Hm, I would say the absolute bottom part of the stomach, like from the 5 to 7 o'clock positions, has firmed up but there’s still some looseness 4-5 and 7-8.
Thinking about how one of the weirder things of the last arc is that all my old plotlines regarding skills I developed in childhood became suddenly relevant to my journey again, remembering that I took flying lessons for several years
Like, when I was in tenth grade I started getting into reading about the history of psychedelics, not even “far out, man” stuff but about moves to use them to seriously grapple with consciousness – the Good Friday Experiment, early psychiatric use of LSD and “psychonauts”, Timothy Leary’s “circuit” model of consciousness all the way up to Shulgin’s circle, reading Erowid/The Lycaeum trip reports every day before I had ever smoked pot or drank alcohol.
Above all “metaprogramming”, the idea of using “entheogens” to reach a state where you could tinker with your self.
In the late ‘90s, long before anyone’d heard of Covid, one of my hyperfixations was “how you can use altered, depersonalized mental states to re-edit your personality”, and then I did some shrooms and acid in college, enough to get used to operating in such a state, and then I just set that one aside for decades
Oh, and the part where I learned American cultural history in enough detail I was able to recognize and predict a paradigm shift in progress – and that i could lean back relieved “no, this isn’t what a successful paradigm shift looks like anymore, this is what a misfire looks like” – that one too
The first transcontinental railroad ran to San Francisco, and when a southern route was built the obvious western terminus was San Diego, but San Francisco elites feared the growth of another California power center so they pulled strings to get it redirected to Los Angeles, which was originally the agricultural lands feeding a Spanish mission and had no natural port. (They first built long piers around Malibu and then an artificial breakwater-protected harbor down by Long Beach.)
Then in 1892, the city was found to sit atop a major oil field and a drilling boom ensued, then in WWI the existence of a large labor force without strong left-labor organization like elsewhere on the west coast and in coastal shipping range of the wood-producing Pacific Northwest made it ideal to spin up a military aircraft industry.
Then after WWI, the booming Mediterranean-climate city drew a lot of immigrants from post-Ottoman lands as their national restructurings wrang out, then the motion picture industry relocated there from upstate New York for the weather and to get distance from Thomas Edison’s IP-enforcing goons, then in WWII that defense aerospace industry got even bigger, carrying the region through the Cold War.
But so why there specifically is that downtown (which was not particularly central to the city since its auto-oriented postwar expansion) is on the banks of the seasonal Los Angeles River, which irrigated the land to grow crops for the mission at the northern mouth of the San Fernando Valley.
I am a wanker who creamed themself at “Rutherford Road” and can sympathise with naming new towns after classical locations, as confusing and disappointing as it is to hear Americans talk about them and realise they’re just on about someplace on the East Coast… but Troy?! my god what the fuck did you have against that place?
I don’t even resent our English places names too much, I bet their Newcastle and Ipswich are shit too and we can bond, though obvious Scottish ones are better.
But my god if you’re going to go full wanker, thing about the associations. Did you want that town to suffer? Did they serve you bad food?
Someone in charge of establishing the Military District, the part of upstate New York given to Revolutionary War veterans, liked classical Greece. That’s where Seneca and Attica and Ithaca and Utica come from.
FLCLick Noise is a book published in 2010 that is a deep dive into the production of and creative influences that went into the 2000 anime FLCL by Studio GAINAX. Framed as a conversation between FLCL director and series lead Kazuya Tsurumaki, and FLCL character designer Yoshiyuki Sadamoto, the two creatives watch the show together and record their thoughts episode-by-episode, alongside a prologue and a “bonus track”. It is in Japanese, with primarily text and screenshots from the show for use as conversational reference, though there is some art as well (almost all of which is available elsewhere).
