#485

Ah! It appears, lost in contemplation and the hustle and bustle of the modern day, I missed my window to hit five hundred posts in 2024. So it goes. Perhaps it is just and meet that 2025 gets the rights to five hundred. Fives go with fives, mathematically. Fives like a five. 

Been playing tons of Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII; Reunion or however it is most proper to arrange that title. It's a real good story, real fun game. Lots of game in the crannies of it, where Final Fantasy does best, at least to me. I am such a sucker for all of their systems, though. I go hog wild, screw around in menus for hours and hours, tweaking and rebuilding everything they let me tinker with. 

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The difficulty of finding the place between taking pride in your work and working too hard--to stay steady, excelling whenever possible, without burning out or making a tool of yourself--has always borne down hard on me in my professional life and other endeavors. All endeavors, I guess, except school, the one area in which I am gifted in the opposite sense entirely. There, I can see so clearly that pride is a false virtue, everything in front of my eyes and at my hands is total fucking bullshit, and the obvious and correct thing to do is to coast on my personal qualities in the service of doing the absolute bare minimum while devoting all my proper energies to my own ends.

Even here, athletics and music proved a weak spot. I don't especially seek out intrinsically social endeavors, but when present, I abhor not pulling my weight, and dread underperforming or quitting out. However resentfully, I am wired to put in an honest effort, because I'm not made to say that kind of fuck you to people who are engaged in something they care deeply about. I can even make myself care. Lo and behold, sometimes this praxis finds me actually caring deeply. It can become a problem, as eventually, I can care more than is strictly required or even wise. I can care so much that I quit, which, y'know. I could have saved myself a lot of time, there. But again, I am wired to earn quitting in many cases. Not all! Thank the lord. But enough.

Yet what price personal growth? 

It could probably be worked out, actually, and winced at. 

*

Real life is some fucked up shit, man. Never stops coming at you. People get covid, motherfuckers have a plan to denaturalize and deport you, other motherfuckers want to make every house in America a lethal-force compound, so like, maybe that's ok? 

Guess I'll just keep going to work and like, doing laundry and playing games and shit. Hang out with my cats. Dunno what the fuck else I'm supposed to do. 

--JL

#484

Comin' up on it now, boi. That five hunnit. More posts will have to be written than even back in January, which holds seventeen, but fewer than in April. It looks like I wrote thirty-two posts this April? Don't even remember that. I'll go read April now.

*

Uh. Wow. Something was up. I'm not sure what! But something was fucking up April 2024. 

Blogger couldn't even show the whole month in one scroll. It's a lot of posts, sure. Some are short. But some are not short. They're fucking long!

That's my first impression. Kinda scared to actually read it.

*

Ok. I was doing a thing, a thirty-posts-for April thing. A thing that apparently helped save my life yet again. Damn. Completely forgot.

Those are some good posts. April and May may be high-water marks for the blog in some key ways.

*

Every time I consider quitting or destroying this blog I am somehow reminded that starting it saved my life, and that at various junctures in the following years, it has done so again. 

That's the kind of return on an activity that makes up for a host of costs and depravities. Makes a person almost superstitious about stopping! Haha. Ha.

*

Well, we'll see where I'm at with things once we hit 500 posts, seven years old, and six years active. New Year's, basically. 

--JL

#483

 Some nameless beast, some vile and base interloper (a friend) accosted me on the street like some vagrant churl to accuse me of being a bad Bat-nerd and a bad gamer--shit, if I'd managed to reproduce, my parenting skills would very probably have been raked over the coals--for not putting Batman: Arkham Asylum on my Factual Top 25 Games of All Time list.

As a person of dignity, I will tell you exactly what I said. I said that yes, Arkham Asylum was a labor of love and one of the greatest things that ever happened in my life, and also revolutionized games on many levels but especially in terms of melee combat. Rocksteady made something that I turned on and didn't turn off until I had solved every single riddle, collected every single profile, every last piece of lore--I explored and admired every last inch of that island.

I was Batman, motherfucker. Started on hard mode and stayed kicking ass the entire time. Absolutely not a single detail escaped my detection.

