Sunday Sampler: Inside Thoughts Edition

Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, none of which really warrant a full post, that have popped into my head over the course of the past week. They may or may not be regular weekly posts.

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Originally, this had been a series of reactions in the lightning-squared round, but I decided to delete those and ruminate a little further cuz I think it’s worth discussing. It has me thinking about two related questions over & over for the past week.

What compels people to share every aspect of their lives online, especially the stuff that basic decorum would suggest that you should keep private? Also, how do you react when you learn something so image-damaging about someone you considered decent that you can’t fathom they’d have sunk so low?

Let’s tackle the second question first, because it’ll make a good segway into the first one. Y’see, in the past few months, a former social media mutual had been posting more & more stuff that’s obviously destined for their spank bank. At first it was pinup photos or art, nothing too bad, and when it was fetish-y, it was pretty standard issue. But little by little, it got… weirder. It’s one thing to have a jones for fat people, but when the photos are all staged in ways where they look like headless beings of infinite stomach, it’s a little disquieting. And it seemed that roughly half of what they were sharing was wank material. It was annoying in that it should have been marked NSFW but usually wasn’t, but it wasn’t anything obviously objectionable.

Until… the diaper bondage playtime couple pic. A twenty-something sapphic couple where one is lustily looking at the other as she’s wearing an oversized diaper, a weird combo baby-sweater-slash-straitjacket, & a pacifier that’s large enough to be a gag. The staging, post text, & expressions make it clear that this is foreplay.

Now… look. I generally don’t kinkshame. You do you, so long as everyone involved in doing it is agreeing to it. But diaper & infant stuff is crossing a line, because when you try to figure out the appeal, everything is horrible. The least vile thing is “we’re so broken internally that we wish to return to an age when we were literally unaware of the world around us”, which I just find kinda tragic. How you can take that level of misery and turn it into a kink is… confusing. But the other interpretations? Okay, best of the worst case scenarios, you just like stewing in your own waste for some reason; this puts in the same “ew gross, but whatever, just don’t involve me” category as any other kind of scat kink. But then there’s the roleplay aspect: WHY do you want to be an infant, or want your partner to be an infant, in an explicitly sexual situation? Either you’re the toddler who wants to get violated, or you want to violate a toddler. I fail to see any kind of healthy, non-horrifying interpretation of this situation.

Needless to say, this has stained every single thing I see of this person & their posting. I used to be able to look at them and see a creative, frequently insightful person. Now? I see a gooner without decorum, someone who fits the odious conservative narration of escalating turn-ons due to overexposure, until you get something that’s psychosis at best & sublimated p*do tendencies at worst. The pictures of fat people without faces? Cuz you don’t want to think of them as people, only as bellies attached to bits. The near-constant protests against the shitty payment processor censorship efforts? Less for the sake of free speech/creative expression and more cuz you don’t want the tap turned off for your increasingly alarming wank fuel. Even looking back, before the payment processors started censoring anything with “fantasy” in the description, you can see where they went from being pretty normal to “sex is the only & ultimate definition of one’s humanity”. As a sex-neutral aroace, you can imagine how I feel about that kind of sentiment. It’s really stung to see someone you thought was a smart, interesting person and realize that they’re, for lack of a better term, fucked up from terminal porn brain.

And in the midst of this experience, I had another thought. When, exactly, did it become acceptable to make sure everyone online knows about your sex life?

We aren’t talking about queerness or identity, because despite what people might think, queerness informs more than just your sex life. It informs your view of the larger culture and what society does or doesn’t prioritize (i.e. gender roles, monogamy, procreation, hierarchy of social bonds, that kind of fun stuff). We’re talking about “here’s what I like to masturbate to, I view it as being as foundational to my worldview as any religion or philosophy”. We’re talking the kind of stuff that, should you start shouting about or showing off in a public venue like a train station or the middle of a Costco, you would get alarmed looks at best & kicked out at worst.

Like, the internet is a public place. This was understood for years, and it was assumed that, should you want to talk about your “me time” fantasies with others, you would do so at a place expressly dedicated to that. But with the advent of social media, suddenly this concept that some things should be silo’d away from your public persona kinda evaporated. Suddenly people decided that everyone needed to know that they’re turned on by balloons popping or have fantasies about taking a cheese grater to their or something else’s junk, and this would be right next to stuff about their everyday lives. Some places eventually created a culture of “don’t post anything that might get you fired if your boss saw it”, but that’s about it.

I’m not saying that people shouldn’t post about these things, but I AM saying that they should apply some “public space” rules that they’d use for in-person behavior. You wouldn’t be walking randomly around a Walmart and then start shouting “man, I really wish I could get vored right now”, provided that you didn’t have some sort of disability that hindered that level of situational awareness. (No, an ASD diagnosis from Dr. Buzzfeed Quiz doesn’t count.) You wouldn’t be shocked if someone got a public reputation as a freak if they decided to wear their puppy play gear (with… strategically located zippers) every time they went out grocery shopping. 

