Sunday Samplers are a “lightning round” of different subjects, whatever I feel like talking about, no matter how random or trivial or rambling. They’ll make appearances whenever I feel like it, but it’ll always be a Sunday.
No AI was used in the creation of this blog post. I have been using em-dashes since high school, and I’ll be damned if I let either the plagiarism machine or terminally online witch hunters take them away from me. Also, any art is by either real people or myself (which you will easily spot cuz it’ll look like trash).
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I swore, when I’d be older, that I wouldn’t be one of those adults who looks at younger people with disdain. I’d be one who tries to understand them & meet them halfway, at least, instead of assuming that they’re all pompous idiots.
Time really does make fools of us all.
Past Mela would not have been prepared for what growing up entirely connected would do to an entire generation & the ones following. These are deeply broken people, and instead of realizing that they’re broken, they want to break everything else around them so it’s on their level. All it took to realize that is a simple request to remember common courtesy exists.
Since lockdown ended, I’ve seen it frequently noted that people are getting ruder. They don’t hold doors or say “excuse me” if they need to pass through a crowd; they’ll block aisles in stores with zero awareness of anyone around them, even when there’s a crowd trying to work around them. I personally noticed just how common it now is for people to litter, be it dropping stuff in the street while walking or yeeting trash from the car window while driving. Movie theaters sound increasingly like somehow even worse than they already had become, with people refusing to stay off their phones or talk quietly or just sit still. Everyone just decided to stop, well, behaving.
And I think a lot of it can be pegged on people in their early 30s on down who think that being rude is “pushing back against arbitrary social norms”. According to them, asking them to do basic things like keep appointment times or not eat during job interviews is:
Ableist
White supremacy
Oppression
Nepotistic (this one is a headscratcher)
Illogical
“OMG, why are you talking about this when (insert current events topic here that has jack shit to do with the conversation)?!!”
Someone said that if you replace “society” with “Mom” or “Dad”, you get the perfect explanation of this behavior. These are people who think that they can buzzword or “debate bro” their way through life, because that’s what has always worked for them online.
And I get some of the frustration at the world at large & how it works. There’s a lot broken, and none of these things are going to be easy fixes. These are things that affect everyone, however, not just these overgrown adolescents. The people older than them know this and know when to pick their battles or where to direct their energy. But to the younger set, EVERYTHING is bad & evil & wrong, and the only way to fix it is to completely shut it down, ideally by shouting the magic “win the Discord fight” words at them.
I’ve said before that these are people who cannot function offline, but when I said it in the past, I thought I was exaggerating. It’s probably a good thing that they will sabotage themselves at every turn, but no one wants to be stuck with swarms of people who are blissfully awful & think it’s their birthright. And they’ll be completely hypocritical about it, too, be it trying to claim a moral high ground on social justice terms while casually dropping slurs & conspiracies or acting like older people have done the same things or worse. Have they? Probably, but they at least had enough self-awareness to experience shame when they’d inevitably get pushback. They didn’t cite the results of a Buzzfeed quiz to demand “accommodations” that always translate to “lemme do what I want”.
The thing is, social contagion is a very real phenomenon. If ten people watch a Braydyn or a Grayleigh throw trash out of their car window while driving, at least two to four of them will decide “huh, guess it’s okay to do that”. If enough people in the theater are watching their phones on speaker or running around the theater, eventually a few of the people who initially wanted to just watch the movie will join in on the chaos. After running into people who won’t move in the store, you stop moving, too. You stop holding doors. You shove your way past people without a word because why not. Unless you actively make the choice not to, you risk becoming yet another asshole “fighting the social norm” by being casually rude in public. Because rudeness & self-centeredness is easier than the alternative, and that ease is what makes it a social contagion.
Really, is it any wonder that people act like what should be their private weirdness is a necessary part of their public-facing self? Shame died as a concept online a long time ago, no matter how many Google Docs & Discord ops are created, and now that enough people have grown up almost entirely online, it’s dying in the physical world as well. I just wish it wasn’t taking “manners you learned back in grade school” down with it.