And I am here to say that I hated that final boss fight enough to disqualify it from the list. I am not sorry and I am not taking it back.

*

Barely even wanna fucking talk about what makes me feel that way, but. But. It's bad form, bullshit really, to say something is inimical to the quality of an effort without explaining. So.

My suspicion, born of projecting my feelings and based on nothing else, is that they didn't want to stop making it any more than I wanted to stop playing it--that they knew, as I do, that the game's only true flaw was its finitude. As such, the pain worked its way into the tail end of the story, dulling their blades. The end is where many stories thrash madly anyway because endings are incredibly difficult and a truly unassailable one is rare. 

Also it may be that physical exaggerations of Joker simply set my teeth against each other and makes them spin in place. I loathe entirely that horsehit where they chop Joker's face off in the comics and he's running around with his face stapled to his skull, and consider the perverted maniac in charge of those storylines to be a fucking morlock that crawled out of the depths of the earth. So, after all that genius level shit with Mark Hamill's utterly unhinged and perfect Joker, Venom Joker, to me, was stupid, and gross, and dumb, and I stopped caring completely in that moment, plus the way you had to kill him was stupid and it took me two tries because his ferocity exceeded by far my willingness to unleash on his ass. It was a stupid ass. I hated it so much it didn't feel worth handing back to the guy, but I did, partly out of spite I guess. To see the credits and hear the music, as is traditional.

The end was also good after that. But no game on my admittedly imperfect and idiosyncratic list ever made me feel the way that boss fight did, so. My decison stands. It also stands because I am insane enough about Batman to disqualify the most singular Batman experience ever created (though I guess I barely started Arkham City or ever get a chance to play the third one) based on a what is basically totally irrelevant and certainly proportionally miniscule issue. I mean this game had no other problems, man. It is still a mystery to me how they did that good of a job. Probably all of them are crazier than I am about Batman by a startling degree, like, even the janitors and the security guys. 

*

Totally made up the scenario in the first paragraph. Been thinking about hunting down an old copy of the game and thought I'd explain why I didn't put it on the list. When I approached the text field, the hilarious conversation I might have had with a buddy if they'd read my post seemed to bloom in my mind, and I thought it would be a funny indulgence.

Now that I've explained it though...hm. Maybe I would be a better writer if I were a better liar.

--JL

#482

It's kind of weird to put words into this text field. I don't only mean that it's a weird thing for a weird person to do, which is true and the whole reason I do it. Nor blogging itself, that's not weird; running this type of blog, not monetized, not designed to angle for the lead in a brutal algorithmic world-race, one which openly critiques its host and its platform and the very environment in which they are set--that is weird. Weird, and indeed, pointless. 

Also it is weird--still not the main weirdness!--because who reads it? No one, basically. And I know this because it is functionally impossible to find. In fact, searching for my blog, rendered on a Google service, using the Google search engine on another person's computing device gave me no results, and the more specific and correct I made my query, the results grew sparser and lesss coherent until I gave the mechanism no choice but to show my blog, and it showed nothing instead. To be fair, it said that it "seems as though few web pages match your search". 

And that's weird too, right? First of all, I am not looking for a bunch of websites like the one I am looking for--I am fucking looking for a specific website, one which I was extremely clear about seeking. Also, even if few websites matched my search, you would think they would want you to see it, since some things are usually more desirable than no things, and being told that there 

• are some things, but
• I won't actually show them to you

is not only weird, but actively needling, perhaps even infuriating. Since...why? Because it is their own engine looking for their own website hosted on their own service, I damn well know they know what I'm asking about even if they're not making money from it. But steering people away from shit they can see for free seems weird, even if I can understand why you would prefer that people look at ads. So are you saying they can't--that people should not look at free content on your service, or that my writing is so objectionable that you need to bury it where no right-thinking person could even look for it where I would think to tell them to?

Guess another reason I can think they might want to bury my blog is that it is excellent food for their large language models, a vast and varied collection of word arrangements, and they wish to camouflage my uniqueness as their own as effectively as possible. But when I criticize AI, and their approach to AI, they flag the post, and never unflag it, despite my humble entreaty. So, is this the clammy hand of a shadowban?