Yet, online you’re expected to… just roll with it. That there’s something wrong with you if you don’t want to be inundated with other people’s personal kinks. If you so much as ask for things to be marked “adult content” or NSFW so you can not have it show up on your screen while you’re working, that’s treated as no different than the censorship efforts. And if you look at someone wishing they could pretend to do unspeakable things to a toddler with a dirty diaper with anything but enthusiastic support, you’re basically a Puritan. You almost start to understand the whole “we’ve gone too far” rhetoric, because some people really don’t know or want to learn when something just shouldn’t be shared with the world.

It’s just a frustrating situation. It seems that my ex-moot has decided to embody every single scare-mongering situation regarding obsessive horniness (from escalating kinks to “omg u prudes” reactions to others’ understandable requests to tag their NSFW as such), and their shares make it clear that explaining to them that they’re not helping their case against actual objectionable censorship with their behavior is just gonna be talking to a wall. I just wish that people would re-learn the concept of decorum online, since all of this could have been avoided if ex-moot & several other people had kept their “naughty nursery” nonsense to themselves. But they didn’t, and now I can’t look at them without thinking so much less of them.

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Video recommendation time: on “shut-down” phrases and how it’s helped kill any kind of creative or critical thought.

“If we encourage people to keep their mouths shut and smile when they don’t like something, we end up creating echo chambers where no complex discussions exist around the art being put out.” I FEEL that quote in my bone marrow.

The domino tip to me doing this and cutting back on social media was such a reaction. The art in question, itself, on its own introductory path as designed by its creators & insisted by its acolytes, was something that I straight up did not like. Hell, I HATED it. It went beyond “dated” humor into being outright offensive, and its dominant tone was that of spite & condescension. But apparently, by NOT watching the series in full multiple times after loathing what I had seen of it, by NOT considering apologies on Reddit for the offensive content enough to negate their continued & constantly excused presence, and by NOT ignoring the fact that its audience/creative team/financial backers have used it as a cudgel against other works & those that make/like them, I am too “fandom brained” to have any opinion on this “perfect masterpiece”. Even though I tried to give it the benefit of the doubt, even though every “clever” joke I see from it is cringe-inducingly juvenile and/or mean-spirited, even though I apparently can’t enjoy something that I actually like without y’all insisting that this is better so no one should want to bother with it again. (You can probably guess what it is if you’ve been paying attention.) It was the absolute nadir of “let people enjoy things” twisted into “enjoyment of these things is mandatory and any other reaction will be punished”.

But that’s not the first time. From adored-by-Tumblr comic writers on Twitter who vanity search & QT’d me so their fans could “correct” my statements (in one case, that the work itself was hard to connect to cuz the “strong female role model” lead was so very obnoxious), to web artists who will happily let their bestie be their personal attack dog & harass people who so much as vague post about them (with no one knowing it was the vague posting subject until they showed up), to just random fans who cannot form any sense of identity or self-image without attaching it to something that they passively consume, it’s EVERYWHERE. This attitude of “it’s not that deep” or “stop overthinking it” or “let people enjoy things” or “only Bad People would object to this work due to its theme” has done more to further erode any sense of curiosity and engagement with a work deeper than “I agree with this very obviously multiple-stated moral” or “I like this couple” than anything else. It’s been snowballing, too, thanks to sites like TikTok basically feeding on the absolute dregs of humanity in every category. 

Is it any wonder, really, why so many people seem to be okay with AI slop? They already treat actual created-by-human-hands work as something that shouldn’t be talked about any deeper than “yay, I like that”. Whether they can’t or won’t articulate WHY they like it, or admit that there are things that they didn’t like, or just want to stymie critical discussion to feed their egos (Jeremy) or the egos of someone they’ve decided is their secret bestie, it all speaks of an eagerness to disengage with the humanity in any kind of creative work. Sometimes that means addressing the uglier sides of that humanity, be it ignorance or arrogance or outright nastiness. It’s just… too much for most people to handle. So if you’re unable & unwilling to engage with the human-ness of art, why not just cut that out entirely and get exactly the kind of Extruded Creative-Flavored Product that you want without having to think?

It’s truly a sad time if you like to think. Like, at all. And I don’t see it getting better any time soon. I WISH I could, but I feel like the correction point has long since passed.

(Also, largely unrelated, but if the creators of That Show mentioned above were still actively making it today, they’d never apologize for the homophobic & transmisogynistic stuff like they did, cuz it wasn’t so much that they realized it was wrong to include it but that the fanbase zeitgeist told them it was, so THAT’S why they apologized. Now, they’d probably just be full mask off, which would probably be better, since you’d have significantly less people trying to defend them & their gilded shit like you have now. Every time it’s brought up, this is my first thought, because it’s exactly what would happen. Like I said, part of acknowledging the humanity in a work is acknowledging that humans frequently are shitty & opportunistic.)

