#489

Oh No! Forgot last post was supposed to be list day! List day for my precious, precious readers, to whom I gave solid assurances!

You poor things, to be such worms on my hook. 

There, there. I have arrived, with more lists that you could ever have bargained for.

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Maybe that's a bold claim, maybe I'm here to wreck all your concepts. Guess we find out together.

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video games I have completed lately:

Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII: Reunion (this has to be one of my favorite games ever. I am not kidding. I know a lot of people take issue with a lot of things about it, maybe the PSP version was worse [I think maybe I got to hold a PSP once. Once] but I think it is a masterpiece. Activate my combat mode, bb)

Final Fantasy IV (somehow it just never gets old! I love this stupid story so fucking much)

video games I have started lately but not yet completed:

Final Fantasy XIII (finally! finally. And you know what? Feels good. It really is an amazingly fun game to play. Faults it has, and they vary in gravity from personality to personality, but the game is so great to play and so amazing to look at, and the story is a remarkable thing remarkably told. Playing a bunch of its predecessors in succession has, as I hoped, help me see it in a new light and raised in in my estimation from "fifty percent genius lashed to a pain machine" to "compromised yet sacred vision". This is probably the nex game I will beat, unless it is...)

Final Fantasy V (getting to be pretty close to done with this bad boy--and it was so rad! That sexy, sexy job system. Another bonkers, silly-ass, beautiful, magnificent tale. Music's not as good as IV or VI, but that's ok. The maps are also iconic.)

INSIDE (almost exactly halfway, kinda stuck on some part of a puzzle that as I type this, makes me unsure that it's a puzzle...I should probably fire it up and try something new right now...anyway INSIDE is very very very good, I have a perception that everybody knows that already and they are right)

The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom (taking my sweet time with this one. It's just that, from the moment it started, I didn't want it to be over)

Final Fantasy VI (really liking it, but I'm at the first juncture where the party gets big and then they split it--like in XIII!--and I took a break there)

video games I particularly wish I could play, but can't right now due to reality:

Final Fantasy VII: Remake+Intergrade

Elden Ring

video games whose soundtracks I have been obsessed with/were FINALLY made available

All Final Fantasy games, to varying degrees, the intensity of it might actually be a little embarassing

Eastward (FINALLY FINALLY THE SHEER PLEASURE OF IT)

Kingdom Hearts II

Golden Sun

The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild+Skyward Sword

albums I have listened to lately from start to finish for the first time

Soul Supreme | Soul Supreme

#KingButch | Butcher Brown

Zelda: The Themes on Piano | Arcade Player

As It Ever Was, So It Will Be Again | The Decemberists

Fractures+Folding+Flight of the Sparrow | Anderholm

200Xad | Mega Drive

Atom Heart Mother | HARU NEMURI

(Per la) via di casa | La rappresentante di lista

Reaching Fourth | McCoy Tyner Trio

Today and Tomorrow | McCoy Tyner

Plays Pretty | Oscar Peterson

Riverside Profiles: Thelonius Monk

Takin' Off (Expanded Edition) | Herbie Hancock

GUNSHIP (Instrumentals) | GUNSHIP

Syndicate Shadow | Neon Nox

Nocturn | Tonebox

Athletic Progression | Athletic Progression

Vince Guaraldi Trio | Vince Guaraldi Trio

Black Classical Music | Yussef Dayes

Quarantine Sessions | Tom Misch

What Kinda Music | Tom Misch and Yussef Dayes

Quarantena | Tenderlonius

Keys To The City Volume One+Black Radio III (Supreme Edition)+Code Derivation | Robert Glasper

BREAD | Sofi Tukker

A01 | OLDUCT

Symphonie Pacifique | Greg Foat

Black Focus | Yussef Kamaal

Think of One...+Black Codes (From the Underground) | Wynton Marsalis

movies I have watched lately

The Batman

The Boy and the Heron 

Namoo

television programs I have watched some or all of recently, some ongoing

Severance

Adventure Time+Distant Lands+Fionna and Cake (rewatch)

documentaries I have watched recently

Chimp Crazy

The Way Down: God, Greed, and the Cult of Gwen Shamblin

Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God

(this is kind of a morbid viewing pattern but I guess I just want to understand these types of mindset better)

comics I have read recently

Vattu+Rice Boy+Order of Tales+3rd Voice | Evan Dahm (reread what I had covered then finished Vattu after a couple years away, which allowed time for a complete and a delicious backlog of 3rd Voice to accumulate--this website is among internet's absolute foremost, and has been since Rice Boy's very first strip--reread that and Order of Tales)

Demon's Mirror | Harry Bogosian

Skin Deep | Kory Bing (reread, catchup)

Octopus Pie | Meredith Gran (reread, but there was also a post-covid story I hadn't read yet with [spoiler] some weddings in it)

Buttercup Festival | David Troupes (reread, catchup)

comics I am about to begin and catch up with because I am just now finding out they exist because one misses these things sometimes and just has to live with the pain and fatality of that knowledge

Blikada | C. Spike Trotman

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It is reasonable to ask how I accomplish such a media diet along with sustaining life and keeping house and meeting any number of other temporal demands. In the first place, I am dedicated. Some would say, obsessed to the point of self-sabotage. For I think of myself as a fairly efficient manager of my days and times in certain senses, depending of course on the day and season, and it bears out in terms of how much I get done. The obverse, of course, is what I basically never get done, what I end up crushing into the last minute, the sacrifices and excisions of other activities necessary in order to pursue my many, errant threads. 