Why flag what you won't let anyone see? That's some...I dunno. That's really something to digest.

No--at last--I mean it's weird because it's a stupid and exposing thing to do. Trying to say real shit about the world and your opinions and ideas about it could seriously get you killed out here. In this sense, perhaps my overlords and masters at Alphabet are doing me a kind of favor.

Well, guess all that is the cost of doing business. I am compelled to do it, and the fact that it might be seen as dangerous must mean that it's not useless, even if it's pointless.

Or they fucking broke their own service. Who can say.

--JL

#481

Interesting--maybe I don't really mean interesting, the way Socrates didn't really mean it when he told a motherfucker "hmm, maybe you're on to something there!"--that all types of people are adept at reducing all other types of people to the absurd, and to behave as though the people they like and admire--people like themselves in key ways, as they see it, typically--are unimpeachable zenith beings.

Not to include myself in this would be bullshit, of course. Might could even be fairly leveled that I am something of an expert, because the technique reaps incredible benefits: you settle on a moral high ground that you can live with, or try to, and you tell yourself that you have found this place to live and be due to your inherent validity and worth, and that most other ways of being are why the world goes to shit. You can see this very easily, from where you are, their venality and hubris.

Naturally, the person over there on their own moral plateau is pointing at you and making very similar noises. And it is deadly difficult to understand, harder to remember, and most grueling of all to make yourself care, in the face of what your entire lived experience tells you to the contrary, they see you as the problem and have just as much right to think so. 

If we all chose to be and live as I am--we say--there would be no such problems. Those poor wretches! They know not what they do. Those bastards! They'll be the death of us, if we don't do something.

This is such, such human all-too-human shit that I don't really know what to feel about it, honestly. Just perhaps that if we solved this riddle of perspective, collectively, we would make such a quantum leap in sociopsychic evolution that we might need a new name.

Usually what happens is war breaks out instead.

*

Ok! Now, the promised Spongebob.

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It has been proven out over time that it is possible to animate eleven minutes of absolute perfection.

Listen to me, because I am being serious. Perfection has been achieved by our frail, nigh-doomed species: in the execution of the eleven-minute cartoon. 

In that, in so far as we have grasped theoretical mathematics, and in nothing else.

*

The eleven-minute form for the cartoon exists because it has to--but it works because it does. And in these eleven minutes, multiple teams have made multiple perfections. I can think of six perfect Adventure Time cartoons off the top of my head--selecting one that I can use as an example later--Dungeon. 

Band Geeks is one of a few perfect Spongebobs, and it is an exemplar of the perfect eleven minutes.

One of the particular accomplishments that takes eleven minutes into the realm of perfection is to waste absolutely no time, but rush absolutely nothing.

A particular masterclass in showcasing this property is--Dungeon! Dungeon has the sass to bring up the fact that it is going to do what it's about to do before it does it (using precious seconds! but the payoff is huge--many perfect cartoons are metareferential, including Band Geeks), and proceeds to tell three stories, each chock-full of jokes and inside jokes and clever references, great action, magic, horror, human vs. self stuff, the power of love, some other tight ideas I'm forgetting to mention. Very advanced stuff here, a sophisticated play--one of the reasons Adventure Time would still matter to a degree even if it had only made one season: that season established a huge chunk of the thesis, which is to take six or seven genres and key points of reference, explode and invert them, combine them into a surging colloid that has never been seen before and which launched a thousand toons, explored the scope, grew its garden, set things up for the future, and executed several perfect episodes right away. I mean, this is how you do it. There are many ways the whole enterprise was and continues to be completely revolutionary--more on that another time.

Band Geeks is merely a perfect story that essentially doesn't stop being funny or good even for a second, and when the real payoff hits, it's not just funny anymore, though it continues to be funny--it is a power and a glory so huge that tears may come to my eyes as I type. I can tell you that the reason I wanted to write all this in the first place is that watching Band Geeks a few days ago made me weep salt tears into my lunch and left me feeling like things were gonna be ok.