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Lighting-squared round! Cuz the alternative is shouting this nonsense at strangers.

• God help me, I really like that new Linkin Park song. It’s very Val-coded.

• Speaking of Val & her story, I swear I’m still working on it. I’m stuck in a setup chunk of the story that I keep scrapping cuz it steers into infodumping more than I’d like.

• I keep seeing things rightfully decrying how dull & monotonous design has become, from brand logos to car colors to architecture. But there never seems to be any further pushback other than the complaints. Not sure what can be done, though, since every single food place deciding to look like a bank branch isn’t something that you can force a quick change from unless it’s caught early and all boycotts do is give the people doing them another reason to be smug shits about optional purchases.

• Kinda weird that I’ve had 3 different YT channels being sponsored by 3 different mattress companies in the past week. One of which was talking about people who claim to have had sex with ghosts, so at least it’s on-theme.

• Lostwave is the gift that keeps on giving. I am dying to learn more about who made “The Fall of the King”.

• The answer to every video with a title like “Why Did The Internet Fall Out of Love With (insert celebrity name here)” is always “they didn’t share every single minute political position as their most vocal online fans”. Doesn’t matter what those particular politics are, that’s always the reason.

• Tale Foundry is a channel that I have an increasingly love-hate relationship with, given that their insightful & interesting videos will be followed up with blithe praise of scumbag creators (Neil, JKR, that kind of “fair for the 2000s but now revealed to be a complete cretin” figure, and of course Ellison) and/or casual callousness (one on the “otherworldly power” of romance was both ignorant about aromanticism & weirdly rapey with its examples). The latest one I’ve seen, basically encouraging maladaptive daydreaming because it works out so well in fiction, is a good example of the latter category. It’s also showing how limited their reference pool is, since if you’ve read even the manga version of Umineko, you’d see a great example of why maladaptive daydreaming isn’t gonna help you or fix your problems in the end; yet let’s make sure we all reference the grown-ass people who face-plant while sprinting into a train station wall cuz they just really really want to see if Hogwarts is real as something cute & quirky. God, imagine how different that scene would have played out with the Tale Foundry approach: “I pray that you live as a human, so that you never need to become a witch.” “Yeah, but the witches are soooo cool!” “Did… did you miss the part that we’re all miserable and born from overwhelming sorrow and using this fantasy as an easy escape?” “Yeah, but… magic! And cool clothes!”

• Wild that widely embraced quackery is how I learn that Tylenol & its generics are largely unique to North America.

• It’s so disappointing when a YT video makes a really good point about a niche subject… but opts to use obvious ugly AI “art” for its visuals when stock images would have been easier & less hideous.

• I omitted it in the part with the video recommendation, but I feel part of the whole “don’t think too much” trend is the whole “choose joy/focus on the positive” thing that I’ve seen online. Even with people that I can tell mean well & are trying to be genuinely optimistic, it takes on strong Helen A vibes. It’s so constant & so accidentally vapid that I can’t help but mentally respond “get bent” every time I see it. The only person I ever found who would come off as genuine saying it was Jim Henson, and y’all aren’t Jim Henson.

• If you got the previous reference, hi. I, too, am old and extremely nerdy.

“Happiness will prevail! And stop doomscrolling!”

• Knit Picks, why did you list off which yarns are gonna be in my mystery bags when the entire point of mystery bags is that you have no idea what you’re getting until you physically get it? I like what I’m getting, but that kinda misses the point of the practice.

• The latest example of “this creator is so ~wholesome~ & family friendly and OOPS, they were just outed for doing something heinous” is only furthering my distrust of anyone who cultivates that very particularly online version of “wholesomeness”, since it’s so very easy to fake and is almost always covering for something terrible.

• Related: There really is no more accurately named social media platform than Discord, because it certainly seems to sow it.

• Everything about K-Pop Demon Hunters looks great, but it’s the whole “you’ll have to listen to k-pop” thing that’s stopping me. Look, I know I have jacked-up music taste (I listen to a good chunk of future funk & eurobeat), but I just can’t get into that genre. It’s a little too Extruded Music-Type Product for me, and it especially suffers from that “songs written based on popularity algorithm” trend with its actual composition. I appreciate the harmonizing of the singers & the choreography, but it’s just… not for me.

• I like to think that the Rapture actually did happen, but the only creature on the entirety of Earth that qualified was one random squirrel, so we all just thought it hadn’t happened.

• Horse-girl game update: Yay, I unlocked Gold Ship’s 3-star form… SWEET BABY JESUS, WHO GAVE THAT MANIAC A WEAPON FOR HER SPECIAL?! She’s gonna do Scorpion moves mid-race!