FLCL is pretty infamous as a show for its free-wheeling compositional style and loose production process; everyone involved was able to throw in visual ideas, dialogue, plot concepts, and so on. Additionally, FLCL slots pretty clearly into GAINAX’s “Otaku commentary” oeuvre - it is very much anime, *extremely* anime, it would be ludicrous to suggest otherwise; but in addition to being anime it was also a vehicle for the creative team to put in ideas and influences that they believed the anime industry was not utilizing at the time, such as its rock-album concept soundtrack or its josei/seinen manga inspired-character designs.
It is this backdrop that makes a book like FLCLick Noise simultaneously more valuable for understanding FLCL than most other shows, and even possible to exist in the first place. Much of it is fun asides, many of the creative decisions are personal whims, but there is so much to those whims that it is worth reading a book about them. If you want to answer the question “why does FLCL exist the way that it does”, this book will answer that question in more detail than any other source will.
Alas this is a complex and large book - I will aim to translate it someday, but I cannot guarantee neither the timeline nor the quality of that translation as I am by no means a professional in that regard. If you want to get a sample of what the book contains, anime-youtuber-extraordinaire Hazel quasi-coincidentally just released a video essay on FLCL that has an entire section on this book and its contents (I learned of this book from her tweeting about it during research for the video, so the timeline is not pure kismet). If you want the highlights and so much more, it is an amazing video. Meanwhile, I do hope to post a “raw text” version of the different sections somewhat soon, to assist those who do want to read it themselves and would find that would help with the translation.
As always, I hope this is a valuable addition to the ‘akashic record’ of 90’s-era anime history, and gives something special to the FLCL-heads out there like me.
(I’ll tag @flclarchives for the two-for-one this week, if they don’t mind! And I apologize for the scan quality here - I wanted to do it non-destructively, as this is not a large print run book, which meant my typical flatbed was a no go and the new overhead setup I used was a comedy of errors. Fortunately this is a book about reading text, and despite the errors it’s all perfectly readable.)
When you see a really good post but there’s some form of guilt tripping to reblog it added on at the end
(ID: A screenshot of Marge from the Simpsons looking dismally at the camera with one arm raised. A caption underneath her reads “It’s true, but I’m not reblogging it.” End ID)
Me:overall agrees with and is interested in post
Post: “But I bet you’re just gonna skip past this bc you don’t care 😒”
Prior to the mid 1990s, RAM was the most expensive component of a personal computer, to the point that the RAM could easily cost more than the whole rest of the computer put together. Businesses that provided computers in their offices would routinely solder the RAM chips to the motherboards in order to prevent tech-savvy employees from pilfering the RAM and walking out the door with thousands of dollars worth of easily concealable computer chips in their pockets. There was literally a thriving black market for stolen RAM.
I bring this up both as a fun bit of historical trivia, and as a critical piece of cultural context for understanding first-wave literary cyberpunk. From a modern perspective, the genre’s preoccupation with ultra-valuable black market computer chips as a plot device might look like more evidence that the people writing this stuff had never actually used a computer in their lives (which was often true) – but no: at the time, that’s genuinely how it worked!
living in the suburbs is like mall. Movies. Mall again. Go to target. Go to gamestop. Back to the mall. Barnes and noble. Back to the mall. Chili’s. Back to the mall. Eat hot chip. Lie. And I’m SICK of it!!!!!
I’m sorry god please forgive me I would give anything to go to Barnes and noble and then dinner at Chili’s with a lava mountain cake please lord take me back I’ll never complain again
had a dream that twitter started selling little subscription pronoun markers to put next to the blue checkmarks and if you didn’t buy one elon musk would personally assign you a gender and add it to your account
in my sophomore year of college this guy made these items which quickly became a craze across campus. i myself bought one of his sweaters, which says “GOOD AND DEAD” across the chest and “ARM PAIN” along the sleeves. he showed up at 11 pm on a bicycle to deliver the goods in the dead of winter, wearing a metal t-shirt tucked into khakis. his facebook screen name is an indecipherable series of symbols. i have no authentic way to credit him but i want to share his art with you.
