me of the most meta- thing I’ve ever seen.

0) World War II happened.

1) In postwar Japanese pop culture, “thinly or completely unveiled reference to nuclear explosion” is rivaled in thematic popularity only by “thinly or completely unveiled alternate-WWII in which Japan wins and is totally the good guys”.

Actually I’m almost afraid they finally got over this in the late-90s with the passing of a generation. I liked that, something somber and elegaic in the culture that wasn’t pure fanservice or third-generation commercial ripoffs. Anno and Miyazaki and remember when Final Fantasy had Cyan and the ghost train instead of a bunch of fucking EZ-Bake popstars?

2) Okay so there was this recent trend, they call “moe anthropomorphism” to represent things and concepts as cute girls, because obviously, Japan. It was particularly popular in terms of military hardware, because obviously, Japan.

3) Manga, etc., etc., so comics are a big thing in Japan, and part of the farm team for that is working on basically fanfic of established properties, they call it doujin, and like all fanfic, like most pulp, a lot of time it’s only good for the sex. Which is often violent and involves 13 year old girls, because obviously, humanity.

OKAY

4) So 1) and 2) combine to create Strike Witches - it was this series about a school/force of teenage girls representing various planes from all the nations of WWII, like they strap on these leg-things to fly around, and because they’re all allied together against an alien force literally representing militarism and war descending on the world even though no one particularly wants this militarism and war oh no, they’re just all brave and innocent warriors, and they might have to put on these leg things and fight the aliens at any time, they never wear pants so you can see their panties all the time, because obviously, Japan.

5) so 4) and 3)  combine to make a hentai (“pervy”) doujin of Strike Witches. Which I read, to masturbate to. The first twenty pages of this doujin is mostly lesbian dominance, all of the girls breaking down and raping one of the more innocent characters, who was the Japanese one and I think a Mitsubishi Zero?

6) and then 5) combines with 1) again, which was already baked in, and the last 8 or so pages are the apocalyptic showdown with the aliens as seen from the Zero’s eyes. The American and British girls are out of the picture, dismissed in one panel. The French and Italian girls have surrendered and slunk away because they’re pussies.

The French and Italian girls have surrendered and slunk away because they’re pussies, but the two German girls went boldly into battle and lie bloodied and dying on the ground, this is the thing.

And so finally, the Japanese girl is fighting alone. She’s scared, she’s meek - she was the natural submissive for the first 20 pages, getting hazed by all the older nations^H^H^H^H^H^H^H girls but now it’s just her, now it’s her turn to prove her honor, and she jets out shrieking her vengeance, dodging alien missiles, coming straight out of the page…

And the next page is imitation newsprint, with a period photo-offset litho as the header. It’s an alien aircraft carrier, obviously American in design, with an exhaust trail streaking into one side of the island and a giant explosion blossoming out of the other.

And THAT is the most meta- thing I’ve ever seen.

(UPDATE for incoming 9/15/16: Takotsuboya’s “Witch-tachi no No-Pantsu”

)

Guess I got some of the details wrong. But still!

(I dunno, that strike might be worse than an island strike. US carriers famously didn’t have armored decks [UK ones did] so a strike in the right place could go through to the hangar deck and set off the magazines. Especially on escort carriers, which this looks like.)

[Oh lookit me, adding paragraphs to prove I know stuff. I’m treading on dangerous ground, because Knowing Stuff About World War II is one of the major events on the Knowing Stuff circuit.]

Met and talked to a girl from New Zealand. Been hearing a lot of Commonwealth accents around Echo Park, wonder if it’s the exchange rate or something.

Anyway, we talked about our countries and she talked proudly about how New Zealand was so fucking harsh on itself for messing with the Maori, and of course she was politely appalled at America. And Australia, and England.

It’s like look New Zealand is literally the least ethnically cleansed country in the world, if you set the bar above that you’re asking to be disappointed.