• [checks online fandom venue] [sees only discussion is about shipping because of fucking course it is] [sees a discussion about something called a “zaddy”]

NOPE

• Seriously, though, have I mentioned how much I hate that shipping has taken over any & all fandom discussions, to the point that creators cater to it deliberately & make it worse? I’d rather have outrage grifters than shipping, cuz at least they’re talking about something deeper than “who do I want to see making out”.

• Related: I saw someone sulking about how Umineko isn’t worthwhile to them because there’s “too many official couples”, so there’s no room for them to string together ships. Oh no, the writer actually cares about making the characters fleshed out enough that their relationships matter & you can’t project your fantasies onto them! Clearly this means that the work is horrible and should never be read or enjoyed by anyone! (/sarcasm)

“Alright, which one of you decided to ship me with GOHDA…?”

• Oh FFS, they're trying to ban legal pot AGAIN?! Even my mom has discovered that CBD is good for her chronic pain and is cool with it! Turning it back now will go over about as well as Prohibition.

• Me: “Man, nothing's sadder than a YTer who simps for BetterHelp.” Lady My Parents’ Age With A Yarnwork Channel: “Hold my subscription box full of stolen patterns & factory reject skeins…”

• I hold no illusions of my writing being the most engrossing & artful prose ever, but I do feel like my refusal to indulge in and/or vocal distaste of shipping & (ugh, gag, shudder, wince) spice probably makes it easier for modern audiences to ignore. Oh well.

• Moon Channel is looking at the current kerfuffle over Nintendo's new patents, the flaws in the popular reporting, and how they're most likely to be applied. Long story short, it’s hopefully not as bad as people are saying due to historical precedent. (Also, that Honkai pet game looks kinda fun.)

• Gotta love when you follow something focused on one of your favorite characters (I refuse to say “comfort character” on principle but they’d probably qualify), and the first thing you see is a bad homophobic/biphobic herpes joke with them from a garbage show that people treat like a holy book. And by “love”, I mean “hate so much it justifies drinking on a weeknight”.

• The sheer volume of online aces using the pushback on payment processor censorship as an excuse to go full pick-me and somehow blame the mere existence of any of us who just don't care for or about smut for it is gonna make my Ace Week entry extremely salty. I'm talking Bret Hart levels of salt. 

• And on top of that, Ace Discourse in all its hideous glory is making a comeback, specifically the “you're not ace, you're just (insert dismissal here)” variety. I guess people need an easy target cuz it's less work or risk than fighting actual problems just like it was back in 2018-2019, and it's well documented that the online ace community will never do shit in response except whine about being valid.

• Horse-girl game update 2: King Halo’s mom is the WORST. 

• Apparently a whole big chunk of the smaller online yarn stores that I like are all owned by the same “investment firm”. To say I am concerned is an understatement. STOP TRYING TO TAKE AWAY MY YARN, VULTURE CAPITALISTS!

• Juvenile & spiteful to do it, but I low-key hope that the two indie animators who are both terminally online get in a cold war over whose pilot/series becomes the topic that overwhelms all animation discussions like kudzu, thus driving away everyone but their most parasocial fans. Whether it happens or not, I'll be avoiding both to rewatch Punch Punch Forever.

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That’s all for this week. Instead of a cat picture, I’m including the picture of a remorseless thief who decided to start my weekend by stealing & destroying my prescription sunglasses because she was mad I was helping Mom cook instead of paying attention to her.

She doesn’t regret what she did, only that she got caught. BRAT!

See you all next week!

Grass-Touching Chronicles: My Favorite Place in New Jersey

 Every time I go to Asbury Park, I feel better. I don't know why. Is it because I usually go in the off-season, when it's quieter and feels more like the shore did when I was a kid, before every TV station in Philly insisted that everyone MUST spend their weekends at the shore or else waste their summers? Is it because it hasn't bulldozed its history for shore homes & instead honors what is there as well as what was lost? Is it because getting there is a once-a-year-at-best experience? Is it cuz the protective energy of Bam Bam Bigelow watches over us all upon entering the city limits? I can't say. I just know that I really truly feel at peace there.

View of the Carousel House & Casino from the boardwalk. It's now a showcase for various local mural artists, along with catnip for urbex types.

Turn around from there and you'll see the theater & convention center. Note that pretty much everyone was ignoring the 'no dogs on the boardwalk' sign in the center.

Beautiful white-capped waves that morning.

And I especially feel that peace at Silverball. Yeah, I know, it's weird to have your happiness attached to a noisy retro arcade/museum (now with its own attached snack bar) that has an entrance fee, but I dare you to find that somehow worse than the people who take out a separate mortgage for multiple Disney vacations & season passes. I just want a day among the machines, near a beach where you can still see the ocean & sand because it's not swarmed in tourists, on a boardwalk where you can still walk without getting killed by a Main Line family riding seven across on their bikes. 

