you need to be around freaks and weirdos who dress ugly and have weird kinks because the more you’re exposed to it the next time you see a conservative try to get you scared about ugly drag queens you’re not gonna think “oh my that is a scary drag queen she must be doing scary things” you’re instead gonna think “hey that looks like the people in my friend group. that’s a relatable down to earth person. what’s your fucking problem”
This is Asobi Asobase. And this is literally the entire anime, just girls releasing chaotic energy and while sometimes showing off the best goddamn slap stick I’ve ever seen.
I don’t know what to do about the internet. It’s getting worse, and getting worse faster than I think any of us ever could have imagined even just six years ago. Tumblr shot itself in the heart at the behest of Apple, at the behest of whichever nameless evangelical finance perverts are in charge of credit card policy, whereupon people like me (artists and people who like art) fled in droves to Twitter, the present state of which I don’t have it in me to be funny about.
Even after that one-two punch, Twitter and Tumblr are still the only (major) social media platforms I can stand to use. I mean, they’re the last ones left where you can, for example, see posts that your friends have made. I might have said that that seemed like the whole point of social media; every digital elsewhere has now collectively agreed that it is, in fact, social media’s greatest flaw. Your friends like to hang out and post weird jokes and titty drawings — they don’t know the first thing about your favorite marketing trends, let alone your unslakable thirst for 30-second phone videos. We have to move on: I’ll die if I think about it.
Uh — I wanna let you in a little. Here’s where I’m at, okay? I’m working on this project. I like it a lot: it’s a writing thing and an art thing and a music thing all at the same time. I’m still struggling with art burnout, but every day I get to sit down and write or compose for this thing is an unending delight, so on the balance it’s been great to work on. It’s taken me a while to get here, though — I’ve blown past all my estimates about when it’d be done. Still, it won’t be much longer.
In the mean time, I keep having these compulsive worries. I feel that I should be posting, but the nature of a long-form project like this is that I don’t have anything to post. I tweet complete nothings now and then, as if to announce my presence, like a lighthouse pulsing in the distance. And every week the websites get worse. They’re bleeding out, and it feels like some of my blood’s in there, maybe. Like, maybe you’d call me naïve, but it wasn’t that long ago that I really, really liked all this online stuff. I never had the hustle culture mindset about it: by good luck alone I managed to make a living posting the stuff I wanted to post on the places I wanted to post it.
The places I liked to post don’t exist anymore. My experience of using the internet feels hostile, alien. The ground beneath all our feet feels eggshell-thin.
But I have to use the internet: it’s where my stuff goes. It’s where all of you are. Here is where art and artists and art-likers live.
The things I love live here, in precarity, as the saw blades and lava traps of our digital dungeon grow every day more numerous.
Anyway, what I’m saying is that the web sucks now, but as long as we’re here — and we will be here — I want to try loving it again anyway. I want to untangle myself from all this disappointment and expectation and try simply “vibing” again. I wanna use cohost more: I’ll even crosspost stuff to Tumblr like I keep saying I should. I’m making a cool thing and I should show it off! I should relearn how to draw a little doodle and post it without feeling like it’s a suboptimal use of my time or whatever!! I want to believe in what joy may find us, though our world be a dumpster.
I’ve always disliked the “I Am No Man” moment in Peter Jackson’s Return of the King because it fails to capture the fact that when the Witch King threatens Eowyn with horrific unimaginable torment, she responds by making him soil his ghostly britches.