Kitchen Sync - Rhythmatic Rebellion

I was on a happy hardcore listserve with Kitchen Sync back in the day, Spree and Muppetfucker calling freeform “Kenneth” and Entropy with his hippie bisupremacist crap. AC Slater got his start there, he had a cousin who DJed as Michael Knight and then they had a friend top them by becoming DJ Tanner.

Vinylgroover - Rave Party

I had this one rated as ** in iTunes, that’s maybe one star too low. It’s not terrible, it’s just okay but embarrassing. I dunno, that’s a thing about being a dance genre with lyrics but no sexual identity - at least a third of the narrative concepts are “I am on ecstasy”, and another third are “I am at a rave”.

Plus fuck, that lead-in is literally half the track.

Man, I remember when raver girls wore more pants than usual.

DJ Slam - Into The Night

Hey kids, did you know that before it was backed by 4/4 kickdrums, happy hardcore was backed by breakbeats? Did you know that back in the day techno songs were made with like, machines, that some engineers diagrammed up somewhere and had people wire by hand, and you had to kind of rig up or punch in lighted buttons on the front like old futures? Did you know that Fairlight, which is like mithril in cyberpunk, was a sampler and synthesizer company?

I took a course in college, “Learning Music Theory Through Digital Music Technology”. I came in a drummer and learned no music theory. The teacher was the original tester of the first Moog. He was kind of a space case and the lectures were basically whatever minutes of him going off on tangents while his assistant tried to make the computer stop crashing. The real prize of the thing was keycard access* to a lab with a rack full of MOTU crap and a Mac with ReBirth (that they actually paid for, with money!) and a sequencer that system crashed basically once a night.

* that you had to sign up for in 2 hour blocks such that I had like 2 AM on Tuesdays at one point

I’m not actually that old, it was more like I did this like the exact year it all became obsolete.

wentdog:

muppetpants:

Okay, this made me lose my shit a little.

AUTOMATIC REBLOG

officialmillionaires:

MILLIONAIRES #igetaroundtour

Is it just me, or since Dani left have Melissa and Allison slimmed down and shifted their look to the point where they have the exact same balance of appearance with 2 people that they had with 3?

1981 - 2011

134 launches, 133 orbit inserts, 132 landings.

Spacecraft are one of the only things that can make me cry. On the other hand, they make me cry very reliably.

fuckyeahspaceexploration:

Space shuttle in orbit

So here’s something I learned yesterday. You know how astronaut transmissions traditionally start with “Houston…”? Houston is CAPCOM’s radio call sign. NASA’s idea was that CAPCOM would be the only node of communication between mission control and the spacecraft. And CAPCOM wasn’t an engineer, he was an astronaut, usually one of the backup crew.

So here’s something I learned a few weeks ago. There was an official government report on Columbia’s final mission. Among the reports was that there were multiple individuals and teams on the ground who noticed the foam strike on the heat tiles and agitated very strongly about it. However, it was never brought up in any transmission because NASA concluded there was nothing that could be done about it.

Eh, the new Submarines…

it’s more of the Submarines and if it doesn’t have the pathos it’s maybe better than the Submarines when they didn’t have the pathos but didn’t know how to synthesize themselves instead?

But the Fire video is so goddamned patronizing, and it’s not like they weren’t music for the CW already.

Update 1 minute after the fact:

distributed in the US by WMG

wikipedia: by Nettwerk

Nettwerk:  We build successful artist brands by developing true partnerships with artists.

// From launching the careers of Sarah McLachlan, Skinny Puppy and Coldplay, to seeking out today’s most talented artists like Old Crow Medicine Show, The Weepies and Great Lake Swimmers, we have released over 400 albums that have amassed worldwide sales in excess of 100 million albums.//

//  On April 12th, Walt Disney Records released the soundtrack to the Disney Channel Original Movie ‘Lemonade Mouth’, featuring songs performed by Nettwerk-managed artist Bridgit Mendler and the rest of the cast of the movie. The soundtrack debuted at #4 on the Billboard 200 Chart after scanning over 69,000 units in its second week of release. The album fast tracked its way to No. 1 on Billboard’s Soundtrack and Children’s Music charts, and No. 1 on the iTunes Soundtrack chart and No. 4 on the Album Overall chart. Watch Lemonade Mouth on Youtube and Vevo! //