My visit was a little more populated than usual, since it was the day after the annual Sea Hear Now music festival & a few people were taking an extra day to see the town, but it was still a calming experience. Also, it wasn't so late in the off-season that the other businesses were closed, so it was just the right level of liveliness.

Now, for my photos from Silverball itself. Fair warning, I am NOT a photographer of any caliber. But I wanted to capture a few pictures that caught my attention.

A couple of the older machines, moved to the private party room (which wasn't in use that day). Note the photo of the Morro Castle wreck on the wall to the right, which I hadn't realized was there until several days after taking this picture.

To go with their beloved arcade curiosity Joust, Williams also made a two-player Joust pinball game, with a format similar to the early 80s cocktail cabinets. In true Joust fashion, it's both difficult and confusing, with the single player switching you from playing one side's flippers to the other until both are out of balls. You don't need to move, as the buttons will switch control to whichever side is in play. Sadly, couldn't find anyone to do a 2-player game, even though playing against me is always an assured victory.

Hercules, the largest pinball machine in the world! Well, since that Sid & Marty Krofft indoor park closed & took its ride-able pinball thing with it, anyway. While expectedly slower than your usual hectic pinball game, there's a certain novelty to playing with what appears to be a dense rubber cue ball.

Pin-Bot and The Machine: Bride of Pin-Bot are both great games, rightfully considered classics. Also, I'll be shocked if there hasn't been at least one drag queen who dressed as The Machine as some point.

There are always several new Jersey Jack's tables every time I visit, and each one is a delight to play. This Godfather one had you picking one of five mob families to play, which would then change what your play goals would be, as well as the color lighting for the table.

Elton John tables, then & now. The Bally table always cracks me up due to the sheer volume of busty cartoon ladies on the table art, to assure the users that it's perfectly straight to enjoy Elton John music. Meanwhile, the new Jersey Jack's table on the right has a "British animation" vibe and lets you pick your favorite song from a surprisingly long list for your enjoyment. Lemme tell you, choosing between "I'm Still Standing" and "The Bitch Is Back" was an unexpected dilemma.

There were other tables whose pictures didn't come out that I wanted to showcase, be it the super saturated dark light Cirque du Voltaire or the three-physical-play-spaces of Haunted House or just favorites that I have to play every time like Medieval Madness or Theater of Magic. And that's to say nothing for their non-pinball offerings, from a well-worn bowling table game to a play-till-you-win ancient cousin of the crane game saved from Palace Amusements to an OG Pong cabinet. But as you can see from above, I'm nowhere near a professional photographer. I apologize for the omissions.

One last view of the sea, with a sailboat on the horizon.

Sadly, the day didn't end so great, thanks to a parking ticket, but that won't stop me from eagerly waiting for the day that I can return to Asbury. I just wish I had a car that I could trust to make the trip, since it really wasn't as far as I used to think. But it is truly my favorite place in the entire state, and every visit brings me a moment of tranquility that nothing else can. It's a glimpse of the old shore and a place where the concerns for the day vanish among electronic bleeps, dazzling lights, & heavy clicks from flippers being pressed, with a heady aura of local history & sea air. Anything else I could say would just be repetitive, so I will leave it here, looking forward to my next chance to visit.

Sunday Sampler: X-Hausted Edition

Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, none of which really warrant a full post, that have popped into my head over the course of the past week. They may or may not be regular weekly posts.

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Recently, Gail Simone asked a question about how many different kinds of people have gathered some value or strength from the X-books over the years, and it’s reminding me of several things from the past few years that effectively have driven me away from a series that was so influential it’s imprinted on my DNA. One, the rise of Big Name Fans from a precise online circle effectively limited the “mutant metaphor” to an extremely narrow definition of queerness and literally nothing else; two, the celebration of stories that ran the gamut from tasteless to missing the point of the X-Men entirely; three, thanks to point two, they’ve effectively written themselves permanently into a corner and will alienate people either way.

The first point is a complicated one. While the metaphor has never been truly applicable to the real world and does have its own issues with who gets the lion’s share of visibility, it has always been a given that the X-Men stood for people who fight against societal bigotry. It could be racially based, religiously based, sexuality or gender identity based, disability based, or just being that weird kid in your class. That was the beauty of the concept, that all of these people from different walks of life who had experienced this other-ness could come together and fight for a better world. But in the last 15 or so years, the talent pool began to be drawn from either fans that had garnered online popularity or pros who had catered to those fans. And these fans decided that they were going to reinvigorate the mutant metaphor - sorry, I mean the Mutant Metaphor, since it’s capitalized now - by making it explicitly and solely about queerness.