A hallmark of the perfect cartoon, this: the sneak attack, the undoing, and the sustaining.

To break it down too completely is like cutting up a chicken until there's just a pile of wet tissue, a bleached wig. There must be something left to cook, so, you know, couldn't hurt you to find a way to watch Band Geeks and determine for yourself.

I will simply say this: to take a character that you have used up to that point as a strawman, a foil, the butt of the joke and the recipient of physical and psychic slapstick, mercilessly as punching bag, portayed as a base unfortunate, sometimes outright cruel, cynical, misunderstood, arrogant, putting on of airs, apathetic, lacking in knowledge of the self--Squidward is several types of the kind of dude Jewish folks have a less-than-flattering word for all vying for primacy in his tentacled frame. His bulbous head contains multitudes of shortsighted, self-satisfied, completely ineffectual idiots.

But! He does sometimes surprise us, rising to an occasion. The end of Pizza Delivery, another perfect Spongebob relying heavily on Squidward's personality, is the outstanding example. 

To take that character and bless him with the emotional arc presented in Band Geeks is more than simply generous and clever. There is something immortalizing and sublime about redemption that fucking costs something. Boromir is one of if not my very favorite character in Lord of the Rings, which is my Favorite Thing Ever, the gleaming spire on the diadem of my obsessions, so that should communicate something about my psychology.

Squidward pays and pays, and it is rare like hen's teeth but sometimes he gets paid, even if for no other reason than the misdirected generosity of others, and because of how the creators were careful with him up to that point, because of that little bit of fresh background at the beginning of the episode that set the whole thing up, the feeling when he wins, when he wins, and they make him a nonsense song about winning just to get him the fucking win--

Yup. Just made myself cry.

--JL

#480

An observation, before we begin. Reflecting on the kinds of pressures that conspire to form the kind of writer that I am:

• the intensity of my experiential sensorium
• imagination as uncontrollable and feverish as to be a kind of nightmare, literally a demonic wild horse that lives in the brain, which needs to be tamed and ridden if one is to survive
• slightly overdeveloped and definitely hyperactive language centers
• trauma
• the kind of introversion that suffers at the hands of merely being scrutinized by others, let alone managing interactions and relationships, but also, the kind of extroversion that makes one very interested and invested in people and their doings
• excess of personality comorbid with delusions of grandeur, overcorrected for, constantly resurfacing, with all that entails

Does that make any sense? The above ramifies into the rest of what I make, of course, and how I am able to exist in my body and environment. Data. Love that stuff.

Anyway. Gonna save myself a big chunk of this post for to write tonight. Ezra has guests coming and I know I shall want precisely nothing to do with them even though they are perfectly fine as guests go. Just...well.

It is evergreen to say so; have done so many times under these kinds of circumstances and no doubt shall again.

See above for all required context: I'll be upstairs in my room typing. 

*

But not about Spongebob! Yeah, that has become a lie.

Look. No one can stop me. I am a cackling, demented sorcerer with no regard for human frailty. Your insane thirst to know what I was going to write about Spongebob will have to wait until next post.

Right now I have only one thing to say:

raw dogg fuxxx for cheep or freeee

--JL

#479

There was a conceptual moment in which I wasn't sure what I would get at when I approached the text field today, so I determined that I might warm up with my most favored of fallbacks, a list. Perhaps, I thought to myself, two or even three lists might fit the bill. I think things like that because I am a pervert and a sadist and I love to make you pay for my free content.

Anyway, when I actually did start writing, the topic burst from the back of my skull and fruited, drawing nutrients from my husk with a barbaric, starveling swiftness. But, hey. Listen.

Guess what.