// Ladytron //  BT // Matt Serletic // Chromeo //

I hear the '90s are back it is maybe time for the '90s to be back but i mean really it’s time for the '90s to be back rather than redoing the '90s in the '10s

Codeine & Unknown - Natural High

Saw X-Men: First Class. Thoughts:

1) X-Factor (That was the British team on Muir Island, right?) meets Mad Men wouldn’t sound like a promising concept, guess I’d’ve been wrong. Let me know when they do one with Mojo and Spiral and Arcade and the Brood. That sentence started as a joke, but seriously let me know.

2) The campiest fucking Nazi sequences in a decade where Tarantino made a Nazsploitation movie.

3) I always wanted Magneto to use some metal type to imprint something on someone’s forehead. If I ever write an X-Men story, “Magneto fight in the print shop” is a given. Or maybe Rogue vs. Magneto or some way to give someone else the power, the dude’s just so goddamn dour.

4) The moments? Good. The connecting tissue between? Awkward. The expository dialogue? Terrible. Below actual 1962 X-Men comics level.

5) wow January Jones cannot put words together into speech the way humans put words together into speech

6) gay male gaze much? Maybe that’s a residue of the weird Britishness. Or maybe that’s how Emma Frost turned from a 14 year old’s idea of sexy to a 9 year old’s idea of sexy.

7) a world in which Nazi research discovers genetic particularities that yield mystic powers is obviously a world in which Germany wins WWII

7.5) oh yeah but I guess Captain America was also punching Hitler in the face

8) as I understand it, the sorting at inprocessing was actually the least forceful, most polite and manipulative part of concentration camp life

9) all in all, a decent job of doing something new and interesting while simultaneously maintaining canon and throwing in a bunch of fanservice touches. Best movie at this since Resident Evil: Apocalypse. (which not only made sense, but it made the existing canonical Resident Evil game plots make sense, which is an amazing accomplishment.) Basically ran subtext as text, with mixed results. Worth it.

10) it must be fun to be Kevin Bacon

Also: I don’t intend to see Green Lantern. Ryan Reynolds as Hal Jordan doesn’t make sense. Ryan Reynolds as Guy Gardner I would buy.

You know Guy Gardner in the early ‘90s when I read him (I think he had a yellow ring for a while?) was supposed to be a parody of an American? Or so says the internet? Which was hilarious, because from his name (his name!) to his speech to his leather jacket and his stupid bowl haircut he was the most obviously British comic book character I’ve ever read, like more so than Captain Britain.

So getting a motorcycle has improved my quality of life better than anything since 2005. All my excuses to not drive somewhere have been supplanted by excuses to drive somewhere. And pleasure drives! I do that now. Up into the hills I see amazing architecture that I wouldn’t even attempt in Dwarf Fortress. Like today I came across a house which starts at the curb with a six story elevator connected to a skybridge.

Today I was just fucking around and came across a house with a six story freestanding shaft and a skybridge, holy fucking shit holy fucking shit.

And all the hillside houses are like this, they’re not only the apex of WASP design as I met it in 1991 but it’s that crossed with the apex of avant-garde architecture as I met it in 1991.

So apparently the reward for selling out is owning a house which is the house you always dreamed of owning when you were 12 to 14, plus an unlimited supply of 23 year old girls bubbly on bubbly and coked on coke, plus recognition and free play within a scope limited only by how much you can pump into it.

So contrary and yet in consonance with what I was saying about the Submarines yesterday, selling out kinda rules?

Tiny Tot - Discoland (Raveland mix)

It’s probably because I’m awesome.

Also: I got a bunch of happy hardcore singles off a Hotline server (it was like post-FTP/pre-P2P for Macheads) back in the late ‘90s and I think it’s sweet and this is apparently the place and these are apparently the people I’ve been holding it for.