Now, I am saying this as a queer person, even if the people who’ve worked on the X-books have made it clear that they wouldn’t count me as such. Their acronym ends at four letters, maaaaybe including the Q if they want to include people still questioning their identities but only occasionally. And even then, it’s only the first three that will have any real visibility (although bi identities will be largely informed by social media reveals or single-panel love interests). You won’t get any trans mutants, only trans coded mutants; you won’t get any nonbinary mutants, only ones who “represent” nonbinary identities by not being able to blend in appearance-wise. And of course, as whole-ass crossovers & plot points have made clear, in the creative stable’s world, the A can only ever stand for “ally”, specifically their casually bigoted straight pal with a bad moustache who plays the ukulele. There’s other stuff, too - POC characters will be there but only if they can call attention to them for one story or “fix” something done decades ago that feels iffy now (see the Psylocke stuff done recently). Religious characters will have their faiths & any cultural elements related to that faith played down, because none of them are religious, in fact many of them are anti-religious, and the only religion that they won’t paint as indistinguishable from a doomsday cult is Islam, out of strictly political reasons instead of any actual respect for Muslims & their culture.

I don’t know how much of it comes from a place of “write what you know”, with the creators leaning towards a lack of racial or religious variety. The queer exclusionism tends to be less explainable, since many of them are trans, nonbinary, bi/pan, etc. (No aces, though, unless they’re also under another more accepted-by-them category and tend towards pick-me-isms. Funny, that.) But the audience that latched onto this & furthered this wound up rallying around every bad idea so long as they could project their own issues & attitudes onto it. If you ever found value in the X-Men cuz you were the only non-white kid in your neighborhood or you weren’t “wired” the same way as everyone else or you just felt like a misfit, well, too bad, it’s not for you anymore. It’s just for this one particular slice of the online queer community, and if you don’t like that, it can only be cuz you’re a filthy Com*csgator. 

The second part ties into this new audience of built-in defenders & knee-jerk dismissals. As much as the whole Krakoa thing feels like a good delineation mark between the end of my enjoyment of the X-Men & the beginning of it being for someone else, it really began before that. Matthew Rosenberg is a writer that I’ve never liked, and I’ve found his work to be nothing but a sea of cynicism & nihilism that has some stock romance thrown in to fool people into thinking he’s sensitive & insightful; that many of his fans recommend his work by comparing it to Venture Brothers (a show I’ve found has the same energy only without the romance cuz that would mean creating female characters who didn’t originate as transphobic jokes) is accurate, although for me it’d be a warning rather than a recommendation. So his run on Uncanny being based around sexualized suicide that the narrative portrays as a good & justified choice, a trans panic-coded murder scene done just to make Wolverine sad, a plot point that felt like it was endorsing antivax rhetoric, and everything being shrugged off cuz the straight power couple of Scott & Jean got to make out in the end should have been expected. What really made it awful, though, was the reaction to it. Defending the “suicide is the only right choice for this teenage girl to make” scene & its downright masturbatory framing is fine from his fans, cuz that’s how they’ve been trained, but celebrating him lying about donating “all” of his pay for that issue to over two dozen different crisis hotlines, when people in comics KNOW that Marvel doesn’t pay shit, was beyond scummy. Then came the trans panic murder scene, with it being specifically transmisogynistic, and he decided that his one trans man buddy (who himself is a real piece of work but that’s another day’s discussion) absolving him & donating his shiny nickel from THAT issue to the Trans Lifeline made it acceptable. And then people either ignoring or agreeing with the antivax plot… It was clear that it had been decided that Rosenberg was a Good Person & thus had to be defended, and anyone who objected to it, be it autistics who recognized Autism Speaks rhetoric in the plot or trans women being talked over by his buddy or suicidal people like me finding his defeatist attitude & lying about charity to be morally appalling, to be Bad People.

Then came Age of X-Man, with its weird pro-compulsive-romance-and-sexuality messaging that, had there been any aro or ace people that weren’t pick-mes on their staff, would have been pointed out as not as “inclusive” as they insisted it was… And creators who liked to vanity search themselves, then sic their loyal fans on anyone who didn’t praise them enough, the one of whom I ran into getting her start during this event in particular…

And then finally came fucking Krakoa.

I will just say this about Krakoa. The Venn diagram of people who insist that Krakoa was “a queer wish fulfillment fantasy” and of people who have gone fully down the H*sanoid slide cuz of Israel being shitty with zero self-awareness is a big dumb loud obnoxious hypocritical circle that’s easily distracted by stupid fashion shows. If the 2000s were all about trying & failing to apply X-Men stories to the Inhumans, this was applying an Inhumans story to the X-Men, and if they hadn’t cultivated that terminally Tumblr-brained audience of exclusionist queers who’d make any & every excuse for them, more people would have seen it. Even a dude I have come to think of as Leftist Chris-Chan eventually saw the parallels and walked back his initial praise for the Krakoa era. If THIS guy can figure it out, y’all have no excuses. But yeah, “if WE did the ethnostate, it’d be morally acceptable” was not a fun time and ran counter to literally everything in the history of the X-books.