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If I ever find the person who decided to put “little to” in the definition of asexuality and/or aromanticism, I will pummel them into paste. Adding those two little words wound up completely undermining the definition of both, as illustrated by a grown-ass man basically saying that you're just as aspec as you wanna be even when you're very much not.
Is it any wonder that I hate how the community has basically stretched the definition until it means absolutely nothing? How that has allowed every supposed progressive to either erase our meagre presence or use us as the go-to punchline? How people who actually fit the proper definitions have been left completely alienated? How predators now feel safe using the labels as a “get out of being a disgusting creep free” card and how bigots seem to be the only people besides myself who picked up on this trend & are weaponizing it? Because we’ve let voices like THIS take over and make asexuality/aromanticism mean ABSOLUTELY NOTHING?
It took SO much restraint not to leave a reply to that video. Everything is “omg I totally felt this way too” or signing up for his memberships because they agree with this bullshit. They agree that asexuality is now the exact same thing as allosexuality, and you’re allowed to say so because we’re all ~vAlId~ here. It’s bad enough that oriented aces pile on whenever an aroace is speaking about their own lives & experiences. It’s bad enough that Zoomer aces happily parrot the “we can still (insert allo nonsense thing here) like normal” lines. It’s bad enough that there’s now been a push to make being as ridiculously kinky as possible (including the inevitable diaper freak shit) a sign of how “normal” aces are that’s smothered any & all discussion coming from neutral or repulsed people. Now we have wannabe influencers taking the most basic element of asexuality (that whole “no attraction” thing), grabbing the odious “little to” that was added at some point during lockdown, and stretching it to go “asexuality is whatever you want it to be, whee”. Not even a discussion of different forms of attraction, just “yep, you can be ace and still be sexually attracted to people, because that qualifies as ‘little’ even if it’s constant & frequent”. It’s the dig Contra made about us (“I’m an asexual slut who LOVES sex”) played as absolute fact & the “default”!
I kinda get why so many other queer people or people who consider themselves allies treat aces like something they need to scrape off their shoes. If this is the kind of attitude that we’ve allowed to become our public voices, ones that have decided to embrace the erasure enabled by the stretched-to-breaking definition instead of combat it, OF COURSE no one will feel the need to give us basic human respect. This isn’t some “gold star” mindset, this is respecting that words & concepts have meanings. Stop breaking them so the Grayleighs of the world can feel validated.
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Okay, now for a GOOD video recommendation.
I love a good sports documentary, and this epic-length look at MLB’s cocaine abuse issues is as good (and in a few cases, better) as any 30 For 30 entry. The focus is on how addiction & lackadaisical drug use dragged down the Pittsburgh Pirates in the early 80s, but like the narration says, theirs wasn’t exactly an isolated story at that time.
(I think my favorite part is when the FBI raided one of the dealer’s houses & started tearing the place apart looking for coke, only for the dealer to walk in & calmly tell them that it’s on a platter on top of the fridge like it’s a box of cereal.)
This same channel, hydn, also has an excellent look at the NCAA's "death penalty" and its enforcement. And there’s also a great two-parter about the eternal romance between sports & beer. They remind me of Bobby Broccoli’s science & finance documentaries, only about athletics.
I may only be a second-hand fan via my family (largely cuz I can’t easily watch any of the local games), but the behind-the-scenes drama is often as exciting as anything on the playing field to me. I doubt I’m unique in having that relationship with sports.
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Lightning-squared round! Because I found myself on Xwitter again, and that’s not good for anyone.
Recently I saw a comment comparing the current boom in indie animation to the 90s Image boom in comics, and while I’ll need to get my thoughts together on why, I think that is an absolutely perfect comparison.
Yen Press had better put out an English edition of the new MGRP Peaceful Days short story collection with the Restart cast. Ever since they declined to translate Null Magical Girl (a trippy PMMM light novella trilogy with hard sci-fi elements), I just don’t trust them.
