I am a recreational Noticer. I love to Notice Things and Make Connections and Identify Patterns. This is one of my favorite activities and it requires me to behave in compulsively silly ways online.
In real life, this manifests itself by suddenly asking a coworker “so how long has your wife known about your mistress?” Because he stopped bringing in a packed lunch and I saw him scrubbing lipstick off his neck one day when he “went to the bank”
Just sitting in my chair, looking out the window at the side yard, seeing how great it looks, remembering how awful it once did, and appreciating how the difference is solely the result of literally hundreds of hours of my personal effort
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”
Just came out of a showing of Death to Smoochy. Audience participation for the howl scene, good stuff.
Weird that never became more of a cult movie. I think might be because it represented an apex of several movie trends that didn’t continue on past.
1. the transitional ‘90s urban plot, where American cities were still depicted as playgrounds for white ethnic crime but the plot was kinda about how they were becoming playgrounds for professionals. Get Shorty, Analyze This, The Sopranos
2. Robin Williams’ self-deconstructive period (One Hour Photo, etc.) After he suicided it turns out everyone had always treasured him, but post-Aladdin into the 2000s there was a growing consensus he had always been just a cocaine-sweaty narcissist hack.
3. The Nora Ephron adult romantic comedy revival. Towards the start there’s hints toward the ‘80s/‘90s backlash “jaded businessbitch thaws out and realizes what’s important (nurturing children)” plot but it turns into a neo-screwball tension-between-equals. Even more than The 40 Year Old Virgin - 3 years later as Apatow supplanted Ephron - Catherine Keener’s is a specifically 40something fuckability, and the movie’s refreshingly upfront that the reward for being a good man is eventually a guarded but mature relationship with someone people in your circle used as a toy when she was younger and tighter.
Also, it’s a pretty good example of a 5 (as vs. the standard 3) act plot structure.
“Environmental degradation resulting from trade in Ezo [old name of Hokkaido] cautions against the argument that commercial growth in early-modern Japan was confined to, as some suggest, a “total environment”. In the Tokugawa years, the Japanese did not set their collective sights exclusively on resources that lay within the traditional provinces or confine themselves to a “total environment,” but rather cast their gaze widely over Hokkaido, the Kuril Islands, and much of Sakhalin Island, searching for new resources to fuel the flames of markget growth, to fertilize cash crops, and to feed a stable urban population. In this way, even in early-modern Japan, the environmental context was not fixed but was, as Conrad Totman insists, “shaping and beaing shaped by human activities.” Environmental changes were “crucial variables in the Tokugawa economic experience.” This economic expansion into Ezo, in addition to having implications for Ainu and other groups in the North Pacific, raises intriguing questions concerning whether Japanese colonialism in East Asia should be viewed as an exclusively post-Meiji phenomenon, or in other words, as the imperialist implications of modernization shaped predominantly by Western models. To begin with, in the realm of what Alfred Crosby calls “ecological imperialism,” the exchange of contagions in Ezo and the demographic and cultural consequences of massive epidemics introduce the horrible specter of the interactions between semi-insular populations such as the Ainu and endemic-disease carriers such as the Japanese. Of all the many facets of the Ainu-Japanese relations […] disease clearted the way for the Japanese settlement of Hokkaido possibly more than any other factor and, hence, pushes historians to confront the ecological implications of expansion in Japan’s pre-Meiji world. On a political leve, moreover, the link between the state, merchants and foreign conquest in Ezo resembles the later Japanese colonial experience in Korea, where, as Peter Duus argues, the “symbiotic ties” formed between government and business facilitated the national enterprise of the annexation of Korea. The political process of colonizing Korea, writes Duus, was associated with the “penetration of the Korean market by an anonymous army of Japanese traders, sojourners, and settlers,” resembling with important distinctions, the situation in Ezo.”
— Brett L Walker, The Conquest of Ainu Lands: Ecology and Culture in Japanese Expansion 1590-1800
the concept of ‘sperm whale’ is so fucking funny. these prudish victorians found a gigantic, terrifying sea-beast, and, discovering it was full of a thick, oily substance, immediately went 'is this fucking Cum???’ and started fueling everything with it. they thought their whole sexually repressed society was running on the monstrous cum harvested by deadly expeditions to the black, icy sea. what kind of immaculate neuroses they must have had.
Saw someone on twitter object to Spanish being called a “colonial language” bc it’s a lot of indigenous people’s first language and like, oh man that’s dumb but also there are layers to it being dumb
ik how reviving looks in a game but imagine irl if you died in battle and then wake up 5 minutes later to your healer mage going “chop chop let’s go you’re not done here! finish killing that guy” like thanks for unbreaking my bones but jeez
me with my life flashing before my eyes: mourn for m-
the guy casting resurrection: no time for that, get the fuck up harry
No joke is one-size-fits-all, but adding “but I remain optimistic” at the end of any somewhat-speculating statement makes it funny, taking a different tone in each.
Adding it to the end of something positive gives it an unexpected twist - implying that whatever the good thing that happened was, it wasn’t what you expected or hoped to happen, but you’re yet to give up hope of whatever the fuck you’ve now vaguely implied towards might still happen. “He survived and is expected to make a full recovery, but I remain optimistic.”
Adding it to a neutral statement implies that you think something can be done about it, funniest if the statement is something that obviously can’t be affected. “Apparently it’s tuesday tomorrow, but I remain optimistic.”
And the bleakest, most hopeless statements just become bleakly funny by the grim absurdity. “About 30 seconds remain until impact, and the chances of any of us surviving the crash are zero. But I remain optimistic.”
Similar to one of my go-tos, the ominous “…for now” at the end of an innocuous statement of fact.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’ve uncovered the shocking truth, and I have to tell you about it right now! Tumblr, that bastion of degeneracy, they used to be all about yaoi – everywhere you looked, yaoi this, yaoi that, everything was dudes kissing. But now, it’s all yuri! Everything is yuri! Yuri as far as the eye can see! And do you know why this is happening? It’s because of the plastics in the water! That’s right, folks, the globalists have been poisoning our water supply with plastics, and it’s turning our precious internet culture upside down!
normally they’re more powerful than non-telepaths, yes? I want a kind that’s useful/powerful because they can read minds, but they can’t edit, and moreover they are in theory hackable by anyone
If you grab a telepath and think your thoughts really hard at them, they can’t tell it apart from their own mental narration, so it’s like force schizophrenia-ing them
You need some skill to do this, because most strangers’ thoughts don’t feel like your own, so the telepath will go “wanting to kill the president is clearly a crazy thought, I’m not doing that”, or “you’re beaming into my head that I’m in love with you and will do anything for you, but you didn’t convincingly swap subject and object”
but if you’re artful you can slip in thoughts and impulses that they can’t distinguish from their own. And if they’re vulnerable you don’t need to be artful, because they’re not paying enough attention to guard against strangerthoughts
this has the nice property that instead of a kind of fuzzy “strength” stat that telepaths typically have in fiction, the best telepaths are going to be those who have such a unique mental narration that they’re hard to mess with
it might be a good trick for a budding telepath to immediately start thinking (but not speaking) in a particular accent, but that’s forgeable
but being a genuinely weird thinker is hard to forge
ALT