So that brings us to the third point. You cannot go backwards. Even if you tried to do a retcon, which they bafflingly didn’t, you’d get pushback from the people who thought Krakoa was a step “forward” (read: something different). As it is, you have mutants as a minority again, and now they’re returning to a world that they removed themselves from out of an openly stated sense of superiority. They had medical technology, stuff like cancer cures, that they refused to share with the world and that’s now gone with their island - you think people aren’t gonna resent that? You think that the weird “make more mutants” Quiverfull religion that was created for the island isn’t gonna keep going, maybe even curdle into extremism like other Quiverfull sects? Krakoa has made the persecution of mutants almost make sense, more than any potential threat from their powers, because they went from looking down on the rest of humanity to not-so-humbly trying to rejoin it. Honestly, even if it would have pissed off a chunk of the audience, a retcon would have been better because it would have removed that whole “we know we’re your betters” stain from the characters.

The worst part is, Marvel doesn’t want to acknowledge that stain is there. There was a book I was half-interested in reading in the relaunch, but once I saw the extended pages of a character lamenting how much they miss Krakoa & how it was “paradise”, and we the readers were expected to sympathize, I was out. Honestly, the tactic that Gail Simone is using, to just… tell X-Men stories and work in both modern & historical glimpses of how mutants have been treated or existed, is the best way. I’m sure she’s been told to acknowledge beautiful, wonderful Krakoa, but it’s barely been done. And her book looks stronger for it. It’s written as though that awful era never happened, and we’re getting to learn about mutants as a subculture throughout history, providing we ignore that blip where they all basically became Silver Age Magneto. Even then, her book was derailed less than six issues in for a brand-wide crossover. Because of course.

Look, I don’t think I can understate the influence X-Men has had on me, from ethics to creative work. It’s imprinted on my DNA, and when I saw what Krakoa had made them into, it felt like that had become cancerous. Worse, people were celebrating the cancer. It was a decline that had been building the moment they decided that the line editor would limit his hiring to his online podcast friends, and that era that should have ended long before it actually did was the point of no return. Aside from the new characters added in Gail Simone’s book looking really cool & having some creative powers (especially the girl who has a psychic power bond with her arsonist horse), the new stuff doesn’t look all that appealing. Hell, in the case of this summer’s big crossover, Age of Fuck Over Mela’s Absolute Favorite X-Character Cuz We’re Too Dumb To Write Smart Characters As Anything But Innately Evil (Also We Still Refuse To Let Him & His Robot Alien BF Be Gay Together), they’re actively repellent. And that’s putting aside that, thanks to the BNFs who’ve helped shape the books in their image since the 2010s, the X-Men no longer feel like a cluster of people who’d have a place for every person who’s ever felt “off”. They’ve become another gaggle of exclusionists.

The past will always be there, but there’s no future for me with the X-universe. It’s become something else, and it feels like it’s a stranger wearing its skin. I will carry the influence of its golden days with me, but now it’s become something by and for a bunch of people who hate people like me & would gladly say as much. Hell, some of them already have. So if that’s what they want, they’re welcome to it.

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Wanna see the trickiest thing I’ve crocheted to date?

Really glad that the kit only had me make one of this motif.

Having to pass the working yarn (which you will probably need to cut) underneath the crossed-over stitches to maintain the motif was one of those techniques that you don’t get warned about doing in beginners’ books. At least my tension with treble stitch variations (US treble) is improving.

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Lightning-squared round! Cuz something something micro-blogging.

• Saying someone who states Holocaust denialism, openly hates other queer people, and says everyone who died on 9/11 deserved it has “good politics” is not doing y'all any favors. In fact, it's kinda making me hope the Fox News crowd picks up her story out of spite at this point.

• Speaking of, if they could talk about literally anything else instead of a faux-martyred pundit, that'd be awesome. Not cuz I care about their pet topics but cuz the constant coverage has broken Mom's brain even further. Y'all got her watching sappy memorial fancams, and it’s beyond ridiculous.

• Well, I did it. I bought the subscription box kit, so that's 2 of them I'm doing now.

• There's a couple people that I miss seeing from Bluesky, but having to slog through the endless sea of bullshit so I can see their cat updates or their actual creative posts just isn’t worth it. Especially after one of them jumped on the “must defend the objectively horrible person cuz she's trans & therefore beyond reproach” bandwagon.

• It's extremely depressing when you finally get to go to the place that's the closest thing you have to a “happy place”, having a truly wonderful time, only for the day to end with a person who always deliberately chooses to be miserable pulling their usual bitter shit over a single parking ticket & vowing to never go there again.