Speaking of things in the Puella Magi orbit, every bit of Walpurgisnacht Rising spoilers that I hear is just making me more excited and more impatient for an English release. ESPECIALLY the stuff I’ve heard about Selema and a certain new “location”...
I’m also in the midst of another crossover-fic-the-world-will-never-see idea, and I’m bummed that the fan translators haven’t done anything with Mitsuru Inami or her related MagiReco event. The concept of a 30 year old magical girl who’s been able to survive & thrive (well, kinda) in that universe is just so interesting to me. And she doesn’t seem to have the same “I am so burned out & jaded” trappings that other “adult magical girl” series use as the default.
After I wrote my ace vent above, I saw someone saying, in regards to autism being a “spectrum” that covers everything from “bad at social cues” to “cannot function independently”, that sometimes making a concept into a “spectrum” doesn’t so much open it up as stretch it to breaking, and MAN… if you can’t see how that applies to a-spec identities now, I can’t help you. Some of y’all are determined to prove Contrapoint’s shitty insult correct.
Every so often, I find myself wondering if any of the folks in my old circle who silo’d themselves to Bluesky ever get curious about me, but given how extreme some of them had gotten, I’m sure they’ve written me off as all of their political boogeymen at once. It’s a shame, but when you’re uncritically championing people who practice Holocaust denial because they’re doing it from your “side”, you’re officially far too gone for me.
The instant I saw that new Dreamworks movie’s trailer, I knew exactly how people would be reacting to it, and in both cases, it’s insanely obnoxious. Although personally, I will always find “this story about how friendships have value should have been a romance to be actually worthwhile” to be infinitely more obnoxious than “this movie has girl cooties”.
Every time I see someone (usually someone younger) talking about having “time blindness” & how they shouldn’t be held to standards of having to respect scheduled times for things like work, school, etc, I am struck by how much they sound like Andy Ditch. And I suspect that they are just as… inauthentic with their issues as Andy Ditch is.
Today in “Venture Brothers Fans Are Fucking Exhausting”, is there a reason they’ve decided to hijack a memorial post to Buddy Holly? Weezer fans, I understand (even if I don’t fully approve), but WTF did that shitshow do that warrants their ritualistic posting of the catchphrase in THIS instance?
Bluesky is awful cuz it’s basically the H*sanoid fan club (with an open invitation for any & all diaper pervs), but somehow it’s still more sane & less online-social-justice-obsessed than Threads. That site will have a published writer saying that using middle school level vocabulary in published works for adults is “ableist”. Worth noting, said published writer was blackballed from comics for refusing to pay her artists on self-published works & routinely trying to run them down behind their backs to justify it. But Tee’s just the tip of the crazy iceberg over there.
I recognize that I am frequently a petty creature, but this is probably the pettiest thing I've ever done. And yes, I will be periodically updating it with more examples until Secret Galaxy covers JQ.
AI signs/ads/logos/etc are ugly on many levels, but the one thing that I personally find the most appalling is how they’re always arranged to be cluttered & unreadable. This is especially bad with event signs that are staked out by roads (for things like craft fairs, open-air events, etc), because they always have the most important info like date, time, & place in the smallest print & in the worst clashing colors.
People are complaining about Discord having age verification, as though that site isn’t as dependent on predators as Roblox is… At least they’re trying to shake that reputation with this move instead of leaning into it.
The next time someone refers to a character, new or otherwise, in an official piece of fiction (such as an ongoing TV show or comic or such) as an “OC” because they were added later, I reserve the right to find them and throw a flat cup of Sprite at their head.
People really do seem to like those all-in-one crochet square yarns, huh? I don’t really see the appeal, since I would find making the same exact color order over & over so boring. At least let me vary it a bit.
Something that popped into my head while re-reading Restart (for the umpteenth time) in anticipation of the show: How would Akane have reacted if she learned Cranberry was dead? She’s pretty much “gone” mentally, and since she became hyper-monofocused on killing her to avenge her family, learning someone beat her to it would probably have wrecked her.