You're still getting the lists, baby. Strap the fuck in. That other shit will be here tomorrow.

even more fucking video games bought (I have run out of money)

Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster Collection

INSIDE

books I didn't tell you I bought or picked up off the ground because I was doing a thing, whatever

Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge by Edward O. Wilson

Wise Blood/The Violent Bear it Away/The Complete Stories by Flannery O'Connor (I went to the used bookstore specifically to give them my copy of The Violent Bear it Away I mentioned so I could knock a buck off owning this instead)

Ways of Seeing by John Berger

Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question & The Gift of Death & Literature in Secret by Jacques Derrida (literally the same translator and everything else as my old copy of The Gift of Death, but [presumably] improved, plus of course Literature in Secret. The timing was perfect; I have lent out my old copy of The Gift of Death and need not worry that it may never return)

The Golden Pot and Other Tales by E.T.A. Hoffman, transl. Ritchie Robertson

Heavy: An American Memoir by Kiese Laymon

Synthedroid Saviors by Mark Lindquist (I am a little loth to record this, since from this self-published treatise on himself on the back of his book here apparently the guy lives in my town, may be completely insufferable, and could conceivably be weird about this. Whatever though; you make something and leave it around, people find it and make an opinion. That's how art usually works and it is certainly how this stupid blog works; anybody can say whatever they want about this heaped pile of whatever I have toiled on to no profit and think whatever they want about me on that basis. This is the bargain that we strike as creators, is what I am saying, one with God and the Devil both)

Hospital Series by Amelia Rosselli

The Sociology of Philosophies: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change by Randall Collins (can you tell that he is a Harvard man? Can you tell that Harvard published this, more specifically, the Belknapp Press of Harvard University Press, Boston Massachussets, London England? I tease beacause I am literally pumped to see what this horsehit is all about)

On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint by Maggie Nelson

Magical Writing in Salasaca: Literacy and Power in Highland Ecuador by Peter Wogan

The Water Street Reader by Various (this was made by anarchists and they filled it with whatever the fuck they wanted apparently--I kept it because it contains at least one bell hooks essay, so we'll just see what else this curation packs. They obviously spent real money on it, so I suspect them to be adherents to a breed of anarchism which, hm. Anarchists with straight, white, even teeth and a unified aesthetics of tattoo; indeed, a kind of uniform in which beanies and Dockers feature prominently. This is a hypocrisy I have witnessed for so long that I am inured to its bullshit. I just get what nutrition I can and move on)

Selected Stories by Lu Hsun

IMAGINE: What America Could Be in the 21st Century by Various, edited by Maryanne Williamson (honestly don't know what I'm in for here, but I got it because basically it looks like none of these visions came to pass, zero. These authors seem as though they are optimistic, enlightened, freethinking beatificants, and what actually happened is now we live stuffed up into the leaking asshole of a rotting carcass that does not know it is dead. I thought this lozenge of completely misspent hope and vigor might be good for a laugh so bitter I could easily die from it)

it's not over yet! I fucking told you! movies I have watched since last I spoke on it

New to me:

Heretic (in theaters, brilliant, loved every minute basically)

Rewatch:

Batman Returns

Batman Forever

Batman and Robin

Jurassic Park

Honorable Television Mention: The Penguin

*

The movie list is fairly anemic because of all the screen time video games take up. Didn't feel like dragging myself into a theater for all that other new shit I was talking about; I'll get to it when I get to it, like everything else. Also Ezra and I have been watching Gotham, though it may be more explicative to say that we are exposing ourselves to the show and enduring actual mutilations at its hands in exchange for the crisp, delicious slices of powerful characterization and storytelling layered through this brutal, senseless pulping and mulching of the setting and the great majority of its inhabitants. The Riddler is thus far the only character to have gotten through this thing mostly unscathed, but we have like, two whole seasons left.

It's not that I don't like it. It's that apparently only a few of the writers and producers like me. Or were allowed to try to manifest that affection.

*

So many obsessions whirl and tumble in my brain that plenty I care deeply about may not have been revealed even in five years and damn near five hundred posts. I'd like to concentrate more on more exhaustive coverage--I mean, I mentioned recently that I am weird about Batman, and you can see I am cruising througha fresh Batman phase even now, but I realized that you, dear reader, basically would have had no idea about that before then. But I'm a nutcase about fucking Batman! Read that last sentence however you want. 

Something has to change. I need to focus around here. 

Tomorrow, we shall look at Spongebob Squarepants--specifically, Band Geeks.

--JL