• On a related note, as much as I don't really want one & definitely can't afford one, I kinda need a new car.

• Made the mistake of looking at Bluesky (for a DM reply), and now the same people who scream about “the world needs more empathy & kindness” are demanding that they be allowed to tell people to kill themselves if they've decided they're Bad People. Lovely. If y'all insist on judging every other platform by its extremes so can dismiss them as “the Nazi bar”, y'all have turned into “the terrorist cell” within the past two years. You’ve let the promise of Alf's hog down for the sake of hateful hypocrisy just as demographics-driven as any actual bigotry group. I guess my unwillingness to make exceptions for leftists being objectively immoral makes me an evil evil centrist now. Oh well.

• Oh no, I spoke ill of the sacred texts known as Venture Brothers again! Time to wait & see how long till randos show up to harass me for not watching a show I didn’t enjoy in full at least 4x while taking notes before I criticized it and how I’m a closet Klansman for not liking that they constantly recommend their religion substitute whenever I suggest a revival of something that I actually enjoy! Seriously, though, that’s what the fans of this show do, and I have zero idea why they think it’s any different than a screaming street preacher. Also, if that show was making new episodes now, they’d be apologizing for apologizing for all of the bigoted jokes, cuz Adult Swim’s creators will say whatever they think needs to be said to appease their attack dogs… I mean, fans.

• Everything that the kiddos in the IWC think CM Punk is appears to actually apply to Andrade. Who wants an over-under on where he’ll go next and how long he’ll last? I’m saying TNA, less than six months. Dude’s got skills, but none of them appear to be people skills.

• It’s kinda stupid how excited I am for the MGRP Restart anime. I’ve been wanting this since I first read the books years ago, and it’s finally FINALLY happening!

• You don't need to say “I'm about to be really obnoxious about boycotting (insert thing here)”. By announcing you're boycotting something, it's safe to assume that you're already obnoxious as fuck and want everyone to know it. It’s one thing to just not opt to use/buy something, but the people calling for boycotts are ALWAYS off-putting. Even when they don’t think they’re doing it, they’re just brow-beating anyone who they decide is “immoral” for not doing the boycott, and the tendency to gloat about money/job losses experienced by their targets is especially vile. At least when their ideological opposites do it, they’re aware of the cruelty/bullying in play and either just don’t care or enjoy it. They don’t try to paint being an asshole to strangers or mocking layoffs at Target as somehow moral & justified like I’ve seen.

• It's so weird that the rights holders of Princess Session Orchestra aren't licensing it for any localization anywhere. I thought it was good ol shounen monofocus from this end, but Italy's biggest licensing group said that they’re turning down any requests to make it available legally outside of Japan. It’s both baffling and depressing, cuz it all just speaks about how little faith anyone has in non-ironic & non-nostalgic magical girl media.

• Extremely torn about Danganronpa 2x2. On one hand, that fact it’s an alternate take on the events & not just a rehash of the original story is interesting; on the other hand, I feel like the major motivation behind this is to get more money from Komaeda fangirls. I’d rather have a new story & cast set in the same general universe (even if it’s one of the “seasons” we didn’t see in V3), but I guess that’s what fangans are for.

• Sad zucchini update: the baby zuke was crushed to death by pine cones from the neighbor's trees. However, other flowers are setting up into baby zukes, so maybe one of those will make it. Also, in the same non-veggie-garden area, it appears that there's a stalk of millet growing.

• Encouragement to “just make your own thing” would ring a lot less hollow if there was an audience for it.

• Was gonna write a whole piece reflecting on my fondness for Jonny Quest & how it sucks to be a fan of something that’s become utterly hated over the years thanks to a combo of inability to accept historical context matters & spiteful dudebros getting their own subnetwork, but I already tempted fate with the X-Men part, so it’s not really worth it. I will say this, though: while it’s a small fandom, it’s still another one where shipping became the most important thing ever, and that is intensely depressing to me.

• CM Punk had a Livejournal during his RoH days, and it's still up! I’m sure it’s too… 2000s for some people to handle.

• On a related note, I miss the little mood indicators LJ had for their posts. I remember using a custom one made with Moy & Moder art from the Reboot Legion.

• Given the amount of times I've seen surprise genitals on my Bluesky TL cuz the poster didn't think they needed to label a close-up of them triple-fingering themselves as “adult content”, maybe I can see why they're just going for a blanket ban. There were methods in place to avoid it, but some of y’all refused to use them, so now it's collective punishment time.

• Sorry, didn't run into anything worth a video recommendation this week. But considering last week's had three videos linked, just mentally insert one of those instead.

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This week’s cat picture features elusive gray cat lip freckles!

With bonus highly boopable snoop!

See you all next weekend!

And a fantastic Earth Wind And Fire Day to us all!