One day, people are going to need to reconcile that every example of a “deconstruction” of a given genre (superheroes, magical girls, action shows, romances, etc) is based not in affection but in contempt. And that just because an entry is darker or more serious/violent in tone, that doesn’t make it a deconstruction. The motive to do it is in the word itself, they want to BREAK it & render it unusable because they see no value in it. Maybe we’ll talk about this in depth someday, but for now, let me put it like this: You see how Alan Moore, widely held as the first big “superhero deconstruction” writer, feels about that genre & its audience, right? Well, he’s not an outlier.
I hate when I’m working on a niche concept for a fanfic, and I have an idea that I want to brainstorm with someone, but literally no one would be interested. Doesn’t help that this particular one involves a concept in something that’s not translated to English yet…
Here’s a little hint…
Circling back to Yen Press, my desire to have an official hold-it-in-my-hands translation of Null Magical Girl has increased now that the new Magia Exedra scenario has been announced & has the same author. Kinda feels like we’re gonna be seeing the origins of homo magica, given Kyubey’s comments & the inter-planetary setting.
Making this a note to myself for a future entry as much as anything else, but we’re gonna need to talk about how so much Western media has limited teenage girl characters to “bland role model”, “le quirky chungus”, & “boys & popularity obsessed mean girl”. Cuz freaking gacha games are lapping y’all in writing teenage girls and making them varied & interesting.
That new Tubi Scooby show set in Japan looks cute, but I will be sad if it’s animated as stiffly & blandly as MAWS. That show is so ass for many reasons, but the biggest is the stiffness. Stuff like hair & fabric that should have some movement (especially in flight) just sort of sits there like it’s made of wood. Worse than 70s Filmation.
There've been so many high profile deaths in September that hurt more than they should that I can’t list them all.
Stop gossiping and focus on the race, Digitan!
This wasn’t the only instance of these exact poses intersecting, and it cracked me up every time. Yes, I am quite easily amused sometimes.
A good reminder that the whole Scientology thing was just the tip of the iceberg for the drama around Neopets. I’m shocked that at least one appeared in Fortnite, the last remnant of any vestige of a media monoculture, as a sidekick.
I won’t name names, but being a crochet pattern designer & tutorial video maker who then not only uses AI to make ugly thumbnails that fail to resemble the actual project but also takes a sponsorship from a shady “take a photo of yarnwork & AI will make you a pattern” service is a unique form of cluelessness. What’s to stop that service from being used on your stuff and stealing your patterns?
As always, Jeff Harris has the best take on the WBD/Paramount merger and ESPECIALLY the dueling hyperbolic online fandom reactions.
It’s really frustrating when you’re constantly being told that having an actual ability to judge character is rude and to admit to not liking something that turned out to have been created by an asshole is also rude, because people who were willfully oblivious and/or fandom-brained couldn’t accept they’d been had for the sake of mediocrity. No, some of us can just TELL. Some of us just don’t like something cuz it’s “off”. Sorry if you didn’t notice it, but stop getting butthurt at the people who DID.
In related news, continuing to praise/excuse Neil Gaiman for “good queer rep” when 90% of his overall work & 100% of the “queer rep” in it has aged like unpasteurized milk in the sun is definitely A Choice.
And on a related note to it all, we need to make “consoomer” more of a common insult online, because MAN, some people cannot handle the concept of people not being excited by every single thing that’s churned out by their “comfort” brands. Also, we need more non-Chipman variations of the meme.
Time & tide have somehow made the “MovieBob or N*zi” quote game even funnier.
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That was most assuredly NOT worth the wait, but I hope you still got something out of it. And yes, “fit of pique” qualifies as something. Also, I hope you didn’t read this on full brightness in the middle of a movie theater feature.
As is the custom, we close with a cat picture, with my skinny little beetus boy looking oddly shaped.
See y’all next time.
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