But we are all weavers, eh? This is my tapestry, and I put it together my way.

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Guess that wasn't too crazy on the list front. Well, keep an eye out. I don't know what happens next either.

--JL

#248

I think one of the funniest things about television is how if they interrupt the broadcast for something, they tell you directly and in no uncertain terms that they are returning you to a state of regularly scheduled programming. Who says the media lies to you?

--JL

#244

Reading through the Sinfest archive again. So formative. My brain was but a freshly pubescent embryo when I started reading the sinfests, just a couple years after the first Sinfest strip heralded the new millennium (how many days after the new millennium did it begin, you ask? why, seventeen! it's been awhile, but never forget: we love the number seventeen.). 

Sinfest is old enough to drink now, and the archive is a better, more informative public record than the stewed pork times, in my humble op. ed. 

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Ezra and I have been watching huge amounts of PBS streamed directly into our television. In the year 2000, televisions were inert boxes that only displayed broadcast programming. Heavy boxes, full of tubes and stuff. Now you can't find a box, they're all flat rectangles. In five years televisions will be transparent wafers, and in ten no one will bother because you'll be able to project lossless, electron-precise images onto a charged neutron "screen", anywhere, anytime. Because hardlight sculptures will dance for you, and you will be able to walk through and explore hardlight sets, and fuck and be fucked by hardlight puppets. Because your retinal implant will beam the images into the back of your eye. Because you will never dream naturally again; just keep watching whatever you want (or whatever you get) as you "sleep", the chip nestled in your brainstem singing quietly but eternally. 

Or finally because the shaman's drugs have made you believe, believe completely.

Anyway my dudes, public television is the bee's knees. PBS and HBO are good, and the cartoons on the cartoon stations are good.

I'm not kidding when I say that everything else is shit-ass god damned useless fucking garbage.

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Ok. BET. Some stuff on BET is good. I guess Jeopardy is all right too. I can make an exception also for Home Improvement because as an immigrant child in the nineties, that program really helped me understand the American psyche and its material continuum. 3rd Rock from the Sun too, actually.

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I mean, watch whatever TV you fuckin want, at the end of the day. However you choose to dispose of your time in half-hour increments, with whatever advertising load you choose to tolerate, it's all good.

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Today I finish The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy! How exciting and sad. Then I begin Native Son, by Richard Wright. Sad and exciting. 

Bam! Boom! Bingo! Watched all the Sam Raimi Spidermans and the Marc Webb Spidermens, and I guess we'll watch the newest Spidey's when we're ready for a break from Nova and Nature and Eons.

peace mother fuckerz yeeeeeeeeeeeah

--JL

#120

Don't like conspiracy theories, personally. The minuscule sliver of them that are perfectly true and are only termed conspiracy theories because of CIA disinformation campaigns are simply not worth the rest of them, some of them also CIA disinformation. I hope it's not too crazy to make that statement; nothing I have just said is not on the public record.

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In particular, and as always, I am thinking of and still absolutely amazed that the History Channel, which I could easily and accurately call the W.R. Hearst Legacy Channel, broadcasts the show Ancient Aliens to the viewing public. I hope Umberto Eco passed without having seen it. It is everything he writes about in his essay on Ur-Fascism, everything he talks about when he discusses critical historical misinterpretation and dangerous textual telephone in his book Serendipities, it is just plain conspiracy theory and the undermining of rational thought and empirical thinking and inductive reasoning.

If you want to know what the show Ancient Aliens is actually about, what its purpose is, and why the people who make it and the trolls that feature prominently are just irresponsible at best, get a load of this shit. Slip into the rabbit hole a ways. Learn about "Awareness" and the true story of our solar system. You're either the kind of person who will fall for it and come to believe that I am the insane one--possibly even not human--for not believing in it, or you'll understand why I'm pissed.

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I have hazel eyes, by the way, and possess vivid memories of my childhood dreams, many of which involved being strapped to a vertical surface by shadowy figures and being pierced by a shifting but always circular pattern of individual lights like floating crystals, so bright they rayed and spangled wildly in the vision. The feeling was one of total panic and of being penetrated and rearranged internally.

So you know, this has particular significance, according to the above conspiracy theory. Makes me special. Singled out.

Still think all of that is bullshit. Come on, people. Get with a program that is called the delusion of being outside a delusion. Take a step back. Then take one more.

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Not a very productive post. Hey, I hate the fucking teevee and the insufferable lunatic demagogues it so clearly empowers and rewards, everybody! I hate to death its infinitely hungry, ever-regurgitating, white-glowing maw! 

Of course, I am a person who has watched a lot of cartoons and PBS and HBO which is, of course, still television. I love the teevee as much as the next guy but FUCK. 

Similar to how I'm pretty much an internet person, shaped by its forces and disdainful of misunderstandings of what I believe it represents, but am absolutely disgusted by everything about the internet, loathe it and belittle it at every opportunity.

Now back to reading this "mainstream history" book I am enjoying, even though it is clearly written specifically to keep me in the dark about how the Earth is actually hollow and full of things that want to drink my blood and steal my hormones.

--JL